She watched as he sank.
Many hours passed before guilt assailed her. She curled into a ball, hugging her tail, unsure when it had reformed but not caring. She’d killed. A man. So she could live. It was a terrible, sinful, wrong thing she had done.
A life for a life, though, her desires told her. It wasn’t so bad.
Curled up, she stayed huddled on the bottom for a full day. Siren. That is what I must be. Though really, she still wasn’t sure.
The next morning, when the sun rippled on her skin through the water, she took a deep breath, frowning at herself and surveying her long, pretty tail, and she vowed never to do that again.
But the hunger was not to be denied. She called it the Ravening.
Judging time by the moon, she calculated that every few months she had to kill a human to survive. Sometimes it was sooner, sometimes later.
Exactly one year after she became this strange creature, at sunset, she felt the urge to swim to shore. As she reached the shallows, her legs formed, and she found she could walk and breathe as a human again. Naked, she walked onward, found a village, stole some clothes. When a woman approached her to ask who she was, she pretended she was mute, afraid that opening her mouth would reveal some monstrous part of her.
Her teeth were not sharp – she felt them with her tongue after the woman moved on.
It might have been more of a problem if what was happening did not feel so surreal. She could not stay for more than a single day.
The following day, at dusk, she went back to the sea.
The years passed, and consuming fish and men became her routine.
Her one courtesy to her past, she vowed never to forget who she once was or her name: Raffaela.
She said it to herself many times. She crept under darkened piers and clung to the barnacled posts to listen to people talk, and afterward she repeated the words to herself. When she ventured onto land, once a year, she exchanged a few words with people, if they seemed safe. Over the years the way of words changed. Language changed. Saying the new ones was fun. She must not forget how to be a human.
Raffaela.
Sometimes, she swam to a coral reef that poked above the sea at low tide. There, she sat in the air and said her name out loud to the fish that slipped by. Her voice croaked from disuse. The fish flicked their tails at her. The warm sun glittered on her naked skin and on her scales.
Raffaela.
When her throat grew raw and her skin dried, she dove back into the water and under the waves.
Many years passed. Many hundreds of years. She was alone and lonely, of course. How could she ever do anything to remedy that? Once, she’d seen a pack of her own kind, a school of them, whichever was the right word for it, tear apart a trespasser who’d swum too close, until all that was left was a slowly spreading cloud of blood.
Then one day at dusk, she swam to the top because the Ravening was upon her. Raffaela came upon a becalmed sailing vessel with a man sitting on the gunwale edge. He was talking and laughing. It was the laughing that fascinated her. With her head above water she heard him clearly. He threw his head back and the last of the sun haloed through his thick hair.
He was beautiful, the most beautiful man she had seen for all her hundreds of years, though the laugh helped too – it was so full-throated and brimming with soul.
She needed him and only him. And so she swam to him singing quietly, and he turned and found her with his eyes, though the light in the shadow of the hull was dim.
She called to him and he leaned over and slipped into the water with her. He let her drag him down many fathoms in seconds, for she used her powerful tail.
Above, someone had cried out his name, “Merrick, come back! Merrick!”
By the time her legs had formed and wrapped him to her, he was probing at her with his manhood, pushing, straining to open her, to penetrate her fully. He shoved in, lubricated by her response. This was such a thick and hard cock that she groaned and mimicked his recent movement – she flung back her head and arched, as he drove himself into her.
She saw his face in between biting at his neck. He suffered her small wounds, enthralled by their sex, pumping at her, pulling her to him with his large hands on her hips.
They fucked gloriously as she bled him, nipped him, consumed his mouth with her mouth. As he consumed her. The kiss was as addictive as the sex and their eyes stayed on each other. She could see the moment when reality dawned on him. When he knew what she did to him.
This terrible and bloody intercourse had already lasted far longer than was normal.
Somehow, she was keeping him alive, breathing her breaths into his mouth while they kissed and fucked. And then, to her dismay, she felt him lose the battle with life.
His life passed to her, and he died.
She wept as she saw the dullness come over his beautiful eyes. She cried tears of silver that floated away as she released him to the depths. The ocean swallowed him, and he drifted lower beneath her feet. With her throat locked by grief, she wept some more.
What had she done?
He was different. He could have been hers. If only she knew what to do to bring him back.
She dived with him then and tried to breath the life back into him, but to no avail.
Again, she released him and turned away, and she swam for hours, for miles. She found herself in the middle of the ocean with nowhere to go, no future, with nothing at all of worth to make her want to exist.
In the morning, still overcome, she returned to find his body, to do with it… well, she knew not what she intended but…
Something.
She could not find his corpse. This had been her hunting ground for the past half century, and she knew every cranny, every underwater cavern, yet she could not find his body.
Some predator had taken it.
Which only reinforced her uselessness.
Never before had remorse knifed into her and consumed her so mercilessly. It was as merciless as she had been to the humans she killed. That night, to consider her path from here on, she went to her coral reef and thought, while the moonlight silvered the waves.
She closed her eyes and spoke aloud to the moon and the sea. This vow she did not want to renege upon, not like the last time when she’d just begun and was a novice at killing.
“Never again will I take another human life. Never.” Raffaela bit her lip with her sharp teeth. She would let herself die. It was for the best.
How to die though? Merely letting herself weaken and expire from lack of food seemed awful. It should be quick yet not too quick. She deserved some pain.
For close to a month she dithered about, staying in her hunting area. Her time to walk upon the shore was coming. So was the Ravening but she dearly wished to walk on the land again. Could she hold off the hunger for long enough? She must choose a way to end herself. A shark would be repulsive. What else, though?
A peninsula lay beside her reef. She swam closer to the shore. There were hills here and among them she might find an unclimbable chasm. When her day of being human ended, she would surely dehydrate and die if she could not find the sea. That seemed fitting – to die near where Merrick had died, plus she would take her last breaths as a woman should, in the human world.
Except, when she swam to the beach, at the dead of night, there was a man sitting on the sand near the jetty where boats were moored. That alone would have meant little.
He saw her. He watched her swim by and followed every deviation of her course.
Something covered his face and eyes – a hunk of metal and glass such as the human divers wore. It made him resemble a monster. He saw her every move, even though the moon had not yet risen, and the night was as black as her sins.