Page 9 of Ensnaring the Siren
“I’m sorry.” He rubbed a hand behind his neck, offering a sheepish half smile. “Remind me. Where’d we meet?”
Her smile grew impossibly wider, showing too many teeth.
And then her eyes flashed from gold to full-blown amber.
He jerked back, cursing.
For just a second, they’d been glowing, really glowing. Like fireflies on a summer night. Or…
Bioluminescence in the deep, dark ocean.
Good god. He bit hard on his inner cheek to hold back a scream, accidentally drawing blood. He had seen her before. Just not here. Not on land. And not anywhere close to shore.
Fishermen screamed around him, each yanked under, one by one. Not even the best swimming training could save him. He’d never move fast enough. Never be strong enough.
Bloodred lips curled over cruel, sharp teeth made for slicing and tearing, and in her unrelenting amber stare, lay the promise of death.
Her nostrils flared, breathing in deep, smelling him. And on some harebrained instinct, he pressed his tongue to the cut in his mouth, as if that would stem the bleeding or throw the monster off its scent.
How was she here? And where was her tail? He’d gotten an aerial view of it glittering beneath dark water, swaying back and forth with a long, sinuous grace.
“Remember now?”
Anger flared. She knew damn well that he did.
Land was his domain, and yet, she had the upper-hand here—that, he felt in the marrow in his bones and in the cacophony of alarm bells firing off in his brain. Was this a game to her? Was he a toy to toss around and discard at whim? Did his life, and the lives of the men she killed, mean nothing? “You murdered those men.”
The mermaid frowned, the wicked gleam vanishing from her gaze. “Did I? Or was it self-defense? I thought Surface Dwellers respected that.”
“You sank their ship.” Fear receded as his anger spiked higher, and although he lowered his voice so he couldn’t be overheard by casual passersby, his words were hard. “They were vulnerable out there, barely staying afloat. They weren’t a threat.”
Leaning in until her face was mere inches from his, she fired back in a tone equally low and hard, “Tell that to my kin taken by their nets.”
She was so close he could count the gold and brown flecks in her odd, amber eyes, and it tripped his danger sense again, now firing on all cylinders, but he dared not pull away. When sharks smelled fear and blood, they bit. A mermaid wouldn’t be any different.
Firming his stance, he replied, “And why should I believe you? I don’t know you.”
“You didn’t know them.”
“I know even less about flesh-eating mermaids.”
“And flesh-eating fishermen are all the same?” she snapped.
“What the hell are you talking about? Flesh-eating fishermen…”
“Do Surface Dwellers not eat meat? Why else are you out there with your boats and giant nets? Is it not to hunt the flesh of creatures?”
“Not the same thing.”
“Isn’t it? Your kind doesn’t have exclusive rights to mind and soul. If it breathes, it feels.”
No point arguing with a half-fish woman if fish had feelings. Evidently, they did.
“I see your point,” he muttered begrudgingly.
She relaxed a fraction, and in that split second, something vulnerable flickered across her face. Something that looked a lot like worry, exhaustion, and fear. That wasn’t the face of a senseless killer, but of someone with loved ones on the line. He’d seen such trepidation before on the faces of families living in dread of the moment a search and rescue mission became a search and recovery. “I’m not lying. We are being hunted. I’d give you proof if I had it.”
“You think they’re eating your kind?” The prospect made his stomach turn just as much as remembering their last search and rescue case. He’d read the research, seen the blood on her lips. The woman before him had likely helped eat those fishermen, and yet he hated that humans might be eating mermaids like her just as much.