Chapter Twenty-Eight
Silas had barely left my apartment when Fauna was already upon me, snatching the laptop from my hands. She was a flash of copper and white, a blur of metal, and the glow of a screen. I shuffled closer to her to see she was searching the town of Bellfield. Azrames leaned against the wall and frowned at me.
Maybe she didn’t need to talk about the encounter with Silas, but I did.
“Since when are the Phoenicians on the board?” came my bewildered demand.
“Since ten thousand BCE,” Azrames said with a shrug. Though the gesture was casual, his energy was anything but.
Fauna’s fingers continued flying over the keyboard. “What is Silas playing at?”
I rubbed my arms for warmth as the blur of possibilities chilled me. “It can’t be a coincidence.”
“It isn’t,” Fauna said without looking up, “but I’m inclined to trust Silas.”
“You were calling him a cocksucker not too long ago!” I could barely contain my emotions. “Now you trust him?”
She looked up from the computer and jutted a thumb toward Azrames. “Az was also an angel, until he wasn’t. I can’t say that’s what’s happening, but this is weird, Marlow. This is really, really weird.”
I wanted to question this radical leap in conclusions, to push back on their willingness to trust that Silas was not the enemy, their confidence that Caliban was in Bellfield and that they knew what they were saying and where we were going and what we would do when we arrived. I wanted to interrogate an assassin with thousands of years of knowing people and combat and situational awareness and push back against the forest deity who’d watched the first plants bloom and commanded the wild animals, but arguing with them was every bit as silly as recognizing that they were living, breathing, powering things.
I was Alice, twirling through the looking glass, and the world was mad.
Worse still: I was a child in church all over again. To accept one piece of this new reality meant to accept everything, except there was no barometer, no good book, no teacher save for those around me. I was six once more, looking at my mother, my elders, my pastor to tell me right from wrong, only now I was looking into the eyes of a nymph, blindly trusting that she wouldn’t lead me astray.
The urge to question everything softened with the knowledge that the answers didn’t matter. Either I’d be bludgeoned into submission or lied to, or she was telling the truth and I was meant to follow her.
I believed her, or I didn’t. I would follow her, or I wouldn’t.
And as odd and erratic and blunt as she was, I believed her.
I numbed any human questions that would be answered with nonhuman logic, and she led the way.
Azrames’s frown deepened while I wrestled with my agnostic paradigm. I’d witnessed an array of emotions out of the demon in our time together, but his face reminded me of a loading screen from an early computer. I could see the pages process on his face, though each new thought seemed to bring him greater trouble as the tabs in his mind opened.
“What?” I asked him, studying the expressions flickering across his face. “Do you have something to say about Silas?”
He shook his head. “It’s not that—it’s…”
“Here!” Fauna turned the computer around to show us what she’d found. A gallery of beautiful images transitioned from one idyllic picture of an orchard. The images continued to dissolve steadily as one picture bled into the next, from the blossoms on the trees outside their barn to the amber waves of wheat and barley that rippled in the surrounding fields. Deeply green knolls surrounded the town with picturesque uniformity. Pretty pictures of a blessed town danced across the screen, showing brick buildings, wooden homes, and the ever-running presence of lovely, green hills. “Next stop, Bellfield. Grab your purse, Mar.”
As the images began to loop into ones I’d already seen, I looked back to Azrames. I’d abandoned my phone and wallet in Hell, and my feet carried me to my bookshelf. I didn’t have to look at the small book that had been cleverly hollowed out to possess a tiny hiding space as I fetched my backup card and ID. My good purse was missing, but I grabbed a slim leather belt bag from the hook and clipped it around my waist. It had been an impulse purchase as I’d thought it made me look like Indiana Jones, and it had proved rather useful at the book signings when I’d needed to pop anti-anxiety meds at all hours of the night and day in the crowds. Perhaps now I had more reason than ever to play the part. I slipped the cards into the belt bag, and just for safekeeping, I scooped up the golden poppet and dropped it in after them.
Fauna made an impressed noise at my inventive failsafe, then returned to the screen. My eyes didn’t leave the demon. “What is it, Az?”
“It’s the Phoenicians,” he said, brows bundled so tightly that lines creased his forehead to underscore his confusion. “Silas said it was a minor entity. The only thing in the Phoenician realm known for benefitting crops or that would be of any use to agriculture would be Dagon.”
“Or Niki,” Fauna offered without looking up.
“Niki is more Sumerian—”
“Wait.” I stopped them. “You’re talking about…gods? I thought he said it was a small problem, like a parasite from their realm.”
Fauna’s eyebrows lifted. She immediately clicked out of the orchard’s site and toggled to the map. She zoomed in repeatedly until a satellite image of the city filled the screen. “Well,” she murmured, “I’ll be damned. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Azrames straightened suddenly. He ran to my kitchen and began to tear open drawers and slam them closed. His teeth set with determination. Intensity burned as he growled, “Marker. I need a marker.”
I nearly tripped over my feet as I stumbled to the table where Fauna had set down my marker the last time she’d been in my apartment. I didn’t even have the chance to properly extend it to him before he snatched it from my hands. He bit off the cap and kept it in his mouth as he ran to the door and began to draw a shape. I watched with wide eyes as he disappeared into my bedroom, then the guest room, returning at long last to the tall window.
“It’s a permanent marker…” I muttered weakly as he drew with a speed I didn’t understand.
