Chapter Seventeen
“Wow!” Fauna stepped out of the en suite bathroom with a towel wrapped around her hair. “I knew she’d have nice shit, but did you see some of these things? This face cream has real diamonds in it! I’m going to have to get some for my place.” Fauna hooked a finger into the cream and scooped a generous helping onto her face. I was quite confident she didn’t need any creams to maintain her ethereal youth. Perhaps it was just the joy of knowing one was glistening with diamonds.
Poppy’s words had stuck a needle in my veins, mainlining dread as I looked at my friend. I tried to remain as casual as possible. If I was going to get real answers, it seemed unwise to let her know that any part of me feared her.
I took my first stab at the seeds of distrust Poppy had sowed. “You’re a nymph, right?”
“ Skosgr? is the Nordic equivalent of nymph ,” Fauna said. “You know this. But I’m fine being called a nymph.”
“But”—I dug my heels in—“you are a skosgr?? You’re not something else?”
“They’re imperfect comparisons,” she conceded, “but as we’ve established, it’s the closest term for public understanding. Now, do you want some diamonds? You could use them. You look stressed.”
“I wonder why,” I grumbled. I extended my hand to receive the mother-of-pearl container with the small golden whale on top. I went through skin care products too quickly to commit to something as ostentatious as diamond cream.
Fauna passed it off to me and took her hair down from the towel, scrunching it until the remaining droplets were absorbed. She crawled across the bed to smell my still-wet hair. “I knew you’d pick that shampoo!”
I shoved her away. “You did not.”
“I tried them all,” she said.
“Well, that explains why your shower took forty-five minutes.” I finished applying the diamond cream and secured the lid. I frowned down at it while Fauna busied herself with her hair. Finally, I looked up and asked, “Fauna, you said you have a place in the mortal realm, didn’t you?”
She nodded brightly.
“Where is it?”
She smiled. “On the beach!”
Yes, she’d said so before. I hadn’t thought much of the elusive nonanswer the first time, but the more time I spent around her, the less I felt I knew her. Cute curiosities took on a more sinister note as I studied her. Inside me there were two wolves, or however the parable went. One who loved Fauna, and another who wasn’t sure if I could trust her enough to help me get Caliban back.
“And,” I tried again, “you said you pay your rent in favors. What sort of tasks does he have you do?”
She shrugged. “This and that. He knows I’m unavailable right now. I’m on a very important mission with a human.”
“Fauna,” I said slowly. Her brows lowered as she met my gaze, evaluating the gravity in my tone. I swallowed, then said, “If I ask you something, will you be honest with me?”
She tossed the towel to the floor and flopped backward onto the bed. “That depends on whether or not what you ask is worth my time.”
Again, it was the sort of answer I would have dismissed as playful or spirited. Now, I wasn’t so sure if her chaos was impish, or if it was a particularly clever mask. I weighed the wisdom of my question, but ultimately, I had no loyalty to Poppy or Dorian. I wasn’t willing to risk sowing seeds of distrust over misinformation. And even if Fauna had joked on more than one occasion that she would have let me die, she’d spent centuries aligning herself with a patron saint of women. I trusted Azrames, Betty, and Fauna to the ends of the earth…didn’t I?
“Poppy said something to me on the cliffs.”
She rolled to her side to look at me, and then the corners of her mouth turned down. She adjusted her posture in response to my seriousness, tucking herself into a seated position as she waited for me to speak.
“She said that this is the first time I’ve had fae blood, and so it was the first time another realm could intervene. She implied…”
A chill snaked through me at the cool look Fauna gave me. “What did she imply?”
I felt the nervous sweat of someone about to give a public speech, a girl about to break up with her first partner, or a child prepared to confess a sin to their parent. I had questions, but I wasn’t sure that I was ready for the consequences of the answers.
“Why did you really come for me? That night with Silas?”
“Oh.” Fauna relaxed. “Is that all? You want to know why you get a pretty guardian in this cycle? She’s right. You didn’t have fae blood before. Maybe if Dorian here were more of a playboy, you would have been one-eighth Greek and a real nymph could have shown up at your door. Your escort through this madness could have been anyone, from any realm. Is that your question?”
It wasn’t, but I didn’t know how to reword my question.
