The Fox and the Falcon (No Other Gods #2)

Chapter Twenty

Wind and razor-sharp sand whipped my hair with my words. I pitched my complaint above the howling, desolate landscape as I gritted my teeth. I could scarcely make out the square reddish buildings dotting the dry riverbed. “I hate it here.”

I expected Fauna to tell me to give it a chance. She was usually chiding me over every passing thought. But she steeled her expression and straightened her posture. She didn’t bother looking at the red sky overhead, the haze of dust in the air, or the lifeless expanse of toppled ruins and sand on either side before responding.

Instead, she nodded. “Me, too.”

Maybe this was what came from being stripped of gods of life, crops, and fertility. Their realm had been robbed of rain, growth, and greenery. I looked to my left, then to my right. My eyes strained to see anything beyond the cracked expanse of dried clay but perceived only empty nothingness. Whatever trust issues I had were put aside as I reached for Fauna. There was no cowardice in comfort, and standing before the ominous, jagged outline of the Phoenician palace felt quite like looking up at cracked obsidian shards that had been rough-hewn into a palace.

I caught a glimpse of motion over my shoulder and tugged her to look in my direction. A swirling brownish-reddish mountain stretched from ground to sky, closing in on us with terrifying speed.

“Is that—”

“It’s a sandstorm.” She coughed. “We need to get under shelter.”

Fenrir planted his feet and sneezed, rejecting the sand that assaulted his nose. His coat, like our hair, was already caked with the dusty mark of the storm.

I didn’t know enough of impending walls of dirt and their timelines, but the distant memory of a college astronomy class had me betting that the sun overhead was the red dwarf of a dying star. The enormous, dull light in the sky fought for my attention with the cloud of dust caking my lungs. A thin film had already begun to stick to Fauna’s face and hair. I was relatively confident that if we didn’t get moving soon into the shelter of the Phoenician palace, we’d suffocate before I was reunited with Caliban.

“Why is their realm like this?”

I knew the answer before I finished forming the question. We’d discussed it. Several major deities had been away for centuries. This realm had not been given the opportunity to symbiotically thrive. While the others glimmered with slices of modernity, this one remained decidedly archaic.

Fauna opened her mouth but covered it with the back of her hand before speaking her mind. I saw the question on her face. She wanted to know if I was ready. Dry wind ran its dusty fingers through her hair as she closed her eyes against the onslaught.

I answered her by leading us forward, tugging her along with the crook of my arm as we interlocked elbows. The gesture was for direction and comfort rather than affection. We couldn’t risk separation in a sandstorm.

Fauna coughed into her hand, but each jagged inhalation only brought more dirt into her lungs. I learned from her mistake and swept my shirt up over my mouth to filter the dust.

Fenrir ran ahead of us and barked once to hasten us forward. I squinted as a cloud of dust assaulted us on a gust of hot wind, tugging us over a bridge that had been doubtlessly intended for a moat. Now it was little more than a dry trench, a sorrowful memory of what once had been.

We reached the far side of the bridge with no resistance. A wall encircled the chipped onyx palace, providing just enough relief from the wind for me to take in our surroundings. It looked like there had once been clay houses neighboring the palace, but there were no doors on their hinges, no closed shutters, no signs of life as we pushed forward. I’d underestimated the speed of the wind—the cloud of dust spilled over the far wall like a looming fog.

“Come on,” Fauna urged, pushing us forward.

We hurried down the remaining stretch as we crossed the space between us and the palace.

A stranger called out in a language I couldn’t discern from just beyond our line of sight. Unable to do anything more than advance, we went toward the voice.

“Stop!” came the woman’s thickly accented voice once more. Through squinted eyes, I looked up at a figure clad for the horrors of the desert and its storms. Her hardened armor would protect her against the glass-like shards of sand. The cloth around her mouth would protect her lungs, and another veil could be tugged down at a moment’s notice to protect her eyes. She clutched a long spear with both hands.

Fauna had no patience for the imposition. “You have the Prince of Hell,” she said. “This is his betrothed. She’s been invited to your banquet. Let us in.”

The sand hit my exposed skin like a million tiny knives. My bare shoulders, arms, and thighs were assaulted by the gust of hot dust as the wind descended on the city. I struggled to imagine that the Phoenicians received a lot of visitors. My arrival was expected, or so I’d been told. It made the guard’s reaction all the more worrying. There was no gentleness in her posture nor her voice as she ushered us into the palace.

