Chapter Thirty-One
Dagon.
My heart stopped at the sight of the man beside me.
I forgot to breathe as I looked at him through the mist. From the straight, black beard to the rainbow scales of his robe, I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that this deeply ancient deity took no pleasure in modernity. He would not be the TV-watching, candy-eating goblin who waited in my living room, nor the demon with a luxury sports car.
He was history and culture and language. He was the Epic of Gilgamesh, the sands of time, the tectonic plates shifting as Pangea broke apart. He was deeply and terrifyingly eternal.
He stood in front of us, feet planted in the lake. He did not possess the fishtail of a merman but thick, muscled legs. I understood the storm and mist the moment I looked at him. Even if someone else had possessed my sigil or the ability to pierce the veil, they couldn’t have seen through the impenetrable curtain of fog that concealed him.
Azrames rolled from his sitting position onto a kneel. He didn’t bow his head but dipped his chin once in respectful acknowledgment as he propped his elbow against his knee. “Dagon, Your Excellence, I’m Azrames of Hell. I think I speak on behalf of all of us when I apologize for your hands.”
I was still in the process of copying Az’s posture, steading myself on one knee, when my eyes shot to the fish lord in the lake. Each wrist bore a thick, terrible scar, as if his hands had once been severed.
At long last, he returned the acknowledging dip. With a terrifying and unfamiliar accent that screamed of his agelessness among eternity, he responded, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
I waited for Azrames to have me speak, but he did not.
“How long have you been kept here?” he asked.
Dagon’s eyes sharpened with vitriol as he asked the present year. “Hmm,” he said slowly. “Two hundred and fifty-two years they’ve kept me here. She could have had it all without me, but if your civilizations crumble, and your temples fall to ruins…if your people forget your name and you’re unwilling to return to your realm…if you demand a kingdom of your own in a world that has forgotten us, what better way to do it than to capture a god?”
“Who, Your Excellence?”
He looked over his shoulder, through the mist and into the inky waters, bitterness seeping into his words as he said, “If humanity would no longer do her will, if they ceased to build her altars and offer her sacrifices and speak her name, then to become a god’s god…that was her evolution. To contain a god who would yield the most excellent crops, who would make her kingdom flourish, who would bless its very soil, so long as I remained fed. She didn’t want my son here. He’d step on her toes, and that would not do. Not for one seeking to be on top.”
Beside me, Azrames’s mouth dropped open. “So, this seal, this trap, are you saying it was made by…?”
“America…” He tasted the word as if it were sour on his tongue, upper lip pulling in a sneer. “Of all of the places to summon me, it had to be where the people are so divorced from the old ways, so lost to history and culture and creation that they’d never suspect…”
“And Baal—” Azrames prompted.
With cold calculation, Dagon said, “Why would she desire his presence in her kingdom if their powers are one in the same? She would spend no more time in the shadows. Furthermore, why would he enter to save me when he knows she would not let him leave?”
“Who?” I whispered at long last.
Dagon turned to me as if noticing me for the first time. He stared at me—into me—before a slow smile began to tug at his lips. “You’re exactly her type,” he said with chilling slowness, each word penetrating me like a bullet.
“You’re not the only one trapped here, Your Majesty,” I said quietly, doing my best to sound respectful as my mind went to Caliban. “There are others here from other realms. Anyone who enters…”
“Including her,” Dagon said, cutting me short.
Azrames’s eyebrows went up. “She’s caught in her own seal?”
“The traps we lay for ourselves are the most difficult to escape.”
“Who?” I asked again, rallying as much authority as I could muster.
His dark eyes returned to me. Dagon began to sink into the lake with glacial slowness as he said, “She is the one who conceives but does not bear. She was the Most High, and it’s the title she’ll retain, no matter the cost.” The water lapped around his knees, then his waist as the wind picked up once more, drowning his words. The rainbow scales of his robe were scarcely visible through the fog as he spoke. “Her sacred tradition is to prostitute in her temple; the selling of sex is more delicious to her than the gifting of souls. Find her in Venus.”
Dagon disappeared, but the heavy, soaking mist remained. My hair felt damp against my face. I tugged at the plaid shirt to button up against the immodesty of my wet shirt. The lake quieted as all traces of the god, including our small offerings to him, disappeared entirely.
Azrames stood and held out his hand.
“Who the fuck are we going to find?”
