“Mmm.” She sighed and snuggled into him again, toying with his shirt buttons. He wasn’t simply meaning tonight. “I will.”
“You see, I love you. I’m fairly sure of it. This is new for me.”
Oh. Fuck. And new for her.
She closed her eyes. No.
Yes.
But also no, no, no.
What was she to do?
“The thing is, I’ve been a bad man. A very, bad man. I don’t deserve you.”
“Shhh.” She placed her forefinger over his mouth, felt him kiss it. “You’re not that bad. You cannot be. I’ve lost count of how many men I have drowned. A thousand or more.” Bitten to death, allowed to bleed out. Whose life force she had taken.
“Then we are both bad, and I am lost. I don’t think I can survive without you.”
“Wolfgang, I don’t know what to do,” she whispered. “What to say.”
“Say nothing except this. Do you love me?”
She considered the bright, bright stars. “I don’t know if a mermaid can love.”
She was pretty sure she was lying. Fairly sure she had indeed fallen in love.
But she was even more sure the Ravening was closer than she had imagined.
Maybe it was his declaration of love that had triggered this increase in her need. Her mouth twisted. She could push it down for now, but soon it would be too strong.
“Tell me,” she said to distract herself. “What did you do that was so wrong?”
“I cannot say. I will not. But it was terrible. I lost sight of my humanity. Not sure I ever had any.”
She shook her head in disbelief.
“Sometimes…” Wolfgang lifted her hand and pretended to count her fingers, pressing each one upward, stroking them. “I think you may be more human than I am.”
The next morning she found herself sleeping on the bottom of the pool, with a wicked hunger inside her. On the tiles above, she heard the slap of feet.
He was here.
She stiffened, swirled in a circle, then sped to the surface, flinging a spume of water high.
She showed her teeth.
“You need to go, now!”
“What?” He stopped at the top of the steps. “What do you mean?”
The water gurgled at her ears.
She smelled him. This was not the smell of an available male; it was the smell of life.
Cautiously he came closer, halting a few yards from the pool’s edge.
“Is it the Ravening?”
Though she was not mindless, the craving was too strong. She lunged, skating and sliding across the shallow water on the ramp, launching herself with a flick of her tail muscles. He spun and fled down the steps. The door slammed.
She hadn’t come close to getting him, had not used her siren song.
Raffaela lowered her head to the concrete and shut her eyes.
Next time she would be compelled to sing.
The Ravening had come.
She needed blood and death, and a life to eat.
CHAPTER 11
Wolfgang leaned his shoulder on the door. Not to keep it shut – to steady himself. The side of his face was on the cool glass, and his heart was thudding at him, reminding him of how he had moved down those stairs. She’d almost grabbed him.
He’d run like a fucking banshee batshit suicide machine. He laughed at himself, wiped at his eyes with finger and thumb.
To get away from her – his love, his mermaid with the pointy fucking teeth, he’d run.
“Raffaela…” he murmured as he side-eyed the top of the stairs, wondering if she would appear there, snarling.
When she didn’t, after another minute or so he heaved himself upright and wiped his mouth.
“Think, fool.”
What could he do? The Ravening did not answer to logic or science, that was obvious.
She needed to eat a human? Regular takeout wouldn’t help him here.
Because he needed to see her and to be certain she had not found some miraculous way to escape, he went to the sofa and lowered himself.
Raffaela waited for him, staring through the glass barrier that was all that stopped her from killing him. Her tail silently stirred, puffing up sand.
Her siren song should, theoretically, not reach him through the glass. It was soundproof. On the other hand, the Ravening was not science. None of this was based on factual evidence.
If he went out there again, for whatever reason, he should be as prepared as he could be.
There was only one solution to this. Two, if you counted letting her go back to the ocean.
His real solution: Find her someone she could eat.
Using her tail to stay at eye level, she bobbed in the water. The sunlight reached down through the water and cast serpentine ripples across her tail, her back, her side. It made her scintillate like a living jewel, and when she turned full circle in the water, rolling her body, the light played across her front.
She was teasing him with those. Tits. Breasts. He’d kissed those, could feel them under his hands, in his mouth.
He laughed. A fucking obvious tease that had made his dick hard in seconds.
“You want a human? I’ll find you one.”
Nothing was impossible. The latest philosophy? You can do anything you put your mind to.
The nearest town was more of a village that filled seasonally with tourists but drive past it to the next place and you found a city. Merrick knew, had known, the ins and out of the drug trade, of where the dealers hung out, who to buy from.
It was recreational for the two of them, him and Merrick – only nightclubs, not dirty alleys or looking to get a hit in the worst neighborhoods,
