In the cold, starry dark, the mouth of the cave pulsed with red light. She heard a low hum, like a distant storm at sea from within. But without, nothing moved, nothing stirred.
“He’s in there,” Fin told her. “I can feel it.”
“He’s not alone. I can feel that. Something wicked, that brings more than a pricking of thumbs.”
“I should go in alone, assess things.”
“Don’t insult me, Finbar. Side by side or not at all.”
To settle it, she started forward. Fin kept a firm grip on her hand, laid the other on the hilt of his sword. “If it turns on us, we break the spell. Without hesitation, Branna. We don’t end here.”
She might have swayed toward him, such were the needs the dream spell stirred. But she steadied herself, stood her ground. “I’ve no intention of ending here. We’ve work to do in our own time and place.”
They stepped into the mouth of the cave, the pulsing light. The hum grew louder, deeper. Not like a storm at sea, Branna realized. But like something large, something alive, waiting at rest.
The cave widened, opened into tunnels formed with walls damp enough to drip so the steady plop of water on stone became a kind of backbeat to the hum. Fin bore left, and as Branna’s instincts said the same, they moved quietly into the tunnel.
His hand, she thought, was the only link to the warm and the real, and knew he felt the same.
“We can’t be sure when we are,” Branna whispered.
“After the last time we dreamed.” He shook his head at her look. “I don’t know how I know, but I know. It’s after that, but not long after.”
Trust, she reminded herself. Faith. They continued on with the humming growing deeper yet. She could all but feel it inside her now, like a pulse, as if she’d swallowed the living dark.
“It pulls him,” Fin murmured. “It wants to feed. It pulls me through him, blood to blood.” He turned to her, took her firmly by the shoulders. “If it—or he—draws me in, you’re to break the spell, get out, get back.”
“Would you leave me, or any of us, to this?”
“You, nor any of the others come from him. You’ll swear it, Branna, or I’ll break it now and end it before it’s begun.”
“I’ll end it, I swear it.” But she would drag him back with her. “I’ll swear it because they won’t draw you in. You won’t allow it. And if we stand here arguing over it, we won’t have to break the spell, it’ll end on its own time without us learning a bloody thing.”
Now she took his hand. A spark shot between their palms before they moved forward.
The tunnel narrowed again, and turned into what she recognized as a chamber—a workshop of sorts for dark magicks.
The bodies of bats, wings stretched, were nailed to the stone walls like horrific art. On shelves skeletal bird legs, heads, the internal organs of animals, others she feared were human, bodies of rats, all floated in jars filled with viscous liquid.
A fire burned, and over it a cauldron bubbled and smoked in sickly green.
To the left of it stood a stone altar lit by black tallows, stained by the blood of the goat that lay on it, its throat slit.
Cabhan gathered the stream of blood in a bowl.
He looked younger, she realized. Though his back was to them as he worked, he struck her as younger than the Cabhan she knew.
He stepped back, knelt, lifted the bowl high.
“Here is blood, a sacrifice to your glory. Through me you feed, through you I feed. And so my power grows.”
He drank from the bowl.
The hum throbbed like a beating heart.
“It’s not enough,” Fin murmured. “It’s pale and weak.”
Alarmed, Branna tightened her grip on his hand. “Stay with me.”