“Perhaps. It would be boring, but one cannot die from boredom. Besides, I have ideas, surprises. Notions about you. What if you could walk about my house?”
Startled, she blinked at him and sank to the bottom to think before she returned. “How?”
“I would have to demonstrate and try things. As long as you admit it is sensible for me to restrain you to begin with? You have such sharp…” He indicated her. “Teeth. You could rip my head from my neck, and maybe my beating heart from my chest with those.”
She favored him with a glimpse of her teeth.
These ideas made her nervous. But if she did not agree, what would he do? Fillet her after all? She needed time, and if she could get into the house below, she might escape through another door.
Houses had many doors, from memory. She hadn’t been inside a building for more than a century. The noises coming from pubs and cafés and whatever else she had walked by on her day on land, those frightened her. The yelling, the singing, and the banging, even the loud talking, it hurt her ears, made her heartbeat pound.
Which made her wonder why she wanted to become human again. It would be nice, in small bits. Maybe? If it were her choice as to when and where.
“And so. This.” He raised the gun. “And these. Submit to the restraints and we will talk, and experiments can be done on you to see about the walking.” He eyed her intently, smiling as if he knew a secret. “Then, if I think you’re safe, I will let you loose, more and more.”
That sounded fair, if dangerous. Was he lying again? She remembered lies too. People loved those. He could easily kill her.
He could do that here, in the pool. Not feed her. Poison her. Harpoon her. Those she’d seen used far too often. Her people, her ex-people, were good at making war and weapons.
Which way to go? Staying in the pool would get her nowhere.
“You can help me walk?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. How many mermaids do you think I’ve had in my hands?”
The pump that fed water to the pool hummed in the background.
“Perhaps this could be satisfactory.” Frowning, she thought some more. Experiments? She had heard of the Frankenstein experiment, and there had been stories of other things. Long ago, those tales were told, but were they true or fairy tales?
“There will be a price to pay.”
“What price?” Dread tingled through her. He didn’t mean to cut her up?
“Pleasure in exchange for freedom.” He leaned forward. “You want to walk again?”
Oh. She understood. What pleasures, might be a question an innocent would ask, but she knew the answer. The man had sexual inclinations.
Was that so awful? Only if he planned to hook her through the tail to do it.
The alternatives were starvation, boredom, and eventual death. Choice was lacking. The open ocean and the cycle of the Ravening now seemed a dream to her, not a nightmare.
To make her walk, he would need to conjure up legs. To have legs, she had to be human.
If she were human, she could have a life on land.
Could she yearn for both sea and land, at once? To choose between them on a whimsy? Yes, yes. One was an achievable goal, the other a fantasy she would love to make come true.
“If you are lying—”
“I am not. It’s just that this will be a new, exciting, and unpredictable science. If it is science? If magic, I’m no expert on that.”
Hmph.
She nodded. “I will agree then. Yes.” A thought arrived. “No hooks?”
No knives, her mind pushed at her, but she decided not to say it.
“No. No hooks.” He smiled at her with that familiar flat-eyed smile.
That had not changed. Somehow, she thought he was deceiving her, but how? Why even?
“So, I have a yes. Good.”
He threw a fish to her and she consumed it in seconds, gulping it down, ripping it apart, the blood cloud spreading. Then he tossed the gag at her. It hit the water a few feet away and sank.
“Fasten that in your mouth, firmly, do not pretend and make it loose or I will be angry.” He flourished the gun, aiming it at her. “It will click shut at the back. After it’s on, swim to me.”
What else could she do but dive and pick it up, fit it to herself, then swim to him?
Wrong, so very wrong to trust him.
But she had decided. This was a more open choice than swimming back and forth in the pool.
He kept the gun aimed at her forehead as she swam closer. “Good little mermaid. Get up here.”
That seemed to amuse him, and she glowered.
He patted the tiles beside him and backed away. “Sit on the edge of the pool, facing the sea and put your hands at your back.”
What? She hesitated.
“You are, to put it lightly, a killing machine. Win my trust and we can do away with the handcuffs.”
“I am not a kill—” She tried to say indignantly, through the gag. It came out garbled. He got the message. It would be obvious.
“I saw what you did to Merrick. How am I supposed to know when this Ravening hits?”
She would tell him… but he would not believe that. And truthfully, maybe she would not.
And so, reluctantly, while glowering, she raised herself and sat on the edge of the pool and let him handcuff her.
His large hand arrived on her shoulder and stayed there while she listened to his breathing, to the shuffling as he kneeled behind her, and she wondered why she was trusting him.
Because, what else? A killing machine was not her norm, not
