Chapter Thirty
I squinted against the morning light.
Starch—not the bamboo sheets of my apartment, not the luxurious black silk of Hell—stiff and scratchy cotton was the first sensation that pricked through my skin. My eyes flew open as I realized where I was. I shot up and soaked in the surroundings. The cheap brown-and-beige filigree of the polyester comforter thrust me into the present. I looked around, searching the tiny motel room with adrenaline bypassing any need for coffee.
The first smell to fill my nostrils was something like chlorine and dried urine.
“Morning, Marmar,” Az said, voice low enough to respect the early hour. He sat upright, legs outstretched, hands in his lap. He’d crossed his ankles on the remaining twin bed as he’d rested his head against the wall. It looked more like he’d been meditating than sleeping.
“What happened last night?”
“Well,” he breathed out, “we’re in Bellfield. We’re in a god-catcher. Caliban’s somewhere in the city. I’ve spent the night thinking about it. If Silas were betraying him, he wouldn’t have told you where to find your Prince, which is the only reason I didn’t shake you awake at six to start our hunt. Also, I have a few presents for you. Is there anything human you have to do before we venture out?” His nostrils flared with controlled temper before he added two strained words. “You’re safe.”
I swallowed at his meaning before I decided that, yes, I did need a few human moments. I showered off the stress of the night. I scrubbed my skin free from the evidence of my roll in the grass and raked my fingers through my hair. When I emerged from the bathroom, I had one word on my lips.
“Presents?”
He smirked, a small piece of whatever agitated him fading as he said, “You and Fauna have more in common than you realize.”
He used two fingers to beckon me forward as he led us from the motel room. The morning air was refreshing, which would have been pleasant if it didn’t feel like my world was ending. “Even if by some miracle the angel is secretly on our side, there’s something wrong with this town. He wouldn’t have told us to go quickly if everything was fine.”
He considered my words silently. We rounded the hall that wrapped around the building’s exterior and descended a set of stairs. He led us into the now-empty lobby and bypassed the desk to where the former night’s clerk sat listlessly in the corner. Azrames went directly to the man’s closet and gestured.
“Choose a sweatshirt. We need to cover up that tattoo of yours. Until we know who made the town’s trap, we can’t risk eyes on you. And with a demonic sigil…”
My gaze shot between the closet and the glazed eyes of the man who rested in the corner. If his chest didn’t rise and fall with signs of life, I’d have sworn I was staring at a slack-jawed corpse. I couldn’t keep the concern from creeping into my expression.
He smirked. “Oh, give me some credit,” he said. “Go ahead, call the motel.”
I blinked in confusion. He pointed to a small, greenish, seventies-era landline with a tightly coiled cord that had to have been sitting beside the man’s bed for decades. I looked at him with confusion.
“It’s zero. Press the button.”
I wasn’t sure what was more disconcerting—his casual energy or the bizarre instructions. I crossed obediently, wrapping my right hand around the phone and lifting it to my ears. The consistent note of the dial tone blasted my eardrums until I hit zero. The second the phone in the lobby began to ring, the clerk jumped to attention and walked swiftly to his station. Though only a few feet away, he answered with total oblivion.
“Bellfield Inn,” he said politely. “How can I help you?”
Azrames nodded expectantly.
“Um.” I swallowed, eyes going between the back of the man’s head and Azrames. Though only feet away, the clerk acted as though I’d never existed. Unsure of what to say, I kept the conversation as normal as possible. “I’m in room 305. I just wanted to ask for maid service to be suspended today? So I can rest?”
“Absolutely, ma’am,” he said. “No one will bother you. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
I shook my head, still looking at Azrames. If I wasn’t mistaken, his gray-black eyes flickered with shades of red and hellfire. I didn’t look away from Az as I responded, “No, that’s everything.”
“Have a pleasant day, and please let me know if there’s anything I can do,” he said before the line disconnected. The moment he hung up, the clerk returned to his chair in the corner to resume his blank, listless stare.
I returned the phone to its receiver. I mainlined adrenaline, cortisol shooting straight to my heart as I stared at the demon. He leaned against the wall with perfect, unmoving gravity.
“What the hell did you do?” I whispered.
