Page 89 of The Deer and the Dragon
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Silas had barely left my apartment when Fauna was already upon me, snatching the laptop from my hands. She was a flash of copper and white, a blur of metal, and the glow of a screen. I shuffled closer to her to see she was searching the town of Bellfield. Azrames leaned against the wall and frowned at me.
Maybe she didn’t need to talk about the encounter with Silas, but I did.
“Since when are the Phoenicians on the board?” came my bewildered demand.
“Since ten thousand BCE,” Azrames said with a shrug. Though the gesture was casual, his energy was anything but.
Fauna’s fingers continued flying over the keyboard. “What is Silas playing at?”
I rubbed my arms for warmth as the blur of possibilities chilled me. “It can’t be a coincidence.”
“It isn’t,” Fauna said without looking up, “but I’m inclined to trust Silas.”
“You were calling him a cocksucker not too long ago!” I could barely contain my emotions. “Now you trust him?”
She looked up from the computer and jutted a thumb toward Azrames. “Az was also an angel, until he wasn’t. I can’t say that’s what’s happening, but this is weird, Marlow. This is really, really weird.”
I wanted to question this radical leap in conclusions, to push back on their willingness to trust that Silas was not the enemy, their confidence that Caliban was in Bellfield and that they knew what they were saying and where we were going and what we would do when we arrived. I wanted to interrogate an assassin with thousands of years of knowing people and combat and situational awareness and push back against the forest deity who’d watched the first plants bloom and commanded the wild animals, but arguing with them was every bit as silly as recognizing that they were living, breathing, powering things.
I was Alice, twirling through the looking glass, and the world was mad.
Worse still: I was a child in church all over again. To accept one piece of this new reality meant to accept everything, except there was no barometer, no good book, no teacher save for those around me. I was six once more, looking at my mother, my elders, my pastor to tell me right from wrong, only now I was looking into the eyes of a nymph, blindly trusting that she wouldn’t lead me astray.
The urge to question everything softened with the knowledge that the answers didn’t matter. Either I’d be bludgeoned into submission or lied to, or she was telling the truth and I was meant to follow her.
I believed her, or I didn’t. I would follow her, or I wouldn’t.
And as odd and erratic and blunt as she was, I believed her.
I numbed any human questions that would be answered with nonhuman logic, and she led the way.
Azrames’s frown deepened while I wrestled with my agnostic paradigm. I’d witnessed an array of emotions out of the demon in our time together, but his face reminded me of a loading screen from an early computer. I could see the pages process on his face, though each new thought seemed to bring him greater trouble as the tabs in his mind opened.
“What?” I asked him, studying the expressions flickering across his face. “Do you have something to say about Silas?”
He shook his head. “It’s not that—it’s…”
“Here!” Fauna turned the computer around to show us what she’d found. A gallery of beautiful images transitioned from one idyllic picture of an orchard. The images continued to dissolve steadily as one picture bled into the next, from the blossoms on the trees outside their barn to the amber waves of wheat and barley that rippled in the surrounding fields. Deeply green knolls surrounded the town with picturesque uniformity. Pretty pictures of a blessed town danced across the screen, showing brick buildings, wooden homes, and the ever-running presence of lovely, green hills. “Next stop, Bellfield. Grab your purse, Mar.”
As the images began to loop into ones I’d already seen, I looked back to Azrames. I’d abandoned my phone and wallet in Hell, and my feet carried me to my bookshelf. I didn’t have to look at the small book that had been cleverly hollowed out to possess a tiny hiding space as I fetched my backup card and ID. My good purse was missing, but I grabbed a slim leather belt bag from the hook and clipped it around my waist. It had been an impulse purchase as I’d thought it made me look like Indiana Jones, and it had proved rather useful at the book signings when I’d needed to pop anti-anxiety meds at all hours of the night and day in the crowds. Perhaps now I had more reason than ever to play the part. I slipped the cards into the belt bag, and just for safekeeping, I scooped up the golden poppet and dropped it in after them.
Fauna made an impressed noise at my inventive failsafe, then returned to the screen. My eyes didn’t leave the demon. “What is it, Az?”
“It’s the Phoenicians,” he said, brows bundled so tightly that lines creased his forehead to underscore his confusion. “Silas said it was a minor entity. The only thing in the Phoenician realm known for benefitting crops or that would be of any use to agriculture would be Dagon.”
“Or Niki,” Fauna offered without looking up.
“Niki is more Sumerian—”
“Wait.” I stopped them. “You’re talking about…gods? I thought he said it was a small problem, like a parasite from their realm.”
Fauna’s eyebrows lifted. She immediately clicked out of the orchard’s site and toggled to the map. She zoomed in repeatedly until a satellite image of the city filled the screen. “Well,” she murmured, “I’ll be damned. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Azrames straightened suddenly. He ran to my kitchen and began to tear open drawers and slam them closed. His teeth set with determination. Intensity burned as he growled, “Marker. I need a marker.”
I nearly tripped over my feet as I stumbled to the table where Fauna had set down my marker the last time she’d been in my apartment. I didn’t even have the chance to properly extend it to him before he snatched it from my hands. He bit off the cap and kept it in his mouth as he ran to the door and began to draw a shape. I watched with wide eyes as he disappeared into my bedroom, then the guest room, returning at long last to the tall window.
