Page 114 of The Deer and the Dragon
“Caliban?” I whispered.
“Mmm?”
“Can you tell me about the first time we met?”
He inhaled in a way I didn’t quite expect. It was more of a sadness than a laugh. His hand tightened on the back of my head as he tucked me in closer, and I knew intuitively that our story was a tragedy.
“The King…”—I cleared my throat as I rested my face against his chest—“your father, I mean…he said we met two thousand years ago, he and I. Is that when you and I met?”
“No,” he murmured, patting my hair. “We met several cycles before that, near the Dead Sea.”
I pictured a map of the world, zooming into desert, salt, and sand.
“What happened?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t think you need to hear.”
“Caliban—”
“Today will be hard, Love. You are strong. You’ve been strong from the moment I met you. And you shouldn’t have to be. You shouldn’t have to be this resilient lifetime after lifetime. It’s a blessing to forget.”
“Please?” I asked.
He continued to stroke my hair, the motion matching the rhythmic noise of the shower from the next room. With his chest and shoulders blocking out the light, I nearly thought I would fall back to sleep. I tried to picture the Dead Sea and wondered if it was truly crystalline around the edges from salt deposits, aquamarine water, and burnt-orange mountains like in the pictures I’d seen. Most of what I knew of the Dead Sea had been from my upbringing in the church.
“Was…” Something uncomfortable scratched at the backof my brain. It was almost a tickle, like something I couldn’t possibly soothe with fingers. I could feel the way my face bunched as clearer, sharper images of the white salt beaches and pale blue shores stretched in my memories. A loud noise filled me like the memory of a dream. Anger. Yelling. Pain. My hair was tugged. I was dragged. My throat was raw from screaming. My eyes stung. I saw the blue of the water, of the sky, of the line where water and air dissolved from one to the other.
It was a nightmare.
“Was I killed there?”
Caliban pulled away from me to examine my expression. I was surprised by the sudden absence of my face against his skin, but something about the alarm in his expression stirred me. “Why would you ask that?”
Even as the concern on his face deepened, the sound from deep within the buried parts of me grew louder. I could see faces. I heard the crunch of bone before I felt it, and I knew he could see me wince against the pain. Their voices continued, but mine stopped the moment the crushing began. I was no longer willing to give them the satisfaction. I stood until I could stand no longer, then I knelt, then I lay, then I crumbled. The hot, coppery taste of blood filled my mouth. The turquoise water turned a shade of lavender as a ruby stream ran from its salty shores into the crystal-clear sea. The sounds stopped, but I continued to stare at the lavender, watching the blood bloom into pretty, floral roses and dilute into the sea.
“I was stoned to death, wasn’t I?”
“Love,” he said, voice low with concern. “What are you seeing?”
I didn’t know how to answer him. I’d never done or seen or felt anything like this before. I wasn’t afraid as the sensations washed over me. It felt like recalling a movie I’d seen in my childhood—disconnected, unimportant. “I don’t know,” I said honestly. I knew Caliban was in front of me in thetown of Bellfield, but I continued to watch the gentle purple color as sun scorched my skin. It burned, frying my cheek, my shoulder, my calves. My dress had torn, though I wasn’t entirely sure where. I tried to move my body but couldn’t.
“I cried out, to no reply,” I said, speaking to the memory. I didn’t know what I was saying, but hushed words tumbled out, one after the other. It was nonsense, and yet… “I needed him. He didn’t come for me. He didn’t answer me. We were told he’d be there. He let me—”
“Shh.” Caliban wasn’t silencing me but reassuring me of his presence as emotion bubbled through me. “I know, Love. You were on Heaven’s side. You have been a few times, and it rarely goes well. We met in nine hundred BCE, and your family was very devout. And when you were accused of blasphemy—”
“They killed me.”
He cupped my chin. “They tried.”
“How did I… How did you know how to find me?”
It took him a while to answer, as if sifting through painful memories. Eventually, he said, “The battle was much bloodier in those days on both sides. We’ve used the mortal realm as our middle ground. And when an atrocity is committed in the opposing party’s name…”
My brow furrowed, not quite understanding his meaning. I wasn’t angry, just quiet, still so far removed from the grainy vision as I asked, “I would be, what? Propaganda? An example?”
The seconds ticked between us. I felt his arms around me in the hotel as fiercely as I felt the heat on exposed skin, not quite like a dream after waking. It was like living two realities at once. My fingers flexed against him to anchor myself to the present.
“Yes,” he answered honestly. His hands continued to move comfortingly against my hair as he spoke. “You would have been an example when we still tried to persuade others to defect. Seeing the bloodshed, the gore, the cruelty committedon one side of the battlefield under the banner of righteousness…sometimes that’s what it takes for another angel to fall—that’s what you call it, anyway. Falling.”