“Astarte” came his worlds-weary sigh. “The goddess of sex, love, and war.”
I would have felt guilty that the storm had whipped the fast-food wrappers from the car and littered the streets, except that, seeing that the town was evil, I thought it probably deserved far worse.
“You didn’t even ask about Caliban!” My temper flared as I slammed the car door.
“The Prince can’t be tracked. If we’re meant to get to him before others know he’s here, then our first task should be finding out what’s going on. We can’t unravel a web we don’t understand.”
I jammed the key into the ignition. The engine coughed and sputtered to life. I wanted to fight Azrames on his rationale, but as agitated as I was, I believed he knew best when it came to speaking to ancient, powerful mermen. I eased the car out of the parking lot and plucked the first question that came to mind.
“What were you saying back there? About his hands?”
Az chuckled darkly. “He and the King of Heaven got into an altercation in about five hundred BCE over the Ark of the Covenant. It’s in your book of Judges if you want to become a biblical scholar later.”
“Isn’t that funny?” I asked, not waiting for an answer. “Mister No Other Gods Before Me talks about other gods in his own book all the time, and the modern church thinks it’s all witchcraft and nonsense and gibberish. There’s only one god. Everything else is demons or make-believe.”
“See, I knew you were familiar with your Bible.”
“It’s not my Bible.”
“Sorry. No intentions of offending. I just know you weren’t raised on The Agamas or The Vedas.”
“What about the Satanic Bible?” I asked.
He laughed. “I’m confident you weren’t raised on that either.”
“No.” I rolled my eyes as I guided the beat-up car through the winding streets, resisting the urge to ram it headlong into a stupid green hill. “Is it accurate? Like a good way to…talk to Hell?”
He quirked an eyebrow. “The Satanic Bible is more philosophical than religious. It’s mostly about loving nature and Epicureanism, or being a stabilizing force in your own life. It didn’t show up until sixty-nine, so, take that as you will. Plus, our king isn’t as interested in dogma.”
“So, if I want to learn about Hell…?”
He shrugged. “Then just ask.”
We pointed the car back to the hotel and idly chatted about our intentions to eat the rest of the clerk’s food and use his computer once we arrived. Since I still had no phone and Azrames had his hands magically tied, we need to figure out what the fuck Dagon had meant when he’d told us to find Venus.
If he was going to continue to disregard my calls for a manhunt to track down Caliban outright, I had a few begrudging alternatives. I suggested we go to a planetarium, followed quickly by a suggestion to drop acid. Azrames found the first suggestion useless but was more open to my second one, though not for the purposes of the mission.
“What if we just bypass Astarte altogether and I rent an excavator?” I rambled on about what I thought was a rather brilliant plan as I pulled into the parking lot. “How hard can it be to operate heavy machinery? Gimme ten seconds to break the seal, and then zap me out of here once it’s done so I don’t get arrested. I just drive the yellow dinosaur to the knoll and—”
My thought died, the rest of my sentence catching in my throat.
Azrames saw it too.
It was him.
The world stopped spinning, my vision vignetting as I saw only the lightning strike of silver fire leaning against the chipping pillar in front of the motel.
I hadn’t found him.
He’d found me.
When Darius had proposed to Nia, she’d claimed she’d turned to see him down on one knee and had blacked out until the ring was on her finger. Lisbeth had once said that mothers forgot the pain of childbirth entirely, remembering only the joy once the bundle was in their arms. I’d heard similar stories where events were so shocking, so wonderful, so life-changing that they short-circuited the brain until it turned off completely. I supposed that that was what had happened to me, and I could only be grateful that my heart remembered to beat, my lungs remembered to breathe, my blood remembered to flow—at least, I hope it did.
I didn’t remember throwing the car in park, though I must have. I didn’t recall grabbing the keys, or Azrames’s comment about disappearing, though he probably said something to the effect. I operated on autopilot out as my feet flew across the pavement, ears ringing, tears spiking my eyes until I crashed into his chest. Strong arms wrapped around me. Moss and rain and gin were as powerful as safety and longing and sorrow. My knees buckled beneath me as I began to cry, but he had me.
I had no idea how he knew which room was mine.
I had no recollection of going up the stairs or of the door opening.
I didn’t remember anything until my back was pressed against the wall, cool hands raking through my hair and fingers brushing away my tears as Caliban said, “I am yours, and you are mine. And whether it’s in this life or the next, we will always find each other.”