Nightfoam

She was as delicate and terrible as the legends said.

Perched atop a treacherous outcropping of stone, the mermaid shimmered like abalone as she surveyed the night sky. The crashing of waves was deafening, driven into a frenzy by frigid winter gales. Hers was a slick, ragged world of sea spray, cold and sharp as daggers. In this moment, the depthless cosmic ocean above seemed more knowable than a mermaid’s home.

A dark figure traversed the cliffs, tall and slender. His cloak, blacker than the space between stars, swelled and snapped in the gusts coming off the water. Something angry and vicious was in the weather tonight that would have pushed back any other. However, the man walked on in silent leather boots that left no prints, disturbed no pebbles. Not a single grain of gray sand shifted nor clung to his person. He moved the length of the cliffs unnoticed, then seemed to float down to the rocks below.

Coming to stand just below the mermaid, the figure stopped to eye the undulating tail wrapped around crags of stone. Its scales caught the moonlight, yet were translucent and soft. Her skin hung over her thin bones as a wet towel clings to fingers. The salty breeze had dried her stringy hair so that it whipped about as fiercely as the waves splashing against her throne, sticking to her cheekbones and the curve of her neck.

There was a split in the darkness: a mouth sliding open in a grin filled with glee and ivory fangs dripping with venom. A drop fell to the ground, and the mermaid turned as the acid stench assaulted her faculties. Eyes of silver fixed upon the intruder.

Claws unsheathed, the vampire sprung at her with the swiftness of a panther! The mermaid slid away from his boot heals, slippery and fast. Ready for a chase, he pursued the retreating tail as the sea queen disappeared into a frothy tide pool, only to be met with a razor-sharp swipe across the palms of his hands. The vampire screamed into the storm. She had lashed out with the poisonous barbs on her fins, spilling stolen ruby drops.

The mermaid parted her lips to unmask her own set of needle-like teeth just before she lunged at her attacker.

Golden eyes blazing, the vampire was thrown onto his back by the impact. Their hands collided in a fierce powerplay that forced saltwater into his wounds. He could smell the mermaid’s briny blood in her veins, blue and pounding just beneath that paper-thin skin. She was not the bag of bones he had taken her for! With impossibly thin arms and shoulders, the mermaid held him down. It was all he could do to meet her grasp without letting his hands collapse against the rocks.

Writhing against barbs sticking into his legs, spitting venom at her, the vampire roared with fury and snapped at her exposed throat. In response, the sea queen shrieked at such volume as to burst the vessels in his eyes and face until his pitch black hair was soaked with as much blood as water. He stared at her in astonishment, for she was completely transformed. Long gone was the peaceful creature waiting to be victimized just moments before. Now the mermaid challenged him with her horrible teeth and the milky whiteness of her gaze. Her rotten breath washed over him as her jaw unhinged to reveal the gaping gullet beyond.

For the first time in his centuries of existence, the vampire accepted defeat and he relented to the deep sea power crashing down on top of him. Visions of ships capsized by boundless waves danced in front of his broken eyes.

In that moment, her jaws snapped shut and the immense pressure forced upon his undead body relaxed. Coils of her tail were sliding off him one at a time, though she still clung to both his hands till the bones nearly cracked. Barbs slid out of his skin. Everything about her returned to the underwater serenity the vampire had first witnessed. Her face hovered over him like a second moon.

The mermaid stared down at her prey, watching him as he watched her. She was again beautiful in all her pale, blemished, bony brilliance. Every movement of her sinewy muscles reflected starlight and unearthly colors.

“Has the hunter become the hunted?” she asked with a hint of a smile. Her voice bubbled like an ornate waterpipe.

Enraged, the vampire again fought her and failed. She squeezed his hands until her talons sunk between his fingerbones. How long had it been since he had felt such pain? The vampire growled and gasped and gritted his teeth. Such immense strength was hidden in that tiny frame, he knew the mermaid could pull the undead meat out from him as she pleased. Their brief scuffle had been a farce!

The vampire let his head fall back against the wet stones of the cliffs.

“Good, good,” the mermaid purred, slithering off of him. She finally released his hands and gracefully dragged her long body into a favored indent of rock where the freezing spray could fall upon her. “I am flattered by your…proposal…to taste my blood. And I’m impressed you were able to catch me off guard.” She smiled around wicked viper fangs. “However, I must warn you that the toxins running through me may not be to your taste. You would carry them around in your corpse body until they ate at your very skin, little by little, shortening your eternal life significantly.”

“Should I thank you for sparing me?” the vampire asked, sitting up. He creaked with the effort after enduring the mermaid’s stranglehold, and every stitch on him was soaked through.

She shrugged, an action that tugged the skin of her bare chest over her ribcage. “You interrupted my evening, and I forgave you for it. I am not so rude as to interrupt your eternal life, seeing as you’re such a tasty morsel.”

“You think I would be tasty?” he asked tiredly.

