Chapter Twenty
“What. A. Bastard,” Fauna breathed beside me.
“Does she know he’s with her?” I asked, voice shaking.
Fauna shook her head. “I have no idea, but I doubt it. The motherfuckers don’t need to be seen to whisper their persuasion. It gets the job done.”
I wasn’t a child caught with my hand in a cookie jar. I wasn’t at risk of a wooden spoon, a switch, or a leather belt. She’d already done the worst thing a mother could possibly do to a child. The clang of keys in the front door reverberated through me like a guard opening a prison cell. I was a child again. Years of buried wounds opened as if a scab had been picked, fresh blood flowing freely. I struggled to calm my breathing as Fauna and I navigated out of the bedroom and headed for the landing.
“Can we jump out a window?” I whispered, words scarcely audible over the pounding in my ears.
“Do you need your legs?” she whispered back.
The door was our only option. I straightened my spine, swallowed the heart that seemed lodged in my throat, and led the way. Fauna remained on my heels as I descended the stairs to see my mother, arms crossed, beside a man who stood a full head and shoulders taller than her even in heels.
She bloomed into view, a picturesque monster in a charcoal pantsuit with a large, white-gold cross resting against her sternum, just as it had always been. Seeing the beautiful, horrible woman who’d raised me was every bit as terrible as I’d anticipated. She hadn’t changed a bit. Except now, she was in a costume to play the socially acceptable role of wealthy, as was I.
Like mother, like daughter.
Time moved in slow motion as I saw her for the first time in years.
The tiniest hints of gray lined her bright blond hair, barely visible amid the natural platinum that had always cascaded from her roots. Her face was free from wrinkles, save for the evidence that she’d once been a person who’d smiled. We’d always been able to trade clothes, and I expected she could still fit into the very cream dress on my back if she’d wanted. The primary change was a cold fire in her eyes. It kindled something dark in me, as someone who’d been raised in a burning house. It had been so long since I’d had a match held to my skin that I’d nearly forgotten the pain of its spark.
“Marlow Esther Thorson.” My mother’s voice sliced through the house, each word a blade.
Despite the revulsion, the misery, the sheer terror that soaked through the room, Fauna leaned in to say, “Your middle name is Esther? How biblical.”
“I rebuke you,” she said with icy indignation as I descended the stairs.
“Lisbeth—” I said her name with frost and warning. My gaze darted between her and the angel, his shoulders back, chest puffed out, wondering which feat to tackle first.
She looked past me and directed her rage toward Fauna. Trembling with anger, she said, “I rebuke your persuasion over my daughter!”
The hate had a somewhat soothing, comical effect. The tension snapped. I exhaled, pushing out much of my anxiety as I said, “Mom, this is my friend, Fauna.”
Her eyes darkened as she looked at me. “I know exactly what your friend is—and now, thanks to your parade around town, everyone knows that my daughter is here on an escapade.” She spat the word daughter as if it were an obscenity. “Do you know how many pictures I got of you arm in arm with this demon at the bakery? As if I didn’t have to suffer humiliation when I was being sent pictures and videos of my daughter on her social media kissing another woman, now you bring one into my town? Into my house, Marlow? Not only have you walked away from God, but you’re letting demons in your bed.”
Fauna suppressed a chuckle beside me, which, despite the turmoil, I appreciated. Her dedication to irreverence was grounding.
“Fauna isn’t a demon, Mom. She’s—”
“She’s not of God” came her sharp reply. “This house belongs to the Lord. I don’t know what you think you can achieve here, but your demons are not welcome.”
I reached out to grab Fauna for support, which infuriated my mother further.
“Could we try being calm?” I asked, looking between my mother and Silas.
“Explain yourself, Marlow. What are you doing in my home?”
I scrambled for an answer that would put this conversation to a stop and allow us a speedy exit. I shot a quick glance at Silas and caught his appraising, narrowed eyes before deciding it was a very, very bad idea to disclose that we were here for my great-grandma’s broach. My mother clearly didn’t know what the trinket was worth, but I wasn’t willing to bet our escape on Silas’s ignorance. He was sharp. And apparently the angel knew the one tool to wield against me that could genuinely hurt me: my mother.
At a loss for excuses, all I could say was, “She’s my friend.”
