Angel stared at him. Then he smiled. “If you eat stars, you don’t want a villager. Right?”
Leviathan laughed, and the sound echoed like thunder. “I told you, I’m not going to eat you. Unless you want me to.”
“I decidedly do not,” Angel said, shifting as Leviathan leaned over him to unfasten the chains.
“If you want, you may call me Leviathan. It’s the name I most enjoy.” He finished freeing Angel. “I will become a dragon again, and I will take you wherever you wish to go. I assume that’s not your village. Most of you don’t want to go back there, when I offer.”
“Is there, what, some village full of former sacrifices living on an island in the sea?” Angel laughed. “I think maybe I’m sun-addled and you really did eat me.”
Leviathan showed all his teeth, the growl of a dragon in his voice when he replied. “When I eat you, you’ll know.” He saw how Angel shivered and knew it wasn’t fear putting that look in the man’s eyes, making his cock grow hard.
Leviathan turned into a dragon, and Angel gave a shout of glee as he was carried across the waters. Leviathandidn’thave an island full of sacrificial offerings, but he took Angel to a small sandbar and tumbled him off his back. Then he shifted form so he, too, was human and pinned Angel on his back in the sand. Angel wasn’t afraid, but he trembled beneath Leviathan, and that was as worshipful as Leviathan needed him to be… until he took Angel and made him cry out, fingers grabbing at Leviathan’s shoulders and tangling in his hair.
He kept Angel there for some time. He liked all of Leviathan’s stories, and he’d spend hours patiently combing the tangles and sea glass from Leviathan’s hair, and he was clever at games and other pursuits. They enjoyed each other. Leviathan taught him to fish and helped him build a shelter, took him swimming and showed him secret, sacred places in the waters around his sandbar. Angel made him laugh, carved dice out of wood for them to play simple games, and never once asked Leviathan to take him home—or anywhere but their little sandbar, where Leviathan would watch him sleep, as protective as any dragon with a hoard.
He could not take Angel to visit his sirens, as Angel was a mortal and couldn’t breathe—or handle the weight of the water—where his sirens lived. But he told Angel about them, how they had bright eyes with slit pupils, how colorful their fins were, how they liked to make him crowns and play instruments made from shells. Angel would lie beneath him, or atop his dragon form, speaking wistfully of how nice it would be to see that for himself.
Then Leviathan’s sibling Death, a woman named Mora, found a companion. And Leviathan began to wonder if he should have one, too. Mora’s companion—a mortal serving as her Grief—would tether her to humanity so that she did not lose her compassion and flood the world with the storm only Death could call. Her companion would gain the immortality she needed to walk beside her immortal lover. Perhaps, if Leviathan made such a bond with Angel, he could show him the sirens, take him to the deep places where he kept treasures unknown to even his brother Desire. He wouldn’t do it to stave off corruption, but simply to have someone with him.
“You must be careful, Sea-Father,” Evadne said, the next time Leviathan left Angel on his sandbar to visit his children. “A mortal’s net will ensnare you, and your godhood will be the price you pay for your entrapment.”
“Even my sibling Death has a lover, Evadne.”
She frowned, idly turning a somersault in the water, clearly considering her words. “It isn’t about having a lover, Sea-Father. I wish I could see more. But my power of sight is fickle at best.”
Of course it was. Mortals were not meant to both seeandunderstand nonlinear time. Seers might get glimpses, but the future was too precarious, small ripples in the currents of life affecting them more than they would ever know. And the past, what was the point of seeing it if it couldn’t be changed?
But when Leviathan returned to the island where Angel waited, as he shifted form and walked onto the sand… Evadne’s words echoed in his head.
“Ah, you’re back.” Angel smiled, a net of woven reeds slung over his shoulder. “How are your deep-sea children?” His smile faded, and Leviathan wondered what Angel saw in that moment: a dragon in the form of a man, standing too still to be mortal, the surf breaking around him as if he were a rock set before the shore. “Is everything all right?”
“What is that?” Leviathan gestured at the net Angel was carrying.
Angel lifted it to display its contents. “Fish. I was hungry, and you weren’t here to catch them for me. Is that… offensive to you, because they’re of the sea? I would have thought…”
Leviathan made himself walk slowly, letting his dark thoughts pass like clouds after a storm as he neared his mortal lover. He wasn’t offended about the net, no, but now he was noticing other things about Angel. It was clear, even now, that Angel was aging—perhaps due to the sun and the elements, perhaps simply due to the passage of time. Either way, Leviathan felt an odd stirring of displeasure at the idea that his lover would one day board his sibling’s boat to cross the eternal river.
He could make Angel his companion, and that would keep Angel from dying. Leviathan thought about this as he watched Angel go about his daily chores, wondering whether enjoying the man’s company on a sandbar for a time would translate well to eternity.
For Leviathan, every day was the beginning of life; every night was its end. The sea had a life cycle all its own, and he drifted on its currents and let the cycle ebb and flow around him. He shifted his form when he chose, swam where he wanted, called down storms simply to feel the rain on his scales. He was not like Mora, who, though she was Death, had once been mortal herself.
Leviathan had never been anything but the storm. He’d never thought of his own life as anything that could end, but he’d also never considered what it meant that it wouldn’t. That it would endure.
Angel was a dominant. Leviathan preferred that, really; submissives were lovely but too easily overwhelmed, like baby turtles that drowned in the first breaking waves near the shore. That night, when he lay with Angel in the little house he’d helped the man build from salvaged materials, their coupling was even more energetic than usual. Perhaps Angel was attuned to Leviathan’s turbulent mood, or perhaps he was feeling the effects of being isolated on his little sandbar—Leviathan did not know how long he’d been gone, seeing to his sirens. Whatever the reason, Angel raked sharp nails down Leviathan’s broad back, bucking up against him, seeking control.
As Leviathan rolled over and pulled Angel atop him—sometimes he would take Angel with two cocks, sometimes one, Leviathan’s control over his form allowing either to be possible—he felt an odd sensation on his upper back, beneath his left shoulder. He thought little of it until they were sated, and then it was only Angel’s sleepy voice saying, “You’re bleeding, love,” that had him frowning.
“I don’t bleed,” Leviathan said, because he wasn’t a man, and there never had been the blood of a mortal in the veins he also, he imagined, did not have.
“You are,” Angel murmured, the warm evening air stirring his dark, curly hair. He wore nothing—who needed clothing, here in this warm climate with no one else around?—but a simple leather cord strung with a tooth, one of Leviathan’s that he’d shed catching a shark. Angel played with it now, looking pleased. “I must be some lover. A fitting sacrifice for the Star-Eater after all, wouldn’t you say?”
Leviathan reached a hand back to touch the sore spot on his shoulder. When he looked at his fingers, they were stained. He lifted them to his mouth, licking, tasting an unfamiliar tang of copper and something salty, like brine. The fluid was red, the same color as his brother Avarice’s paste-jewel eyes, and despite the words he and Angel had just exchanged, it took Leviathan a moment to realize what it was.
He stared at his fingers, Evadne’s words echoing in his mind.
Ensnared. Caught in a net.
Perhaps it would have been different if he’d loved Angel the way Mora loved Bergitte, or as her successor, Azaiah, would one day love a soldier named Nyx. As his sibling Ares loved Atreus Akti, enough to weep tears of blood and flame into the sands of Arktos. As Avarice would one day love Declan. But Leviathan did not understand attachment to anything but his sirens, and while they were long-lived, they eventually returned to the sea whence they’d come, becoming coral reefs where new life flourished from the bones of the old.