“I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before,” Fauna muttered, running her fingers through her hair and leaving them bundled against her scalp. “My invite-only wards aren’t enough.”
“Silas wanted to be overheard,” Azrames said, cap still in his mouth. “We don’t.”
He recapped the marker and breathed a sigh of relief as he stepped away from the elaborate design resting just beneath Fauna’s graffiti. His words were cryptic, but his actions were easy enough to understand. Whoever might want to eavesdrop on my apartment no longer had the ability to do so. I looked between my door and window to confirm that the same thing had been emblazoned on both access points. If I had to guess, I’d assume that every window in my apartment now displayed a bizarre combination of what looked like little more than triangles and intersecting lines. Two symbols of the occult per entrance seemed imbalanced. If we were going to keep defacing my property, I’d have to ask them to add a third.
Now was not the time to worry about getting my deposit back. I hated that they were sitting on their hands while, if the angel was to be believed, we knew where Caliban was. “Okay, let’s go! What are we waiting for?”
Az’s voice was every bit as troubled as his face as he said, “Dagon’s credited with gifting farmers with the plow. But he’s mer. A Philistine fish god.”
“Mer?” I repeated incredulously. “You’re telling me this tiny town has a merman? And, just to be clear, a merman was put in charge of agriculture?”
“A mer god,” Fauna said appreciatively. “Look at the town.” And sure enough, at the center of the town was an enormous circular lake. Its perfect edges informed Marlow and the others in no uncertain terms that it was man-made.
“Wait,” Azrames said, stealing the computer from Fauna’s lap. His lips parted. I could hear the shock escape from him as air left his lungs. The gray of his skin shifted to a nearly silver pale. Every troubled thought seemed to click together all at once as horror crashed over him. “Holy shit.” He turned the screen, eyes wide. “Fauna…I can’t let you come.”
“What do you—” Her eyes widened as she saw it. She gaped at the screen for a few more moments, jaw slackening. She shook her head, “No, Az, you can’t go! If this is strong enough to hold a god—if this is keeping the Prince—”
“Is someone going to tell me what the hell is going on?” I hadn’t meant to yell, but panic bubbled over as I sucked in the palpable stress that pulsed between them.
Fauna opened her mouth to speak, but only a squeak came out. Her finger touched the screen, running along the circular lake. From there her delicate nail traced outward as a green line on the satellite image ran from the water like a spoke from a wheel. She continued to follow the path as the green line widened into a thick hill that curved into a small, unbroken mountain range of perfectly connected hills. The dark, intermittent cluster of trees on the satellite image had kept me from seeing its uniformity until her finger carved the path through the trees. The knolls ran through town in squiggles, hills, and intersecting lines.
I swallowed, hardly able to believe my eyes. The circle had to be miles wide. There would have been no way to see it without a bird’s-eye view. Within the concentric shape were several small hills, each mound creating dots and lines of ornate, intentional patterns. The only thing it had in common with my tattoo was the circle and the eerie sense of otherworldliness. I looked between them, realization dripping through me. “The town is a sigil?”
Voice as low as an oath, she said, “The town is a trap.”
The world fell out from beneath me as I asked, “Silas sent Caliban into a trap?”
No sound beyond our near-silent breathing interrupted the windless night.
After a long time, Azrames said, “I’ve never seen anything like it. To be strong enough to hold a god…”
“Why would he tell you?” Fauna whispered.
“What?”
Her freckles burned like constellations as they furrowed, face bunching in her confusion. “If Silas was trapping Caliban, why would he tell you where to go? Why would he give you the town name? Or the pantheon? He could have left the Prince imprisoned. This gets weirder by the gods-damned second. If it’s kept a god stuck in a town—”
“She can come and go,” Azrames said. “Marlow remains unbound, so the seal won’t affect her. If anyone’s going to be able to save him…”
“But with what power?” Fauna demanded. “How the fuck is a human supposed to save him? How—”
“With a shovel,” I said.
They both looked at me. Azrames folded his arms over his chest and rubbed his chin while he considered my words. Fauna’s fists went limp at her sides.
“Why can’t I just break the seal? Wouldn’t that render it useless? I mean, if Silas is some dark-horse hero who tipped me off to where he stashed Caliban, and it just happened to be a place where only a human can come and go? It’s fucking crazy, but it’s every bit as insane as your existence in the first place. So, if I were to dig a crack into the hills around the town…”
Azrames nodded. “We’ll go now.”
Fauna shook her head. “Let her go,” she said. “She’s human. The seal won’t hurt her. If Caliban is there, she’ll be safe within the seal. We can wait on the other side for her.”
It took him three steps to plant a kiss on Fauna’s head. He reached around to envelop her in a hug. “You stay here, Fauns. I’m not going to let you go into combat in a town you can’t escape. Besides, Marlow may be an eighth Norde, but she’s also the closest thing Hell has to a princess. I can’t let her go alone.”
She looked up with him larger doe eyes than I’d ever seen her use.
He exhaled into her hair. His hands began to unravel from their hold as he said, “I love you.”
With his final, distracting words, he accomplished two things.
I watched with a silent gasp on my lips as the fingers of one hand wrapped around the hilt of her Latin-engraved dagger. With the other, he reached for me. She must have felt the tug as he plucked the blade from her holster, for in the second it took him to grab me, the last thing I saw was Fauna’s wide-eyed fear before everything disappeared.