She watched all the humans within her line of sight. Not because she was intrigued—gelatinous sea snails were more interesting—but because she distrusted them.
After all, what did these humans do other than consume? They were entirely focused on the acquisition ofthings. They were like the rats infesting Mrs. Smith’s basement. Except the rats were smarter. They knew to be silent when she slithered down the wheelchair ramp from the first floor. The rodents recognized her power. The woman in white did not. If she knew what Mrs. Smith truly was, she’d cower inside her block of a house and never leave again.
Having fixed her bracelets, the woman had knocked on the door with her weak fist. Then she waited several seconds and knocked again. And again.
It had been a while since a neighbor had been this dogged. For the most part, they left Mrs. Smith alone. They were not like the humans of the previous century. Or the ones before them. And so on.
Those humans had been wiser. They’d sensed her otherness. They’d known she was a threat. They’d come in the night with iron chains. With a noose. With fire.
More than once, they’d destroyed her nest. They’d driven her back into the water, forcing her to seek shelter on another shore.
She was never vanquished. Only inconvenienced.
She always found a new place to hide. Back then, there were dark caves where only the sea was brave enough to venture. She would stay hidden, and she would hunt. She would punish the humans by devouring their man-children. And eventually, she would be reborn.
The man-children restored her power. After gorging on four or five Pure Ones, she could transform into a human so beguilingly beautiful that no one could resist her thrall. Her human form dazzled. When she chose a female form, she was fair-skinned and raven-haired. Her eyes were the blue of a shifting sea. Her body was supple. She moved like a river flowing into the ocean. She had a tiny waist and creamy-white breasts that swelled over her corset like cresting waves. Her voice was low and sultry. Her full lips whispered promises she would never keep.
In this form, she walked among the humans, trading gold coins for the perfect shelter. Solid walls close to the water’s edge surrounded by stone or metal fences and an army of trees. A dark lair made of timber and brick.
Money was no object. She could buy whatever she wanted with the treasure she’d reaped from the seafloor. She had piles of coins, gold bars, jewels, and trinkets. She spent a fortune on safety. On privacy.
When she had to conduct business, it was necessary to slip into a man’s form and become Josiah Smith. In the past, women did not own estates. They did not captain ships or buy tracts of land on coasts of a dozen different countries.
Women stayed in their homes, tending to the hearth and their young. They fed and nurtured the children who would guarantee Mrs. Smith’s next rebirth. In this century, the women were still primarily breeders, but their children spent most of the day away from the home. In their absence, the women shopped or gardened or made themselves pretty. Mrs. Smith saw little point to their existence.
One of these insipid creatures had knocked on her door.
She’d dared to disturb the Mother of Eels.
The woman in white had knocked again and again. Then she’d yelled, “Hello! Can you hear me?”
Mrs. Smith had wanted to whip open the door and grab the woman’s fist. She’d wanted to crush her hand like a shell, grinding the bones to powder as blood and tissue dribbled onto the floorboards. She’d wanted to clamp her jaws down on the woman’s head, silencing her kitten mewl of a voice for good.
But memories of women from the past had kept her rooted in place.
Women whispered. They whispered to one another. They whispered to their men. With enough oxygen, a woman’s whisper could light a torch. It could build a scaffold.
As Mrs. Smith stood as still as stone on the other side of her front door, she’d heard a subtle whoosh of air followed by a gentle thud as a letter landed on the foyer floor.
Mrs. Smith had stared down at it in disgust.
Humans loved their paper. Newspapers told them what to think. Leaflets and catalogs told them what to buy. Bills shoved into the mailbox demanded they pay for what they already owned. They used reams of paper for their fictional stories or to create records of their short, meaningless lives.
Such an ephemeral thing, paper. So easy to destroy.
Mrs. Smith had speared the letter with her hooked nail and unfolded it.
The woman’s name swam across the top of the page. The thin, slanting letters looked like blades of seagrass.
Elaine K. Bernstein
Mrs. Smith’s black eyes swept across the first three lines. They were full of inane platitudes and held no interest.
In the second paragraph, Elaine K. Bernstein got to her point.
She had a request. No, two requests. She wanted to cut back the oriental bittersweet infringing on the yacht club property.She also wanted permission to set off fireworks at midnight as part of her son’s bar mitzvah celebrations. She then wasted two paragraphs explaining the significance of the occasion.
Mrs. Smith needed no schooling when it came to these ceremonies. At one time, every culture had a ritual recognizing the passage from childhood to manhood. Long ago, when the humans were less numerous, she received a number of these man-children as offerings. Now, she had to hunt for the nine she required.
