Chapter Thirty-Six
I’d only asked him once.
“I just go in there and…wait for the cavalry?”
Pain painted itself across his expression. “I truly can’t tell you, Love. Not because I don’t trust you with the information. Quite the contrary. But I am confident my plan will work. And if it doesn’t, I will hack my way through every man, woman, and child who stands in my way.”
“So violent.” I tried to smile.
“I’m serious,” he replied. “I don’t want you to go at all, but we have one shot at breaking this bond, and killing a goddess is no small feat. We need her guard down. Not only hers, but everyone around her. Like I said, we have—”
“One shot.”
My throat worked as I struggled to swallow. He was serious. I tried to picture Astarte’s stunning form and spotless, medical coat full of bullet holes as she looked back at me with lifeless eyes.
And though I was desperate to know what he and Azrames were plotting while I stepped like a child into a den of vipers, I didn’t press him. She may be a serpent, but I ran with wolves.
“Astarte needs to believe everything is normal. Better than normal. I’ve seen you in a number of masks, Love. This may be the greatest acting role to date. It’s…I wouldn’t be able to do what you can do. I wouldn’t be able to look her in the eye knowing what I know. You have a gift far greater than mine. Don’t underestimate the value of your skill.”
“So I carry on with the procedure as if I’m just there to get knocked up and write a book. Got it.”
My tone may have been light, but my soul was anything but. My unshakable faith in Caliban and Azrames didn’t make things any less stressful for the anxiety-ridden control freak in me.
He’d kissed me more times that morning than I could count. Cool, gentle kisses against my shoulder had woken me up in the morning light. Tender kisses on my mouth, on my neck, on the notch at the bottom of my throat had made me loop my leg around him to pull him closer. He’d accepted my bid for affection, crushing me against him as his mouth claimed mine.
“Fuck later” came Azrames’s grumbling voice from the far side of the room.
“Prude,” I replied.
He laughed and shook the sheets from him. Shadow-dark muscles in little more than night shorts, he ran a hand through his hair and walked past us for the shower as he said, “You don’t want Astarte smelling Hell on you.”
Azrames disappeared into the bathroom, and a steam of hot mist escaped the shower a moment later.
“He’s right,” Caliban agreed. “You’ll need to scrub off any sign of me.”
“Join me?” I asked, biting my lip as I rolled my hips against his.
His voice stayed low as he growled against my cheek. “That would defeat the purpose, Love.” Goose bumps raced from my scalp down my back at the rumble of his words. He traced his fingers up and down my spine as we waited for Azrames to shower, and my heart squeezed for him. I wondered how much harder this was for him than I could ever realize. I tried to fathom lifetimes with a person, only to have a window of understanding after two thousand years. The moment the window had cracked open, it had been slammed shut. It was hard to believe a love like that could exist. It was even harder to believe I could be worthy of it.
“Caliban?” I whispered.
“Mmm?”
“Can you tell me about the first time we met?”
He inhaled in a way I didn’t quite expect. It was more of a sadness than a laugh. His hand tightened on the back of my head as he tucked me in closer, and I knew intuitively that our story was a tragedy.
“The King…”—I cleared my throat as I rested my face against his chest—“your father, I mean…he said we met two thousand years ago, he and I. Is that when you and I met?”
“No,” he murmured, patting my hair. “We met several cycles before that, near the Dead Sea.”
I pictured a map of the world, zooming into desert, salt, and sand.
“What happened?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t think you need to hear.”
“Caliban—”
“Today will be hard, Love. You are strong. You’ve been strong from the moment I met you. And you shouldn’t have to be. You shouldn’t have to be this resilient lifetime after lifetime. It’s a blessing to forget.”
“Please?” I asked.
He continued to stroke my hair, the motion matching the rhythmic noise of the shower from the next room. With his chest and shoulders blocking out the light, I nearly thought I would fall back to sleep. I tried to picture the Dead Sea and wondered if it was truly crystalline around the edges from salt deposits, aquamarine water, and burnt-orange mountains like in the pictures I’d seen. Most of what I knew of the Dead Sea had been from my upbringing in the church.
“Was…” Something uncomfortable scratched at the back of my brain. It was almost a tickle, like something I couldn’t possibly soothe with fingers. I could feel the way my face bunched as clearer, sharper images of the white salt beaches and pale blue shores stretched in my memories. A loud noise filled me like the memory of a dream. Anger. Yelling. Pain. My hair was tugged. I was dragged. My throat was raw from screaming. My eyes stung. I saw the blue of the water, of the sky, of the line where water and air dissolved from one to the other.
It was a nightmare.
“Was I killed there?”
Caliban pulled away from me to examine my expression. I was surprised by the sudden absence of my face against his skin, but something about the alarm in his expression stirred me. “Why would you ask that?”
