Chapter 8: Under the Bluff

"Then don't go," I said.

"I have to. When the eldest calls, we all come. If I don't, she'll come for me."

"Here?"

"Here," he said, and looked at Margie's kitchen window.

That settled it.

"Then I'm coming with you."

"No."

"I'm a certified night diver with two hundred logged dives. I know that cove better than anybody on land."

"You don't know what's under the bluff."

"Exactly," I said. "That's my whole career, Jet. Things nobody's looked at."

He argued for ten minutes.

I put on my drysuit while he argued.

Margie drove us to the north ledges at half past two.

My tank rode in the truck bed, and she had a thermos of coffee between her knees.

"If you're not back in an hour, I'm coming in after you," she said.

"You can't dive."

"I can drown loudly."

Jet went into the water first.

On the ledges he'd been a man in borrowed jeans.

In the black water his legs were gone, and the tail was back, long and dark.

He held his hand up out of the water to me.

I took it and went in.

The cold came through the drysuit at my wrists and neck.

I kept my light pointed down at my own chest, with my fingers over the lens.

Jet took me by the belt and pulled.

We went down and out, along the face of the bluff, faster than I'd ever moved through water.

Then the bottom fell away into a deep basin under the cliff, and I saw them.

Thirty of them, maybe more.

Pale bodies hanging in the dark water in a great loose ring, hair floating around their faces.

Tails silver and gray and green.

Moonlight came down through the surface in long shaking ropes and lit them in pieces.

They were singing, low, all together.

I felt it in my teeth.

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