Page 55 of The Deer and the Dragon
I sighed before asking something that had been plaguing me for a long time. “No. Don’t tell me jack shit about another deity’s sex life. This is about…” I struggled to spit out the words, sorting through years of repressed memories. “It’s about Caliban.” I paused, closed my eyes tightly, then reopened them to accept the road before me. I chose my words again, saying, “It’s about my life. It’s… I just don’t understand…he’s been with me since I was a child.”
She waited.
“He was a fox for years. I thought it was an imaginary friend, then a guardian angel. But I was a kid. I believed he was real at the time. When I was in the church, that is. Then I had to let it all go when I left my faith. He was just a coping mechanism, a hallucination, you know? Years later, here we are, with all I feel, with what we’ve done…” I let my question trail off.
“Oh, that’s all?” She waved it away. “That’s easy. I’ll answer as soon as you get me gummy bears.”
“But you already have—” My outrage was cut short. I made a sweeping gesture to the bags of snacks we’d gottenfor the road. Every one of them was a ghost of candies past. There wasn’t a trace of chocolate, sour worms, spicy cinnamon suckers, or sugar rocks. “How do you do that? Don’t you get sick?”
“Nope,” she said cheerfully.
I hedged for a moment, monitoring her from the side of my eye before I asked, “Don’t most deer like saltlicks? What even are you?”
I wasn’t sure if the question would offend her, but a smile tugged up the corners of her mouth. “You know, sometimes you remind me that you don’t exclusively have cobwebs between those ears.”
I didn’t know what to do with her statement, so I waited.
“Your fae blood is Nordic, as is mine. Every pantheon has its heavy hitters front and center while its overlooked deities run the world in the background. Every religion has deities of forest or earth or wildlife.” Then she muttered, “Artemis gets a whole temple for being a deer goddess and I get elf status, but whatever.”
I stifled a chuckle before saying, “She’s the goddess of huntedandthe hunter. I’m going to go out on a limb and say you’re just there for the wilderness, not the one doing the killing.”
“Sure, I’mjustthere for the earth and a guardian for brainless bitches who fall in love with demon princes,” she sighed. “Now, are we getting me that candy, or not?”
I glanced at the needles on my dashboard and supposed it wouldn’t hurt to top off the tank. While I pumped gas, Fauna was bored enough to insist on ruining the lives of everyone inside the gas station for her amusement. She took my card in alone, no hat, no sunglasses, just brilliant, ethereal glory and a smile carved from starlight as she undoubtedly rendered all of the patrons speechless. I wouldn’t have been shocked if speaking with her led the attendant of whatever gender to go home and immediately divorce their spouse in search of something magical. I’d just turned the nozzle to the pumpwhen she emerged victorious, hoisting what had to have been seventy dollars of candy above her head like a deep-sea fisherman displaying their marlin.
She slammed the door. “Five hours down, four to go! Back to making fun of your book?”
“No,” I said before starting the car. “You said you’d tell me about Caliban.”
She kicked off her shoes and planted her heels on the dashboard. “Oh, yeah, that. It’s just not a very interesting answer.”
“I’m going to guess that you and I have differing opinions on what we find interesting,” I said as I eased back onto the highway. I wasn’t sure how comfortable I would be with her answer. I allowed her to empty the final sprinkles of powdered sugar donuts into her mouth, then cracked open a sugary soda before she started speaking.
She crossed one ankle over the other. “I mean, I don’t know him, and I don’t really know you. I haven’t met him. But, if I had to guess, I’d just say he’s done it before. Maybe a few times. Maybe hundreds of times.”
I dared to steal a glance at the passenger’s seat. “Done what?”
She cursed as she fumbled with a plastic bag. She tore at it with her fingers and teeth until I wiggled my palm for her to hand it over. I drove with my knee as I used the tiny, serrated edge to easily peel back part of the bag and hand her the candy.
“You’re worse than a child,” I said.
“But a child with answers!” she said triumphantly, shoveling tiny, red strawberry-flavored gummies in the shape of fish into her mouth. “I’m going to take a stab at it and say that he met you a few lifetimes ago. You were probably, I don’t know, eighteen, twenty-five, forty, the age doesn’t matter. The human cycle has been around for a long time. You could have been anywhere. You could have been anyone. You would have been more open-minded than you are in thislifetime, obviously, if the two of you fell in this sort of love. Whatever connection you shared was important enough to seek out time and time again, even if it meant he’d have to find you in each of your lives. So, of course, he’d want to seek you out when you’re a kid just to make sure you’re okay.”
I made a face, which strengthened her resolve.
She rummaged around in the bag as she continued. “Like, let’s say you’re married, right? You found your soulmate, and you’re madly in love. You’ve been married for however many years, and then some witch’s curse or sci-fi shit or something sends you back in time.” She used a stray foot to push my shoulder. I wrinkled my nose down at her bare toes and narrowed my eyes at her, but she’d been kicking for emphasis. “So you woke up, and it was twenty years in the past or something. Wouldn’t it be tempting to check on your soulmate and see if they were happy and healthy? To protect them? And if they were miserable or abused or suffering, wouldn’t you want to try to make their life better, even in the smallest of ways? Because you love them?”
I rolled the hypothetical around on my tongue, tasting it, chewing on it.
She shoved another handful of strawberry-flavored fish into her mouth. She spoke through her mouthful as she said, “It’s gross to imply there’s anything romantic about a time-traveling wife saving her partner from abuse. You aren’t time-traveling by choice. You’re checking on them because you care. Don’t make it weird.”
I felt dismissed. “I’m not making it weird—”
“If you’ve known him since you were a child, I’m sure it was because he was doing what he could to keep you safe, to help you find joy, all that. Like yeah, he loves you, but love looks a lot of ways. How did he appear again? Ghost in the attic? An animal, you said?”
I knew it was unsafe to close my eyes while going seventy miles per hour, but I had to take a moment to myself as ten thousand memories sliced through me. On a breath, I said,“He was a fox. When I was little, he was an artic fox. I didn’t see him as a person until I was much older. He didn’t talk to me until…”
She relaxed into her seat.
