Page 94 of The Deer and the Dragon
He shoved his hands into his pockets before saying, “If the town is a seal, then someone’s responsible for its existence. I suspect it’s tied to the orchard Silas mentioned, but we can’t go in half-cocked. If we want to figure out what’s going on? I recommend our first stop be to the lake.”
“To the merman?”
“To the god.”
Perhaps if the clerk hadn’t deserved the living death he’d been issued, I would have felt bad for our theft. We’d robbed him clean, taking all of the alcohol, the glass, the honey, the cash, and the fruit we could find. Azrames wiped off a silver platter and smiled when he realized it was genuine. He handed it to me to add to my tote—another stolen item. I grabbed the clerk’s car keys from his bedside table and cast him a long, cautious look as a single stream of drool ran down his face.
I almost wanted to ask Az what else he’d learned about the clerk.
Almost.
Instead, I shuddered in disgust as we left the motel, slamming the doors on his chipped compact car from the mid-nineties. The smell of the soiled fast-food wrappers that covered the floorboards permeated the air. I gagged as I rolled down the windows. With a sympathetic flex of his fingers, Azrames’s scent of smoke filled the vehicle in a welcome, overpowering relief. I shot him a grateful look as we pointed the borrowed car toward the lake.
Terrible clerk aside, the town was stunning.
Every home, every shop, every building hummed with an old-world picturesque charm, as if plucked from time and perfectly preserved. The windows all seemed too clean. The people were too smiley. The grass, the bushes, the trees were all so green that they’d be more believable as transplants from a movie set. Under normal circumstances, I would have been thrilled at the chance to stroll through a small, idyllic town. Instead, seeing the emerald, grassy hills that prevented any straight shot between the motel and the park at the heart of the city filled me with dread.
The bright-green hills crawled lazily throughout the little city, and shops, roads, and bridges had been built to accommodate the unbroken shapes. Because I knew how the sigil looked from the top down, everything about them went from quaint and unique to ominous. The snake-like knoll stayed tomy right as I followed the road to the lake. The frown rippled from me as I drew nearer to the sparkling, man-made body surrounded by perfectly manicured trees and lush, vibrant gardens of grasses and flowers. Thomas Kinkade couldn’t have painted a more unnaturally radiant lake if he’d tried.
Its banks were too round. The water was too blue. The draping willows that tufted gently in the perfect weather were too storybook. I unbuckled my seatbelt and grimaced at the heavenly park, hating it with every fiber of my being.
“Bellfield is the worst place in the world,” I said to Azrames.
He chuckled. “I think the residents of this little slice of heaven would disagree.”
I narrowed my eyes as I stared at the glittering water through the filthy windshield. “Isn’t Heaven your enemy?”
“Yup.”
Even with the smoke and the fresh air streaming in through the windows, my stomach roiled against the nausea of a night with little sleep, a morning without coffee, and a world where women had to sleep mere feet away from terrible men. The clock read just after nine in the morning when we pulled into a parking lot.
Not caring if someone stole our only means of transportation, I left the windows of the vehicle down. I wholly understood the side-eye from passersby as they caught a glimpse of the garbage that filled my vehicle and didn’t possess the sass to snap at them. I was glad Azrames had made me cover up the tattoo, given the number of classist stares I was already drawing because of my outfit and the vehicle.
“Okay,” Az said, clapping his hands together as he took several steps away from the car. “Time to find a piece of the lake without pedestrians. Mortals will be no more able to see him than they are to see me. I’m most concerned with you looking crazy and having the authorities called on the raving lunatic in the park, so do your best not to talk to me when anyone’s looking. I think if we aim for those trees”—hegestured to the far side of the lake—“we should be fine to make our offering and see if Dagon really is in these waters.”
The park-goers in their athletic apparel thinned as we rounded the lake, and I realized I had no idea what day of the week it was. It didn’t have Saturday energy, for which I was grateful. It seemed as though the overly ambitious members of society had jobs to get to and lives to live, leaving Azrames and me with the park more or less to ourselves. By the time we reached the far side of the lake, I watched the final car pull out of the parking lot. Maybe they were fleeing my presence.
Azrames wasn’t overly chatty, which made me miss Fauna. He seemed to talk only when he could improve upon the silence, whereas I was confident she would have been chirping like a warbler at dawn. I nearly asked him how the two of them had found one another, just for something to talk about, when the seriousness of our situation pressed on me again.
My understanding of the world had changed so wholly after decades of telling myself I was crazy that I’d found it easy to bob in and out of states of lucidity. Sometimes, I completely forgot that the handsome demon in shades of iron, smoke, and ash, with small black horns poking up through mussed, black hair, was someone—or something—that I’d written off as fiction before the day Silas intervened in my apartment and made Richard choke on his own tongue. Prior to that, I’d spent years telling myself that Caliban…
“How do we find Caliban?” I asked quietly.
He nodded. “That’s our top priority. If Silas was telling the truth, then the Prince must be here. Like me, Caliban won’t be able to leave or move within the seal, save for on foot. Dagon might be able to tell us who created the seal in the first place.”
“And this mer god—Dagon—is your ally? I know Heaven and the Phoenicians are at odds.”
Azrames twisted his mouth to the side. “It isn’t that simple. We have a healthy respect for each other. But realms don’t really do…allegiances. Not like that.”
We left the smooth asphalt path and crossed the grass toward the water’s edge. Part of me felt like I’d prefer the uncomfortable odors of piss and stale smoke to the curated perfection of floral blossoms, the magnificently green leaves that brushed against one another as if to sing a charming greeting, and the grass so soft that it might as well have been carpet. Everything about the park set off an indescribable alarm bell within me.
Before now, I would have told myself I was paranoid…but I thought of the dread that had descended over me the moment I’d broken into Richard’s house, and an idea pricked me. I wondered how much I was able to sense of an otherworldly presence given the diluted fae blood sparkling in my veins. Perhaps my irrational intuition was just what Fauna had spent weeks calling clairsentience. I was too distracted by the bright-blue water, the expensive scent of exotic flowers, and the warmth of the cheery, blue day to catch the underlying implication of Az’s words.
I stopped at the water’s edge, looking at him as I realized something with horror. “What if Caliban isn’t here at all? What if Silas was just lying to get you trapped here?”
Azrames didn’t look concerned. “If that’s the case, we’ll get you that shovel. Besides, I’m not important enough to trap.”
“I beg to differ.”
