Page 7 of Ocean of Sin and Starlight

PRIEST

Salvation, I think again as I stare at the Syren. Or is it damnation?

I watch as she hovers in the current, her body so sinfully soft and curved that I have a hard time imagining her as a vicious creature. She’s too beautiful for that, too delicate.

I want to see her monstrous side in action. So far, she has not spotted me. She’s just hovering in the water a few feet below the surface, and though I can’t see her back fully, I spy faint splotches of blood coloring the water from where the fisherman must have stabbed her.

It takes all my resolve not to make a move for her. I could be at her in seconds flat, tearing her apart.

Instead, I shoot up to the surface, breaking through. I gulp in the cold night air, staring up at the moon as I wait for her to attack.

I hear her approach, a snarling sound from the depths beneath me, and brace myself.

She grabs my ankles first, sharp claws digging in through my flesh and tendon and bone, surprisingly strong. If I was a normal man, she would have broken my bones like splintered twigs.

I could fight back right away and stay above the water, but I let her pull me under.

Until she has pulled me right down to her level.

She spins me around, silver-blonde hair swirling around us.

I am staring at two large, hooded eyes that glow like violet flames, pupils a diamond of coal at the middle. Her brows frame them like archways. Her nose is short and pert, her face the shape of a heart, with small, full lips above a dainty chin. For a moment, I trick myself into thinking I’m staring at a beautiful woman until those lips part, and she bares her teeth at me. Her smile is razor sharp, like looking into the mouth of a shark.

A shark that thinks it’s about to devour its prey whole.

But I don’t want to lose my nose, even if it will eventually heal, and I don’t feel like experiencing pain—the gouges she dug into my ankles still throb.

I duck out of the way just as she lunges for me, teeth bared, letting out a roar that travels through the water like a wave.

I bite her before she has a chance to bite me.

My fangs pierce her neck, her skin surprisingly tough, and she lets out a scream. I put my hand at the back of her head, making a tight fist in her hair, the other hand squeezing down her back until I find the knife wound.

I press my fingers inside it, hard.

Her back arches, buckling in my grasp, her cries of agony filling the water, but at least I’ve gotten her to stop fighting. The pain has stunned her.

I start drinking, pulling the blood into my mouth.

The moment it hits my tongue in a burst of salt and vitality, I feel the beast inside me rattling its chains. If I let go, it will rip this Syren to shreds, and while it will feel good in the moment to succumb to the very thing I’ve fought so hard against, to lose all the humanity I’ve earned, I know it would be the foolish thing to do.

I could devour her, and she would keep me going for a long time.

But not forever.

Yet if I brought her ashore, kept her as a prisoner, as a pet, I could slowly drain her of her blood. I could take as much as I could without killing her, put it in the casks with the rest of my supply as a backup in case I accidentally do kill her, and then, every few days, take more from her. It wouldn’t have to be much, just enough to sustain me.

I know what Abe would say, that it’s immoral and inhumane.

But the more I drink from this Syren, the more I realize that’s something I’ll never be able to escape, no matter how often I pray to a God who doesn’t hear me, no matter how the world sees me as a man of faith.

I am immoral.

I am inhumane.

I’m not even human anymore.

Yet I need to drink human blood to survive. And if it’s a Syren’s blood, that’s even better. Isn’t it kinder to keep one savage creature, such as this fish-woman, as my food source than it is to slaughter people every week? I’d be doing the world a favor, saving the lives she would have killed, as well as the ones I would have killed.

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