It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the windowless gloom of the antechamber. The iridescent rainbows of dark oil slicks blinked over my vision as I struggled to discern light from shadow. I didn’t realize how tightly I was gripping Fauna’s arm until she made a small sound at my side. I looked in horror at the deep purple-red marks my fingers had made on her bicep as I’d struggled to adapt.

Fenrir shook his coat as if he’d been caught in the rain, and a cloud of his dust filled the hall.

The guard called to someone unseen, once more using a language I didn’t recognize. I knew a smattering from my upbringing in the church, a little from my studies writing the Pantheon books, and a bit more from my helpless week on search engines and computers while separated from Caliban after escaping Astarte’s fingertips. The Canaanites had spoken a number of languages during their prominent time in the human realm, from a medieval relative of the still-living Hebrew, to Moabite, Punic, and of course, Phoenician. I wasn’t educated enough to say so much as hello in modern Hebrew on a good day. While most of the gods I’d encountered had spent eternity flitting between realms, I felt a stab of uncertainty that the Phoenicians would be as accommodating to my ignorance as the others had been.

A thick, bearded man only a few inches taller than Fauna or I approached. He was dressed for the temperature, not the elements. Unlike the guard at the door, his knee-length tunic was sleeveless. A belt provided a hook for his dagger and water flask, but he wore little by way of protection. I wondered if he had unseen abilities, or if the weather was simply too uncomfortable to expect sleeves and pants beyond the wall. I was glad for the dresses Poppy had gifted us as we followed the man down the hall.

“No,” came the same guard’s voice.

The man escorting us paused as we all turned to regard her. My shoulders tensed as I held my breath, terrified our plan had been uncovered before it had even begun.

“No dog,” she said firmly.

My pulse quickened. “He has to come with us. He’s my dog. I can’t—”

“No dog,” she repeated. She used the dull end of her spear as a cane to herd him closer. I widened my eyes in panic, but Fenrir shook his head once. He didn’t have to use his gift to tell me not to press the issue. I attempted to reason with myself that there would be no room or shelter or shed they could put Fenrir in that would be more terrible than being tethered to a boulder in a marsh and left to die, but it did little to console me.

He was powerful enough to bring on the Twilight of the Gods. I was with Fauna, a deity in her own right. I needed to take a breath. I needed to unclench my fists. I needed to focus on the fact that Caliban was somewhere here, within the walls.

The pair exchanged a few more quick words before the woman took off in the opposite direction, continuing to use the blunt end of her spear to urge Fenrir down the hall.

I looked at Fauna, but I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t expect her to answer, to translate, or to explain. She simply shook her head once, just as Fenrir had done, as she laced her fingers between mine. I felt a thin grime of dust in the gaps between our fingers. I ran my tongue along my teeth, doing my best to summon saliva and rid my mouth of the grit. I didn’t want to ask for water moments after arriving.

The man stopped at a seamless stone wall. He pressed his hand against it, and a door without hinges pushed back from the unbroken surface before swinging open.

Shit .

I didn’t have to look at Fauna to understand we were entering a cage.

We followed the man through the door. I looked over my shoulder as it scraped shut behind us. I squeezed Fauna’s hand and jerked my head for her to look. It took her less than a second for her crestfallen face to tell me all I needed to know. The elaborate seal on the wall informed me we were in serious trouble. She sucked in a tight breath of unsullied air but wouldn’t meet my eyes as she blinked at the ground. Her gaze stayed trained on the sandaled heels of the man before us, paralyzed by whatever she’d seen.

I tried a few grounding exercises I’d been taught in therapy for whenever I felt a panic attack coming on. The therapist had instructed me to ground myself by asking questions about each of my five senses, and by the end, I would be calm. I heard the steady slapping of feet on the corridor floor. I smelled sweat and grime and the ancient scent of decaying structures. I tasted dirt. I felt stifling heat, the slick nervousness of Fauna’s hand in mine, and the near-painful pounding of my heart. And I saw darkness. Nothing but claustrophobic darkness as the walls, ceiling, and floor pressed in on me.

The therapist was wrong. The exercise had made things much, much worse.

He took us into an enormous windowless bedroom and gestured for us to stop. He didn’t bother speaking to us as he held up his hands for us to wait, then excused himself through another seamless door. His hand summoned an invisible rectangle, drawn forth by his magnetism. It swung open by his will, then scraped closed as he stepped through.

In the absence of his shoes on the ground, I heard only the drumlike thunder of my heartbeat and the threatening hum of dizziness in my ears. I tried to pull in air, but it became harder and harder to breathe.

