She smelled too good. I missed her. I nuzzled into her.
She gave up and held me against her so tightly that I scarcely had room to move. My mouth couldn’t find her.My hands ran over her hair, her back. “You have to go back,” she said.
“I’m already on it. You have this under control?”
“I have it,” she barked. “Go!”
“Fauna, it wasn’t—” Silas could barely gasp as his eyes widened.
“Go!”
Fauna got me into the shower that night, though not for the reasons I’d wanted. She claimed the Phoenician reek and scent of my drug was unbearable. She stuck her fingers down my throat over and over again as I vomited up the cucumber waters I’d guzzled in the basement. I had tried to suck on her fingers the first time she’d shoved them in my mouth, which had caused her to laugh a coarse, humorless laugh as she yanked my hair back and shoved her fingers in deeper.
“You are in so much trouble, you goddamn shithead,” she’d growled.
I was still pretty sure I wanted to fuck her.
I puked my guts out for three hours. Any time I thought I was done, I’d accept a glass of water from her, then slide my hand up her thigh. She’d pull the entirety of my hair into a tight fist and bend me over the toilet’s edge as she continued forcing me to purge the drug from my system. I wasn’t sure how many glasses of water, how many fingers to the back of my tongue, how many pats on the back, how many worried words rushed over me.
She waited until I stopped coming on to her before she struggled to get me into the shower. The hot water ran over us. Instead of searching for her legs, I bundle my face into my knees as the cleansing rain of the hot water drenched me.
She crawled into the shower with me.
“Where are they?” she insisted.
“I left them,” I choked. “Why…why did Astarte let Caliban in? What happened?”
“I need you to get your shit together, Marlow. Tell me what happened.”
I shook my head, feeling the hot water plaster my hair to my back as it covered my naked body. I tried to look up at Fauna, but it was too dark to see her. She hadn’t turned on the lights as we’d spent hours in the bathroom while I’d dispelled the last of the drug from my system. I was trembling against its residual effects as I clutched myself more tightly.
“You and Azrames got to Bellfield. You found Caliban. You were looking for the Phoenicians. Then what? What happened?” Fauna begged, shaking me.
“Astarte,” I said. “Fertility.”
“Tell me!”
How could I explain to her that I would have fucked anything on two legs? I would have let the Soul Eater impregnate me if she’d had the equipment to do so. Once Caliban had arrived, my love and need for him had barely been enough to cut through my haze. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that even if Fauna’s beloved had been the one to arrive in that room, I would have slipped my hand into his pants. I’d had no control.
“She drugged us.” I shook my head. “I don’t know how to explain it. I was supposed to get pregnant. She was there. It was…sex. Why did she let Caliban in? She knew who he was. How did she know? Why would she…”
She shouted over the pounding of the shower water. I yelped as she turned the knob to drench me in sobering ice-cold water. “Why was Silas there? Why did he take you?”
I looked at her through the cutting darkness. There was no light in my apartment. I knew she asked not just for me but with the knowledge Azrames was left behind, and it was my fault. I struggled for my eyes to adjust to the shadowed bathroom as I looked into her enormous eyes. I could scarcely make out her outline against the distant amber gloom of the lights that drifted up from the streets of the warehousedistrict. She crawled deeper into the shower until the water pummeled against her shoulders, face inches from mine.
“I’m sorry,” I choked. “Caliban told me to call him. I don’t know why he trusted him. I don’t know what he knows. I’m so confused. I’m so…”
“I don’t need your apologies.” Fauna shook me again. “What happened to Az?”
I sobbed again as I clutched my knees, burying my face against my bruised, purple knees.
“Marlow!” she cried, grabbing my wet hair with anger rather than pleasure as she yanked my face from my knees. “You fucking dumbass, tell me what the hell you did! Where are our men! Where is Azrames! Tell me before I shove gummy worms down your throat until you asphyxiate!”
Her words were light, but her tone was not. She was worried.
“They were fighting,” I said loudly through the water.
“Fighting where?”
