Chapter 12
He watched from the waves. Clinging to the sea’s embrace, content to observe as the little female wandered the back of the cave, her belly no longer swollen. Pacing the edge of the tide, avoiding the water as if it might save her to remain dry. As if she had any hope of escape.
Delicate hands plucked at detritus left at the edge of the tide. Strands of battered kelp. Crabs dancing in shallow tidal pools. Pressing crustaceans and kelp to cracked, dehydrated lips, she ate. Like a savage.
A starving thing.
Her attempts were pitiful.
Almost… charming in a primitive manner.
So much that at first, he wasn’t sure what she was doing. Not until she took a bit of greenery between her lips and began to chew. Her nose scrunched in disgust.
A cute, wrinkled pucker.
But a shameful attempt at survival, nevertheless.
“Please,” she murmured, her voice carrying through the waves as she licked salt from her fingers. “A-Apollo… please…”
He shivered.
It was a voice laced with exhaustion. Thick with confusion. But a voice rich in something he couldn’t name. Something beautiful and grotesque. Something human and… more.
A hint of what was to come.
Until then…
She moaned, curling into herself. Body wracked by shivers as she clutched at a flat belly.
His bride hungered.
A grin kissed his lips, then. Sinister, cruel, it was a thing that made the water still, just for a moment, for even at this distance, he could see it.
The glow.
Pulsing through her veins. Surging beneath her skin.
It called to him. A beacon he couldn’t resist.
And so, he began to hum.
The Resonance.
It began in his chest, a tectonic friction, a sound utterly beyond her pathetic human ears. A sound she couldn’t hear…
… because it was meant for her body.
Using the water, he sent a vibration through the surf. A song older than the Wind. More ancient than the Earth. Older even than the Fires that sank beneath the waves so many eons ago.
The water shivered.
Shaking the sand, he made each grain dance, turning the shore into something treacherous for land-dwellers.
Easing his passage.
Taking one final pull through his gills, he slid from the water.
Crooning a sound beyond hearing, he purred as he breached the surf, dragging coils of glittering, wet muscle ashore.
Serpentine as he slid through quicksand with relative ease.
His every movement fluid, timed to land with the waves rolling gently ashore with the receding tide.
Reacting to the sound, his bride went still before she clenched. Glistening wet thighs slid together as he approached.
She was enthralled by the song of the Black Sea. Obedient. Pliant.
Ready.
Weeping for a mate she could not see, desperate for him to soothe the pain of hunger. To give more of what she craved but couldn’t name.
The molten salt of his cum—the serum that would bind her to the sea.
He’d stayed away too long. Took longer than he’d meant recovering his strength in the trench, feeding his foundling reef until his venom sacs were depleted. Long enough for the seal inside her to rupture. For the tide to come and go, carrying the scent of his seed mixed with human slick.
Long enough for her to want…
His bride hungered.
And he could give.
The surface was pain. A dull roar screaming in his gills as the air seared the sensitive filaments not meant to taste pure oxygen. His every breath a chore with a price.
But the sight of her?
Tiny.
Bare.
Gushing for him?
He hefted his enormous bulk from the loving embrace of the sea, for pain was an old lover, and Nyx would not suffer without purpose.
It was sacrifice.
Calculated.
The price he must pay for such a creature as this.
Her.
Bracing for the coming marathon, he paused to look.
She lay in shadows, huddled at the back of the cave. Eyes closed, trembling as her body reacted to the Resonance. His purr. A crease pinched between dainty brows, and her skin? It was laced with the pulsing blue of the deep. She was marked.
His.
Already, she was progressing. Taking to his toxin in a way that promised what she could be. Already further along than her predecessor.
Nyx flashed his teeth, hissing low. Fins flaring at the painful memory.
This one would be different.
Better.
He would take his time. Ensure she consumed enough, flooded her from every direction with venom and seed, bloating her on the essence that would usher her into a new life.
And when she was ready, when the last scrap of her grotesque humanity had been drowned in brine, he would knot her so deep the Black Sea itself would rejoice.
For he would have his queen.
And she would never resurface again.
His song deepened.
With a fluid, monstrous grace of something not meant for land, Nyx entered the cave. Each coil of his tail dragging over stone, leaving a trail of scales where they were torn from his flesh. Bloodied and glittering in his wake.
It was a cold determination to continue. A blanket of fierce need that settled over him as he watched with unblinking, predatory patience.
Plotting.
Cock pressing at his seam, he rumbled deeper.
He’d strip her of every drop of fragile, human instinct. Hollow her out, and remake her into something gorgeous. A creature that would be the envy of the seven seas.
Silent, but for the hiss of his coils on stone, he snaked toward her. Eager to begin. When he was close enough to touch, his cock slithered from his slit with lazy menace. Already leaking, veined and pulsing as a gush of fluid escaped his tip, he reached.
Cupping a taut breast, he tugged at the rosy peak and crooned when she arched into his touch. Rewarding her obedience, he played with her.
The scent of pussy bloomed in the dank, humid air.
Raw and desperate.
For him.
Because she belonged to the sea.
And he was starving too.
With a flick of his tail, he settled beside her. Hefting his tail over her abdomen, he brought forth the smallest spine nestled in a dorsal fin.
One he’d saved for her.
Venom beaded at the tip an instant before he barbed her. Thrumming to keep her docile, cooning as she squirmed at the molten heat pumping into her muscle.
