Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
The cramped bedroom was one I knew well.
A cross hung over her bed. A framed picture of her family forcing a smile sat upon the dresser.
A Lord of the Rings poster featuring Legolas ordained one wall—okayed by a deeply religious mother given the Biblical undertones of Tolkien’s work—and a Keira Knightley poster in pirate garb from the Pirates of the Caribbean, okayed because it was a woman, and her parents couldn’t conceive a world where their daughter might be queer.
In this cycle, Love’s name was Marlow, and tonight was one of familiar pain.
She was on her knees, eyes closed, hands clutched over the bed, face stained with salt from tears that would no longer come.
I thought I’d seen it all before I’d experienced the acute pain of this cycle.
Born with a drop of fae blood—a great grandmother who’d loved, mated, and created a strained, beautiful, terrible life with a Norde from beyond the veil—Love had been able to see me from birth, which, if Izi had her way, would have been a nightmare of its own.
The trailer house outside of her Midwestern city was set so deeply within the woods that she was unable to experience anything beyond isolation, no matter how close, or far, I remained.
I hadn’t found our relationship complicated before this one.
Prior to this life, the options were clear-cut. In some, she neither saw me, nor asked for preternatural help, and I played the role of helpful spirit, much like every spiritual human knew they had. I protected her, aided, and respected her autonomy without question.
Some cycles I was absent entirely. In others, I found her but was not permitted access.
And finally, in the best of our lives, save for young Yuka and her guardian wolf, Love had consistently learned to see me with the conscious autonomy of someone in her twenties, thirties, or beyond. She’d been spiritual, intentional, and wanted to see beyond the veil.
Even in life where my human had been born and raised to see beyond the veil, it had been with openness, with curiosity, without the guilt, the crushing shame, that came with Marlow.
Our first milestone came before kindergarten, years before her family abandoned the city.
She was four years old, nosed pressed against the window of their two-bedroom trailer house as she watched the big kids wash a car three trailers down, dancing to silly music, getting colorful shirts and shorts wet on a hot summer day.
Her mother had given her a red bucket of soapy water, a sponge too big for her hands, and put a red baseball cap atop her head.
I watched my brave human approach the children, then felt the painful chill as they stilled, as they paused the music, as they made it clear she wasn’t invited.
I watched her stand at the end of the driveway, suds flowing past her shoes, as she tried not to cry.
If she didn’t, I would.
Her first rejection destroyed me.
I became a fox before I could think. I jumped around, leaping, desperate to make her smile. I darted between houses until she saw me. I darted into the house, desperate to get her away from those who wished to crush her spirit.
I’d be this human’s pet, her imaginary friend, the spirit guide that showed up to keep her from breaking. I’d remain that way forever if it would help keep her whole.
I didn’t count on the day when her mother opened the door and saw me, too.
Of course, the fae blood ran on her maternal side, and Lisbeth Thorson, woman of god, daughter of Heaven, prayer warrior, four-times-in-church-per-week, knew what I was long before it was appropriate to admit it.
Lisbeth had seen a demon.
Marlow was dragged to the church screaming and sobbing while elders prayed over her, casting out Satan, praying hedges of protection over her.
I braced myself for Constantinople, ready for the domed barrier, for the angels, for the banishment where I’d have to wait decades to see her once more…
But instead, a tearful girl too small to reach the bread with her folded hands had prayed for me—her guardian angel.
She’d described me. She’d invited me into her life.
She said she knew I was good, that she wanted blessings for me, that she thanked god for me—even if we may not have been talking about the same god.
And though I waited with flinching trepidation, the dome never came.
The years passed.
She read her Bible.
She listened to her mother.
She attended church.
She prayed.
And every night, she cried. I’d come to learn the tears of the clairvoyant—the death sentence cast upon anyone cursed to see beyond the veil in a world that didn’t accept it.
When she asked to see my face, I obliged, though as far from her as I could be in the small room. She insisted I was a guardian angel, even when I refuted the title. And when she made the mistake of telling her mother of her angel, the torment of evangelical exorcisms returned.
