Shark Bait (3 page)

* * * *

Those eyes had watched her all morning like a cat on a mouse. Sophia trained her gaze dead forward. She felt his stare like a dark shadow on her side. Her bladder screamed for release, but embarrassment stopped her from relieving herself in the cell’s small chamber pot. Her stomach clenched in hunger and thirst, but she held tight her lips, determined not to cry and waste the salt and water.

She’d only glimpsed him full-on the once, and Sophia wanted to look again the way she wanted to look at car accidents when she visited the human world. Her mind’s eye pictured that wide scar sliced from his hairline to his jaw, diagonal across his face and those mismatched eyes. She struggled to remember if that matted, spiky hair held a tuft of white-blond right above the electric blue eye. She peeked to find out, but swallowed a yelp when he moved.

“Hungry?” He didn’t move to stand but shifted position, waiting for her answer. When he didn’t receive it, he crawled across the floor to a half-height cupboard, rifled around inside, and retrieved a loaf of bread and jug of something. Then he returned to his spot against the wall and broke a hunk off the loaf. “Don’t you have to piss or anything?”

His crude inquiry caused her head to whip around so that she saw him again. A thick layer of dirt covered his hands, his face, and his neck above the shapeless gray rags he wore. She wondered what color his skin was beneath the grime. “Are you offering?” Her hopes were low, but then again if she died from thirst, they would never collect a reward.

He seemed to think about it for a moment before answering. “Yeah.” A lump of bread flew through the bars and landed on her lap, and he leaned forward to place the jug within her reach. She hesitated, wondering if it was a trick but then rose and grabbed it into her cage and drank in deep droughts before he could take it away.

After draining the last drop, she sat back down to her bread. Her forehead wrinkled at the effort to hold her water.
“Go on then, do it already. You’re making me want to cross my own damn legs just watching you!”
Her bladder clenched painfully at his words, but she belted out, “Well, at least turn around, then.”
To her surprise, he did, abruptly shuffling until he faced the wall. She stood, rushed to the pot and lifted the lid, trying not to think about whom or what might have used it last. At least it was currently empty. She sat, but stage fright hit. “Can’t you at least leave the room?”
He tugged at the chain holding him to the wall, and the metal clanked in loud peals. “Only way out is the ladder, sweetheart, and I can’t reach that far without hurting myself.”
The sound of his voice provided cover enough and her stream began, but when he stopped talking, her center clamped down. “Can’t you, maybe, sing a song or something?”
He cursed, but it sounded more frustrated than angry, and a moment later he launched into “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” He sang in curt phrases loud enough for the notes to clang off the aluminum walls. Oddly, he had a nice singing voice, low and melodic and familiar. She finished her business, cursing her lack of toilet paper, and lowered her dress.
Sophia turned to thank her jailor, but the look on his face stopped the sound in her throat.

* * * *

Footsteps approached the hatch.
Fuck.
Raider glared at the human-form dragoness, who’d wheedled him with her sighs and shrugs and big, brown eyes, and crossing and uncrossing legs. He’d wanted to be left alone with his thoughts of getting between those thighs, but the idea of her being hungry or uncomfortable had itched at his calm.

Now that he’d drawn their attention, he’d pay in skin. She lowered her eyes from his, and her bottom lip quivered again. Good, she should be scared.

He hoped that this time Crayz had sent one of his underlings. But when the hatch lifted, his father appeared framed in sunshine. The light burned Raider’s eyes.

