Page 48 of Fear No Hell

“Unfortunately so.” I lean over and trace my finger across the screen, translating the line as I read aloud. “‘In the bedchamber, honey-filled, Let me enjoy your goodly beauty, Lion, let me caress you.’ And then it goes on to reference Inanna, the goddess of fertility, and her consort, Dumuzid.”

“You read Sumerian?” Excitement takes over Sam’s face as he shifts to face me. “Hasn’t it been a dead language for millennia?”

“Even though Sumerian was on its way out when I was born, I had to be familiar with it anyways. I can read it alright, although please don’t ask me to speak it because I have it on good authority that my pronunciation is atrocious.

” I tap my foot against the floor in thought.

“I would say it stopped being used altogether in, maybe, 100 AD or so? I’m not really sure. ”

“Holy shit, that’s so cool. I never really thought about it, but you’ve seen the rise and fall of whole damn civilizations.”

I shrug. “Kind of. We were fairly removed from humans, so while we might be aware of cultural changes, we weren't really a part of them.”

“Did you see Pompeii happen?” Sam blurts.

“The volcanic eruption?” At his enthusiastic nod, I chuckle.

“Yes, I was with Pliny the Elder around the time Vesuvius erupted. It was—” Towers of smoke reaching to the heavens and blotting out the sun as far as the eye could see for days.

Massive lava flows pouring down the mountainside, so bright they could see it even in Misenum.

Shattered pieces of stone falling back to earth after the initial eruption. “Horrifying.”

“How did you survive?”

“Most of the time when I inspired people, I was in a…” I pause to search for the right word.

“I guess you might call it a ghost-like state. Neither physically there nor wholly removed. The people I inspired couldn’t see me, and my surroundings couldn’t touch me.

” It was why it had been such a shock for Arthur both to search for me so extensively based exclusively on rumors he had heard about the muses and to find me in my home when I wasn’t in my inspired state.

“So when Vesuvius erupted, I wasn’t occupying a physical form that could get injured.

Not to mention, I was summoned away to Misenum only a few hours later to inspire Pliny the Younger in his writings on the occurrences at Pompeii. ”

“I’m glad you got away.” Sam tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, ignoring the couple standing a few feet away, eyeing our table like we’re going to get up and leave if they stare hard enough.

I stare back until one of the women shuffles awkwardly and turns, tugging her partner away with her. When I turn back to Sam, his lips are pursed consideringly.

“What?” I tease.

“Did you ever meet Darwin?” he blurts. “See the Galapagos?”

He’s so excited, his smile so earnest, it hurts my heart. I press a hand to my chest, rubbing at the ache as I nod. “I did. Well, not so much met him as inspired him. But the islands were a beautiful place to spend time, even in my inspired form.”

“I always wanted to go.” Sam sighs. “I took an Evolutionary Medicine course, and all of the photos of the Galapagos were so gorgeous. Whenever I was half dead before finals, I would look up tickets to go there as a sort of ‘what if’ escapism idea.”

“What about this?” I wrap my hands around his forearm. “What if, once we figure out what’s happening and whether we should be concerned or not, we go there?”

His mouth opens. Shuts. Opens again. “What?”

“Take a vacation to the Galapagos. Just the two of us.”

He goes quiet, the chaos of the coffee shop rushing in to fill his silence. I worry I may have misread the situation, may have pushed too hard, until his face lights up brighter than the sunshine outside, and he drags me into his lap, burying his face in my neck.

“I would love that.” His response is almost giggled. All animated exuberance, child-like excitement, that turns me inside out.

“Once we figure this out then.” I press a kiss to the top of his head, basking in the warm press of his arms around my waist, the firmness of his legs under my thighs. “Before we run away together… you should probably tell me about the research you were doing.”

“Hmm? Oh, yeah.” He lifts his head from my throat. “I haven’t found anything super helpful about any of the imagery we can remember. At least not anything peer-reviewed.”

“Sam, my darling, we’re talking about shared dreams and magical tattoos. I highly doubt the peer-reviewed literature is going to have a lot to say on the subject.”

He barks out a disbelieving laugh as he runs a hand down his face. “Shit. Shit, I didn’t even think about that. So maybe Google Scholar and the library weren’t the best places to start then, huh?”

“Perhaps not.” As I snicker, I lean to the side and lift my backpack into my lap, barely biting back a moan as Sam starts to harden beneath me.

I give him a scolding look—his response is a small smirk that makes me want to see how badly I can torment him in this coffee shop—as I unzip my bag and retrieve a stack of papers.

They’re covered with renderings of each of the many tattoos now covering my body, ones I spent hours sketching.

After lowering my backpack to the floor, I flatten the pages out on the table in front of us. “I finished the drawings.”

“And?” Sam shuffles through them with one hand, reviewing each one carefully as if he isn’t intimately familiar with them, hasn’t traced each and every tattoo with his fingers and tongue.

