Page 3 of Ensnaring the Siren
It was only when he heard a faint click that he realized she hadn’t bitten a chunk out of his neck but had instead clipped him into the winch. And it was then that her words sunk in. I can only hold them off for so long. Was this creature protecting him from her kin?
“The fishermen are hunting us, you know,” she said, almost too quietly to be heard. “There’s a whole fleet of them. Don’t know what they do with our bodies once they’ve killed us. My companions think you’re one of them.”
His mind whirred at the claim. There was a foolish part of him that wanted to believe her, but he’d just watched five grown men get pulled under, never to resurface.
He had to get out of here.
Muscle memory kicking back in, he signaled to the aircrew, and the slack cable connecting him to the hovering helicopter above pulled tight, lifting him away from the water. Away from her.
With eerie, glimmering eyes, she watched his ascent, her body’s amber bioluminescence winking back at him, revealing a long, finned tail swaying languorously beneath black water. Hints of her skeletal structure glowed from within, an odd translucent quality to her skin and muscles.
He couldn’t tear his eyes from her, as strangely beautiful as she was lethal.
It wasn’t until Hatcher roughly shook his shoulders, repeating his name for probably the millionth time, that it registered he was flat on his ass inside the Jayhawk. Head a bit fuzzy, he blinked slowly, pushing off his mask with shaky, freckled white hands.
“Was that what I think it was?” Their aircrew’s dropmaster looked about as shocked as he felt.
Reid sat heavily in his seat and strapped in. It was one thing to know such creatures existed, another entirely to meet one face-to-face and tread the razor-thin edge between life and death. “That was a goddamned mermaid.”
Chapter
Two
Nireed plucked at a piece of netting, almost invisible to the eye, when an approaching pod of whales, including two calves, let out a volley of distressed clicks. Any closer and they’d get tangled.
She flashed her luminescent lights in rapid succession, issuing a warning, then indicated where they’d need to swim to get out.
The biggest whale, likely the matriarch, dipped her great big head and, with a series of whistles and pulsed calls, redirected her pod away from danger.
If only Nireed could swim away with them and forget this mess.
What in the deepest, foulest murk was she supposed to do about all this loose, drifting netting? It was miles wide and hundreds of feet deep, and she couldn’t even attempt to reel it back up, not when the fishing vessel that towed it was now a groaning, sinking hunk of metal below them. Soon, it would drag this mass of netting into the deep, entangling any number of unsuspecting creatures in its descent.
All because of one young, hot-headed merman.
Cyrus.
The net had been encircling them, yes, gradually drawing up from below and threatening to trap them all inside, but there’d still been a clear, direct path overhead to the boat. They could’ve scaled over the side.
Instead, Cyrus had flown into a fit of rage and slashed open the boat’s haul before she or anyone else in their hunting party could stop him and prevent this exact outcome. The boat took on water fast, its crew leaping into the ocean. Naturally, everyone wanted to attack right then and there, but Nireed slapped her fins hard and signed that they needed to guide the creatures trapped inside the net to safety first.
It was long, hard work. Miles of netting, hundreds, probably thousands of individual creatures, and only five of them to make it happen. But they did it.
“Why’d you let him go?” The younger male snapped his tail. “The orange one with weird fins.”
Anger prickled along her scales. As if he’d any reason to be frustrated. He’d just eaten his fill of choice cuts from the boat crew.
Under normal circumstances, their waters were teeming with fish. Hunting should’ve been easy, and yet, fewer and fewer of their hunters returned each day, disappearing right alongside whole schools of fish and whatever other ocean denizens happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the last few weeks, their people had learned the hard way not to fall for the lure of potted meat, a recently introduced delicacy to their diet. But even knowing that now, with how large these walls of nets were, by the time they smelled it in the water it was sometimes too late.
As it had almost been tonight.
Merfolk were being baited, then captured or killed, and each of the boats—hard to say just how many—reported back to a larger ship that reeked of dead fish and diesel-run heavy machinery. A factory ship. A shore-bound friend had once explained to her what that was—a beast of a vessel that processed and packaged fish at sea in large quantities, sometimes more than 200 tons per day, and prepared it for Surface Dweller markets.
The floating factory was nearly 400 feet long and greedily gobbling up her pod’s main food sources. Her people too.
“You should’ve killed him,” Cyrus pressed, his challenge fiery and fierce.
She glared, gesturing to the netting with a hard slash of her hand. They had bigger problems to deal with, and he was wasting energy trying to undercut her authority as hunt leader. “He wasn’t one of the others. He didn’t do this.” While the orange-clad human in question had tried to save the fishermen who’d attempted to catch and kill them, and maybe that made it unwise to let him go, his scent was curiously familiar, teasing at the edges of recollection. And she followed that instinct to protect him, to make sure he was able to get away.