Chapter Thirty-Nine
My hands and knees hit familiar glittering, black marble, the brunt only half-absorbed by a male body. I gasped for air as if resurfacing from a deep lake. I barely had time to take in my surroundings before a high, angry feminine voice filled the air. I fought against it for a fraction of a second, terrified it was Astarte or Anath or Jessabelle.
I scarcely registered the constellation of white and ginger freckles that dotted her arms and the free space above her soft breasts before I buried my face in her hair. I recognized the smell. The salt and conifers and sea spray of trust, of love, of friendship, of beauty. My hand ran over her neck and into her long, beautiful curls.
“What’s wrong with her?” Fauna’s voice demanded in high, startled horror.
I felt the words more than I heard them. Each word vibrated against my lips as I kissed her throat.
“I have no idea,” Silas insisted. “I think I have to go back. She was with the Prince and Azrames—”
“Az was there?” She tried—and failed—to get me to stop kissing her neck.
She smelled too good. I missed her. I nuzzled into her.
She gave up and held me against her so tightly that I scarcely had room to move. My mouth couldn’t find her. My hands ran over her hair, her back. “You have to go back,” she said.
“I’m already on it. You have this under control?”
“I have it,” she barked. “Go!”
“Fauna, it wasn’t—” Silas could barely gasp as his eyes widened.
“Go!”
Fauna got me into the shower that night, though not for the reasons I’d wanted. She claimed the Phoenician reek and scent of my drug was unbearable. She stuck her fingers down my throat over and over again as I vomited up the cucumber waters I’d guzzled in the basement. I had tried to suck on her fingers the first time she’d shoved them in my mouth, which had caused her to laugh a coarse, humorless laugh as she yanked my hair back and shoved her fingers in deeper.
“You are in so much trouble, you goddamn shithead,” she’d growled.
I was still pretty sure I wanted to fuck her.
I puked my guts out for three hours. Any time I thought I was done, I’d accept a glass of water from her, then slide my hand up her thigh. She’d pull the entirety of my hair into a tight fist and bend me over the toilet’s edge as she continued forcing me to purge the drug from my system. I wasn’t sure how many glasses of water, how many fingers to the back of my tongue, how many pats on the back, how many worried words rushed over me.
She waited until I stopped coming on to her before she struggled to get me into the shower. The hot water ran over us. Instead of searching for her legs, I bundle my face into my knees as the cleansing rain of the hot water drenched me.
She crawled into the shower with me.
“Where are they?” she insisted.
“I left them,” I choked. “Why…why did Astarte let Caliban in? What happened?”
“I need you to get your shit together, Marlow. Tell me what happened.”
I shook my head, feeling the hot water plaster my hair to my back as it covered my naked body. I tried to look up at Fauna, but it was too dark to see her. She hadn’t turned on the lights as we’d spent hours in the bathroom while I’d dispelled the last of the drug from my system. I was trembling against its residual effects as I clutched myself more tightly.
“You and Azrames got to Bellfield. You found Caliban. You were looking for the Phoenicians. Then what? What happened?” Fauna begged, shaking me.
“Astarte,” I said. “Fertility.”
“Tell me!”
How could I explain to her that I would have fucked anything on two legs? I would have let the Soul Eater impregnate me if she’d had the equipment to do so. Once Caliban had arrived, my love and need for him had barely been enough to cut through my haze. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that even if Fauna’s beloved had been the one to arrive in that room, I would have slipped my hand into his pants. I’d had no control.
“She drugged us.” I shook my head. “I don’t know how to explain it. I was supposed to get pregnant. She was there. It was…sex. Why did she let Caliban in? She knew who he was. How did she know? Why would she…”
She shouted over the pounding of the shower water. I yelped as she turned the knob to drench me in sobering ice-cold water. “Why was Silas there? Why did he take you?”
I looked at her through the cutting darkness. There was no light in my apartment. I knew she asked not just for me but with the knowledge Azrames was left behind, and it was my fault. I struggled for my eyes to adjust to the shadowed bathroom as I looked into her enormous eyes. I could scarcely make out her outline against the distant amber gloom of the lights that drifted up from the streets of the warehouse district. She crawled deeper into the shower until the water pummeled against her shoulders, face inches from mine.
“I’m sorry,” I choked. “Caliban told me to call him. I don’t know why he trusted him. I don’t know what he knows. I’m so confused. I’m so…”
“I don’t need your apologies.” Fauna shook me again. “What happened to Az?”
I sobbed again as I clutched my knees, burying my face against my bruised, purple knees.
“Marlow!” she cried, grabbing my wet hair with anger rather than pleasure as she yanked my face from my knees. “You fucking dumbass, tell me what the hell you did! Where are our men! Where is Azrames! Tell me before I shove gummy worms down your throat until you asphyxiate!”
Her words were light, but her tone was not. She was worried.
“They were fighting,” I said loudly through the water.
“Fighting where?”
I shook my head. My teeth began to chatter as the water leached through my skin and froze my muscles, my tendons, my blood.
“Where?!” she practically screamed, voice echoing between the glass and tile of the shower as steam filled the room.
“The heat, please,” I begged.