“I won’t tell you that you’re welcome, because you’re responsible for neither knowledge nor gratitude for the removals of evils of the world, but I do serve a very specific purpose in the mortal realm. I’m glad I was with you last night.” He closed his eyes slowly as if the thought pained him. “I wish I could be everywhere, for everyone. I’m not omniscient. Betty helps me find those who deserve it, but…” He shook his head as if clearing it of cobwebs. “Now, find something to cover that arm. Let’s go.”
I sucked in a shocked breath, but it wasn’t one of disapproval.
I wasn’t aghast at the vileness of the world.
I wasn’t startled, or even disappointed, that a gross, gaunt man in the dead of the night had filled my room with cameras and undoubtedly observed countless women without their knowledge or consent. I was dismayed, of course, but not for the reason one might think.
I was upset for every moment that I’d existed before knowing Azrames.
I understood his quiet frustration as his words had drifted off. The look on his face was one of a man who would do his job without pay—not for the luxury apartment, the beautiful vehicle, the soft sheets, or the sugary cookies that he doubtlessly had to replace every week just to ensure they were never stale.
If I could go back in time, I’d grab every escort I’d known by the shoulders and beg her to wear the same sigil that dangled from Azrames’s lowermost chain. He was the dark angel who lurked in the shadows. He was the one I wanted when my back was against a wall.
“Az?”
He raised an eyebrow from where he leaned near the closet but said nothing.
“If we had made a deal…one where you said you wouldn’t do anything I didn’t explicitly ask for…”
His shoulders slumped slightly. He removed a hand from his pocket and gestured to the man. “I know what you’re asking. I couldn’t have done any of this. This was your life, and your night. If we’d made a deal? Then, if you hadn’t explicitly asked for me to handle him, I wouldn’t have been able to act of my own accord. You would have had to tell me to destroy the cameras, to go from room to room throughout the motel to ensure every woman was safe, to erase decades of footage so that anyone who looks at it sees only static, to infiltrate the wiring of his brain…”
My eyes nearly popped out of my skull. “You did all that?”
“Free will isn’t always a two-way street,” he breathed. “But when I have it…”
I wondered if he could hear the way my heart thundered in my ears as I weighed his words. Fauna was right about several things. Above all: I was an idiot.
His lips pressed into a thin line before he said, “Don’t make deals unless you want them honored, Marlow. And then when someone adheres to the parameters of your agreement, understand that it’s something you asked for. Now, are you going to choose clothes, or do I need to do it for you?”
I didn’t want to fight him on the issue. I didn’t have the energy to learn more about binding verbal contracts. Instead, I grabbed the closest long-sleeve plaid shirt and shrugged into it. I rolled it up to the middle of my forearms, ensuring my tattoo was covered, and left it unbuttoned for the late summer warmth. I looked to the clerk once more but knew without having to ask that he would never be a problem again.
Whatever gratitude I’d felt was being replaced by my rising tide of anxiety that we hadn’t made any strides toward finding Caliban. We got to the lobby before I asked Azrames to explain our plan.
He shoved his hands into his pockets before saying, “If the town is a seal, then someone’s responsible for its existence. I suspect it’s tied to the orchard Silas mentioned, but we can’t go in half-cocked. If we want to figure out what’s going on? I recommend our first stop be to the lake.”
“To the merman?”
“To the god.”
Perhaps if the clerk hadn’t deserved the living death he’d been issued, I would have felt bad for our theft. We’d robbed him clean, taking all of the alcohol, the glass, the honey, the cash, and the fruit we could find. Azrames wiped off a silver platter and smiled when he realized it was genuine. He handed it to me to add to my tote—another stolen item. I grabbed the clerk’s car keys from his bedside table and cast him a long, cautious look as a single stream of drool ran down his face.
I almost wanted to ask Az what else he’d learned about the clerk.
Almost.
Instead, I shuddered in disgust as we left the motel, slamming the doors on his chipped compact car from the mid-nineties. The smell of the soiled fast-food wrappers that covered the floorboards permeated the air. I gagged as I rolled down the windows. With a sympathetic flex of his fingers, Azrames’s scent of smoke filled the vehicle in a welcome, overpowering relief. I shot him a grateful look as we pointed the borrowed car toward the lake.
Terrible clerk aside, the town was stunning.
