ledge to join the merman. There were worse things than ghosts.
Obludas.
The thought halted her for a moment before she resumed her trek, ears tuned to any melancholy dirges that might suddenly rise up from the Gray. She stepped over mounds of seaweed and skirted the corpses of jellyfish with their long tentacles stretched like venomous ribbons across the sand.
Ahtin swam parallel to the shore, powerful shoulders flexing in tandem with the rise and fall of his back and tail through the water. He paused when she did, near the cave’s black maw. He gestured to the opening with a thrust of his chin. “Go inside, Brida. I want to show you.”
She trusted him. Mostly. Had he wished to hurt her, the chances to do so had been many and varied since they first crossed paths. Brida didn’t believe he’d lead her to an otherworldly trap where some monstrous thing waited to wrest her soul from her body and plunge it into nightmarish oblivion. But Ixada Cave…
So dark, with its untold mysteries and stories of the haunted dead.
“I have no light,” she told him. “I won’t be able to see anything in there.” Things like once-dry expanses flooded with the incoming tide and the gods only knew what strange creatures that swam within it. Merfolk were almost commonplace compared to the horrors she imagined lurked in the concealing darkness.
Ahtin drew nearer, the splash of his fluke sounding close enough to touch. “Safe, Brida,” he crooned to her. “You are safe with me.”
In that moment, she understood what the sailors meant when they spoke of sirens’ song. She set a foot down in the direction of the cave where some of her worst childhood fears waited.
“Wait.” Ahtin shook his head. “Not that way. This way.”
Puzzled, Brida followed him on the shore as he swam around the edge of the bluff. Her skirts dragged in the surf as she waded knee-deep through water growing colder with each passing autumnal day. She clutched the satchel she’d brought with her, its contents clinking and together. Nothing inside was of much monetary value, certainly not like the pearl he’d given her, but she didn’t want to drop them and lose them to the Gray before Ahtin saw them.
She squeaked at the sight of a sharp fin slicing the water toward her. In an instant, Ahtin disappeared from her view, leaving only a temporary wake behind him that marked a path aimed directly at the fin which also dove beneath the waves. A frothing of water boiled up from the spot before dissipating. Frozen in place, Brida stared, unbreathing, until a crown of seaweed hair emerged, and Ahtin’s glowing eyes stared back at her.
“Safe, Brida,” he repeated and propelled himself through the surf until he floated alongside her.
“What was that?” She hated how her voice warbled, but it was hard to speak normally when her heart was still stuck in her throat.
“A hunter. It hunts something else now.”
That short answer was less than comforting, and she slogged faster toward the patch of beach revealed on the other side of the bluff and a smaller entrance she assumed led into the cave. Here, the land rose more sharply, keeping the high tide at bay.
Brida looked down at her companion. “How will you go in?” She supposed he could pull himself along the sand, using the power of his arms and tail, but what a struggle that would be, even with him healed of his injuries.
He gestured toward the second entrance. “You go there. I will meet you from the other side.” Before she could protest, he dove once more into the deeper waves, fluke giving a single flick before sliding under the waves.
A sliver of moonlight illuminated a patch of sand just inside the low entrance. Brida bent to enter, straightening with a gasp upon discovering a large interior space of soaring height with tidal pools closest to her and the pounding of the surf against a tumbled barrier of rock on the other side where the wider entrance faced the more level shore.
The darkness prevented her from seeing much more than the outline of curved walls and roof and the hint of reflection on the pools’ surfaces. A loud splash echoed in the chamber. She tensed as verdant light spread across the cave floor, brightening the waters of a large pool surrounded on three sides by rubble, with the fourth side narrowed down to a channel where the surf spilled into the pool as a waterfall. Some