I take a deep, steadying breath. “Do you think that’s who your mother saw?”
Levi sighs. “It’s possible as much as anything is, but I’ll never know for sure.”
“The artist I spoke to, she used to be a professor. She has a theory that all of these primordial goddesses were related to dark matter.”
Levi nods. “It makes sense. Many names and faces for the same ineffable thing across many cultures and languages.”
No wonder Rudzitin’s spell isn’t holding. He wrote it for something finite and trapped something infinite. I don’t know how much time we have, but if the Fathom manages to free herself, the results will be catastrophic. There’s only one small hope. Appeal to her nature—free her first.
“I think I know what I have to do,” I tell Levi, looking at the stack of books. “And I’m gonna need your help.”
22TOLD YOU SO
I check my phone again, waiting, but there’s still no response. I messaged Aaron before Levi and I left the shop, telling him I got sick after lunch, but that I’d be staying at Levi’s for the night and would see him tomorrow at work. That was nearly an hour ago. He hasn’t even read it yet.
The days between watching Dara flee our house and getting the news she was dead flit back to me, filled with unanswered calls and texts. How quiet the house had become in her absence, how heavy. Every breath laden with expectation, the very air fraught with memories and dread. A silent countdown happening to all our doom.
“Something’s not right,” I tell Levi. “My friend Aaron, he’s not answering.”
He turns to me. “Aaron, huh? Is this a friend I should be worried about?”
“No,” I tell him. “Not like that. In fact, he’s sleeping with another friend of mine, Brennan.”
Levi’s brows lift with curiosity. “I’d like to meet these friends someday.”
“You will,” I tell him, but my confidence tanks remembering why I brought them up. “Provided Aaron actually replies at some point.”
“Maybe he’s just busy,” Levi suggests. “Give it time.”
I flash to Brennan sprawled across the hotel bed. If he’s busy, I know who’s keeping him that way, but I have regrets about introducing Aaron to Brennan after our conversation at the Four Seasons. Brennan’s still a part of this, which means Aaron is in danger. But from what, I’m still not fully sure. My head has become a swirling maelstrom of disparate information, all of it connected like the radial threads in a spider’s web, manifold paths crossing and recrossing, leading me somewhere I’m not sure I want to go. But I’m too close to see the overall design, the spider sitting at its dark heart.
Is it Arla or the Fathom herself?
Levi lives a short ride from the store in a small three-bedroom home with concrete steps leading to the front door and modest Arts and Crafts details. It’s cozy inside, clean enough to feel sanitary and messy enough to feel lived in, furnished with eccentric antiques like a French Art Nouveau cupboard and a red leather barber’s chair.
He draws the curtains and makes me scrambled eggs and toast, pouring me glass after glass of water. When I’m still hungry, he makes me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He wanted to take me out for dinner, but I couldn’t take the glare of restaurant lights or stomach sitting in a room full of people casually chewing their food as if nothing in the world were out of place.
We curl up on the couch to watch a movie, but before we can even get to the meet cute, I remember something Arla said. “You grew up learning Hebrew for prayers and blessings, right?”
He nods affably. “Yeah, why?”
“Is that similar to Aramaic?”
“They’re related, yes. And I studied a little Aramaic in Jewish day school, not because my family was religious but because my father and grandfather were trying to make up for the education my mother would have given me had she lived.”
“Do you know the word forgift?” I ask, expectant. Arla indicatedthat was the command she needed to produce the key to see the Fathom. I’ll need it if I’m going to get inside and find a way to let the Fathom out. Levi and I have been planning but I want to make sure I have everything I need.
“Hebrew or Aramaic?” he asks.
“Aramaic, actually.”
“I’ve studied Kabbalah as an adult. The Zohar—the central work of Jewish mysticism—is written entirely in Aramaic.” He smiles warmly. “Yahavmeans gift. Which is what you are to me.”
I lean in and kiss him hard, mouths and tongues groping as we peel our clothes off layer by layer, dig condoms out of a pocket. Undressed, I straddle him on the sofa, burying my face in his neck, hiding my eyes from the light as I let him pierce me like a grounding rod, suck me back down to earth. My skin ripples with sensation as if newly exposed, networked with nerve endings that have multiplied a thousandfold, so sensitive it causes me to gasp at every thrust. In the wake of seeing the Fathom, emerging changed, renewed, I am experiencing Levi, everything, for the first time. Only more intensely and robustly than I once did, a tapestry of feeling I never experienced before. And my mind is deliciously blank, all my attention focused lower.
The energy between us builds to a succulent boil, and I come hard and fast, shuddering against him as the orgasm grips me, and with it, vision after vision of a deep hole and dark water, the churn and bubble of something driving to the surface, the crest of fin and scales, hair and tentacles, and a scream behind it all that only I can hear.
Later that night, as we lie together in his bed, I wake and run my hand between his thighs until he rouses and pulls me to him. We make love slowly this time, every second something to be cherished, every breath and touch. Our bodies ache for each other, for a release we’ve only begun to feel. And when we finally pull apart, it is all I can do to roll over, checking myphone one last time before falling into a sleep so deep, it defies dreaming.