“Indeed!” was her eager response. “My sisters would be thrilled if I dragged you down to places where your immortal form would crumble under the weight of the sea, only to swim you straight back up so your stomach bloated and hung from your mouth, and your eyes popped out. Bodies are so delicate! They come apart so easily if you know what to do. Maybe an undead body would give my sisters a better show than a mortal one?” She giggled, a grotesque sound. “Fortunately for you, I think land creatures are far more interesting alive and kicking. And you kicked quite hard! I’m sure I have a few bruises.” She flicked her serpentine tail. The sharp, spiny fins scratched against the rock. “I hope I didn’t hurt you too badly.”

He stood up and turned to go, making an effort to hide the discomfort he was in. In fact, he felt quite deflated by this encounter. After months of tracking stories and scents and rumors, the hunt had ended in humiliation that he wanted to leave far behind. All his plans for a mermaid feast had been for nothing.

“No one can hurt me,” the vampire retorted as he walked away.

“Oh?” she wondered, lounging on a seat of jagged edges. “What about pleasure? Can anyone please you?”

She laughed as he slowly looked back at her. At some point the snake-like lengths of her tail had made their way to him, wrapping gently around his ankles to brush his trousers with thorn-like barbs. “You seem like a very tasty morsel,” she repeated, licking her lips with a blackish-blue tongue.

Such a sight was enough to turn even a vampire’s stomach, no matter how she beckoned with her dainty webbed hands. So, he shook his head and continued on his way, leaving the siren and the storm behind in search of a hot jugular.

And that would have been the end of the story, were it not for a lingering curiosity left in the vampire’s mind. He trekked across the cliffs, down the beach, and up the hill into the soggy fishing town where his suitcase was laid out on a bed in a small inn. The marks left on his body stung and throbbed, making it impossible to simply forget what happened, and every moment of the encounter replayed in his mind.

The vampire left the wailing wind and rain, closing the heavy door on the squall. He was immediately enveloped in the groaning sleepiness of the inn built out of whole tree trunks. The smells of human life flooded his senses, as relaxing as a holiday meal to any of the mortals in the rooms around him, tucked into their oblivious slumber. A soundless thrum of heartbeats and rushing blood echoed in the vampire’s ears with the same background comfort as the fireplace. It occurred to him that it was a very different sound than that of the mermaid’s heart.

The dark figure returned to his room to strip off his wet clothes. At first he did so calmly, methodically, but then he was tearing them off! Wet, bloody, and full of holes, there was no saving them, so the vampire shredded them in frustration. Only his black cape survived to be strewn over a chair to dry out. Feeling neither heat nor cold the way humans do, the flickering lightning from the window moved across his naked body.

He slipped out the window as nothing but a shadow.

There were no screams in the night, only the muffled dream sounds of women who woke up blushing, feeling as though a fine gentleman had taken them for a dance, whispered in their ear, and kissed their throat so passionately they could feel his teeth brush their skin.

Raindrops dripped off the roof onto the damp ground as the morning sun peeked through the clouds. Fully healed, the vampire Riven stood in front of the vanity mirror searching for any signs of the mermaid’s poison. He was refreshed and as close to rosy-cheeked as an undead man could be, and there were no more purple puncture wounds along his legs nor festering cuts on his palms. No one would ever know about the failed hunt, just as they would never know that vampires really do have reflections.

A ray of sun burst through the fluffy clouds to alight on Riven’s face, and he squinted irritably. He did not sleep enough to be truly nocturnal yet the harshness of direct sunlight burned his skin and irritated his eyes, which were a pleasant golden-brown that passed for normal now that he had sated his bloodlust. And yet he felt empty. Riven had traveled to these distant isles in search of the mermaid-animal so he could experience what it meant to be a real vampire, free to ravage its prey without consequence. Not only had she spoken and laughed, she had played with him as something worse than food: a pet or a plaything!

Riven was still struck by the memory of her loveliness, as well as her horrors. It was not surprising that accounts of her kind were dressed up in sailors’ memories to resemble human women rather than confront the reality of her deep-sea form. They spoke of flowing locks and soft skin that had lured their shipmates to a mirky death in the arms of terrible beauty that dove into the waves with an emerald green tail. Songs and stories, paintings and books―they were all wrong. Nothing but fantasies made up by the weak-minded.

The reality was much, much better.

And infinitely fiercer than Riven’s hubris had allowed him to conceive.

The following night, the vampire donned his flowing black cloak and disappeared from the inn. A different sort of wind, one that was soft and cool, blew across the beach as the moon shone unhindered in a cloudless sea of stars. Quiet, countless waves rolled onto the sand. Riven wondered if a calm night was a bad omen when one hoped to meet a demon. To a creature of the deep, any celestial light would be blinding.

Yet there it was. The mermaid’s scent drifted on the air. Riven caught a whiff of it, then again as he returned to the cliffs and made his way down to the fateful spot where his unholy life nearly ended. A blanched being sat in a familiar spot, one who at first glance looked like a mere waif, sad and lonesome as a banshee, yet had proven herself to have all the softness of a kraken. After thousands of nights spent with maidens who learned too late they had been seduced by an animal, if they ever knew at all, Riven found himself under the crushing aura of an entity bigger than himself. It stayed put only out of a passing fancy.

The mermaid was waiting for him.