“Was that singin’ I heard?” Boots descended the metal ladder. “Pretty deep voice for a gal.”
The lady dragon popped the crust of bread into her mouth before the older shark noticed.
Crayz dropped to the floor with a thunk and swiveled to look at Raider then Sophia. His right-hand men, Thorlo and Zrah, descended and stood like twin boulders behind their boss. The storage area stretched twenty feet in either direction, but still the men’s bulk filled the room.
Crayz spun on the girl. “So, was it you singing, little miss?”
Her eyes darted to Raider. The three sharks’ gazes followed. “Friendly now, are we?” Crayz strode to his son and lifted the younger male to his feet by the neck. “If you weren’t such a damn embarrassment she wouldn’t do that! Instead you’re singing lullabies. Next thing you’ll be knitting together!”
He knocked Raider’s head back against the bowed metal wall once then signaled to his men. Thorlo and Zrah pulled his poncho over his head and threw it like a pile of trash to the spot that served as his seat, bedroom, and bed. His long chain clanked as the men threw him against the bars of Sophia’s cage and locked his arms above his head.
Sophia let out a little scream and scampered backwards to the far corner. Good. If she had started with that irritating talking of hers, it might be her against the bars.
His father sent Thorlo for his whip, and Raider’s muscles bunched against his bindings. More than chains held him captive. If his father razing his birth home wasn’t enough to keep him prisoner, the way Crayz destroyed the next place Raider ran sealed his captivity.
Raider stared more closely at Sophia’s heart-shaped face. Gods, it had been a long time since he’d had a female, especially one he didn’t have to pay. As he watched her, some of the fear left her eyes. Instead he saw interest, and pity.
Fuck, she better stop that right now.
He widened his eyes to get her attention then mouthed a single word
. Scream.
The first blow landed across his back, and thank the gods, she did.
Her cry covered several hits. Each lash tore a new strip of skin, the whip soaked in standing water to slow down his healing. He closed his eyes as the next landed, fisting his hands to resist a flinch. The female gasped at every stroke, the sound rhythmic and not a little erotic, like she was taking a small part of the beating for him.
Crayz worked to exhaustion, and then handed the weapon to his lackey. Raider’s eyes met the dragoness’s, wide with fear and wet with tears. When Thorlo laid into him, Raider watched the female’s face, so open in its terror, contained and yet abandoned as she whimpered for him. He hardly felt the last few strikes.

* * * *

“Don’t forget what’ll happen if you try to leave, kid!” The leader shouted behind him as he and his men climbed the ladder. Not until after they’d closed the hatch did her jailor collapse. The sharkshifter’s bloody body hung on his chains against the rusted iron bars of her cell. His eyes were pressed closed, and his jaw clenched, but whether in pain or anger, she couldn’t tell.

His wiry muscles still tensed as if to take a blow. Without his bulky cloak, he seemed more slightly built than the other sharks in the crew and maybe a little taller. Most shark-shifters were built square and barrel-chested, but this one narrowed from the wide shelf of his shoulders down to a chiseled waist and thin hips. Ancient jeans hung at his hipbones. Clearly, he’d lost some weight since he’d gotten said jeans and they perched precariously, in danger of falling off completely.

A soft swelling formed in Sophia’s human reproductive organs, and her breasts, which she could never get used to no matter how often she took this shape, seemed to tighten. Mercy, it was bad enough she neared heat as a dragon; Sophia didn’t need this reminder of her impending heat in both her forms.

Now that she saw him up close, she realized his mark was not a scar, but a strip of depigmentation that stretched from his hairline down his body. It crossed one eye, and passed over his lips, leaving a path of soft pink against the brown.

It ran down his chest and speared into his jeans, as if she needed the line to direct her eyes! Sophia couldn’t help but wonder how far the mark ran and where it went. Did it feel different than the rest of his skin? Was it sensitive? She wanted to touch it and find out.

His eyes flew open. “Don’t.” It was half a growl and half a plea. Her brows drew together in confusion. She felt her finger drift to her mouth so she could bite at her nails. Her mother constantly harped at her for the habit, but here in the bowels of a pirate ship no one would notice. “Don’t what?”
His fists clenched above him. “Don’t pity me.”
Sophia searched her emotions to assess what she had been feeling. No, pity wasn’t it. “I wasn’t going to.”
He sighed, prideful and irritated. “Liar.”
There were many things Sophia didn’t mind being called— spoiled, flighty, even irritating, but untruthful was not among them. “I do not lie.” Then she muttered under her breath. “Frankly, my life would go a good bit smoother if I did.”
“Oh, cry me a river, sweetheart,” the shark-shifter snapped.
The lilt of his voice struck her, and that, combined with the pale skin of his birthmark, led her to a realization. “You’re part mere, aren’t you?” His brown skin, spiky hair, even his aggression suggested shark-shifter, but she was certain, yes, certain, that he also seemed mere.
His jaw twitched and he looked sideways, as if to evade her probing eyes. “Just a slice.”
“I think your mark is very becoming.” She winced as the words left her mouth. They were true, of course, but probably not worth saying out loud.
“You will shut your mouth.”
On the surface he sounded frightening, but she saw under the subterfuge. “You are not like those others. In a way, yes, but in ways that matter, you are not.”
He snarled at her, low and long, raising the hairs along her arms and legs. His head shifted, elongated and became shark-like. Rows and rows of teeth populated his mouth, and he used them to bite cleanly through his one arm at the wrist, then the other.
Sophia screamed in horror.
His blood splattered against her face, spraying from his severed arteries. Tissue and gristle stuck between those jagged, curved razors. Hands freed, his head shifted back to human. He shook his arms as pink skin formed over the severed stumps. “Damn, that stings like a bitch!”
Fighting nausea and vertigo, she watched his hands regenerate. Of course, sharks. They healed fastest of any ocean shifter, so fast they could rarely be killed.
He circled her cage.
She swiped at her face, smearing his blood from her skin. Her eyes kept darting to the remains of his former hands in bits on the floor.
“I am the same as any shark on this boat, and I’m not going to live the rest of my godsdamned life in this hole. You ever tell
anyone
that you were anything less than terrified of me…and I’ll rip your arms from your body and leave you to be torn apart in the ocean.”