“She is not of this world,” my mother retorted. “If you truly had my gift, then you’d have the discernment to realize what you’ve done, Marlow. An angel of the Lord was sent to me to tell me about the spirits you’ve let into your life. I should have known when you began whoring—”
“Hey—” Fauna cut in, bristling at the word. She took a half-step as if to put herself between her mother and me.
“It’s okay.” I waved, urging her to stand down. My mother and I had had this fight on the last night I ever saw them.
It had been early June in my twenty-second year of life. I’d returned from Colombia with six thousand dollars in cash, and that had only been what I hadn’t been able to wire directly into my account. Taylor had been right. Between Buenos Aires and Montevideo, there had been more than enough opportunities for a girl to get ahead. Once my visa expired and I gave up my life in Colombia, I’d needed a place to bridge the gap between my transition back into North America.
My mom had cried when she’d hugged me at the airport—the Prodigal Daughter returned, she’d said. I was finally home to live a good life, to turn away from sin and distractions and worldliness. I didn’t have the heart to correct her.
In a fog of jet lag and reverse culture shock, I’d needed somewhere to crash while setting up the next phase of my life. They’d left my bedroom more or less untouched, save for the closet space that my parents had used to stash things that were better off out of sight and out of mind. I stayed at the time capsule in the woods for the better part of a week while scouring the web for my own place in the city. While I was on a weekend excursion apartment hunting, my mother had taken it upon herself to snoop through my things. She’d made no excuses for what had prompted her to go through my belongings—she never needed to. She was the parent, and I was the child, after all. She hadn’t been looking for anything in particular aside from a satiated curiosity when she’d found the money in the lining of my suitcase.
I vividly recalled the cloud of dread and adrenaline that had descended on me when stepping back into the house. My smile had faltered the moment I saw her sitting at the kitchen table, cash neatly displayed in front of her next to an open, glowing laptop.
She’d suspected drug trafficking, which, in hindsight, she might have preferred. Of course, she hadn’t stopped at finding the money. The moment she’d uncovered her treasure, she did what any good mother would do and immediately went through every means necessary to further violate my privacy. She’d managed to guess my security questions to get into my email and read exchanges between myself and my clients—both those over the past with whom I’d met up in my final weeks in Colombia and the clients I’d already arranged for the city. While helping herself to my computer, she’d googled an array of terms based on the acronyms in the threads, like FSSW for full-service sex work, GFE for girlfriend experience, and had gone down a rabbit hole on findom. She had a few pictures of me, naked, face obscured, from my client thread open on the screen when I walked in.
I met the disgust in her eyes with speechlessness.
“I don’t even know who you are anymore,” she’d whispered.
It had been the Pandora’s box of fights.
We’d said every cruel, hateful thing we could conjure. We’d launched missiles at one another, bloodying the other with our words until we were little more than shreds. My dad had arrived at the house just to hear the tail end of the screaming, including me shouting just how much money I’d made in the past three months alone and how I was happier, freer, kinder, and better off as a sex worker than I’d ever been in the church or as their daughter.
She’d told me they had no daughter, and that she’d miss me when they were in heaven, knowing I’d be rotting in hell.
It was a fight I’d relived on therapists’ couches through boxes of tissues. It was a fight I’d used bottles of prescription medications to get through whenever panic attacks over my mortal soul strangled me. It was a fight that had forced me further and further from Caliban, demanding that I put up walls, that I choose sanity, that I close myself off from the irrational hold on the fiction that my mother led.
And now…now the words tickled me as I thought of my Prince.
“I know all about your angel of the Lord,” I said, glaring at Silas, “and he’s a dick with an agenda.”
She turned and looked at Silas—actually looked at him.
Fauna and I gasped simultaneously. Despite our years of conversations on seeing angels and demons, despite knowing that her fae blood was thicker than mine, despite everything I’d learned, witnessing my mother make eye contact with an angel was staggering.
“He told me what you are,” she said. The tremble of her fury had passed. She spoke to Fauna now with frosty strength.
“Nice one, Silas.” Fauna glared. Then back to my mother, she asked dryly, “Did he also tell you what you are? Though, to be fair, I think I speak for the Nordes when I tell you: we don’t want you.”
“And he told me who you’ve sold your soul to.” She looked at me, ignoring Fauna’s goad. “Do you think I haven’t spent every day praying for your soul? Do you think I haven’t spent every night on my knees petitioning God’s angels to get you back? Do you think I want my daughter to spend eternity in the inferno? I love you, Marlow.”