Tonight, as she cried, her prayers had taken on a different nature. There was a bottle of orange pills in her mother’s medicine cabinet, and she wanted so badly for the pain to end, that she begged for her angel to take her hands and give her a sign.
There was church language for such things. It wasn’t meant to be literal. It had been six months since she’d seen my face for the first time, and given the revelation’s religiously disastrous end, I was reticent to reappear.
But for fuck’s sake, she could not die because of her mother’s relentless cruelty.
The wooden spoon, the leather belt, the forms of physical, emotional, and psychological abuse, quickly added Lisbeth to a list of enemies that had, until this moment, only been populated by war deities and succubi.
On the far side of the bed, I slipped my hands over hers and spoke.
“I’ll protect you,” I promised. “Please, trust me.”
She opened her eyes just enough to see that I was there, then shut them again. Choking sobs filled the tiny space. She closed her eyes tighter. “Why did you give me an angel, God? Why would you give me one if I would only be punished for having one?”
I squeezed her hands inside my own.
I pushed down the urge to murder her mother.
Love—Marlow—my human, prayed for her parents’ safety on a nightly basis, much to my chagrin.
Besides ignoring Marlow’s autonomous wishes, Lisbeth’s untimely death would solve little.
Marlow was a minor with no relatives, and unlike when the world had only a few thousand humans and a king here or there, I couldn’t orchestrate her rise to a better life with ease in a world of red tape.
The best I could do until she turned eighteen and could get her the hell away from her mother—when I could finally inflate her salaries, fill her cupboards with food, have every call from her mom mysteriously go to voicemail—was just to keep her alive.
“Love, listen.” I began the sentence without knowing how it might end.
“I want to tell you that your mother loves you, but I can’t see her heart.
I can only see her actions, and what I see is this: she’s scared.
You don’t deserve to be punished. You deserve love.
You deserve to be heard. To be understood. To share your stories without fear.”
Dry tears choked her through a stream of silent prayers.
She waited until she could take full, deep breaths before she opened her eyes to look at me.
“I’m sinful,” she said.
I could have thrown the frame against the room and watched it shatter. I restrained myself, shaking my head. “No. No. Love, I—”
“You shouldn’t be my angel,” she said.
“Don’t say that.”
“Please, go,” she said.
And her fae blood had a second, horrid effect. She could see me before she was ready. She could also banish me before I was ready.
Love would graduate college in three days.
She was a complicated, strange, beautiful disaster. She’d given me a new name. A Shakespearean one. In this life, I was Caliban. I quite liked the moniker, though I wasn’t sure if she could fully appreciate what it did to me to have a name.
I avoided her seeing my face as diligently as possible until she was in college.
Even then, I wanted her to see me as a fox, and to save her as a guardian angel, but with her combination of fae blood and religious trauma, I had no idea how to respect her autonomy while balancing on the razor’s edge of impossible situations.
She crashed into the door of her shitty basement apartment in a bandage dress, one heel broken, makeup smeared down her face. If I hadn’t been playing a lifelong role in the shadows, I would have assumed the worst, given her state.
Instead, the worst was the depths of her unhappiness.
This wasn’t the first time she’d come home too drunk to see, but each time, I pressed a healing hand into her back, disappeared behind the veil, and helped her to bed without her knowing.
Unless, of course, she commanded it.
Being summoned on command was unfamiliar and uncomfortable. I was never her prisoner, but I didn’t have the option of giving her space when she called out to me. The combination of her bloodline and our soul tie shifted the power dynamic.
I’d always wanted her to be in control.
I’d just never imagined it would be in a lifetime of pain.
She hiccupped, newly sober with my help, but esophagus still spasming from the blue raspberry slushie she’d painted across the alleyway.
“I’m here,” I murmured in the dark.
“Lay next to me?”
It was all I’d wanted to hear in every lifetime.
In this one, everything she said sliced through me.
Therapy, medication, religious trauma counseling—they were the sort of topics she no longer wanted to hear.
After leaving the church, she’d decided I was psychosis.
She imagined me to cope, and as such, I was as much a part of herself as my legions were fragments of me.
It was truer than she realized, given her command over me.