Every home, every shop, every building hummed with an old-world picturesque charm, as if plucked from time and perfectly preserved. The windows all seemed too clean. The people were too smiley. The grass, the bushes, the trees were all so green that they’d be more believable as transplants from a movie set. Under normal circumstances, I would have been thrilled at the chance to stroll through a small, idyllic town. Instead, seeing the emerald, grassy hills that prevented any straight shot between the motel and the park at the heart of the city filled me with dread.
The bright-green hills crawled lazily throughout the little city, and shops, roads, and bridges had been built to accommodate the unbroken shapes. Because I knew how the sigil looked from the top down, everything about them went from quaint and unique to ominous. The snake-like knoll stayed to my right as I followed the road to the lake. The frown rippled from me as I drew nearer to the sparkling, man-made body surrounded by perfectly manicured trees and lush, vibrant gardens of grasses and flowers. Thomas Kinkade couldn’t have painted a more unnaturally radiant lake if he’d tried.
Its banks were too round. The water was too blue. The draping willows that tufted gently in the perfect weather were too storybook. I unbuckled my seatbelt and grimaced at the heavenly park, hating it with every fiber of my being.
“Bellfield is the worst place in the world,” I said to Azrames.
He chuckled. “I think the residents of this little slice of heaven would disagree.”
I narrowed my eyes as I stared at the glittering water through the filthy windshield. “Isn’t Heaven your enemy?”
“Yup.”
Even with the smoke and the fresh air streaming in through the windows, my stomach roiled against the nausea of a night with little sleep, a morning without coffee, and a world where women had to sleep mere feet away from terrible men. The clock read just after nine in the morning when we pulled into a parking lot.
Not caring if someone stole our only means of transportation, I left the windows of the vehicle down. I wholly understood the side-eye from passersby as they caught a glimpse of the garbage that filled my vehicle and didn’t possess the sass to snap at them. I was glad Azrames had made me cover up the tattoo, given the number of classist stares I was already drawing because of my outfit and the vehicle.
“Okay,” Az said, clapping his hands together as he took several steps away from the car. “Time to find a piece of the lake without pedestrians. Mortals will be no more able to see him than they are to see me. I’m most concerned with you looking crazy and having the authorities called on the raving lunatic in the park, so do your best not to talk to me when anyone’s looking. I think if we aim for those trees”—he gestured to the far side of the lake—“we should be fine to make our offering and see if Dagon really is in these waters.”
The park-goers in their athletic apparel thinned as we rounded the lake, and I realized I had no idea what day of the week it was. It didn’t have Saturday energy, for which I was grateful. It seemed as though the overly ambitious members of society had jobs to get to and lives to live, leaving Azrames and me with the park more or less to ourselves. By the time we reached the far side of the lake, I watched the final car pull out of the parking lot. Maybe they were fleeing my presence.
Azrames wasn’t overly chatty, which made me miss Fauna. He seemed to talk only when he could improve upon the silence, whereas I was confident she would have been chirping like a warbler at dawn. I nearly asked him how the two of them had found one another, just for something to talk about, when the seriousness of our situation pressed on me again.
My understanding of the world had changed so wholly after decades of telling myself I was crazy that I’d found it easy to bob in and out of states of lucidity. Sometimes, I completely forgot that the handsome demon in shades of iron, smoke, and ash, with small black horns poking up through mussed, black hair, was someone—or something—that I’d written off as fiction before the day Silas intervened in my apartment and made Richard choke on his own tongue. Prior to that, I’d spent years telling myself that Caliban…
“How do we find Caliban?” I asked quietly.
He nodded. “That’s our top priority. If Silas was telling the truth, then the Prince must be here. Like me, Caliban won’t be able to leave or move within the seal, save for on foot. Dagon might be able to tell us who created the seal in the first place.”
“And this mer god—Dagon—is your ally? I know Heaven and the Phoenicians are at odds.”
Azrames twisted his mouth to the side. “It isn’t that simple. We have a healthy respect for each other. But realms don’t really do…allegiances. Not like that.”
We left the smooth asphalt path and crossed the grass toward the water’s edge. Part of me felt like I’d prefer the uncomfortable odors of piss and stale smoke to the curated perfection of floral blossoms, the magnificently green leaves that brushed against one another as if to sing a charming greeting, and the grass so soft that it might as well have been carpet. Everything about the park set off an indescribable alarm bell within me.
