Page 51 of The Dark, Dead, Deep

I irritated Cormac, but in contrast, Shay felt little to nothing about my being. Though his braids told a different story as they rose up and turned to me.

“You refuse to go any further?” Shay blinked slowly.

“Yes.” I swallowed the lump in my throat and watched Cormac and four guards disappear into the chasm.

Shay cocked his head to the side and gestured to someone. A moment later, Tor and Rainn joined us. They were both in their animal forms and seemed impatient to continue the journey to the capital of the merfolk territory.

“This is not the time for stubbornness,” Shay warned, his gaze flicking to where Cormac had been swallowed by the darkness of the chasm. “I’m happy to put you over my shoulder if you don’t want to swim.”

“It’s not that.” I ignored how my stomach twisted at the idea of being over his shoulder as I worried my bottom lip. “Something is wrong. We can’t go that way. The water is wrong.”

“The water?” Shay tilted his head to the side, and the seal and the black horse mimicked the movement. “You have not reached magical majority, is that correct?”

I exhaled sharply. “No thanks to you and your bloodshed,” I spat.

Shay continued as if I hadn’t said a word. “And yet the waterfeelswrong?” He used his fingers to surround my declaration with quotes.

I nodded stiltedly but said nothing else.

Shay lifted his hand and waved it above his head with a sigh. The guards that hadn’t already gone through the chasm with Cormac stopped moving and waited for the nymph to speak.

“We’re going around,” Shay declared.

“But sir, that will take much longer—” one of the mermen argued.

Shay silenced him with a look as our party began to retreat away from the darkness of the pass.

“If I find out you have misled me,” Shay warned, “your smart mouth won’t save you.”

His threat made me doubt myself for only a moment until our departure prompted the shadows to let out an almighty screech of anger.

Based on the lack of reaction from the males surrounding me, I was the only person to hear the screams.

It wasn’t until the chasm was no longer visible that I allowed myself to relax. Without Cormac’s barked orders and highly strung demands for us all to swim faster and keep up, there was a collective sigh of relief amongst the other princelings and the guards.

It seemed that even amongst royalty, there was a hierarchy. Cormac might have been a king, but the other males were important to their respective creeds. Regardless of how unpleasant the mer-king had been to the people he had killed on the Frosted Sands and to me, I had no desire to see him eaten by whatever lurked in the darkness of that chasm.

Magic poisoned the water in the deep, and I recognized its flavor, though it hovered unnamed on the tip of my tongue.

“What was that place?” I asked Shay as he led us away from the chasm.

“The Whispering Pass,” he replied shortly. “It’s the shortest route to Tarsainn, from the Reeds.”

“I’ve never heard of such a place,” I remarked, trying to affect disinterest.

Shay snorted. “It is well known that the Whispering Pass is a sore subject for King Irvine. I assumed he would have mentioned it in passing.”

“A sore subject, how?”

Shay glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. “It’s the only way to Tarsainn unless you take to the land.” Shay gave me a toothy grin, and the seashells in his braids rattled. “The merfolk have fought and died for the pass—it’s probably why Cormac Illfin refused to believe that something dangerous could be lurking there. The mer are very proud of their borders. None have fallen since the war began.”

“I don’t know what I felt in there, but it was anything but safe,” I argued. “It felt hungry.”

“How odd,” Shay chuffed. “I have never felt the hunger of any being save for my own.”

“You think I’m lying?” I gripped his arm, turning him towards me.

Shay looked down at where I had roughed him as my hand snapped back to my possession. “I don’t think you’re lying,” he said, but I felt the unspokenbut.

---