There was no one to disagree with her.
Over the weeks and days she glimpsed others like her, but they kept their distance. She did not understand or know their reasons, but it seemed wise to do the same. She was frightened of what someone like her might do to a new addition to the … species.
Was she a mermaid? It must be so.
Or was she something else, something more monstrous?
An undefined hunger dwelled inside her, and it seemed to be waiting for something.
Catching and eating fish, seaweed, and various other creatures she tried to not examine as she bit into them, calmed her, but it did not last, and always that deeper hunger waited.
Eventually the clouding of her mind drove her to swim upward, closer to the surface. Up there her new, shocking hunger might be sated. It raged at her while her body grew numb and her limbs prickled with drifting pains.
She popped her head above, into the air, and found she could still breathe, though the air lacked the clean taste of the sea. The scents of mankind pulled her to the ships that sailed by. After several days of following the ships then losing them, she ceased to deny herself. She was weaker and hungrier, yet also more able to smell them, their flesh, their lusts and their urges, Closer to land, where hills rimmed the horizon ahead of her, the ships often slowed. Some of them kept together like schools of fish.
Fishing boats. The men called to each other as they cast their nets.
She swam closer to a boat swaying back and forth in the waves, and there she found her first prey. A young man, merry of face, concentrating on his net while he hauled on ropes.
He saw her and frowned.
With a hold on the boat’s side, she lifted herself and her breasts, above the water.
The man froze.
Then she opened her mouth and sang to him in a voice that pricked him with desire and kept him staring at her fixedly as he approached. With the slightest of tugs, she pulled him closer. When he fell over the side, she slowly lured him deeper, downward, pulling off his pants and wrapping him in legs that had newly formed just for this purpose. To spread them, to fuck a man while he drowned, to kiss him as he thrust, to take him into her world. Finally he was spent. His mouth gaped, his wide-open eyes glazed over, his chest stilled. His limbs washed to and fro like pale seaweed.
Though she had tasted his blood at his neck, it was his death she sought.
Then… his life rushed into her, a fresh and glorious sun to heat her, strengthen her heart, and give her the force to go on.
She watched as he sank.
Many hours passed before guilt assailed her. She curled into a ball, hugging her tail, unsure when it had reformed but not caring. She’d killed. A man. So she could live. It was a terrible, sinful, wrong thing she had done.
A life for a life, though, her desires told her. It wasn’t so bad.
Curled up, she stayed huddled on the bottom for a full day. Siren. That is what I must be. Though really, she still wasn’t sure.
The next morning, when the sun rippled on her skin through the water, she took a deep breath, frowning at herself and surveying her long, pretty tail, and she vowed never to do that again.
But the hunger was not to be denied. She called it the Ravening.
Judging time by the moon, she calculated that every few months she had to kill a human to survive. Sometimes it was sooner, sometimes later.
Exactly one year after she became this strange creature, at sunset, she felt the urge to swim to shore. As she reached the shallows, her legs formed, and she found she could walk and breathe as a human again. Naked, she walked onward, found a village, stole some clothes. When a woman approached her to ask who she was, she pretended she was mute, afraid that opening her mouth would reveal some monstrous part of her.
Her teeth were not sharp – she felt them with her tongue after the woman moved on.
It might have been more of a problem if what was happening did not feel so surreal. She could not stay for more than a single day.
The following day, at dusk, she went back to the sea.
The years passed, and consuming fish and men became her routine.
Her one courtesy to her past, she vowed never to forget who she once was or her name: Raffaela.
She said it to herself many times. She crept under darkened piers and clung to the barnacled posts to listen to people talk, and afterward she repeated the words to herself. When she ventured onto land, once a year, she exchanged a few words with people, if they seemed safe. Over the years the way of words changed. Language changed. Saying the new ones was fun. She must not forget how to be a human.
Raffaela.
Sometimes, she swam to a coral reef that poked above the sea at low tide. There, she sat in the air and said her name out loud to the fish that slipped by. Her voice croaked from disuse. The fish flicked their tails at her. The warm sun glittered on her naked skin and on her scales.
Raffaela.
When her throat grew raw and her skin dried, she dove back into the water and under the waves.
Many years passed. Many hundreds of years. She was alone and lonely, of course. How could she ever do anything to remedy that? Once, she’d seen a pack of her own kind, a school of
