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  We reached the surf-washed rocks in seconds and Caspian and the increasingly choppy surf carried us up to the biggest and flattest of the rocks. There he pulled out of me and turned me over on the rock, wet and sore and satisfied. I looked up into Caspian’s beautiful face as he reached for my bound wrists and pinned them to the rock above my head.

  “You’re so very beautiful, Nadine,” he said in a somber, musical voice, and for the first time, I really believed that about myself. He hooked my bindings on the sharp edge of the rock so his hands were free but I was bound tight to the rock like a sacrifice, then started working his way down my body. He kissed my throat, my breasts, my belly. He kissed between my legs. He blew on my sore, exposed clit until I trembled for him and whimpered.

  He ran his fingers down the length of my legs and up the backs of my calves as if fascinated by them, then leaned against my lower body and kept my thighs from clenching down on his head with his elbows. He used his thumbs to splay my wet and dripping labia and circled my eager opening with his tongue. It made me thrust my pelvis against his face, made me moan and thrash uncontrollably on the rock. He sucked my clit into his mouth, worried it delicately between his teeth, and I cried out in mindless pleasure as I came and came against his mouth, screaming forth my release, my voice nearly musical in its intensity.

  “My siren, you’ve found your voice…and your tail,” he said as I writhed on the rock in the throes of one of the most intense orgasms I had ever experienced. When I finally had the sense to glance down at myself, I realized my body felt much heavier, and I couldn’t move my legs at all. Instead of legs, my great, heavy fantail flapped wildly against the rock that Caspian had me pinned to.

  He hummed against my lips and throat in that deep, musical voice. “You have a beautiful tail, Nadine,” he said, and I couldn’t help bug giggle at that because it sounded like a siren pick-up line. In his defense, my scales were a bright orangey-red color, like a koi fish, the same color as my carroty hair, and they did look pretty.

  I smiled up at him and ran my hand down his back and boldly against the sharpness of his dorsal fin, and said, “You’re pretty too.”

  He laughed at that and our tails twined together as he rubbed his pulsing erection against my glistening opening, teasing over my clit again and again, until I thought I would go mad from need, before nudging the swollen head inside me.

  I cried out as he took me in this form. He seemed even bigger now, or I was even tighter this way, but either way the stimulation of pleasure so close to pain made me buck uncontrollably as my body tried to escape him, but he held me down against the rock and forced his way inside me, deeper and deeper. He pistoned in and out of me until all my muscles clenched down upon him, squeezing him so tightly he cried out along with me so our voices, like our bodies, mingled and merged into song, a song we sang into each other’s mouths and into the blustering storm and sea raging all around us.

  Finally, he plunged in as deep as he could go and slid his hands around the backside of my tail as he held me still and his seed pulsed one, twice, three times in all inside me. When we finally fell back onto the rock, exhausted and clinging to each other, we realized there was a circle of a half dozen heads poking out of the water around our rock, and a half dozen tales splashing as a pod of sirens frolicked around us.

  * * *

  We learned all about the other sirens on our swim back to shore. The older male was Caspian’s sire, and the five young ones Caspian’s brothers and sisters. When I asked about the four sirens that belonged to Marissa, Caspian’s brother and sisters, the old sire told us that he and his wife had had trouble conceiving. They had visited an old sea witch who gave them a spell that would help his wife, but in return, they had had to give the sea witch four of his wife’s eggs as payment. The old sire seemed very sad about the deal he had struck, and sadder still when he learned how the old witch, Marissa, had been exploiting the sirens.

  I looked at Caspian swimming close beside me and said, I wish there was a way to help you and your siblings.

  He looked sad but didn’t answer me.

  We surface about a half mile from shore. There was a yacht bobbing in the bay not far from Lauren and Miguel’s house, but when I saw it was called the Sea Witch, I felt my stomach clench in worry and Caspian looked at me with the saddest eyes I’d ever seen. “It’s Marissa,” he said. “She’s here for me.”

  I gripped his arm. “You aren’t going back!”

