Chapter 5

Dipping my sharp claws into the water's holy surface, I smiled to myself as the little orange fish wove between the space left between the webbing of my hands. My sisters chattered, brushing their hair with fish spines. Their color was bright that day, after their sailor feasts, they glowed even in the bright sunlight above the sea. The sparkles of Edina's red scales, the glimmer of Cupida's pinks like a coral reef, and the deep aqua of Brizo's wet hair as it trailed next to her thick fin. We were the most beautiful things in the ocean. Not as matter of boasting or pride, a matter of evolution, it was simply a fact.

Us sirens used our beauty and temptation to lure our meals to us. Our prey were decidedly stupid, simple, ugly creatures on two legs, covered in prickly putrid hair in odd places. No fins to speak of, nevertheless, season after season, they ventured into our waters. Our bait laid and effective even without our songs.

"You are looking bright this day," Edina remarked, picking her fangs with a finger bone from the previous night's meal.

I surveyed my fin as it drooped off our rock and lazily into the lagoon. It shimmered amethyst that day. Though, unlike my sisters, my colors always changed.

I nodded. "I got the big one's heart. Oh, it was bitter," I chuckled.

"Lucky," Cupida cupped her bare breasts, admiring the way her light yellow-pink hair fell over their fullness. "His liver was decidedly tough. I only consumed half and fed the other to the hammerheads."

Brizo hissed. "A waste when I left hungry."

"You're always hungry," I quipped, eliciting melodic laughter from my sisters. "Remember the time you devoured a ship of forty on your own?"

Brizo smiled, her fangs still tinted crimson with blood. "The goddess of storms delivered such a mighty bounty that eve, didn't she?"

I loved sharing in sacred sirenhood with my sugar sea sisters. Edina and her curious and astute nature, Cupida and her innocence leading to great findings and many a meal, and Brizo with her ruthless and insatiable hunger. We were the wicked ones of the sugar waters. No other sirens inhabited this particular tide. Why would they bother? It was true that fewer boats came through here, perhaps due to our reputation, but still many did.

Edina stared wistfully in the distance, her orange gaze the color of first sunrise, her gills along her neck folding in and out softly. "I believe they seek out the blood lovers."

"Who does?" Cupida asked, rubbing Edina's hair gently.

"Our prey, the mortal men. I believe all of their kind seek out that which they cannot obtain, even to their ultimate demise. Though, we do them a mercy with their ocean deaths. Better their organs an offering to sacred sirens, than their blood an arousal to the cold tormenters."

Brizo dipped her tail in the ocean's tide and flung it at my sisters, splashing them. "You're as superstitious as the humans. Believing their archaic tales now?"

Edina shrugged. "Some night, sister, we'll catch a blood lover and you'll roll over on your gills."

My dark siren companion rolled her diamond eyes in response, opening her mouth to respond, when we were interrupted. Salmon hued tentacles sprang like seaweed from the waters around our sleepy rock. We extended our palms, quieting to listen as the suction of the octopus's gripped to the skin on our forearms. The tentacled being kept her head buried in the tide, opting to twist around us instead… the sensation… not unpleasant…

I want…

A low voice radiated into my mind. Though I couldn't be sure what she was communicating to my sisters. Cupida groaned softly as a tentacle twisted around her torso. My own breath hitched in my throat as his grip tightened around my neck.

Brizo answered whatever she'd communicated to her, "Not possible." Though her tone was edged, her tail twisted around the thick tentacle that pinned her to the rock, slithering up her middle. She bucked against it, her cheeks turning red.

Edina made no sound beyond the wet sound of slurping, as the tentacle thrusted into her mouth and she sucked, hallowing her pale cheeks. This was becoming a long-standing habit. Though we never knew when she would appear, and she never showed her octopus head, or form, and well… I supposed we didn't quite know what she looked like, for she always disappeared before we went back under the break. But her voice was smooth, her commands easy, and she left us sated in a way that tearing through human meat did not. No, those killings only calmed our stomach's hunger, not the deeper and insatiable desire we had to mate. And oh, as glorious as it was, there was little I desired to mate with in the ocean. Though, many things desired to mate with me.

Such was the siren's allure.

Sometimes I minded.

This time I did not.

Cupida called out, sounding like a flute played over still waters. Her voice, her everything, was the most beautiful of us. A tentacle pierced her entrance, which she readily unfolded her scales for. Brizo and Edina writhed beneath the touch of their unfurling and pulsing pleasure. As it looked as if we were being controlled from below, the tentacles were our strings. Pulling our pleasure this way and that.

A deep, unearthly voice echoed in my mind.

Open your scales to me, siren.

I gasped as I was wrapped around the wet and bumpy mass, three, four times round, pinning my arms at my sides. "I don't like being told what to do," I challenged weakly, the tip of the tentacle rearing back and staring me down like a water snake.

Your body does. The creature retorted in my mind as it slowly sank to coax at my opening. The lips of my entrance throbbed with need and my scales, now fading from amethyst to ruby, parted like a gate, making way for what was to come. Immediately, the tip pierced me like a stake to a fish. I cried out, my own siren song weaker than my sisters. But together, our melody of pleasure haunted amongst the mists of the waves that lapped against our rock. The octopus being expertly drove my fellow sirens to release after release as it pushed in and out of me. And then, deep as it could go, it curved, pressing a suction cup over my bud of sensations. Pressing down hard before pulling up. Wiggling back and forth, sucking my bud as its tip pressed and spun within me. Somehow, I'd laid back, though I didn't even feel the cold hard rock beneath me. My back arched and I moaned, it sounding more like a song, our combined pleasure a wicked tune to no end. There were no sailors to hear our call, no human monsters to coax forward into the sugar depths.

I supposed this was just for us… and for her, whatever our newest friend got from the exchange, I couldn't know. Though she got what she wanted when we finished with the men. However, it seemed never enough. And thus, these exchanges began.

Once I'd came four times, the being slinked away, slipping back into the depths.

Fix it. Was her parting words.

I looked to my sisters, all in various stages of sated, blood flushed, lip parted disarray. "The ship still stands."

"That cannot be," Cupida replied, trying to tame her now unruly, curly, sunlight colored hair.

Brizo sucked in a breath. "Tis what I said. Though, there must be one lowly coward left aboard."

Edina stretched her arms as she laid on our perch, still basking in the warmth of her release. "Not it."

"Not it." Brizo and Cupid said at once.

It was a game we'd observed and learnt from a long-eaten crew of sailors. They each declared it at a task they did not want, and the last standing had to attend to it. Annoyance pulled my ribs as I looked to the horizon. "Fine–"

But it was too late. The sirens had dove back into the sea. I'd sooner catch a stray undertow than one of them. We were fast; we were stealthy, and always hidden beneath these sweet waves.

Best of all, we were deadly. And irritation aside, I found myself panged with hunger once more. What's one more sailor to lure toward my teeth and claws?

We were death.

And this last sailor was mine.