“Spit out a single coherent thought and I will turn on the hot water and wrap you in a blanket and make you tea and rub your feet,” she said, voice hitched with desperation.
“Caliban killed Astarte,” I said. “He killed her. There was so much blood. She let him in and he knew she would, but I don’t know how or why. He didn’t tell me why, but he knew. She drugged me and—” I flinched away from the memory.
“Azrames!” She gave my wet hair another yank.
“Parasites!” I struggled to free myself from her hold as I flailed like a fish in the shower. My legs hit the ground with a wet splash as the hot water continued to burn us. I shook my head free from her fist and grabbed her shoulders. “Anath was calling them. There were so many in the lobby. It was just Caliban and Azrames against so many. He made me call Silas to get me out of there. I didn’t want to leave him.”
I released her as I crumbled into myself. I no longer had my knees as support, face collapsing into the puddle of frigid water, lips barely above the tiny pool before it raced toward the drain. The water’s temperature changed ever so slightly, inching from arctic to lukewarm to hot once more. Each drop ran from my back, my hair, from Fauna, over my collapsed form and into the tiny drilled holes in the corner of the shower.
She helped me up from the floor. The shrillness left her voice as she wrapped her arms around me, cradling me while heat rained down over us both. There was a gentleness to her questions as she asked, “Parasites and Anath? That’s all who was left?”
I started to cry, but she squeezed me until my sobs abated.
“You’re sure Astarte was dead? What of other Phoenician presences? Gods? Goddesses? Was Baal there?”
I shook my hair, sputtering as the water attempted to drown me. Her scent filled the shower as if I were scrubbing with forest-scented bath soaps and oils. I spoke through sludge and fog and steam, but my words came with slightly more ease as I said, “No. Caliban took Astarte down in the room with me in the middle of some…mating ritual. I don’t know. I still have no idea why she let him in or what the fuck they were talking about. None of it made sense. But we were there, and then Azrames killed Jessabelle in the lobby—I didn’t see it happen, but almost. She was dead. Baal wasn’t there. Dagon didn’t come for them. It was just Anath and the parasites.”
She relaxed almost imperceptibly as I my sobs grew too loud to control. The sounds coming from me were louder than the pounding of the shower. My grief burned hotter than the water. My pain was more poignant than the absence of our partners. She pulled my utterly naked body into her arms, still dressed in a soaked tee and drenched pants. She held me as she began to shush me.
“They’ll be fine,” she said.
“There were so many—”
Whatever remained of her fury and angst was gone. Her tone shifted, becoming the comforting, strange entity I’d known.
“It’s okay,” she promised.
“It’s not,” I said, struggling to breathe as my shoulders shook with tears.
She tucked me against herself as she said, “I know it doesn’t seem like it right now, but it’s going to be okay.”
“You weren’t there!” I sobbed, voice hitching into a hiccup. I choked into the water between the shower’s steam and the puddle of her hair.
“Hell’s Prince, its greatest assassin, and an angel of justice all stacked against a single goddess and her nothing army?”
“A goddess of war!” I cried. “Caliban begged Silas to get me out because it was so dangerous! Because it—”
“Hush,” she said, stroking my hair. I knew she was still worried, but her tone, her body, her aura calmed as she said, “Because the stakes were so much higher for you, Marlow. You’re mortal. Your safety is so delicate. And I get it. This cycle means infinitely more than the others. Your eyes are open, and the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been for all of us. That doesn’t mean they aren’t okay. The three of them can take any shitty, forgotten war goddess and the parasites she convinced to follow her. So few still worship the Phoenicians. Without the energy from an army of faithful, they’re weak. They don’t have temples. They aren’t given mass sacrifices or godspouses or energy—”
“Fauna…”
Her hand continued to move against my hair, my back. I tried to focus on her through the pain that coursed through me like a lightning rod. I’d spent my life rejecting love, and the moment I accepted its reality, it was to be snatched from me.
“Hush, Marlow,” she repeated through the blackness as night gripped us wholly. I saw nothing. I felt only the outline of her body against the hot water. “I’ve got you,” she said while I shook. Her voice cut through the choking shadows as she whispered, “I know it’s dark. I know. But we’re going to be sunflowers.”
“What?” I almost gagged on the absurdity of the statement as I trembled in darkness, free-falling through the emptiness of oblivion. There was no hope, no warmth, no light as I shattered.
She tightened herself around me, arms on my body, a hand in my hair, like a mother, like a friend, like a sister as she said, “Have you heard that sunflowers turn to face each other when there’s no sun in the sky?” She didn’t wait for my response, allowing me to crumble into myself as if I were a black hole. “It’s not true,” she said quietly. “It’s something cute, something made up, something people tell themselves about flowers to feel nice…but Marlow, right now there’s no sun. And everything about your life has felt like make-believe up until the moment it’s come true. So what if it’s a myth that sunflowers look to each other when there’s no sun in the sky? When has something being a myth ever stopped it from being real? Things feel hopeless right now, but they aren’t. I promise you. You and me.” She lifted my face, wiping the tears from my cheeks, her doe eyes burning into mine as she said, “Let’s be sunflowers.”