Even as the concern on his face deepened, the sound from deep within the buried parts of me grew louder. I could see faces. I heard the crunch of bone before I felt it, and I knew he could see me wince against the pain. Their voices continued, but mine stopped the moment the crushing began. I was no longer willing to give them the satisfaction. I stood until I could stand no longer, then I knelt, then I lay, then I crumbled. The hot, coppery taste of blood filled my mouth. The turquoise water turned a shade of lavender as a ruby stream ran from its salty shores into the crystal-clear sea. The sounds stopped, but I continued to stare at the lavender, watching the blood bloom into pretty, floral roses and dilute into the sea.
“I was stoned to death, wasn’t I?”
“Love,” he said, voice low with concern. “What are you seeing?”
I didn’t know how to answer him. I’d never done or seen or felt anything like this before. I wasn’t afraid as the sensations washed over me. It felt like recalling a movie I’d seen in my childhood—disconnected, unimportant. “I don’t know,” I said honestly. I knew Caliban was in front of me in the town of Bellfield, but I continued to watch the gentle purple color as sun scorched my skin. It burned, frying my cheek, my shoulder, my calves. My dress had torn, though I wasn’t entirely sure where. I tried to move my body but couldn’t.
“I cried out, to no reply,” I said, speaking to the memory. I didn’t know what I was saying, but hushed words tumbled out, one after the other. It was nonsense, and yet… “I needed him. He didn’t come for me. He didn’t answer me. We were told he’d be there. He let me—”
“Shh.” Caliban wasn’t silencing me but reassuring me of his presence as emotion bubbled through me. “I know, Love. You were on Heaven’s side. You have been a few times, and it rarely goes well. We met in nine hundred BCE, and your family was very devout. And when you were accused of blasphemy—”
“They killed me.”
He cupped my chin. “They tried.”
“How did I… How did you know how to find me?”
It took him a while to answer, as if sifting through painful memories. Eventually, he said, “The battle was much bloodier in those days on both sides. We’ve used the mortal realm as our middle ground. And when an atrocity is committed in the opposing party’s name…”
My brow furrowed, not quite understanding his meaning. I wasn’t angry, just quiet, still so far removed from the grainy vision as I asked, “I would be, what? Propaganda? An example?”
The seconds ticked between us. I felt his arms around me in the hotel as fiercely as I felt the heat on exposed skin, not quite like a dream after waking. It was like living two realities at once. My fingers flexed against him to anchor myself to the present.
“Yes,” he answered honestly. His hands continued to move comfortingly against my hair as he spoke. “You would have been an example when we still tried to persuade others to defect. Seeing the bloodshed, the gore, the cruelty committed on one side of the battlefield under the banner of righteousness…sometimes that’s what it takes for another angel to fall—that’s what you call it, anyway. Falling.”
I saw the turquoise water ripple. A vulture landed on a sun-bleached branch.
“So?” I asked in a whisper. My muscles remained stiff, but not with fear or distrust. They hurt as if recovering from the impact wounds of a long-forgotten memory of a daydream. I wasn’t sure what pressed me to ask anything further. He was in my bed. I was in his arms. The rest should have been unimportant. And yet I asked, “What happened to your plan?”
I wondered how often he thought of our meeting. It seemed from the wounds in his voice and his reluctance to answer that it was a memory he tried to bury. His voice was thick when he said, “You reached out and touched my face. I was so surprised you could see me, but then again, your time between life and death was evaporating quickly. Sometimes it makes the veil thin. For a moment, we weren’t human and other. We were just us. The only two in existence. And you said three words.”
“Which three?”
He closed his eyes, and I could sense the way the memory flooded him. Emotion colored his voice as he saw the day when he recited: “Don’t leave me.”
The baking sand, the taste of salt, the excruciating blood and pain crashed over me once more as I felt a cool touch. Scavenger birds joined the others, their shrill cries piercing the air when a face blocked out the sun. I was picked up in arms and carried to one of the caves that lined the shores. Maybe they’d think my body was taken by the wild dogs. Maybe they’d never check on my corpse and leave me for the buzzards. The sun died as my bones knit together, my swelling calmed, the ringing in my head settled into the quiet sounds of the desert.
I’d clutched at my heart when I’d seen him. The blood was dried and stuck to my hair and clothes, but there were no wounds to be found. The pain had dissipated, leaving a pleasurable humming in its wake. There was no fire, yet I had no trouble seeing the phantom-white man who’d shared the shadowed space in the sea cliffs. It should have smelled of dust and blood, but it didn’t. There was a freshness, a beauty I didn’t recognize.
“Are you an angel?” I’d asked.
He’d shaken his head sadly at the fear on my face, but his answer had been simple enough.
“No.”
Something between panic, horror, and confusion had torn through me as I’d stared at the beautiful man. I’d rejected the day as if I’d imagined it, but looking at my clothes, I knew it had all be real. I should have been dead. “I needed God. I didn’t denounce him, and—”
The crystal-white hair had been such a shock, like the moon itself had joined me in the cave. He’d looked like a star had been knocked out of the sky to heal me. “I know,” he’d said, voice quiet. He’d extended his fingers for mine, then stopped himself, hovering just above my hand. He withdrew slowly. “He didn’t deserve your loyalty. Your refusal to turn your back on that which ignored you…it broke something in me.”
