The third time she surfaced, she lazed about in water, lying prone and slipping to and fro. There was a ceiling above. Something rumbled.
Raffaela shifted and found herself somehow fixed inside a tube that was open above, like a small tunnel. She had been in underwater caverns and tubes. This was not that. This was wrong. Alarmed, she shook her head. Water sloshed under her shoulders and something had been jammed across her mouth.
Her tail lumbered, moved, swished and smacked the sides.
Tail… She hadn’t changed. She coughed and felt sludge in her throat, swallowed, blinked away the last of the stuff making her vision blur.
Where was she?
She flopped about, curving upward at the waist, finding her hands trapped behind and under her. Wriggling achieved nothing except to make this canvas tunnel sway, and she slapped her tail down, hard, in anger.
Everything lurched. The rumbled ceased. There came a great, long, echoing slam. Then a light switched on above. As she squinted upward and around her, she heard someone grunt, then a face appeared above.
Wolfgang. He grinned at her.
“Awake, are we?”
Clearly, she was not of human form.
“Wha—” She managed to say, tongue hitting metal. The rod fastened across her mouth and between her teeth made speech difficult.
“What am I doing with you? Where are you? All of that?”
Wary, anger growing, sure he had betrayed her, she nodded. Water gurgled against her ears.
“This building is where we do marine research. Small place and at night nobody comes here. So. Just us. Me. You. All my equipment for holding the marine life, studying it, dissecting it… knives, big hooks.” He eyed her, piercingly.
She blinked. Bad, this was bad. Why was he doing this? “Why?” she whisper-gurgled.
“You killed my friend, or likely it was you? I doubt there are many mermaids in the area. My lover, my best friend, and you fuckin’ killed him.”
Reality dawned on her. Now she knew what that smile meant. His teeth showed. It was an evil smile. Predatory. Nasty.
“In the name of science, I’m going to study you, fillet you, dissect you, and eventually kill you. And guess what, since you are not human, nobody will give a damn.”
The vehicle shifted when he vanished from view, and she heard a door open then shut, heard his footsteps.
She’d meant to die. Just not like this. Maybe… she blinked away the sudden tears, maybe this was what she deserved?
Her heart had sped up and was banging away at her chest and temples. Maybe.
The rear doors of the vehicle were flung open, one after the other, and she looked past her tail to the light, past Wolfgang to where chains hung from a high ceiling.
“Oh yes.” He followed her gaze. “Those are just for hoisting specimens out of the van though. Still, it’s a taste of your future. This is a Sunday, and early. About, ohhh, six AM? I have a whole day to play with you.” He hauled on the end, pulled her out and let the canvas tube down onto a concrete floor. The canvas flattened, opened out.
When he kneeled beside her, she slapped her tail again, splashing him with the residual water.
Wolfgang wiped his face with one hand then grabbed her chin and dragged it around as he stared down at her. “Bitch. Was that you hating on me? I promise I do hate better than you ever could.”
She tightened her jaw as he traced around her lips and made a growling sound she’d never made before.
“You’re just a fucking animal. Just for you, I dug up this gag. Such sharp little teeth you have.” He stroked along in front of them at the gumline. “I’m going to love your screams.”
“Bashtud,” she managed past the gag, and tried to fasten her teeth onto his fingers but her mouth couldn’t open much more.
He pushed back on his knee and withdrew his hand, then chuckled and returned to push his fingers into her mouth and press them onto her tongue. There was a big hole in the metal rod, she realized as she choked and spluttered.
“Such a fun day ahead of us.”
Then he dragged her further into the building to where there were shiny steel tables and walls lined with tanks of fish. He turned on many lights above that blinded her.
Then, while she was recovering from that, still straining to open her eyes, he hooked something into her, near where her tail muscle ended and the fin began.
Searing pain erupted.
The fire.
Rippling fire.
She gasped, held it in, tensing.
And he began to pull on a chain. It clanked as it ran through an anchor point far above, and her tail began to be hauled upward.
Her weight fell on where she was hooked.
She screamed full-throated and writhing, as he hoisted her upward.
When he was done and she was off the floor, he left her there, swinging slightly, with her long, wet hair dragging the floor. Panting, she waited for the pain to subside a little, for the screeching feel of it running from tail to spine to her pounding head, to settle to something bearable.
Less pain, less pain…
Unscrunching her face from the grimace of agony, she heard the scrape of his boots and stared up at him. A curved knife hung point-down from one hand.
He raised it to waist-level and pursed his lips, then remained in place, stiff, uncompromising, apart from the turn of the knife as he shifted his fingers.
She couldn’t help flinching. Dying by a knife, with this maniac intent on hurting her, it was going to be terrifying.
As bad as what she had inflicted on others?
Worse. At least her lovers had suffered ecstasy as well as death. Her bites had been nothing compared to steel slicing into her flesh.
She imagined the
