Page 43 of Vampire Sins
The ground beneath me immediately opened up, and then I was on my way to the fifth ring of hell.
A Muse Turned Mermaid
Sarah
It’d only beena few weeks since I’d become a mermaid, but it felt like a lifetime had passed by. I lazily swam through the undercurrents where my sisters didn’t often go. I wasn’t like them. I didn’t participate in the mermaid orgies or gain a sense of peace that the sea was supposed to bring me. I’d given up everything of my past life, but something still tied me to land. Something kept me from enjoying what I was now and starting a new chapter.
It shouldn’t have been possible, but that night when my father stole the Tear of the Sea and abandoned me, Vikki and the sirens had lifted me up in song, helping me to survive the transition as the mermaid my father had captured guided me home.
I didn’t know her name, or perhaps she didn’t have one, so I’d decided to call her Gem. It sounded appropriate to me. She was a hidden gem in the sea and glittered like one.
My mermaid savior followed me at a distance. She was always so worried about me. I glanced over my shoulder to find Gem watching. Her eyes glowed with a soft golden hue of our kind and her irises watched me with their slitted stare. She was both beautiful and frightening. Her long tail glimmered with mystical scales that sent cloaking magic out in waves to keep us hidden from potential threats. The edges of her arms were rimmed with dangerous spikes that I’d discovered were also poisonous, after she’d fended off an arrogant shark that’d thought I was lunch. I hadn’t quite mastered the cloaking spell yet. She was powerful both in her physical form and in our magic, which is why my father had chosen her. How he’d gotten her to the surface, I had no idea.
Turning away from her, I twisted my fin to propel me deeper. Usually I wandered around the lower ocean tunnels, looking for baubles or lost treasures. The urge to find something I had lost consumed me and so I searched, although for what, I still wasn’t sure.
Do you think you’ll find it tonight?Gem asked me, her voice ringing pleasantly inside my head.
She always asked if I’d find “it.” We both knew my search was pointless, but she allowed it. She was powerful enough to restrain me back in the mermaid city if she wanted to, but she wouldn’t do that to me. If anyone knew what it felt like to be caged, she did.
I hope so,I replied. The echo of my mind brushing hers was oddly comforting. Even though I hadn’t fully accepted that I was a mermaid now—permanently. It just didn’t feel like this life fit me very well.
Long rows of deep ocean kelp swayed and a crevice in the seafloor caught my eye. It was impossible to see anything this far down and my magic didn’t work so well to give me vision in the dark. I worked better off echolocation and sensed my surroundings through the images that bounced back at me and faded until I sent the vibrations out again. I’d grown accustomed to the alternating view of my new world, but this time the crevice in the ocean floor remained constant. I realized that a red glow emanated from it and curiosity bloomed in me as I drifted closer.
I sensed Gem’s apprehension before she spoke.Dangerous,she warned. The waters shifted as she shot through it and appeared at my side in a flurry of bubbles. She gripped my wrist and her eyes widened in warning.
Shrugging her off, I continued down into the red glow that called to me, making me feel more at home than I’d felt anywhere else on the ocean floor.
Once I passedthe thin veil, I knew that I wasn’t in the ocean anymore. The transition from the crushing depths to something more familiar was slow, but soon the waters drained and my own weight was what kept me down. I crawled on my elbows, dragging my massive fin that was now useless across whitewashed marble floors.
I should have been accustomed to magic portals by now, but my heart thundered in my chest as I coughed up water and forced myself to breathe oxygen again. I hadn’t gone to the surface in so long that I’d almost forgotten how.
I blinked when I looked up and saw Vikki staring down at me, her hands propped on her hips and her small mouth twisted in a scowl.
“Well, it’s about time,” she said, then grinned and waved someone over. I balked when I saw the feminine form running towards us.
Sonya huffed and had the biggest smile on her face. She leaned on her knees as she gulped in air. “Hey, sexy.” She winked at me. “Welcome to hell.”
Pride and Sloth
Sonya
I gave Vikki a raised brow.She’d said that we could lure Sarah to hell with her pride. It didn’t surprise me that “pride” was Sarah’s cardinal sin. She was too proud to share me with anyone else. It was what made her unsuited to be my mate, but the magic between us had drawn us together anyway. She was doomed to be a sin that would never be forgiven. Pride was a failure on both our parts.
If she’d wronged me, she’d paid the price by everything that had happened to her. She was literally a fish out of water and it wouldn’t do for a mermaid to be flopping around the flames of hell, so there’d been one extra thing Vikki had to do for me.
The siren produced the Tear of the Sea, a ring that emanated with power, and handed it to Sarah. After Apollo’s death, Vikki had tracked it down and then come to find me. She’d just been sitting here waiting for me in the fifth layer of hell.
Sarah blinked at us, shock making her eyes go wide, which only augmented the strange slitted irises of her new form. She accepted the ring and put it on, then clamped her jaw and suppressed a groan as bones crunched and her scales blistered off into ash.
Shaking, she stood on wobbly legs and reached out to Vikki for support. A jealous part of me flinched that she hadn’t reached out to me, but I had to remember who Sarah was to me. She wasn’t my mate. She was a sin bonded to me and if I didn’t play my cards right, would be my downfall when I faced the witch who’d branded me with this curse again.
“Can you walk?” I asked, then grabbed my stomach and winced. During limbo I’d absorbed my mates’ souls. Carrying them inside of me was the oddest sensation, but once I got out of hell, everything would be all right. I had to accept their power and their gifts right now, no matter how much it terrified me.
Sarah leaned heavily on Vikki’s arm, but gave me a raised brow. “Canyou?”
I scoffed and limped my way down the sheet of white marble. It separated the two rings of hell that seemed to have merged into one another. Sarah’s pride glittered behind us with the crushing ocean full of mermaids who didn’t care about anyone except themselves, and Vikki’s sloth that waited before us. Vikki’s sin didn’t look so different than the depths of the oceans. A long stretch of shadows swirled with nothing for as far as I could see other than drifting fog and the scrawling fingers of my nightmares across the sky. The darkness was following us down into the depths of hell and I wondered what it’d do when it caught up to me.
We walked on in silence until Vikki finally addressed the elephant in the room. “Okay, so, now that we’re here, how do we get free?”
