Page 115 of The Deer and the Dragon
I saw the turquoise water ripple. A vulture landed on a sun-bleached branch.
“So?” I asked in a whisper. My muscles remained stiff, but not with fear or distrust. They hurt as if recovering from the impact wounds of a long-forgotten memory of a daydream. I wasn’t sure what pressed me to ask anything further. He was in my bed. I was in his arms. The rest should have been unimportant. And yet I asked, “What happened to your plan?”
I wondered how often he thought of our meeting. It seemed from the wounds in his voice and his reluctance to answer that it was a memory he tried to bury. His voice was thick when he said, “You reached out and touched my face. I was so surprised you could see me, but then again, your time between life and death was evaporating quickly. Sometimes it makes the veil thin. For a moment, we weren’t human and other. We were just us. The only two in existence. And you said three words.”
“Which three?”
He closed his eyes, and I could sense the way the memory flooded him. Emotion colored his voice as he saw the day when he recited: “Don’t leave me.”
The baking sand, the taste of salt, the excruciating blood and pain crashed over me once more as I felt a cool touch. Scavenger birds joined the others, their shrill cries piercing the air when a face blocked out the sun. I was picked up in arms and carried to one of the caves that lined the shores. Maybe they’d think my body was taken by the wild dogs. Maybe they’d never check on my corpse and leave me for the buzzards. The sun died as my bones knit together, my swelling calmed, the ringing in my head settled into the quiet sounds of the desert.
I’d clutched at my heart when I’d seen him. The bloodwas dried and stuck to my hair and clothes, but there were no wounds to be found. The pain had dissipated, leaving a pleasurable humming in its wake. There was no fire, yet I had no trouble seeing the phantom-white man who’d shared the shadowed space in the sea cliffs. It should have smelled of dust and blood, but it didn’t. There was a freshness, a beauty I didn’t recognize.
“Are you an angel?” I’d asked.
He’d shaken his head sadly at the fear on my face, but his answer had been simple enough.
“No.”
Something between panic, horror, and confusion had torn through me as I’d stared at the beautiful man. I’d rejected the day as if I’d imagined it, but looking at my clothes, I knew it had all be real. I should have been dead. “I needed God. I didn’t denounce him, and—”
The crystal-white hair had been such a shock, like the moon itself had joined me in the cave. He’d looked like a star had been knocked out of the sky to heal me. “I know,” he’d said, voice quiet. He’d extended his fingers for mine, then stopped himself, hovering just above my hand. He withdrew slowly. “He didn’t deserve your loyalty. Your refusal to turn your back on that which ignored you…it broke something in me.”
“But, I waited for him, and—”
“The deities you call aren’t always the ones who answer.”
That had been it.
I looked at him now in my hotel room as the memory faded like smoke, twinkling stars from the gap in the sea cave evaporating into the speckled decorations of the luxury hotel. He was even more beautiful now than he’d been in the gloom of the cave. I whispered, “I made you promise me, didn’t I? I’d been abandoned by Heaven. And then I met you and…I asked you to never leave me alone.”
He breathed out slowly, tufting my hair with his chilling breath.
“I chose you then,” I said. “Cruelty and pain and neglect, and then you were the first person—first anything—that didn’t let me down. You answered my cry when I was left for dead. I chose you the moment I knew you.”
His laugh was quiet, almost imperceptible. “And I, you.”
“How do I…?”
“How do you remember it?” He moved his head slightly, not quite shaking it against the pillow. His lips twisted. “You’ve never done that before. I want to credit your fae blood, but… I don’t know. I think it’s your openness. Every day you step closer to accepting the universe might have new impacts on the world you knew before.”
I tumbled into his eyes, confident that he’d looked into mine a thousand times before, but never with the hope he held now.
The high squeak of a knob followed by the abrupt end of the shower cut our conversation short. Azrames didn’t need the shower any more than he’d needed the beer. Some pleasures were indulgent whether or not you were in mortal or immortal form. Obviously, a good steam was one of them.
“You’re up next, Love,” Caliban said, tucking a lock of hair behind my ears.
“But—”
“I made a vow that I intend on keeping, for two thousand three hundred and fifty reasons. But first, we have to get through today. When you come out of the shower, Azrames and I will be gone. I don’t want Astarte to have any reason to sense us on you. But I made you a promise that I’ve never broken.”
“Caliban—”
“You’re never alone.”
Azrames emerged from the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist, water glistening off of his horns and dripping from his hair. “It’s all yours, Marmar. Go get ready. We have a deity to kill.”
I hated emerging from the bathroom to see that they were, in fact, gone.