Before now, I would have told myself I was paranoid…but I thought of the dread that had descended over me the moment I’d broken into Richard’s house, and an idea pricked me. I wondered how much I was able to sense of an otherworldly presence given the diluted fae blood sparkling in my veins. Perhaps my irrational intuition was just what Fauna had spent weeks calling clairsentience. I was too distracted by the bright-blue water, the expensive scent of exotic flowers, and the warmth of the cheery, blue day to catch the underlying implication of Az’s words.
I stopped at the water’s edge, looking at him as I realized something with horror. “What if Caliban isn’t here at all? What if Silas was just lying to get you trapped here?”
Azrames didn’t look concerned. “If that’s the case, we’ll get you that shovel. Besides, I’m not important enough to trap.”
“I beg to differ.”
I looked beyond the lake to the hill and balked at the sheer size of it. This would not be a few hours of digging through a hedge. This would be a month of unbroken excavation. Not only would I have to dig longer, farther, and deeper than I could have possibly fathomed, but I’d need to find a place in the town where I wouldn’t be jailed for a very perplexing crime of vandalism. I wondered what stories residents told themselves about the emerald bluffs, or what the police thought of the interesting landscaping that carved through their little city. I couldn’t imagine any excuse making sense once they found me elbow deep in a mountain of destroyed property.
He sat down on the edge of the lake but didn’t touch the water.
“All right,” he said. “Make your little altar.”
I didn’t have to be a practitioner to understand what he meant. I’d done enough and seen enough to understand the rough configuration of my offering. In addition to the food, crystal decanter of liquor, and the roll of bills, I arranged a few candles and procured a matchbook with Bellfield Inn emblazoned on the side.
“I don’t know what a merman is gonna need cash for,” I mumbled as I lit the candles.
“It’s not about the money; it’s about the sacrifice. And please, for the love of the gods: if Dagon shows up, don’t call him a merman.”
I didn’t want to snap back at Azrames that I wasn’t stupid, because the truth is, I was. However, I was an idiot with a literature degree and an international reputation for fictional works in mythology. Perhaps I didn’t know anything about the ancient Canaanite religion of what would be modern-day Lebanon, but I understood that gods weren’t djinn. I wasn’t summoning a lake genie to grant a wish; I was compiling an offering of gratitude to thank him for intercession on my behalf. In this instance, hopefully Dagon and I would share a common goal.
The candles burned, and we waited.
And waited.
And waited.
“Az, what if—”
He lifted a finger to his lips to shush me, then pointed to the clouds. Just on the edge of the horizon, the calm sky broke into cumulonimbus towers. The enormous clouds moved forward on a gust of wind, blowing out what little remained of the candles. I lurched to grab the offerings, but Azrames snatched my wrist to stop me before I touched the items, allowing the fruits and bundle of cash to blow into the water. I looked to him with growing concern as the clouds crawled through the air with incredible speed, snuffing out the midmorning sunlight to a day so dark it might have been dusk.
Wind whipped across the lake, stirring up tiny whitecaps. As the air turned harbor-gray with the churning weather, the waters dropped into a menacing shade of charcoal. For the first time, I smelled fish and seaweed and the silty soil of lake bottoms rather than the manicured gardens. I squinted as the wind whipped my hair into my eyes, wincing as the world abandoned logic and reason for the sort of meteorological anomaly that one could only describe as an act of God.
Don’t be scared, you coward, I begged myself. Azrames isn’t afraid, and he’s sitting right next to you. You’re fine, you’re fine.
But it was a lie. Chills raced across my back, my arms, my neck, pebbling every inch of my flesh with fear and adrenaline. My mouth dried out as the water began to ripple, stirring from the center of the lake. I was one crack of lightning away from wetting my pants. I jolted halfway to my feet at the shock of movement as a thick, white mist crept in on either side, but once again, I was yanked to the ground and urged to remain still. Azrames kept a tight hand around my forearm this time.
“Be reverent,” he hissed.
Reverent. Right.I nodded, swallowing. I’d spent years on my knees in church. I knew how to prostrate myself before a god. Only, my god had never answered my crystal decanter of liquor with mist and thunder. My heart raced as the fog thickened until I could barely see Azrames.
Then just as soon as it began, the wind died, giving way to utter silence. The thunderheads, the mist, the tangible feelings of dread remained.
I heard it then. At first it sounded like a fish jumping out of water. The sloshing noises of steps filled the air, and then, we were not alone.