Vexa Rill's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Vexa Rill had drowned nine sailors with her tide-song, and she had loved each one for the short time it took them to die. Tonight the tenth stood at the bow of a wrecked schooner, salt crust in his beard, and he did not turn when she sang. She circled the hull in the dark water and pushed her voice higher, the notes that always pulled men over the rail like hooked fish. He kept coiling rope. Lightning had marked his forearm in a white fork, and she understood then what the old sirens meant by storm-touched. Her song could not find a door in him. She wanted him anyway, more than she had wanted any of the drowned, because he was the first who had ever looked past her mouth and kept working. She stopped singing. The silence startled him more than the song had, and he lifted his lantern over the rail. Vexa let him see her plainly: wet hair, human enough from the waist up, the rest hidden. In one hand she held a sleek blue squid with curled ivory tentacles, still alive, a creature sailors prized for ink and meat. She set it on the deck at his feet like a cat offering a bird. "I can't charm you," she said. Her own voice, spoken, felt raw and strange in her throat. "So I'm asking." He stared at the squid, then at her. He did not reach for a harpoon. He crouched, picked up the animal, and dropped it in his bait bucket. Then he sat down on the deck where she could see him, and told her his name. Vexa gripped the rail with both hands. She had never learned how to keep a man alive long enough to know one.