Page 11 of Bloody Bargain
I leaned over the creature, brushing his filthy hair back with one of my vinyl gloves. He was out cold, which suited my next task. I crouched at his wrists, looking for a way to remove the cuffs embedded in his flesh. Luckily for us both, the iron crumbled under my fingers. I removed the biggest pieces, dislodging them from his tendons and bones and discarding them into a neat pile against a rock.
By the time I was done, my gloves were smeared black, leaving smooth fingerprints on his sickly yellow scales. The necrotic fluids felt like healthy blood, though, not lumpy gelatin or tar or puss. The weight was immense, as if my gloves were lined in lead.
Something moved in my periphery and the base of his thick tail caught my attention. I couldn’t define the muscle groups that fell into it from the small of his back. His lats were exceptionally defined, and then a wrap of muscles from his hips… Internal obliques maybe. The gluteus media were shaped differently than on a human too, and his thoracolumbar fascia… The narrowest part of the small of his back flexed in the same way a well-defined forearm would, suggesting fine motor movement that climbed all the way up his spine like the fingerboard of a guitar.
I shoved my fascination aside, squeezing his hip and pushing him just a little.
I needed him awake for the next part. He couldn’t lay on his side while I popped his shoulders back in place. I felt his shoulder blades and the swelling in his biceps. The strong divot of muscle on either side of his spine. The ball joints of his shoulders were several inches from where they were supposed to be, sloped awkwardly and hanging like overfilled water balloons on a clothesline, the vinyl sacks ready to split and spill.
“Hey,” I said lamely, not knowing his name. “Badrock.”
He hissed, his tail curling in as consciousness returned. Its tip grazed the arch of my foot and I shuffled away, disturbed.
“B’adruokh,” he rasped.
“I need to relocate your shoulders so they can heal. I don’t think they’ll do it on their own like this.” I blew flyaways from my eyes and balanced my forearm on my knee with a squint into the distance. “It’s going to hurt again.”
His blackened eyes slit open, one smaller side pupil honing in on me over his shoulder. “I believe you enjoy it.”
I held his stare for a heartbeat, then snorted at the exhausted curl at the corner of his mouth.
“I don’t get to torture immortal badrocks every day. Sit up and let me enjoy the moment.”
“As you will,” he said. His core engaged, the long muscles of his back going taut, and he pushed himself up by the base of his tail. His hands fell apart, knuckles dragging into the mud. He bared his strange curved teeth and hissed through the agony.
A waft of saccharine rot overwhelmed the fresh air. My brow creased at the sudden odor of death. The creature’s injuries hadn’t smelled bad before. I opened my mouth to breathe, having no menthol stick to slather under my nostrils like I used to for work.
No matter. Jostling them could have been the culprit. Movement that tore open the flesh and released pent up gases and pressure. It happened sometimes with body removals too.
I picked up one of his ruined hands by the wrist, shuffling into a better angle by his knee. He couldn’t keep his head up, so it sloped between his collarbones, the mop of black hair once more obscuring most of his face. A tight line of anguish marred his mouth, but he was quiet as I tucked his elbow against his side then rotated the forearm out towards me like he was jumping rope.
I stopped there, watching his face for when the tension fell away. “You never told me your name,” I murmured, wearing that professional calm like I’d never set aside my EMT uniform. “I can’t call you Badrock forever.”
“D’abeloloa ad B’adruokh,” he said. “My name is yours.”
“D’abel it is.” There was no way I’d be able to weave my tongue through all those unfamiliar syllables, but maybe I wasn’t meant to. The pronunciation was so close to the devil that a chill ran through me.
A breathy huff of amusement, whether genuine or pained, gripped his mouth, and I used the opportunity to lift his shoulder centimeters at a time. When he winced, I stilled. Nothing good came from trying to force tense muscles to relocate a shoulder or hip. It was better to wait it out, even if my arms burned holding up the weight.
“Isentenno fear on you, my lady,” he said quietly, as if he knew the distraction of our conversation was important. His tail curled around his legs, drawing my attention. “You do notweileorflen.”
“I don’t… wail, or…” I tried to hear the connection of our English over the six hundred years that separated us, but it was hit or miss. “I’d have to be an idiot not to be wary of you, but I’m not afraid to die. Perhaps that’s the difference.”
“You will not di-hssssssss–”
I rotated his shoulder back into its ball socket. A deep, masculine groan rolled through his throat that ended in a vindictive chuckle when the bones visibly popped, and the tip of his tail beat the ground like one might a fist against a table. He licked the corner of his mouth, panting through the pain.
“Well played,” he rasped.
I smirked with smug pride, standing up and shaking out my legs from crouching so long. “I’ve been around the block, as we say in the twenty-first century.”
I took two steps back and walked around his tail towards his other arm, picking my way through the remnants of the shed wall.
The earth groaned and yawned again, knocking me off balance.
D’abel’s tail grabbed me around the thigh and dragged me off my feet, taking advantage of my distraction. The breath left my lungs as he pulled me through the debris and gravel. My knife was in my hand without a thought, my grip sure from pure muscle memory and instinct, knowing exactly where it was at my waist. I sank the knife into the meat of his tail to the hilt. Black veins exploded around the blade, slithering through his scales like worms.
D’abel’s hold tightened. He reached for me with the arm that I’d just set, using his hand as if it wasn’t blackened with parts I could see through between the bones and tendons. I withdrew my knife and punched down again and again, wasting no time with curses or threats. He was going to kill me if I didn’t hack my way out of his tail’s grip.
