Chapter Twenty-Nine
Azrames rotated as we fell through time and space, absorbing my rough collapse in the last instant. He grunted against the blow as his back struck the grass with a dull thud. I apologized as I scrambled out of his arms and looked around.
“Where are we?”
Stepping from one place to another in the same realm wasn’t as disorienting as jumping between Earth and Hell, but it still came with a head-spinning confusion. I’d expected to appear outside of the red barn in the photos or on the edge of the lake at the town’s center. Instead, we rolled to our feet in a perfectly ordinary neighborhood. The high-pitched yip of a small dog cut through the night as a crusty, white shih tzu alerted the world to our arrival. I made eye contact with the dog through the bay window of its home. It had pressed itself between the window and the curtain as it howled its angry alarm.
Its owner cursed at it to shut the fuck up from somewhere within the house, loudly enough for the world to hear.
I looked around for Caliban as if we should have appeared at his feet, but he was nowhere to be found.
Az gestured to me to follow as he made his way to the sidewalk. I waved at the dog and caught my tattoo, realizing that people would only be able to see me—not my demonic escort. The tattoo was the best one hundred and fifty dollars I’d ever spent. I crossed the yard to catch up to him.
“Where did you take us?” I asked, keeping my voice low. Knowing that I’d be perceived as a lone woman in an unfamiliar town, I couldn’t afford to draw more attention by loudly conversing with myself. It was bad enough that I was still bra-free in a thin shirt that Fauna had specifically selected for the wandering eyes of an angel. The chill of the late hour did not improve upon my self-consciousness. I folded my arms across my chest as I examined the copy-paste normalcy of suburban homes.
Azrames shrugged. “I wanted to get us as close to the business district as possible without drawing eyes. We can’t have a human appearing out of thin air in front of a hotel. People might see you.”
“How thoughtful,” I mumbled.
“Listen,” he said, voice serious. “People can’t see me, but I’m as stuck here as you are. I can’t go back to Hell. Whatever we do from here on out, we do together.”
“How do we find Caliban? Do you still have…whatever abilities you have?”
“I believe so,” he said, “except for movement. We don’t have the luxury of jumping through space, even within the seal. And no, I can’t track him. He’s royalty. He’s untraceable. If Silas hadn’t told us where he was, even the legions couldn’t have pinpointed his location. But this seal is trapping something. The threats have to be within it. We only have one lead.”
“And our lead?”
“Dagon.”
The god.
“How do we know he isn’t the bad guy?”
The way Azrames’s brows met brought me no comfort. “He certainly could be, but it’s his lake in the trap’s center. My guess is that he’s as much of a victim as the Prince and I are.”
He remained silent, which was even worse. I frowned at him as we continued to walk. “Fauna was right,” I said. “You should have let me come alone. You’re stuck in flypaper with whatever nightmare awaits us. And if I already have to go door to door, house to house to find him as if we’re both helpless humans, then the only thing I’ve accomplished by bringing you here is ruining your life.”
He laughed, voice light. “You’re a good soul, Marmar. You’re also perfectly useless, even if you have a fighting spirit. I, on the other hand”—he tapped the silver lasso on his hip lightly—“am far from useless.”
I frowned down at the object, realizing it wasn’t a rope at all. Quite like the layered necklaces he wore and their sigil, the weapon at his hip was more than it appeared. A large, spiked sphere dangled at its bottom. “What is that?”
I caught the wicked gleam of his smile in the streetlights as he said, “Have you ever heard of a meteor hammer?”
Azrames apologized at least three times for the length of our walk. It took roughly forty-five minutes until an aged sign announced we were approaching the Bellfield Inn.
“We can’t get a hotel room,” I practically spat through my surprise. “The clock is ticking, right? We have to be looking.”
“Silas said we should start with the Wild Prairie Rose, right? We have no idea what that is or what it means. We need to get the lay of the land and formulate a plan that isn’t: wander the streets and hope for the best. We’ll need to speak with Dagon, and we can’t call upon him until morning. He’s a daytime deity.”
I struggled to believe that deities kept certain hours, but as much as it pained me, we headed toward the check-in office. The moment I cracked open the door, I wanted to leave. Though it had been years since I’d watched Psycho, I couldn’t help but feeling like I’d walked into the Bates Motel. If a demon known for protecting women hadn’t been at my side, I don’t think I would have been able to confidently withstand the ogling of the man behind the counter.
The interior had yellowed with cigarette smoke and decades of neglect. From the gaunt of age and the creases of his face, the man might have been around for its grand opening back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth. He rubbed discolored fingernails along his jaw as he eyed me, asking a few too many questions about why I was here and who I might be seeing.
“One key or two?”
“Two, please,” I said. No part of me wanted this man thinking I was alone.
His eyes lingered on my bare ring finger before asking, “Will your boyfriend be joining you?”
“I expect him any minute,” I replied tersely.
He made a sound to let me know that he didn’t believe a word. He flashed me a smile, and I wished he hadn’t. The odors of inflamed gums, age, and decay rolled from his mouth.
Azrames’s loathsome glare brought me comfort as I handed the man my credit card.
He swiped it as I booked for a room for two nights, but the moment the man turned his back, Az swiped his hand through the tech, and the computer blinked out of use just before the machine finished processing my payment. I concealed a smile while accepting my card with one hand, the other still folded over my chest. The man passed me a metal key, which was all the confirmation I needed to know I’d stepped into the past. I hadn’t stayed at a motel that didn’t use electronic cards since my family’s failed camping trip.
The moment we entered the room, Az held up a finger. I’d thought he looked angry in the lobby, but that was before I saw the burn of true hate. I caught how lupine he looked as his lips pulled back in a snarl. It took him exactly six seconds to locate the cameras and microphone that had been drilled into the wall, hidden in the vent, and propped behind the painting. I stood speechlessly in the middle of the room as he short-circuited each of the pieces of equipment.
“Don’t go anywhere,” he said without looking at me. I almost gasped at the shadowy hate in his eyes as he brushed passed me. I swallowed as he disappeared out the door. I took a seat on the bed and watched the clock, heart racing. Five minutes turned into ten. Ten turned into sixty.
The deluge of exhaustion hit me like monsoon season in the tropics. I crawled backward onto one of the twin beds and slipped my legs beneath the starchy sheets. If the clock was to be believed, it had to be almost four in the morning. Given our walk from the neighborhood and calculating the time I’d spent in the apartment before Silas’s arrival, I tried to count how many hours I’d been awake. The math was something like counting sheep, as before I’d reached a final tally, the rhythmic raindrops of fatigue lulled me into a deep, terrible sleep.
Leave, and don’t come back.
I stood in the middle of a body of water so large it could have been the ocean. There were no mountains; there was no land, no signs of life. The clear ice ran as thick as cement as Caliban stared back at me. The ice fractured under the weight of his broken heart at my words. Thousands of white lines spread from where he stood as the sea was cut from top to bottom. The once-perfect glass was now covered in a spiderweb of white. The wind howled as I looked at him.
Leave, and don’t come back.
A white fox cocked its head at me before taking one step back, then another. I looked around in search of friends or family but saw no one. I was alone in the whipping winds of subarctic temperatures. I reached out to touch the snowy fox, but I’d issued it a command. It continued to step away.
“Wait,” I said quietly, but it couldn’t. Bound to my words, it had no choice.
The wind kicked up until snow surrounded me. I hadn’t felt the temperature before this moment. As the fox disappeared, the crippling cold sent me to my knees. I huddled against my pain, fingers, toes, and ears turning red as frostbite bit into my flesh.
“Come back,” I said, but the howling wind stole my words.
I was completely and utterly alone.