I made another attempt. “That night, Silas said this wasn’t your war—the one between Heaven and Hell. That I should be left to the two of them. And you said that he should leave it up to you what you did or didn’t want to get involved in. That…that you were doing it so that Heaven didn’t turn the tide in the war. Right?”
She made a contemplative face before saying, “Ask what you’re trying to ask.”
“Fine.” I gritted my teeth. “What is your stake in the game?”
“Spit it out,” she challenged.
Every muscle in my body clenched on instinct. “I know you. You don’t do anything out of altruism. I don’t believe that you’re here on pure allyship with Hell. I definitely don’t believe you showed up on pure coincidence because I’m a long-lost citizen. If you’re just in it for Azrames, you can tell me. But you came for me long before either of our demons went missing. Why do you want this?”
“There we go.” She smiled. “How’s it feel to grow a pair?”
I didn’t take the bait.
She tilted her head, waves tumbling to the side. “Did you play with dominos as a kid, Mar?”
My brows puckered into a frown. I knew a rhetorical question when I heard one, so I remained silent.
Fauna sighed, saying, “When one topples, they all go. Maybe if you’d bound yourself to Silas, Heaven would have won the war. We’d have ten thousand more years of sameness across the realms. Nothing would happen. But maybe if a pretty Norde named Fauna intervened, Hell could stand its ground and live to fight another day. Or maybe…”
“Please just tell me.”
“Maybe Poppy’s right and I don’t give a shit about Hell. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love Azrames, and he has a great apartment…but if Hell fell to ruins, I’d just have him come live with me in álfheimr. Or I’d stash him at my apartment in the mortal realm or something. Maybe I don’t care about Caliban, just like Fenrir doesn’t care about Anath, just like Poppy and Dorian don’t care about the Phoenicians. You’re missing the forest for the trees, here, Marlow.”
Anarchy.
“You want an uprising.”
“There’s a smart girl,” she practically purred. “The gods have had their fun.”
“Odin? Frigg? Thor?”
Her shoulders lifted. “You saw what they did to Fenrir. Maybe they haven’t done anything to me personally, but that’s beside the point. That’s the kind of shit the big gods do in every realm—whatever the fuck they want. Those below them have no say. But Hell’s model…now, that’s aspirational. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. ”
“Did you just quote Karl Marx to me?”
Her dazzling smile was vaguely threatening as she said, “Now you’re seeing the bigger picture, baby. Maybe you’re a pawn, Marlow Frejya Thorson. But you’re one important fucking pawn. And does it matter what brought us together? We’re together now, and I’m not going anywhere.”
She extended her hand toward me and wiggled her fingers, urging me in closer.
I didn’t accept her bid for affection. “What’s your name?”
Her fingers stilled. “It’s Fauna.”
“Your true name,” I emphasized.
She waved it away. “You have to know by now how rude that is. We keep our names to ourselves for own protection. Haven’t I been trying to get you to stop sharing your name from the moment I met you?”
I looked at the hand. “How can I trust you when you won’t even tell me who you are?”
Genuine confusion rearranged her features. “I’m sorry?”
“You’re only my friend because of the role you think I can play in some war of the realms. How is there any honesty in that?”
She scoffed. Her hand dropped. “Because before, when we were connected by distant bloodlines, that was a true bond? This thing between us was so much purer when you were merely a Norde?”
“Well—”
She arched a testing brow. “Is that why you’re so close to your parents? Is that why you stand by them and their excellent decisions? Because blood is so important? You matter to me, Marlow. You matter to a lot of us. And I don’t know if you know this, but that famous quote about blood has been bastardized.”
“Which one?”
“ Blood is thicker than water. People use it to say the exact opposite of its original intent.”
I twisted the fabric of my tee in my fingers as I prompted, “Which is?”
“ The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb .”
I tasted her message. The implication was uncomfortable and did nothing to put me at ease. My fidgeting continued as I said, “I matter to you because of what I symbolize.”
She didn’t deny it. “Yes. And that would have been reason enough for me to guard you with my life. I know you’re something of an expert at lying to yourself, so I’m sure you’ll convince yourself that our bond is meaningless. But don’t lie to me and try to pretend we don’t care about each other, because I won’t believe you. Now stop fighting our friendship and come here, sunflower. Tonight, we sleep. Tomorrow, we take over the worlds.”