Page 61 of The Deer and the Dragon
“Are you coming in? Or should we head back to the city?”
“Is that an option?” I asked. I knew the answer. I wasn’t just curious to find Caliban. I was desperate. He’d been my anchor in a life that had been nothing but storms. He’d kept me from losing my mind, even when I’d blamed him for my loose grip on sanity. He’d saved my life in more ways than one, and I needed him to do it again. I couldn’t face the future—especially not one knowing that angels and fae and gods and demons lurked in every shadow—without him.
They’re not even home,I inwardly cursed.Don’t be a coward.
I entered and looked around at the utterly unfamiliar space. While a few small touches remained, it was hard to find any evidence that I knew the humans who lived here. I never thought I’d live to see the day where John and Lisbeth were upper middle class.
The gallery wall of photos and mid-century-modern furniture were the browns, beiges, and grays of an HGTV makeover. I knew exactly how much the cognac-leather couch and chair set cost, as I had looked at it myself before ultimately selecting to move into a furnished apartment. My gaze wandered over the books, the globe, the bobbles, the speakeasy-style light fixture, and the cowskin rug. An enormous, illustrated topographical map that looked like it might have been salvaged from a one-room schoolhouse hung as a focal piece on one wall. Brown wooden beams stretched over the ceiling, breaking up the white walls.
It smelled faintly of window cleaner and bleach, which were the main odors permeating my childhood. The sterile scent, however, was the only element of nostalgia. There were no family photos. It felt so staged, so fake, there was no evidence that anyone real had ever lived here.
“Do any of your gifts help you find things?” I asked Fauna.
“Um, if you’d like, I can grow a tree? Or call a few animals, if you think summoning a bunch of rabbits might help. Or bless the fertility of their garden so those peony bushes get some tender loving care. Or—”
“Fine, fine. Let’s get looking.”
Despite her threats to raid the kitchen, Fauna stayed by my side for most of our hunt. We began on the ground floor, peeking into the guest room and the office, the kitchen, and stately formal dining room with glass double doors. Fortunately, a chest was a challenging object to conceal, which limited its hiding places. For most of my childhood, it had been at the foot of my parents’ bed. Now that they had space, it might not be something Lisbeth would want sitting out in the open any longer.
Fauna and I went into the basement next—a finished, carpeted basement free from parasitic entities—and it took less than two minutes of poking around to ascertain that aside from a large sofa, a flat-screen TV, fire-safe egress windows, and the boiler room, there was nothing for us down there. We mounted the stairs, and the second floor seemed a little more promising.
Every door stood open, which drew me first to yet another guest bedroom. I looked behind the bed, opened the closet door, and frowned at the very large verse painted in driftwood that hung on the far wall. I found a few of my things tucked into a storage container beneath the bed, which may or may not have been comforting, as I wasn’t sure if hiding them was better than my mom burning them altogether. Fauna had quickly grown bored at my walk down memory lane and wandered away, leaving me alone with the only proof of my existence.
There was a musty scent to my things. It was the mildew of nostalgia, of a tin-can trailer home in the woods, of rainy days and walks in the forest.
I lifted a crinkled picture of my mother, father, and me smiling in front of a tent. Our thrifted clothes were so collectively outdated that the photo could have passed as a relic from the ’80s. I remembered the trip. It had stormed so hard that our sleeping bags had soaked all the way through. We’d packed the tent in the pouring rain and used what little money we had to get a motel for the night. The three of us had stayed up late, eating junk from the vending machine, and watching an old western on the static of a box TV.
It was a happy memory.
I looked down at my chest to see if a physical thread was sticking out where my heart should be. I knew that while under their roof, I was a single tug from unraveling.
Fauna had been away from me for less than two minutes when I heard her triumphant noise from the next room.
“Did you find it?” I called, still kneeling over old grade-school pictures, report cards, and several childhood drawings of me playing with a friend with eyes as silver as diamonds.
“Get over here!” she yelled.
I folded up a drawing of my guardian and slipped it into my pocket. I joined her in the master bedroom. Despite Lisbeth’s commitment to beige, it didn’t look like the stuffy, over-priced room one might expect. She’d used vintage movie posters and spread statement wallpaper from the 1920s on one wall to break up the room. She’d always loved antiques.
If only I could have convinced my mother that homes should smell like something other than bleach.
“Fauna?”
“In here!” Her voice drifted from the walk-in closet. Sure enough, the little pirate had tracked down our treasure chest. She knelt between the rows of hung pants and pressed shirts over a large cedar chest. She’d already opened it and pulled out the wool bunad. “It’s in great shape,”she marveled, running her fingers along the red-and-blue woolen dress. It was strange to see it in color after years of having only the black-and-white picture on my fridge. “This has to be two hundred and fifty years old. Gods, it makes me emotional.”
“Great,” I said. It made me emotional, too, but not in a way that permitted us to linger. “Let’s focus on finding the broach and get out of here.”
I picked up a handmade quilt and set it to the side to reveal a row of wooden boxes. I knelt beside her and felt through the various containers, frowning at the concealed, orderly collection. One box contained a collection of old photographs. I passed it off to Fauna, who began to flit through them while I continued to dig. I opened the next box to find a leather journal wrapped in twine. I passed it off to Fauna as well, who immediately dove into Aloisa’s diary, no doubt searching for salacious details about her friend Geir and the human-Norde sordid love affair. Another box was filled with handwritten recipes for various desserts and traditional dishes. Finally, I found the box I was looking for. I knew it before I even opened it. The moment I lifted it, the sound of shifting metal snapped both of our gazes into alert. Fauna huddled around me as we opened the box and looked at the delicate fabric of a handkerchief concealing something small.
She held the box so that I could move the fabric to the side, releasing a low, appreciative murmur as I gripped the edges of the dangly, silver heirloom as delicately as possible.
“That’s it,” Fauna breathed. “That belonged to Geir.”
“And what is it supposed to do?” I looked over the antique and into Fauna’s eyes.
“These are exceptionally rare. Every pantheon has their legends about gifts like this. He gave it to Aloisa so that she could move to and from the mortal realm to visit him on her terms. If she—”
A car door slammed, and just like that, our spell was broken.
