This was written for Clockabye.  It’s horrific and dark and I don’t know if it’s particularly well written, but I fretted over it for weeks, so there you go.

Be warned: There is death in this, and some sex, but that’s peripheral.  There’s blood and gore and what I wouldn’ t consider cannibalism, but you might. So…if you don’t like your fiction dark and disturbing (as this was meant to be) better to avoid it.

 

It was at night she came to him. Fresh from her journey to shore and still dripping, a wave rising and pushing from the door to where his feet poked cold and blue from the covers she came, inexorable and unstoppable – but so fluid, so subtle in her motions that she knew she could wear down his protests sure as a waterfall wears as a stone. She’d wear him away, if he cried out, as the sea wears away the edges of glass until they’re smooth and velvet.
And her hands, they slid over his feet and up those muscled thighs, and her face was shadowed and her eyes dark with churning liquid heat and hunger as her body slid up, up along his form, stretched and sleeping on that low bed.

In his sleep, deep in his dreams, he felt a stirring. Some presence, some motion, drawing him up from the depths of sleep to lie blinking on the shores of wakefulness, feeling a touch upon him, a long, slow caress rising up his body, smooth as water.

If there were clothes, her clever fingers drew them away. If there were linens that hid his body from her dark eye, they were plucked up and deposited elsewhere. She sat back then, when he was bare to her eyes and lips and hands, and watched the sailor’s tattooed chest rising and falling in the moonlight. He was lovely, but more than that he was Mortal, he was Man. Full to the brim of that pulse, that power she hungered for, and would never go happily without. It was his smell that drew her to lean down, pressing her nose into that soft, furred place where thigh met hip, and inhale deeply. It made her give a tiny shudder, and lick her lips.

Did he wake? Look up, sensing her, seeing her by the light of the moon that streamed through his window, reaching out his two hands, his mind still fogged with sleep? Did he start, feeling her breath upon him, the part of him it warmed painful in its sudden rigidity, his eyes filling with heat as his body moved into awareness? …did it matter?

To think they’d rented her room away. To think that there was a man, here, in the bed that had always been her own. She could smell herself on it still, under the dusky scent of it’s current occupant. And under that, others. Lovers, playmates, she searched her mind and sniffed for the whiff of each one. The scent of mortal man had always overwhelmed her.
Oh, there. There he was, full, keening, hot. She wanted him. And oh, he was so velvet-soft against her cheek, against the palm of her hand as she stroked up, down… And lord, how she wanted to *taste* him, the salt of him, that flavour that made up the sea and was yet nothing like it. There was a moan as she felt that softness glide against her greedy lips and tongue, and it may have been her own.

She was as giving, eager as water is to flow into each new hollow place it finds, and just as gluttonous in her need to swallow up every branch and shell and bit of glass on the shore of his body. The trip to shore had exhausted , but her time away had made her long for that thing she’ never thought to miss. Dimly, the woman-witch could feel his hands on her, tugging and stroking her, but she barely noticed. She loved taking sailors down to be her lovers, tightening her fingers in their hair…in it’s own way, this was almost as sweet.
Wrapped in human skin, she wanted only their laughing and their scent, and remembered the hot smell of lifeblood as a distant dream. Home, in the sea, hot flowing red was the only comfort for a love stilled by her winning pleasure in it.

She’d lost the taste for love-play with mortals, in the sea, even as she’d always watched and wanted them from the waves before drawing them under. But what mortal man could stroke her as ocean currents could? And yet she delighted in embracing them, kissing their gasping mouths, feeling their weakening arms cling so sweetly to her neck as the waves closed over their heads. They never pleased her, after, and some part of her would never understand it. …the roses in their cheeks would fade, they grew still and cold and blue until finally, bored with her playthings, she released them to the currents and tides.
But not before a taste. After sailors stopped smiling, after they gasped and their eyes went blank, it was comfort enough to take refuge in her dearest taste. On land, she’d neither the taste nor the stomach for it. In the sea was pleasure beyond love to kiss them even more thoroughly, harder, harder with tongue and teeth, until she could taste their life, hot and rich, take her fill and suck the bones clean. It was a short fulfillment, that in it’s completion exhausted it’s joy, but a sweeter one than any other.

Now, rising above her loveprey, the two lusts commingled and filled her with duel hungers, so matched in intensity and so undeniable in insistence that they twined one about the other and sent crooked rivulets of hot salt pricking over her skin, pushing her along.
It wasn’t enough. It was never enough. The moment she felt that pulse, that dear shudder in him she pulled away, feeling her body tighten and flood. The need to devour him, to take that life and heat as her own in every way possible, was overwhelming.

Is this what she had come for? This heat, this prickling urgency? As the sea-white creature rose pale and shining above her prey, she hissed as she mounted him and let her hands stroke over his body, tiny sea-frond caresses. Her pale shoulders flashed in the moonlight as her hips rose above him, and she watched his eyes widen and close. He reached up for her, a blind, grasping thing, his hands seeking an anchor, something to steady himself against. They caught at her hips and held tight, rocking beneath her as she surged over him, relentless as the tide. Such loving completion! Such desperate, gasping insatiable need! He was hot, so hot, and even the moon’s silver light couldn’t sooth her. Her lips opened and her tongue came out, a red darting fish to lick the taste of him from her lips, to lap up the sweat from the hollow of his pulsing throat and smell the heated life there, and revealed her thin, sharp teeth. A moment. A bare, grasping moment, as her fingers found little places to take hold, to work him open and to reveal to her a richer banquet than could ever come still wrapped up in skin.
She looked down at him. And it struck her then, half-caught in two hungers and two worlds, that they were never so beautiful as when they rutted, and died.