The Sailor's Song: A Fairy Tale of Terror & Temptation (Dark Fairy Tale Romances) by Vernon Daria

Author:Vernon Daria [Vernon Daria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Daybed Books
Published: 2022-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Moray looked down at Ersa. She had taken one of his ankles where it rested underwater on the step. A creature strong enough to toss him on this rock now pleaded with him to wield the only thing she knew to be stronger than herself.

The way she described it was very much how he had felt under the sway of her song. He did not know how he’d been able to preserve a tiny thread of himself—of fear and survival—in that moment, but he had. Perhaps he possessed other defenses against her, something besides his song.

“You want to feel that again, Ersa? You would give me that power again?”

“I give you nothing. You already have it.”

Her hair played around his ankles at the water’s surface. He reached a palm down to her, expecting her to take it. Instead she pressed her cheek to it —a gesture so gentle that he ached at the kiss of her skin.

“Very well, I will sing.”

He pulled one of his legs up, bending it out to the side for his comfort. No sooner had he done so than Ersa pulled her upper half from the water, wrapping arms around his waist and tucking her face into this newly made lap.

For an outcast and castaway on strange shores, he felt strangely wanted. Perhaps more intensely than he ever had been in Newzance. He thought of a verse and began to sing.

“She’d eyes as abyssal

As trenches deep

And longed to have

My voice to keep

Rarest beauty e’er I saw

With silken tail

And wretched maw…”

Ersa nestled into him, her gills fluttering shut as he stroked her hair. Warm, human breath washed against the taut, wet canvas of his breeches. He almost forgot to keep singing, but she stirred, pushing her head needfully against his abdomen until he continued.

His notes began to quaver, not with weakness as before, but with the charge of nervous intimacy. The morgen was curled, docile as a kitten in his lap. Her tail stretched away from them at the water’s surface, floating effortlessly.

Moray’s heart pounded, and he did his best to control his breath. He reached out a hand to stroke the sleeping morgen’s back.

A quiet song began to pulse from within her, a purring trill that caressed his insides. For a moment, his gut clenched against the feeling. Her song was designed to lure and seduce. A trap, he’d called it. But the worry, as he gazed down at her, was that he was seduced long before this new song sank into his skin.

He was seduced by the way she’d sung his own song to him for help. Was seduced by the tension of cautious trust between them. By the earnest despair in her eyes when the water had burned him. By the feeling of being needed after having been discarded by the only life he’d ever known—a life at sea. By the fact that even the most powerful creatures have their weaknesses and must, apparently, feel loved.

“Alone she watched o’er Samson Cay

She, its mistress

I, her prey…”

Moray’s eyes skimmed along her body.

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