  “You don’t understand, Nadine.” He looked away as if he could not meet my gaze. “She gave me two days. If I don’t go back, she’ll take her rage out on my brother and sisters. I can’t let her do that to them.”

  “And she shouldn’t own you!” I shouted angrily. “She shouldn’t own any of you!”

  He smiled at me then. “She doesn’t, Nadine. You do. But I do need to return to her. Alone.” He turned to me then and seized my cheeks in his big, strong hands and kissed me, his tongue sliding across the seam of my lips, inside my mouth. “I loved our two days together, and I thank you for them from the bottom of my heart, but I have to go back.”

  I gripped him with shaking fingers. “Take me with you, then.”

  “You can’t, Nadine,” he said, and his voice was choked with tears. “If you come with me, she’ll enslave you. She’ll do terrible things to you.” And with that, he slid out of my hold and dipped beneath the surface.

  I waited and watched as he swam toward the yacht and the other sirens gathered around me to comfort me. Once he’d reached it, Marissa let down a fishing net and pulled Caspian—my mate—ashore, and the two disappeared into the wheelhouse. Caspian’s sire touched me on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, little one,” he said. “It was our deal.”

  “I don’t care about your deal!” I threw off his hand. I swam toward the yacht, cutting through the water like a knife.

  I reached the starboard side of the boat where there was a ledge for fishing, and there I remembered what I was. I could probably get my land legs back if I really wanted to, and right now I wanted to. I was neither human nor siren. I was both. And I loved Caspian. I wanted to go to him. As I pulled myself from the sea, I really believed I could walk, and with a brief, harsh pain not unlike a leg cramp, I felt my tail shift into legs.

  I stood up and tottered uncertainly to the wheelhouse and opened the door. The room was furnished in antique gold and red velvet furnishings and was fit for a queen. Marissa was beating Caspian with a gold scepter while Caspian lay coiled on the floor, letting the scepter rain its sharp cracks against his shoulders. She was cursing him out, telling him how he had failed her.

  I stepped into the narrow room and she turned to look at me.

  “You,” she said, and her green brocade gown seemed to float with her rage. Her hair seemed animate with it. There was a rabid glint of greed in her eyes that made me think of that night in the loft of Neptune’s Palace when she had grabbed my wrist and I had felt that jolt. “You’re her…you’re the halfling!”

  “And you’re a bitch,” I told her as I felt my blood boil in my veins at the sight.

  “All he had to do was cast the spell!” she shouted in rage, all her beauty contorting with her anger.

  “What spell? What are you talking about?” I asked, and looked over at Caspian, who stared back at me with longing and regret. “Caspian, what’s all this about?”

  He licked his lips nervously. “Marissa let me have two days with you because she wanted me to cast a spell on you—her spell. It would turn you permanently into a sea siren and allow me to impregnate you. Then she could take your eggs. She could have sirens that walked on land or swam in the sea.”

  “But you didn’t,” I told him, looking down at myself, my legs. “I can still walk on land.”

  He shook his head. “I couldn’t do that to you, Nadine. I won’t.”

  Marissa screamed like a banshee and charged me with the scepter. I was still weak from being in the sea, but love makes you strong, and I loved Caspian ve
ry much. I loved Caspian and I hated Marissa for what she had done to him. As her heavy gold scepter came down over my left shoulder, intending to batter me to the floor, I caught it in my hand, and with all my strength I pulled her to me, locking her own scepter under her chin so she was helpless. She continued to screech in the most unearthly voice, and I felt her shift in my arms, felt a number of steely, powerful tentacles as they coiled snakelike around my body. They were her arms, her legs…her hair.

  Suddenly I was entangled in Marissa. She started to squeeze and I felt the air go out of my lungs and darkness started leaking into the corners of my eyes. I had seconds before I passed out, so I swung around to find myself on the deck of the heaving yacht. The storm had finally caught up to the mainland, and wind and rain lashed the little boat.

