Chapter 16 #2
“Animal,” she hissed, and ignored the way her cunt flexed, her belly growing hard as her muscles pined for more. Choosing instead to watch the spot where the scale had vanished beneath the waves.
Blood trickled down her wrist, then. A thin, jagged trail veined red against the sand and surf. She stared at the spot, watching it ooze until it… stopped. Until the flesh knit before her eyes.
Her heart skipped.
Because it wasn’t possible.
Turning her bleary gaze away—a denial—she spotted a clam nestled in the sand and seized the distraction.
Lumbering forward, she stepped deeper into the surf. Chilled and sobering, the water licked at her thighs. Cooling what the sun had baked and burned.
She stooped, groaning as she moved around her own obscene girth.
Shaking, she went to her knees with a hiss, reaching for the clam…
… and froze.
Her skin caught Apollo’s divine light.
The migraine throbbed between her temples. A rainbow blur through the pain.
But she saw it.
A web of iridescence tracing her forearm. Smooth beneath the skin. Too precise, too perfect… because it was a pattern.
Scales.
Tiny and translucent, layered. An armored filigree written beneath the surface.
Not shining with the greens and purples of the beast.
These were…
A sunrise.
Pale gold, blooming into pink. Bleeding into baby coral.
“No,” she whispered, breath catching high at the back of her throat. She sat back on her heels, horrified. “No, no, no…”
She reached for the trailing edge. Tracing the razor-sharp fan of the last scale until it slipped through to the surface, sailing on a bead of crimson.
A thread of pain lanced through her nerves, but she pressed harder. Letting her nail slip beneath it, freeing it enough to tug.
The skin tented where it was attached.
Attached.
With a hitching breath, Kore tore it free and watched the blood well from the wound. Watched the bead burst free and trickle down her forearm.
The trail wasn’t smooth.
It was jagged…
… around more.
Raised bumps lurking beneath the surface. A lattice, dozens of them lying flush and uniform. Following the natural lines of tendons and bone. Arranged in a perfect geometry too neat to be the result of chaotic fucking.
A whisper escaped her lips, and with a breathy, repeated, “No, no, nooo,” she began to scrub anew.
Fists full of sand, scouring her own skin, she scrubbed.
Efforts redoubled, fueled by panic and denial, until she was chafed and raw from the elbows down.
Rubbing hard enough to leave ribbons of red etched into her skin.
It didn’t work.
Because the scales weren’t foreign bodies embedded by vigorous rutting.
They weren’t morbid souvenirs won beneath the pummelling weight of a demi-god.
They were hers.
A tight, spiraling pattern scrawled across the backs of her fingers, curled over the ridge of her wrist. Trailing in a shimmering arc from elbow to bicep and beyond. Tiny, translucent plates—each shining with the shades of a stunning sunrise—speckled her body.
Itching were they promised to break through into the light.
The more she scrubbed, the more obvious they became. Shining against the reddened, angry shade of flushed skin.
A pattern.
Hers.
Screaming, giving life to the panic bubbling in her chest, Kore scrambled back from the poisonous lure of cool waters and quiet, lapping waves. Breath choppy. Belly distended and sloshing, her balance betrayed her, sending her crashing into the beach.
The sun caught the glimmer of emerging scales and forced her to look.
Below the surface, more color. Tiny speckles curled around her nipples, delicate fans spiraling across her sternum in dainty patterns. Ridges of skin glossed with pressure pressing up from below.
Her fingers brushed lower, then. Tracing the swell of her enormous belly. Where she’d been inflated and marked.
More scales. Bigger ones, making the skin of her outer hips rough. Textured. A clear trail she couldn’t help but follow.
Cautious, her fingers wandered in. Tracing the curve of her thigh, she touched what had once been given in service to the divine. The skin there had always been soft. Sacred. A place marked for the gods and priests who served them.
Now?
She moaned, and it was a fragile, terrified thing.
What she found was tight.
Slick.
And the soft brush of downy hair?
It sloughed off in clumps that clung to her fingers, in its place… something sharp.
Smooth and hard.
Tiny ridges where there should have been nothing but the divine feminine.
A sob chattered through her teeth.
She shouldn’t have touched herself.
Shouldn’t have given in to the morbid curiosity.
But she had to know.
“Nooo,” she moaned, hand clapping over her mouth to stifle a scream. Sinking her teeth into the meat of her thumb, Kore drew blood. Disrupted the lacy pattern that shouldn’t exist.
The sun vanished behind a cloud.
But the sea crept higher. Crashing against the shore, swirling around her thighs. And in a surge that was almost a caress, it washed over her hips. Seeping inside her to touch what had been desecrated by a monster.
Something inside responded.
At the touch of the sea, the seal inside her burst.
There was no warning.
Only a flood of sperm returning to the element it had been born of.
A strangled screech gurgled from her chest, and Kore convulsed. Eyes wide before they rolled white, belly flexing as a torrent of thick, pearlescent seed spilled out of her.
Climax roared through her with the force of a rogue wave. Her limbs flailing in the shallow water, pussy clenching in waves as a river rushed between her legs.
Panting, she lay in the shallows, dazed.
Sightless gaze staring up at a looming storm cloud that offered blessed relief from the blinding morning light.
Belly no longer swollen, pussy throbbing with aftershocks of the tectonic event that had just moved through her.
Her heart pulsing beneath the corners of her jaw.
It wasn’t the horror of it.
The obscene thrill of being emptied.
It was the knowing.
Of what she’d just done. That he’d catch the scent of in the water…
… and return with the tide to put it back…