“But, I waited for him, and—”
“The deities you call aren’t always the ones who answer.”
That had been it.
I looked at him now in my hotel room as the memory faded like smoke, twinkling stars from the gap in the sea cave evaporating into the speckled decorations of the luxury hotel. He was even more beautiful now than he’d been in the gloom of the cave. I whispered, “I made you promise me, didn’t I? I’d been abandoned by Heaven. And then I met you and…I asked you to never leave me alone.”
He breathed out slowly, tufting my hair with his chilling breath.
“I chose you then,” I said. “Cruelty and pain and neglect, and then you were the first person—first anything—that didn’t let me down. You answered my cry when I was left for dead. I chose you the moment I knew you.”
His laugh was quiet, almost imperceptible. “And I, you.”
“How do I…?”
“How do you remember it?” He moved his head slightly, not quite shaking it against the pillow. His lips twisted. “You’ve never done that before. I want to credit your fae blood, but… I don’t know. I think it’s your openness. Every day you step closer to accepting the universe might have new impacts on the world you knew before.”
I tumbled into his eyes, confident that he’d looked into mine a thousand times before, but never with the hope he held now.
The high squeak of a knob followed by the abrupt end of the shower cut our conversation short. Azrames didn’t need the shower any more than he’d needed the beer. Some pleasures were indulgent whether or not you were in mortal or immortal form. Obviously, a good steam was one of them.
“You’re up next, Love,” Caliban said, tucking a lock of hair behind my ears.
“But—”
“I made a vow that I intend on keeping, for two thousand three hundred and fifty reasons. But first, we have to get through today. When you come out of the shower, Azrames and I will be gone. I don’t want Astarte to have any reason to sense us on you. But I made you a promise that I’ve never broken.”
“Caliban—”
“You’re never alone.”
Azrames emerged from the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist, water glistening off of his horns and dripping from his hair. “It’s all yours, Marmar. Go get ready. We have a deity to kill.”
I hated emerging from the bathroom to see that they were, in fact, gone.
I hated that they’d opened a window to banish the smoke and moss from the room, leaving only the garden-fresh smells of the idyllic town beyond. I hated changing into the only other pair of clean clothes I’d purchased at the boutique, and I hated the bitter taste of coffee from the lobby. I hated wasting my day on the hotel’s business computer googling ancient Canaanite civilizations, Phoenician gods and goddesses, religious practices, and pagan fertility rites. I did kind of enjoy the scowl I gave a nosy, middle-aged onlooker with bobbed blond hair when she peered over my shoulder.
“I’m just looking up sacrificing rituals,” I said to the woman.
She glared at me as if I’d just flashed her my tits and told her to take a picture.
“Human sacrifice,” I clarified. “It’s a favorite topic of mine.”
The woman disappeared with a loud huff and a look on her face that told me that the hotel manager would be hearing from her.
My thumb slipped a time or two and I found myself searching for pictures of the Dead Sea, but memories did not return.
I promptly returned to hating things.
I hated choking down an overpriced cuban from the hotel’s restaurant and pushing the fallen bits of ham and spare chips around the plate until I eventually signed my name to the room. I hated flipping through the television with nothing to watch, staring at the clock as the hours crept on. I hated that time moved slowly when I didn’t have my phone to scroll or my laptop for work.
I hated walking down the street to a coffee shop and seeing the chocolate pastries, wishing Fauna were here with me. I opened my purse to pay and frowned. I was down an item. My broach and poppet clanged together in the loose bottom of the bag as I reached for the credit card, but Azrames and Caliban must have taken the knife back from me while I was in the shower.
I wouldn’t have been any good with the weapon, but it was hard to swallow that I’d be going in truly defenseless after all.
And once the clock hit half past four, suddenly it felt as if there’d been no time at all. I could never have prepared myself for the emotional turmoil of the drive to the clinic, or the way my heart thundered so hard in my ears that I thought perhaps I’d crashed the BMW into the car in front of me when I’d eased into a parking spot. I shouldered my purse and walked on unsteady feet toward the lobby, but Jessabelle was there to receive me before I reached the glass door. Her smile was one of appreciation and something that almost looked like…veneration.
“Merit,” she cooed. “We’ve been counting the seconds all day.”
“Me too,” I said honestly.
Abandoning all sense of decorum, she looped her arm through mine as she escorted me forward. Instead of taking me to the stairs, she turned to a row of elevators and hit the downward arrow. Given the height of the building, I hadn’t expected so many subterranean floors, but from the tiny dashes indicating the negatives before each number, it appeared that it extended into the earth nearly as deep as it was tall.
And as the elevator began to pull us down, down, down, I couldn’t help but wish we really were going into the pits of Hell. At least Hell had good booze.