  Marissa screamed in my ear and I screamed back, calling all the sirens in the sea to me, Caspian’s family…my own, wherever they were. Within seconds the choppy, dark green waters were full of the bodies of dozens of sirens screaming back at me. I saw glinting, feral eyes and dripping, open mouths full of sharp teeth. Marissa had made enemies, a lot of them. She had taken countless children from the sea over the years, exploited them, used them, and now I would give her back to the sea as payment.

  Just before I passed out, I heaved myself overboard and into the water, with Marissa still clinging to me. The moment I hit the water, my world went black, and for a long time afterward I thought that maybe I had died, drowned at last like I had almost drowned as a child.

  Then strong warm arms closed about me, and I felt someone propelling me back to the surface. The moment my head broke the surface of the ocean, I felt Caspian kiss me, rock me in his arms. “Nadine? Are you all right?” he called over the storm. “Nadine!”

  I blinked water from my eyes and found myself staring into his dear face, even as our tails tangled in the roiling, white-capped water and rain slashed our face and lashed our hair to our cheeks. “Caspian!” I said and threw my arms around his neck. My heart soared and I took solace in the comforting solidity of his body as I clung to him.

  I heard a single, desperate scream, and turned in time to see Marissa being dragged beneath the surface of the sea by the angry sirens. They had their claws in her, and their teeth. Within seconds she was gone, and she did not surface again.

  “We’re free, Nadine,” Caspian said, holding me tight against his chest and kissing my face all over as he smoothed my wet hair. “We’re all free at last.”

  I felt a surge of joy, and, more importantly, a sense of belonging.

  We swam to shore and together lay in the warm, wet sand as the storm slowly broke above us. He asked me to go into the sea with him forever, but I told him the truth—that I loved him, but that I also loved my friends and my human life. I realized I had two families now, one here and one in the sea. I thought he might be angry with me, but he kissed me then, soundly, wetly, and said that that was a very halfling thing to say and that he would let me go, but only if I promised to visit the sea every single day to be with him.

  I promised. And before he left me, he gave me a string of real black pearls—the rarest in the world.

  About the Authors

  Madeline Apple is a mysterious soul who is known to write under many other names. To see all of the Courtesan Press titles, visit http://courtesanpress.wordpress.com.

  Alex Crossman works as a boring cubicle slave by day and writes romantic erotica by moonlight. She likes feeling like a superhero with a secret identity. She lives in the great southwest with dogs, cats and assorted cacti. To see all of the Courtesan Press titles, visit http://courtesanpress.wordpress.com.

  * * *

  Read an excerpt from another exciting Courtesan Press release, Blood & Lace (Blackstone Hall) by Eden Myles:

  BLOOD & LACE

  (Blackstone Hall #1)

  by Eden Myles

  Chapter I

  As we passed a dense forest of fine, old oaks on our way to Blackstone Hall, I leaned out the window of our coach and noticed that many of the trees were tall and proud, with strong limbs, good for climbing.

  My father, seated on the cushioned bench beside me, said, “Marie. You mustn’t.”

  “Mustn’t what, Father?” I asked innocently, biting back a grin. I didn’t turn to look at him, lest he see my secret smile.

  “Climb trees or do anything which might be construed as unladylike.” He took my hand and squeezed. “You’re almost twenty years old, girl. I’m counting on you to be on your best court behavior.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  The coach jostled along the uneven road, throwing us back against the braces, but my father’s coach was so luxurious that the padded velvet seats made the ride—almost seven hours thus far—more than bearable.

  “We shall be there shortly, my dear,” Father said as if concerned I might be losing patience.

  I wasn’t. I more than enjoyed watching the landscape drifting by, the deep, old forests—it was so different than the colder, craggier Northlands where our estate resided. There the trees grew short and farther apart, the people were brutish and covered year-round in animal furs, and the horses shaggy. There were mountain orcs that were a constant threat to my father’s people, but I hadn’t seen such creatures here. I wondered if there were Fae in these forests. “No more than an hour yet,” he added.

  “Yes, Father.” Once more, I leaned out the window of the coach, seeking out both the familiar and unfamiliar in this strange land.

