To Seduce A Siren

13. She's Beauty, She's Grace, She'll Probably Eat Your Face

Raz woke up, in the dark, to the sound of clicks.

Sometime in the night, he'd moved to the floor, which was more comfortable than the couch.

He opened his eyes slowly, checking for the dark outline of a figure. There was nothing. Raz focused in on the noise, listening to the abrupt pattern of the clicks. Then it dawned on him. That was the sound of teeth chattering.

Raz peeked his head up to find Selene crouched into a ball, shivering so violently he was afraid that she might have had a seizure.

He got up slowly and approached her. She was asleep. Raz turned to see the yellow light coming from the heater had disappeared. He turned the heater on but nothing happened. Damn it! Had it stopped working sometime in the night?

Raz didn't feel cold. Selene, being a siren, should have been used to cold temperatures.

Hesitantly, he shook Selene by the shoulder, careful not to startle her.

She blinked her eyes open, slowly coming to consciousness.

"Wha - What's going on?" She managed to say through her chattering teeth.

"Are you cold?" Raz demanded.

Selene nodded.

"You're a siren, for God's sake!" He yelled in a hushed tone. He didn't know what for. Selene was awake anyway and there was no one else in this motel.

"Don't say the lord's name in vain." She smiled weakly.

Raz had the sudden urge to slam his head into a wall. This was the most infuriating woman he had ever met.

"Why are you shivering?"

She shrugged, her form shivering just as violently as it did before he woke her up.

"It's nothing. I'm a little cold. Pass me another blanket and go back to sleep."

Raz took the blanket he had been snuggled under and wrapped her in it.

She was still shivering. What was wrong with her?

"What's going on? Are you sick or something" He asked. "Do you feel okay?"

She nodded again, "Yeah go back to sleep."

He wanted nothing more than to go back to sleeping on the floor. But this was worrying him, despite his logical brain telling him there was no way a siren could die from hypothermia. There wasn't anything serious, biologically, that could make a siren shiver like that. They thrived in icy waters.

He told himself all of that as he slid onto the bed, next to her, wrapping her fragile form to his chest.

"Wh - What? What are you doing?" She murmured.

"Warming you up, of course." He said through gritted teeth, trying to ignore how right she felt in his arms, tucked under his chin.

"Why are you so hot? You're like a radiator."

Raz sighed. "Shut up, Selene."

Thankfully, she shut up.

He held her tight against him until she finally relaxed and stopped shivering. His arm had gotten numb sometime in the middle. He didn't dare remove it.

"Why were you shivering?" He demanded, again.

"Uh. I was cold?"

"Really? You. A siren. Cold?"

Selene groaned, "Look. I don't like the cold okay? It just feels awful. Sucking all the life from your body, paralysing you, it's like dying. It was dying. For me. I just don't like being cold."

Raz tightened his hold over her, without thinking. Selene had actually died. He couldn't help but imagine her, young and innocent, suffocating in freezing waters.

"How did you drown?"

"I was pushed."

"What?" Raz cried, his head coming up. "Someone pushed you? Like pirates? How? Who did that?"

Selene rolled her eyes. "No, not pirates obviously. It was a man. I thought we were in love."

"Then how did he push you? To save you?"

She laughed then. A cold and sharp sound, full of hidden pain. "To save himself."

Raz exhaled. She had been murdered. By someone, she had loved, too. Why had he done that? He couldn't keep prying into her past, no matter how much he wanted to. It was making him feel too much, too many conflicting emotions.

"Is that why you play with random men's lives now? To get back at him?"

It wasn't his imagination, she had stiffened the slightest bit.

"No. I got back at him. I killed him and his friends who participated and for good measure, I also sank a few ships, with wealthy passengers. I play with people's lives - I don't discriminate - for fun now. "

Raz unwrapped himself from her body even though a large part of him wanted to stay in this hazy cloud of comfort but he had to remember this one fact. Selene wasn't a good person despite whatever had happened to her. She had experienced pain but the things she had done to others were worse. She met out pain to innocents. For fun. He couldn't feel sorry for her when she belonged to that class of immortals that thought they were above humans and could do whatever they felt like.

Just like his father.

"You're warm now." He said as he lay on the floor. Raz didn't bother closing his eyes. He knew sleep wouldn't come for him. He doubted Selene was going to fall asleep anytime soon. They both lay still, waiting for the dark to recede so they could ignore the things that were said, in the dark, by morning light. 

------------------------------------------------------

So this is a really short chapter because the last one was long and the next one will be long and this was a good, organic place to cut up the chapter.

But two updates in a week! I'm on a roll baby!