“Why would they…? I don’t understand.” I buried my fingers in my tangled hair. “We were invited. We belong here! Why would they put us in a cage? Why…?”

Fauna ran to the wall the moment he departed. It contained the same angular seal I’d seen on the first door. She looked like a mime against an invisible wall as she clambered up and down the stone. “Shit, shit, shit.”

She continued scrambling against the seamless door. I stared vacantly at our circumstances, assuming my nymph was looking for something magical, something unseen, something that only a deity could summon. She reached the ground and groaned. She slammed tight fists against the door before rising again, skimming her flattened palms against the door.

I extended a hand from behind her. “Fauna—”

“I’m not done,” she bit through gritted teeth.

I stumbled on my words. She was rarely short with me. I stared after her while she continued to search the wall for a slip, a crack, something .

I watched for thirty seconds. One minute. Three minutes.

I flexed and unflexed my fingers at my sides, inhaling through my nose as I forced myself to look away. Focusing on Fauna’s panic would only rile me into a state of unrest. We’d been invited. Surely this was just rude, terrifying precaution. I wished I had the wits to appreciate my surroundings. Gauzy curtains, a four-post bed, and gold, black, and stone that my limited exposure could only affiliate with Egyptian hieroglyphics crowded the room. The far wall had a black gem tub that ran nearly the length of the room. The black settee was curved with luxurious gold legs and angles.

I stepped away from Fauna’s still-searching shape toward the bath to see that it was already filled with water and rose petals. Apart from the rose water, the scents of lilies and lemongrass wafted through the room. I couldn’t find the source of the lemongrass, but a few overflowing vases had a curious blue flower that reminded me of lily pads and the pond lotus. I wondered if that was the floral scent on the air.

There was nothing else to see.

“Fauna—”

Her command came out in a desperate snarl. “Let me look!”

“Fauna!”

She rested one hand on the wall and turned to me with fiery embers in her eyes. I almost gasped at the crimson glower of her anger. She heaved as she looked at me with the true fury of a god. “What!”

I shook my head in surprise, taking a half step back. I bumped into the hip-high bath before realizing I had nowhere to escape. “We can’t get out,” was all I said.

“I’m trying to fix that,” she hissed through bared teeth.

“We’ll be okay,” I said in a soothing, placating voice. I wasn’t sure why I believed it, but I did. Maybe it was the lack of malice in the guard’s voice. Maybe it was the accommodations we’d been presented. Maybe it was the number of times I’d been locked in a room, a closet, or a basement as punishment. I’d been shut into a crumbling building in the forest as a child, and Caliban had come for me. He was here now. Somewhere within these walls, I knew he was here. I’d learned the resiliency of patience through my cages. And our cage was gilded.

“We’re sealed in,” she said, voice hitching with panic.

“Caliban is here. We’re guests, not prisoners. I know it doesn’t feel like it, but—”

“What do you call this, if not imprisonment?” Each of her words was more frantic than the one before.

“Have you never been locked in before?”

Her brows turned up in the middle. Her hand dropped from the wall. Her honey-brown eyes widened into their doe form as she said, “I’m a deity.”

I nodded, face softening. “I know you are. And I know this is scary. But even though I’m human, maybe I’m the expert here.”

She sucked in a sharp breath of air. “I couldn’t jump when I was in the mortal realm by choice, Marlow. I didn’t go into Bellfield because—”

“Because Azrames didn’t want you to go into a trap. But he and I went in. I don’t know if it was his first, but it certainly wasn’t mine.”

Her face collapsed, expression defeated. Her hands went limp at her sides.

“We’ll be okay,” I said.

She looked at me defiantly, lip quivering. “These seals prevent us from being okay, Marlow. I can’t leave. It isn’t just jumping to prevent others from seeing us entering. We can’t move. We’re sitting ducks. We’re animals. We’re—”

“We’re sunflowers,” I said. I extended my hand. My heart lurched at the motion, realizing the position I was putting us in. I’d had my reasons to distrust her, but I didn’t. She was chaotic, and frustrating, and bizarre, but I knew in my gut that I loved her. “Maybe there’s no light right now,” I said.

She looked like she was about to cry. She took a half step toward me before lifting her own hands to her arms to hug herself.

“So, I’ll be your sun, and you’ll be mine.”

Her eyes were glassy with impending tears. I understood from her face, from her insistence, that her fear was not for herself. She hadn’t crossed the room to me, and she’d known me for scarcely a blip on her life’s radar. Her panic had come from understanding the fortress of the Phoenician palace.

I tried once more. “We’ll be sunflowers.”