* * * *

David watched with morbid fascination as Friedson cut the sedated shark’s flesh. The scalpel turned and cleanly lifted a thick flap of skin from the animal’s body. The blood pooled and then congealed almost instantly. Mottled granulation tissue rose from under the wound and the edges began to contract. David resisted blinking lest he miss a step of the process. Within the space of two breaths, thin, pink skin covered the area, and a half second later, the shark’s rubbery tail emerged unmarred.

“Impressive, huh? All ocean shifters appear to live about 250 to 325 years. But with the right engineering, shifting sharks’ life spans could—“ Friedman looked at David expectantly, and the younger scientist, rubbed his eyes, warding off the headache that had been forming all day.

Friedson noticed. “You must be exhausted from your trip.” “Yeah.” David trained his eyes back on the sleeping shark. “How can it even survive out of the water?” It seemed a silly question, with all the new and bizarre things he’d learned that day, but David had to start somewhere in making sense of it all.
The older man smiled, pulled out a syringe and inserted it into the shark’s dorsum. “Watch.”
The animal jerked once and then its body melted, sections changing shape in a grotesque metamorphosis almost faster that David’s eyes could follow. The head retreated and grew hair, arms sprouted from its side and the tail split in two until a man lay on the gurney instead of a shark. The man’s eyes shot open, and Friedson punched a syringe into his arm. The subject’s black eyes closed again.
“Human lungs. Problem is that it’s impossible to keep them sedated when they shift. The metabolism boost breaks down the drugs too fast.”
David stared in wonder at the newly-grown man. His body started to shrivel before David’s eyes.
“Oops!” Dr. Friedman drew something into a fresh syringe and injected it into the man, turning him back into a shark. “Oddly, their human form is more fragile on land. In the wild, they keep to boats and docks. Sharks have even less land range than mere.”
David pressed his glasses back up his nose and ran a hand through his hair. “And mere are mermaids?...and men?”
Friedman smiled patiently. “Mermaids are mythical creatures. They’re purported to have fish tails, and as far as Dendric can tell, they don’t exist. Mere are half-dolphin in their aquatic form.”
David’s mind roamed back to the beautiful merman…mere man…in the tank. He wondered what he would look like in human form. Shit, it really had been too long since he’d had a lover, if marine mammals were starting to look appealing.
“Let’s call it a night, shall we?” Friedman nodded toward the door. “I’ll get some of the lab techs to return this one to the tank.”
David followed the doctor out. “I’m going to take one last look in the lab.”
He wandered the wide, humid room. Bubbling tanks, beeping machines, and swishing water filled the air with sound. The merman was coiled again at the bottom of his tank. David wondered if the animal was allowed to swim in the larger aquarium ever, or if the sharks would tear him apart. At David’s approach, the merman spun, golden-blond hair billowing in a wide arc then hovering around a chiseled face.
Those eyes stared hard into his, and David felt a heated embarrassment rise under the collar of his dress shirt. He’d wanted to observe the creature, not be observed in return, and an urge to drop his gaze overwhelmed him. David snorted. His self-confidence must be rock bottom if he could be cowed by a lab animal.
A low, melodic voice sounded from the tank. “Why?”
David raised his head in surprise that the merman addressed him. Friedman had said that “Hank” never said a word to any of the staff.
“Um…” He felt strange responding to the animal like a person. “Why what?”
The merman only raised an eyebrow, which pissed David off. He was being thrown off kilter by something that until yesterday he’d thought only existed in fairy tales.
“Why am I here? Why are you here? Why is Dendric studying you? Why what?” He knew his voice rose at the end, and he hated that he was losing his cool. It reminded him of all those times kids would taunt him just to see him get all worked up and “girly” as they put it in grade school. “Faggy” as they said in junior high.
That firm-looking mouth curled up into a smirk, and David fisted his hands. He wanted…He didn’t know what he wanted to do. Maybe punch something. Either that or shove his hand in the water, grab a fistful of that hair, drag those lips to his and invade them with his tongue.
Instead, he turned on his heel and brushed aside the rubber curtain. His feet carried him out of the steam and back to the cool air conditioning and the stability of concrete walls.