Siren by John Everson Page A

always surprised at just how much liquor they managed to squeeze into his hold before he left Mexico and pulled out the fishing nets to mask his true trade from the port authorities.
    He stepped into the deep shadows of the crates and whistled. He tried to hum a tune his mother had once sung to him as a child. He’d found it soothing, though it hadn’t ever quite been up to par for those on the outside of the relationship. They said she couldn’t carry a tune. But he’d wanted his momma to know that what she did mattered. In the end, it didn’t really matter what his momma had sung to him. It all sounded pretty much the same to Buckley.
    Some said he was tone-deaf, but he just figured that hereally didn’t appreciate music. That’s why he’d found it such a beautiful irony when just a few weeks before, the Greek man had led him to the hidden room that he’d stashed the singing woman in. Supposedly the woman had been taken in the middle of the night from where she wandered along Delilah’s beach and would never be missed.
    “Don’t take that gag off, whatever you do,” the wizened dark-skinned man had insisted. “The sound…it is death to a mortal man. Mark my words.”
    Buckley had marked them, but not surprisingly, hadn’t listened. On the other hand, it hadn’t seemed to matter. He had released the bonds on the beautiful woman’s mouth and instead of hearing the litany of verbal abuse he was used to from a female, he’d instead heard a long, tremulous ululation that, he supposed, seemed like the thing that others called music.
    For him, it was only noise. A hair-raising exercise in interruption that prevented him from reaching the reason he’d bought the woman from the Greek in the first place. When she sang, he found he couldn’t complete the deed with her. His exertions simply stretched out in a frustrating infinity until he grew tired of the effort. Certainly her song had an impact on his manhood, but really, enough was enough. He quickly found out about the impact her song had on others though. On the first night of her new captivity he’d slept with her in a hotel in Delilah before they’d broken port, and a man had smashed down the door in the midst of Buckley’s rutting. The captain had leaped for his gun, but he quickly saw that the man meant no harm—his eyes looked vacant and he only stood there, rapt at the hotel bed while she sang.
    In moments, her mouth had been on the poor fool’s neck, and blood drenched both the bed and voluptuous body Captain Buckley had so recently been enjoying. Hewatched with shock and awe as she chewed out the man’s throat. There was nothing he appreciated more than the danger of savagery—Buckley had always longed to be a big-game hunter. Instead, he used his lust for blood as a means to keep a group of ruffians to work.
    He tied a leather strap around her head and made sure it fully covered her mouth as soon as he got her back to the ship and stripped off the robes they had draped her in.
    She needn’t sing to him, or play coquette behind the pretense of civilized clothes. She was brought to his ship with only one purpose in mind. Robes would only slow that purpose.
    But her insistence at singing caused the captain to ultimately keep her mouth in check. Aside from its impact on slowing the arrival of his orgasms, he couldn’t have the men wondering who was in the captain’s cabin besides the captain. The answer of “a woman” would have torn the ship apart. Nor could he afford for them to be smitten with the strangely euphoric effect her song seemed to have on other men.
    And so she remained gagged and tied to his bed for hours on end until he returned to release her.
    But, apparently, someone else had gotten wind that she was there and decided to release her without the captain’s orders.
    Buckley thought of the remains of Nelson and laughed.
    Some men could handle their women. And some couldn’t.
    “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty,” Buckley growled,