Undertow

One night a year, the sea lets her walk. One man is still breathing to see it.

Salvage captain Garrick Thorne has spent three summers diving the Gravecomb, the reef on the storm coast where a hundred ships lie drowned and every grandmother in Harrowmouth swears something sings. He is thirty-eight, six foot three of hard-hauled muscle, tanned and weathered, with wet dark brown hair swept back off his brow, a full auburn beard, a broad furred chest, steady grey eyes, and rope scars down both forearms. Tonight the storm took his ship, his shirt, and very nearly the rest of him. He wakes in a hidden sea cave with nothing but his sailcloth trousers, a brass-buckled belt, and the woman who pulled him out of the deep.

Nerissa has sung ships onto that reef for longer than Harrowmouth has had a name. On the Drowning Moon she has legs until dawn, and for the first time in centuries she knows exactly what she wants to do with them. Warm deep bronze-brown skin, wet black curls tumbling past her waist with tiny pearls at the crown, delicate sea-green fins behind her ears, scales glittering along her collarbones, shoulders, and forearms, dark eyes, deep red lips, and a body made of dangerous curves, poured into a clinging, shimmering sea-green silk gown with thin straps, a neckline cut nearly to her waist, and a slit high up one thigh. A single strand of pearls gleams at her throat, a gold pearl drop at each ear.

Every sailor knows what her song does to a man. Garrick knows it better than most. He has heard it once before, and never forgotten.

So he asks her to sing for him.

With his eyes open. With his head clear. And with the one promise no siren has ever been asked to make: when he says stop, she stops.

The tide is high, the lanterns are lit, and the sun is a long way off. But the old ones say a mortal who gives himself freely on the Drowning Moon belongs to her tide forever, and Garrick has never in his life done anything halfway.