“And I still don’t know what they’re supposed to mean.” A sigh shakes out of me. “I used the computer to research them, but Reddit is—”

“It’s a terrifying place,” he finishes, his lips twitching. “Yeah.”

"There was a witch on one of the forums who told this one"—I point at the tattoo in between my breasts—"Is the mark of the goddess, Lilith. But I haven’t ever met a goddess named Lilith, much less pledged my allegiance to her.”

Sam’s eyes, which had darkened to the color of molasses as they followed my finger down, dart back up to mine.

“I was using that name as part of my search terms after I dreamed about it a month or so ago.” He adjusts the laptop, so we can both see what he's typing. “Time to search real Google, not Google Scholar.” The screen blinks before populating countless websites in response. He flicks his fingers across the mouse pad, the links scrolling past in a blur as he mumbles to himself. “Not Wikipedia. Not Reddit. Huh, I’m sure this random .net website is a credible source.”

“Your scholarly snob is showing, my darling,” I mock him gently.

“Okay, okay, you’re right,” he huffs, clicking on a random link.

“Let’s see. ‘Lilith: Worship of a Dark Goddess.’” He skims the lines quickly, humming under his breath as he takes in the information on the screen in front of him.

“Apparently, she’s a lot of things to a lot of different people, and she shows up pretty much everywhere.

As an ancient dark goddess to the Sumerians.

The first wife of Adam who got cast out of the Garden of Eden because he wouldn’t respect her as an equal, and she wouldn’t submit to a man she perceived as inferior.

What a badass. Hey, apparently, after that, she—”

“She what?” I glance up from the screen to see he’s gone slack-jawed. Quickly, I scan over the next few sentences until I catch up to where he had stopped reading aloud. “Hmm, that’s interesting. She became the bride of an archdemon named Samael.”

A choked noise emerges from Sam.

“Sam?”

His jaw flexes.

“Sam, what’s going on? You’re starting to scare me.”

“My, uh, my-it’s—fuck me—my birth name is Samael.”

“What?” Now it’s my turn to blink at him.

“My birth name is Samael. Mom said it was a family name—" He taps a finger against the keyboard. “And I always went by Sam because Samael was a weird name. I mean most people fucked it up and called me Samuel, anyways, so it was never a big deal, y’know, except on the first day of school.”

All around us, the world keeps spinning, the denizens of the coffee shop going about their business.

At our table, everything grinds to a halt.

It’s not like before when I was panicking, and everything was too big and too loud, too stimulating.

Instead, it’s a fraught thing, a ringing silence filled with confusion and concern.

Somehow, our attempt at research did nothing except make our situation more confusing. All thoughts of romantic trips to the Galapagos Islands fall away, replaced by the ominous oddness of every new piece of information we discover.

And I’m at the center of all of it. Seemingly the source of every inexplicable thing happening to us. We need someone who knows me, remembers the things I don’t or can’t, to help us—maybe—be able to understand this.

There’s only one person who meets that criteria. And I really don’t want to talk to her.

“I think I—” I trail off. Lick my lips. Try again. “I think I need to try to contact my mother.”

Hazel irises warm on me, Sam only asks: “Do you think she can help?”

“I-I-I don’t know.”

“Do you want to talk to her?”

Same answer, but this time when I respond, my head is shaking in disagreement.

“Do you feel safe with her?”

“I’m with you.” It’s more a subtle admission of how safe Sam himself makes me feel than an actual answer to his question. “The rest doesn’t matter.”

“Do you want to contact her?”

I shrug.

“Listen.” His thumb drags across my jaw in a soft gesture of reassurance.

“This is your choice, sweetness. Whatever you want to do, however you want to play this, I’m with you.

If you feel comfortable contacting your mom, that’s great.

If not, I’m okay with leaving this Scooby Doo mystery unsolved.

The dreams and the magic don’t bother me as long as I have you with me. So… your choice. Always.”

Feeling races back into my body, pushing out the numbness that crept through my veins. The world returns to its normal speed, the movement of the humans around us no longer syrupy slow.

It’s all too much. Too much stimulation. Too many people. Too many decisions.

I open my mouth to tell him I’ll think about it. What comes out instead is: “Can we go home?”

“Of course.” It’s the work of a minute for him to pack everything away, including my sketches and half-eaten muffin. “You ready to go?”

I stand, accepting my caramel cappuccino when he hands it to me and tugging my backpack over my shoulder. “Yes, please.”

“You gotta give me my keys back, sweetness.” As I tug them from my pocket with my free hand, he drapes an arm around my waist and pulls me into him, nuzzling the side of my head when he takes the keys from me.

He shoots me a small smirk as he escorts me out of the café.

“Now why don’t we go see how much paint you managed to scratch off the car. ”