  Where we lived, in the lands several hundred ticks to the north, the squatty pines shivered in the heavy snows. The people were fair-haired and blue-eyed like my father (except for the gypsies who regularly passed through) and there were still a few remaining ice dragons slumbering deep within cairns in the earth. On a cold morning one could stand on a balcony and spot their breath pluming up through small cracks in the earth.

  But I’d heard that Lord Elric Rothschild’s lands were warmer, the oaks and elms soaring and rotund, spreading their lush green boughs to the heavens like supplicating hands. I’d heard there were dwarves and tall, slender people of a swarthier complexion here. Food was bountiful, war scarce, and the people more congenial and trustworthy. Stone dragons still occasionally circled the skies. It was a pretty land, green and fecund, with autumn bleeding through the trees in vibrant shades of yellow and fiery orange, though we had not encountered many villagers along the way so I could not yet ascertain the friendliness of the local inhabitants.

  I did not blame the villagers for hiding. Though beautiful, it was said these were perilous lands, dangerous for those on foot, particularly now, with the evil of a corrupt Vargr on the loose—a werewolf who kills for its own pleasure.

  I had never seen a Vargr, either dead or alive, but stories abounded in our own realm of such things. Men who became wolves to placate their own nefarious hungers. It gave me something of a delicious shiver to think of it, for in our lands, there were no more werewolves, evil or otherwise. They had all been hunted to extinction decades before I had ever been born. I wondered if I would see one during our stay at Blackstone Hall.

  I admit I sighed to think of it. Adventure. The only adventure I had ever really known past childhood games was in my father’s libraries. A wealthy man who had made his fortune in shipping, he had a thousand books spanning every possible subject: science, alchemy, romance, chivalrous adventures with knights and pirates. I swore I had read them all at least twice. Growing up, reading about fierce warriors, and pretending I was one among their number, had been my two great passions in life.

  Less than hour later, I saw “the Hall,” (as the locals called it), standing mistily upon its distant rock for the first time, its highest spires and flapping banners rising far above the summit of the land. Even from this great distance, Blackstone Hall sprawled large enough, and certainly grand enough, to house a king or emperor.

  It had been built in a time that no one remembered by the hands of the Fae Folk, according to folklore. It was
said the King of the Fae built the great keep for his Queen and court, and he had done so out of pure, shining white stone carved from his mother the moon. But some great tragedy had occurred there, and the Queen of the Fae fell dead, a dagger in her heart, and as her sacred blood spilled upon the floor of the Hall, it turned all the stones in the structure black. Or that was the story, anyway.

  No one knew who had really built it, or why. According to Father, only the Rothschilds had occupied it in the last few hundred years after their ancestor, the fierce and bloodthirsty warlord Alaric Rothschild, had conquered the land and set his flag upon the highest turret.

  As we rumbled nearer, I could just make out the black banner sinister with the white dragon upon it, the sign of Rothschild house. Father had stayed here at Lord Rothschild’s court as a child when Elric’s own father had invited him here visiting, and he had many tales to tell of it.

  As we crossed the spindly bridge that spanned a yawning and seemingly bottomless chasm on our last leg of the journey to our destination, I marveled at the vast, rambling darkness of it—the chipped, battle-weary ramparts and battlements, the craggy side chapels and gatehouse. The outer walls of the Hall stood five hundred feet high, with a tall, pinnacle tower twice that size rising from the center of the courtyard, enshrouded by a yellowish, poisonous-looking mist.

  The black-as-soot flagstone of which the Hall was constructed made me think of some burned leviathan of a dragon, the spines of its carcass shimmering high in the heavens. The few windows on display were of colored glass, giving the place the brooding look of an abandoned monastery. The land surrounding the hall was different than the countryside—jagged and strangely lifeless, with virtually no trees and only patches of melting snow and cold, churned mud, which made crossing the vast, arched bridge treacherous and slow-going.

  The sun was beginning to set by the time we approached the portcullis, and as we rode under the gatehouse, I marveled at the enormous, black stone dragons and gargoyles crouching overhead, seeming to watch us with their cruel, idiot stone eyes.