Love.I nearly laughed at the word.
“I told you.” Silas spoke for the first time. His voice was quiet but firm beside her as he looked directly at Fauna. “We have a claim to her.”
“Silas, you’re a goddamn cocksucker,” Fauna grumbled. “And you can shove that claim up your master’s ass next time you’re kissing it. We’re done here.”
She grabbed my arm and yanked me toward the door. I winced as if preparing to plunge beneath icy waters as we closed the space between my mother and me. Fauna pushed past the woman and yelped when a small, electric shock stopped her. The jolt was enough to send her stumbling back, eyes wide.
My mom backed away, not daring to touch the demon and the whore as she watched Fauna grab for the handle once more.
She reached out her hand and tried again, cursing as the shock assaulted her. She lifted her eyes to where, just above the door, a protective ward had been hung—not to keep out but to keep in. She took several steps backward into the living room, panic rising as she scanned for an exit.
“I can’t get you out of here,” Fauna said, truly looking like a frightened deer in a glen as her wide eyes searched me. “I can’t get you out,” she repeated, taking another panicked step back.
The comfort of Fauna’s calm irreverence evaporated. All that remained in its wake was the sickening injection of cortisol as my heart thundered. The smell of bleach was overpowering. The home closed in on me as I demanded, “Can you get out? Can you go?”
“Yes,” Silas answered for her. “She can go back to the Nordes. She can visit the Sumerians, the Greeks, or seek refuge with the Hindus. She can go straight to Hell if she wants. She can step into any other realm. But her guardianship over you is done.”
She’d done it. My mother had successfully pulled the thread. I cracked as it released the pieces of me that I’d spent so many years pulling together and became a child once more. My heart bled against years of buried terror as, small and helpless, I shattered into a powder of nothingness before her.
“I have not given up on your soul, even if you have,” Lisbeth said. “I will force the demons from your life, whatever it takes. Now the angel—”
I swallowed against the cotton in my throat. “Mom, you don’t know this guy like I do.”
“I’m a chosen, faithful servant. I’ve been speaking with angels of the Lord my entire life. He arrived as an answer to prayer. Neither the Lord nor I have given up on your soul, Marlow, even if you have.”
“I’m still willing to make the bond, Marlow,” he said quietly. He didn’t look angry or hostile or violent. Fractals of sadness reflected in his golden eyes as he looked between my mother and me. “I’m sorry it had to be like this, but there was no other way to get to you. I won’t let anything happen to you. I’ve already proven my worth to you. I’ve saved you three times already, and I’ll continue to do so. Just”—he extended his hand exactly as he had that night in my apartment—“make the bond.”
“Commit your soul to the Lord,” my mother commanded as she looked between the angel and me. “God is always reaching out his hand to you! Can’t you see that? How can you spit on this chance at salvation?”
“So that’s it?” I asked. My voice sounded so far away. “I choose a realm right now? My decision is now?”
The silent, watery-eyed apology on Fauna’s face broke my heart.
“Marlow.” He repeated my name, his quiet plea the voice of reason juxtaposed against her rising hysteria.
Then, something clicked. The world stopped spinning. The suffocating, sterile smell of cleaning products vanished. The only sound was that of my own heartbeat. I looked at Fauna with complete certainty as I said, “Step into another realm.”
Silas’s golden eyes flashed at my command. The tendons on his forearm pulsed as he flexed his fist.
“I won’t leave you.” She planted her feet, voice swelling with her resolve. “I can’t throw you to the dogs—”
The beats between seconds stretched like taffy as time slowed. My pretty mother with her ugly heart surrounded by the opulence of her blessings and her jackass of an angelic counterpart blurred as I focused on Fauna alone. The roar in my ears sounded like the ocean’s relentless pounding as blood thundered through me.
“Do it, Fauna!”
“I’m not going to abandon you,” she repeated through gritted teeth.
I plunged my hand into my pocket, fingers digging through the bits of handkerchief until they touched the cool, silver treasure. Her eyes shot to my pocket, then up to me, and I knew she understood. I said all I could with the intensity of my eyes as I shouted, “Then don’t leave me!”
Fauna’s hand was on my bare skin in an instant. I heard a deep, masculine cry as the angel dove for me, saw a glint of glitter, and watched my mother’s eyes flare all at once.
Silas’s gold winked out as the world went utterly black.