Blood saturates the black water, making it too terribly thick to see through. Moonlight murkies the clearest pictures as an incessant frenzy washes over them, the ladies of the sea. Their pod is hunting, both for mates and food, clicks raging through the waters as they communicate with one another. Strangled screams explode from the bubbles rising from the lips of the ship's drowning passengers.

Grown men. Always grown men.

Never anyone Iridessa's age.

Never anyone attractive enough to mate with.

Until.

Between the silver tops of rising bubbles, there's someone further down in the water, untouched by anyone else in her pod. His eyes are shut, body slowly giving up on oxygen. His soft features, his rather short, white hair... it strikes her. She's never seen any man, any boy that looks like him before.

Through the chaos, she pushes past two of her sisters as more blood spurts through the water, the siren's small, razor-sharp teeth ripping flesh and meat from bone.

Iridessa drops lower, coming nearer and nearer to the boy. He looks around her age, two-hundred and forty-three full moons.

Her scaly, webbed fingers reach for him, feeling for a pulse. It's faint, but his heart continues pumping his blood through his veins if only for a few more moments. Giddy, the young siren fumbles with her knotted skirts and pulls forth the singular pearl embedded in her left hip. With shaking fingers, she places the pearl against his neck with her right hand, cupping it to his skin. He doesn't move; his heartbeat only grows fainter. His light will soon fade from this world, meaning Iridessa needs to quicken her pace. She only gets one chance to mark her mate.

A small light filters between her fingers as the pearl fuses with his body, hidden in his neck until their bodies are ready for one another and she goes to find him on land. The siren's song surrounds her in the water as the hunt wanes, the effects of their voices wearing off. Her pod is peeling away.

Iridessa's pearl stops glowing and the boy's eyes flutter open to rest at half-mast, pupils unable to focus. She takes note of his ice-gray irises, the slightest bits of blue shimmering through in flecks. In a trance, she breaks the surface with him. He spits and sputters, weak and hardly able to process what's happening.

She swims him over to a rope dipping into the water. The women on the ship cry desperately in attempts to help the men that had jumped overboard, each of them hypnotized by a siren's song. A few females had followed to save them, but fell prey to Iridessa's pod. Sirens don't usually eat the flesh of women, the bond of womanhood keeping them from choosing females over males for food, but it'd been a long week, and the frigid weather brought fewer humans across their waters.

The human's language reaches Iridessa's ears before she dips back under, each syllable foreign to her. Anxious to learn, to go out into the world and find her chosen mate, she loses her grip on him and he sinks below once more. With clumsy fingers, finding difficulty in not drawing blood with her sharp siren-made claws, she ties a knot around his waist and pulls him back to the surface. The women above scream with worry and uncertainty as some notice she'd saved her prey. Even through their confusion, they haul him over the ship's edge, Iridessa noticing a few men had withstood the siren's call. They glare at her angrily, helping the women pull the boy she'd chosen for a mate up onto the deck, shouting foul words at the feeding mammals below.

The young siren backs away, dipping back into the water to feed off of what's left of the massacred men.

Before the sharks decide they're hungry, too.