Groaning low, her jaws went slack. “Apollo,” she murmured, eyelids flickering in delirium. “My lord, please… take me… save me…”
Gills fluttering, Nyx grinned. Pausing to stroke his girth from base to bulging tip, he milked a surge of cum and smeared it across sagging lips.
Her tongue darted out. To taste. To savor.
A breathy groan vibrated through his shaft.
And hazy, glassy eyes fixed to his face. Unfocused, a dazed smile spread across her lips.
Pinching, he twisted that caught nipple and made her squirm. Gave her a tiny fraction of the pain he suffered just to give her this gift, he tortured that swollen bead until it grew puffy and red.
Gaping, she was transfixed.
Her foggy, animal gaze fell to his cock with a gasp. Hypnotized by the ridged and glowing lines, she mapped his girth. Worshipped what he flexed and sent toward a hole he had yet to defile.
Cum oozed from his tip, the tiny slit belching up a pearly bead.
And, setting one clawed thumb to her pout, Nyx dragged her lips further apart and commanded her to open. To take what only he might give.
Heat.
Blissful, searing heat.
His song stuttered to a halt, his gills flapping with the strain of restraint. And with a rumbling snarl, Nyx buried one fist in tangled, brown hair and pulled her face down on his cock.
Wasting no time, he slithered into her.
Ridges popping through the tight ring of her lips, he made it fit. Flexed, so his girth would thin and reach as far into her throat as he could.
She spluttered.
Offering a weak flail as the song faded from her ears.
But it was much, much too late for that.
This was a claiming already begun.
Her mouth was receptive enough that he surged forward in a single, relentless press. Thrilled by the way her throat clenched at his helm, the velvet grasp of a hole created for him to fuck, even if that tight sleeve spasmed in some pathetic attempt at rejection.
She would learn.
Clawing at his scales, she fought—and clenched around him.
Slapping at his belly, she tried to push him back—and massaged his shaft.
The desperate, greedy little thing.
He would oblige her.
Picking up a heavy rhythm, he worked her throat in steady, ruthless strokes. Holding her head in place as her gag reflex surrendered, he plumbed her throat. Offering the tiniest sips of oxygen, for soon she would learn to go without.
Fucking her throat with brutal, measured precision, Nyx used his colossal weight to his advantage. Letting his pearls bulge along his shaft as he neared the end, he adjusted his grip and sent his cock deeper.
She gagged.
Cried.
Moaned.
Her stomach heaved before she relaxed.
Fingers hooked into claws, smoothed out. Stroked what she could reach as she coaxed him toward climax.
She took him, exactly as a bride ought.
Claws flexing against stone, he let his hips snap into her once more before his shaft grew thick and sluggish. Stretching her jaws wide as they might go, he roared. Burying himself in that slender human throat.
And he came.
Sending jet after lashing jet of seed gushing down her throat, he fed his mate. Filling her with endless, punishing pulses.
She choked.
Gurgled.
Swallowing him down in great, heaving gulps, she nursed at his prick. Instinctively. Her belly rounding out with every heated pulse.
Thrumming, he let her feast until she was bloated. Distended and full.
Enormous balls flexing, he groaned with his head thrown back when they too popped from his slit. Displayed against the gleam of his scales, flexing against her chin, he emptied himself.
It was an offer, though she didn’t know it.
A gesture between mates to expose so delicate a part of himself to a female, for if she’d been one of his kind—a Virelii—she might have been able to resist. As it was…
Her eyes rolled white as she swallowed an obscene torrent of cum, taking everything he could offer until a gurgle whistled through her nostrils.
A tiny moan vibrated up his shaft.
A fragile shudder as she shifted toward him, still hungry for more.
It was enough to make him snarl. The complete surrender? The vacant eyes?
She was perfection, his little human slut.
And so, he would not harm her. No matter the ecstasy of her clinging throat, the way her eyes had gone limpid and vacant, this was a feeding.
Unquestionably selfish, yes.
But action with purpose.
Pulling back, he pumped a rope of sticky cum across her lips as he pulled his cock free.
Leaving her face smeared with a pearlescent sheen, sperm dripping from slack lips, he paused to catch his breath.
Toying with her tongue, probing that soft mouth with two fingers, he admired the pretty thing he’d enslaved.
The scent of female slick heated the air with need.
Her need.
Grinning, he pulled his length back, curling it behind his slit, sealing it behind a flap of scales. He sank greedy fingers into the mess between her legs. Parting swollen folds, he filled her. Caressing the place he’d soon bury his knot.
Teasing delicate flesh, making her arch around a belly swollen with him, he felt her clench.
Helpless little human.
She spasmed in an attempt to suck him back inside. The pearl of her clit swollen and needy.
“Please,” she groaned, voice raspy with the abuse. Both hands snaking down to strum that knob of female flesh. “I… I need it. It… it hurts… please…”
He grinned.
She wanted to be bred.
But burning gills and an empty sack spoke of another pressing need—recovery.
Thumbing her clit just to make her buck in his palm, Nyx abandoned her at the height of her need.
Leaving her wanton and wanting.
Tasting fingers saturated in female slime, he purred. Tongue laving up every drop, he licked the salt from his digits, then turned.
Chuckling, he snaked toward the sea. Chasing the tide as it retreated.
Not bothering himself to look back at the creature he’d claimed, Nyx vanished beneath the waves with a satisfied sigh.
Empty balls already beginning to boil anew.
She’d burn while he recuperated.
And the next time he returned…
… she’d beg.