Page 41 of Ensnaring the Siren

“Let us know if you find the rest of the crew.” Just Perez this time.

“Roger that. Heading below.”

“Be careful. If you prove Hatcher right, I’ll have to come down there myself and start punching mermaids.”

If he wasn’t so goddamn terrified for Nireed’s well-being, he might’ve laughed.

He found the stairs and began his descent.

The first thing he noticed was the stench. The bowels of the boat reeked of fish, something coppery, and worse. The second was the pitch-black darkness. Not even the auxiliary lights still worked down here. Reid briefly nudged aside his headset, but the only thing he could hear was the muffled sound of waves lapping against the hull outside. Not the engine. Not even the refrigerated fish hold.

Flicking on his headlamp, Reid discovered where the rest of the crew had gone and stifled another heave, bile burning the back of his throat.

They were…all over the place, body parts strewn along the hall, blood splattered, and viscera smeared.

But still no mermaids.

Maybe they’d gotten off the boat. Injured, but alive.

Shaky relief whooshed out of him for one glorious moment, until something caught his eye—a severed, booted foot propping open the fish hold door.

Something Nireed said came to him in a rush, something that made his blood run cold.

“The fishermen are hunting us, you know. There’s a whole fleet of them. Don’t know what they do with our bodies once they’ve killed us.”

He wove around the gore, avoiding it wherever he could, but where he couldn’t, he didn’t think too deeply about whatever squished beneath his neoprene booties. Reid yanked open the fish hold door and kicked aside the severed foot, a wall of cold air slamming into him. When he looked down…

Horror and anguish hit him like a tidal wave, a silent scream clawing up his throat before shock killed it on his tongue.

Mermaids. Two of them.

He tripped over a dismembered fisherman to get to the one with silver scales, collapsing to his knees beside her and gathering her up into his arms. After several shaky, panicked swipes, he freed her face of the stiff, frozen hair plastered to it.

“Kruetz, what’s going on? You’re breathing hard.”

“It’s not her,” he croaked, dizzy with mind-numbing relief. Oh, thank God, it’s not you, Starfish.

And neither was the mermaid next to her. The deep burgundy scales tipped him off right away in the seconds it had taken him to assess the scene.

The mermaid in his arms was stone cold and rigid, sightless eyes a milky white. Her body was badly broken and bruised, but that was not what killed her. There was a bullet hole in the dead center of her forehead.

She’d been dead awhile. Days, not hours.

This happened before the attack, not during.

And given her other extensive injuries, either the fishermen had beaten her before they killed her, or she’d gotten them when they hauled her from the water. Trapped inside a purse seine net with other sea creatures, that massive crush of bodies, the sheer weight, easily could’ve killed her. But she’d held on, only to be done in by a bullet to the head.

“Kruetz, who’s not her? Give me an update.”

“There are two frozen mermaids in the fish hold, each with a gunshot wound to the head. Forensics will have to confirm it, but I’m certain they were dead well before the attack began. Still need to check the galley and the living quarters, but I feel confident the crew’s all dead.” And he’d seen more to them than he’d ever cared to.

“Hatcher will lower a camera down to you. Get as many photographs as you can and collect anything that looks too important to lose if bad weather hits the area.”

Reid dimly registered the instruction. “I gotta find her.” Make sure she wasn’t bleeding out on this goddamned boat.

“Great, just great. He’s worried about his flesh-eating gal pal.”

“She’s not my…”

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