Page 56 of The Deer and the Dragon
Fauna abandoned her tough-love bravado. After a long while, she said, “He’s willing to wait by your side as a cute animal just to make you smile? Maybe that’s why he’s patient with you even when you refuse to acknowledge him, despite how frustrating it must be to watch you dabble with tales of deities and pantheons and know of angels and demons. It’s all on the tip of your tongue, but you just won’t say it. I guess if you waste this lifetime, he loves you enough to try again in the next. And the next. And the next.”
“But…”
“But nothing,” she said. “You can’t apply human logic to a nonhuman situation.”
“I’m human,” I argued.
“Only mostly,” she countered.
My lips parted. I looked down between my breasts to see if a physical blade pierced the space where my heart might be, expecting a dagger to protrude through my chest. Every rhythmic beat bled into the wound, exacerbating my injury. The idea of a love so deep, so patient, so…
“It’s impossible,” I breathed at last.
She shrugged. “It’s your cycle,” she said. “You’re lucky. Caliban, as you call him—again, I like the name—has a solid reputation across the realms. Almost too sterling of a reputation for kindness and generosity. But, he is a demon. So, double-edged swords and all that.” She paused for an unnatural length as if sorting through an uncomfortable, unspoken truth before saying, “That’s a conversation for another time. Anyway, as I said, it’s your cycle. You were free to waste it however you wanted, until the proposed bond with Silas.”
“Because Silas is bad.”
“What? No. By himself, Silas is morally neutral. But it’s not like you could bond with him and then skip into thesunset. A bond toanyangel would mean an entire heavenly kingdom would have access to you. It’s the goose and the gander or whatever. You rarely get one without the other.”
“He said they had a claim to me,” I said uneasily.
She swallowed her gummies. “He and his master are referring to your baptism. Splash of water here, pretty white dress there. It’s a bargaining chip to keep them in play at best. Heaven wants you—probably only because you’re important to Hell—but you belong to no one until you decide.”
There were so many pieces of her monologue to pick apart, but I remained fixated on the name. “What will happen to Silas?”
She played with the reclining settings on her seat as she wiggled her feet against my windshield. Her toes had been painted a pretty, shimmery shade of penny-bright copper. She bit into another fish, yanking its tail off, and responded while chewing.
“You know: war.”
I was simultaneously exhausted at the prospect of all the things I didn’t know and the need to understand it all. I hoped my doe-eyed plea would do the trick, and it did. She sank more deeply into the passenger’s seat until she launched into her tale like the least reverent narrator a sloppy documentary could hope to scrounge together.
“He and Caliban are on opposing sides of what was once a united kingdom, obviously. Centuries—millennia—locked in a cold war like a bunch of losers wasting their time. A battle in which, for the record,onlyhumans are on Silas’s side…and even then, it’s a limited number of humans. Every other realm is with Hell on this one. The defectors had every right to leave. They shouldn’t have to live in servitude. We, on the other hand—the ‘pagan gods,’ as you call us—are the best. Well, most of us. Maybe not most. Some of us kind of suck. Anyway: the god of your church, the one who refuses to even give himself a name, since he prefers to pretend that no one else exists…he doesn’t really believe in equality. Sothen, imagine, if you will, that Silas kills a parasite—oh, don’t look so shocked. We all heard. I fucking hate those things. Parasitic entities?”
I gagged at the vivid memory. A horrific child, a scabby smile, the stink of pus, the grin of starvation. I wrinkled my nose both at her knowledge of it and at my reliving it.
“They’re like leeches or ticks on humans, except sentient and persuasive. They take on a bunch of shapes and names throughout your scary stories and folklore. Creepy little bastards. Low-vibrational humans with dark inclinations have these openings; voids, if you will. Sometimes, parasites slip through the cracks and crank the volume to a hundred.”
I attempted to reimagine Richard on our date all those years ago, wondering if a small child who bled blue had been standing at his side, whispering about their shared cravings. I’d trusted my gut so explicitly when it had urged me to run from him. I wondered if part of it had been—what had she called them?—my clairabilities sensing something nonhuman had been attached.
She shuddered, her entire body rejecting the image in the same way mine did whenever my thoughts drifted to the child with the cat-like smile. “Anyway, Silas kills a parasite, then gives his report to his boss. Silas gives the rundown about what he did and who was there. He gives the real name that youinsist on giving to everything and everyone.It was sent up the chain fast as fuck, because by the time you got home, he’d already been given strict orders to take your deal. If you—you, miss The Prince’s Love Across Lifetimes—were bound to an angel? Someone with Norde blood? It would be our fault. The King of Hell himself would be banging on our door.”
Shades of green and brown and gray blurred on all sides as the world continued to open before us. She snorted as she switched to a vine of red ropes. I wondered how long it would take her before we’d have to stop for more candy. I also wondered if the fae had stomachs made of iron.
“So Silas…” I recalled the man who’d saved me, thenwho’d knelt to tell me it was all a dream. I vividly remembered the gold flash of eyes, the hardened armor, the sword dripping in aquamarine pulp. I could still see the muscled arm I’d gripped in desperation as he contemplated leaving me in the basement to die. I needed something to do with my nervous energy, so I fidgeted with the air-conditioning. The chilly blast was doing an excellent job at keeping me wide awake.
“Same kingdom, babe. Probably grew up together…kinda. Eternity is a long time, so most of us get to know each other in whatever capacity. Silas is military, and Caliban is royalty. So. It would have been a fun slap in the face for theheavenlyside if you’d bound yourself to a soldier over a prince.”
I’d spent twenty-six years breathing without issue, but ever since meeting the fae, I regularly forgot to inhale until I grew dizzy. This was one of those times. The car jerked slightly until the tires hit the rumble strips. My Mercedes vibrated loudly and forced me to fill my lungs again. “When you say Heaven—”
“I don’t mean ‘the ultimate good place’; I mean their realm. It’s literally just a word, sweetheart. Like I said, we’re all fae. Silas, me, Odin, Zeus, Horus, Shiva, Caliban, your OG god: I’m using the wordfaefor everything. Every one of us who walks around behind the veil, who has home addresses in other realms, who wields superpowers. Heaven is just a word so humans understand we’re talking about the realm on the side of this god, the one that a third of the world is sending their energy to during Sunday services. There you go. That’s theology in a nutshell.”
I couldn’t stop myself from muttering, “Blasphemous theology in a nutshell.”
She shrugged, ripping another rope in half with her teeth. Through smacking bites, she said, “Well, you’re hearing it from a pagan forest deity—your words—so take whatever you want with a grain of salt. It’s up to you. Believe me ordon’t. But, you got a sigil tattooed on your forearm. You’ve spent a shit ton of time with me. You’ve had a demon cock between those legs. I’m just curious—what would it take to convince you?”
As much as I hated to admit it, I conceded the point. She was right. If I wasn’t fully convinced that everything she said was true by now, perhaps I never would be. And…Iwasconvinced. But I wasn’t comfortable with the truth.
I was glad the highway was empty as I glanced over my shoulder at her, and as I looked at the too-pretty being beside me, I understood my reluctance, at least in part. In a way, Fauna was my mother. She was the church. She was the Bible. She was a singular entity I would need to trust implicitly to redirect my reality. And I wasn’t sure how comfortable I was with that.
