Page 96 of The Deer and the Dragon
Dagon’s eyes sharpened with vitriol as he asked the present year. “Hmm,” he said slowly. “Two hundred and fifty-two years they’ve kept me here. She could have had it all without me, but if your civilizations crumble, and your temples fall to ruins…if your people forget your name and you’re unwilling to return to your realm…if you demand a kingdom of your own in a world that has forgotten us, what better way to do it than to capture a god?”
“Who, Your Excellence?”
He looked over his shoulder, through the mist and into the inky waters, bitterness seeping into his words as he said, “If humanity would no longer do her will, if they ceased to build her altars and offer her sacrifices and speak her name, then to become a god’s god…that was her evolution. To contain a god who would yield the most excellent crops, who would make her kingdom flourish, who would bless its very soil, so long as I remained fed. She didn’t want my son here. He’d step on her toes, and that would not do. Not for one seeking to be on top.”
Beside me, Azrames’s mouth dropped open. “So, this seal, this trap, are you saying it was made by…?”
“America…” He tasted the word as if it were sour on his tongue, upper lip pulling in a sneer. “Of all of the places to summon me, it had to be where the people are so divorced from the old ways, so lost to history and culture and creation that they’d never suspect…”
“And Baal—” Azrames prompted.
With cold calculation, Dagon said, “Why would she desire his presence in her kingdom if their powers are one in the same? She would spend no more time in the shadows. Furthermore, why would he enter to save me when he knows she would not let him leave?”
“Who?” I whispered at long last.
Dagon turned to me as if noticing me for the first time. He stared at me—intome—before a slow smile began to tug at his lips. “You’re exactly her type,” he said with chilling slowness, each word penetrating me like a bullet.
“You’re not the only one trapped here, Your Majesty,” I said quietly, doing my best to sound respectful as my mind went to Caliban. “There are others here from other realms. Anyone who enters…”
“Including her,” Dagon said, cutting me short.
Azrames’s eyebrows went up. “She’s caught in her own seal?”
“The traps we lay for ourselves are the most difficult to escape.”
“Who?” I asked again, rallying as much authority as I could muster.
His dark eyes returned to me. Dagon began to sink into the lake with glacial slowness as he said, “She is the one who conceives but does not bear. She was the Most High, and it’s the title she’ll retain, no matter the cost.” The water lapped around his knees, then his waist as the wind picked up once more, drowning his words. The rainbow scales of his robe were scarcely visible through the fog as he spoke. “Her sacred tradition is to prostitute in her temple; the selling of sex is more delicious to her than the gifting of souls. Find her in Venus.”
Dagon disappeared, but the heavy, soaking mist remained. My hair felt damp against my face. I tugged at the plaid shirt to button up against the immodesty of my wet shirt. The lake quieted as all traces of the god, including our small offerings to him, disappeared entirely.
Azrames stood and held out his hand.
“Who the fuck are we going to find?”
“Astarte” came his worlds-weary sigh. “The goddess of sex, love, and war.”
I would have felt guilty that the storm had whipped the fast-food wrappers from the car and littered the streets, except that, seeing that the town was evil, I thought it probably deserved far worse.
“You didn’t even ask about Caliban!” My temper flared as I slammed the car door.
“The Prince can’t be tracked. If we’re meant to get to him before others know he’s here, then our first task should be finding out what’s going on. We can’t unravel a web we don’t understand.”
I jammed the key into the ignition. The engine coughed and sputtered to life. I wanted to fight Azrames on his rationale, but as agitated as I was, I believed he knew best when it came to speaking to ancient, powerful mermen. I eased the car out of the parking lot and plucked the first question that came to mind.
“What were you saying back there? About his hands?”
Az chuckled darkly. “He and the King of Heaven got into an altercation in about five hundred BCE over the Ark of the Covenant. It’s in your book of Judges if you want to become a biblical scholar later.”
“Isn’t that funny?” I asked, not waiting for an answer. “Mister No Other Gods Before Me talks about other gods in his own book all the time, and the modern church thinks it’s all witchcraft and nonsense and gibberish. There’s only one god. Everything else is demons or make-believe.”
“See, I knew you were familiar with your Bible.”
“It’s not my Bible.”
“Sorry. No intentions of offending. I just know you weren’t raised on The Agamas or The Vedas.”
“What about the Satanic Bible?” I asked.
