Page 12 of Bloody Bargain
His desecrated hand locked down on my wrist before I could stab him a seventh time. He snarled, locking all of his working limbs around me, and fell back on his injuries. The groaning of the earth turned into a splintering. A deep, echoing sound like ropes snapping in a vast mountain cavern. I stopped trying to stab him as the chains in the stone crossbeam finally rattled.
And then the piece of stone fell.
Not to the ground, butthroughit, as if it were water. The ground beneath us undulated and tore apart while D’abel shimmied backwards, propelled by his oozing, bloodied tail. I helped with my boots, heels gouging out the soft ground.
“What the fuck?” I gasped. His bony hips pressed into the small of my back and his ankles went slack where he’d wrapped his legs round my thighs. The blackened hand on my wrist trembled as he fell limp, breathing hard.
“Ank…Anchor,” he managed. “Fell.”
I scrambled out of his makeshift cradle hold and peered into the sunken crater of the shed. A rectangular hole sat in the middle in exactly the shape of the crossbeam, bits of grass and rock falling into the nothingness.
The hair stood on the back of my neck when I smelled the deep wealth of the soil, because I knew in my bones that it wasn’t the scent of Earth but somewhereother.
I turned back to D’abel with wide eyes. If I hadn’t smelled like fear before, I sure as hell did now. He lay on his back with his dislocated arm awkwardly smashed beneath his side and stretched unnaturally from shuffling. His newly injured tail had curled up on itself like a dying snake, weaving loop after loop over his hips and the scraps of cloth between them. The hand he’d grabbed me with was shriveled with pain upon his chest. His vision was swimming again, and veins of black radiated out from where I’d stabbed him.
“Damn it,” I sighed. I sheathed my knife with trembling fingers, then wrapped myself in a hug, hiding my fists in Matthew’s sweater while the adrenaline worked its way through me.
“I will be whole,” D’abel assured me again.
“You saved me.” He didn’t respond. I took an angry step towards him, a maelstrom of anger and guilt building in my chest. “I thought you were going to kill me.”
“Better my blood than… your blood,” he sighed. His curved white teeth glinted as he smiled drunkenly. “You have less… of it.”
“Damnit,” I snapped again under my breath, sitting down next to him. I stared at the rivulets of black streaming from his tail, drawn and exhausted. He needed stitches. I’d get my entire kit and bring it out with fresh towels. And make some tea. Not just for getting warm, but to help stop the bleeding.
“Your blood for my blood,” he said again, eyes sliding to my hand.
“Yes, I know. I need to go to the cottage, get some things to help you.”
I stood up.
“Yours… for mine.”
“Yes, I heard–”
My thoughts slowed. D’abel was staring at my wrist.
He closed his eyes.
“I will be whole,” he repeated. “They will come here. You will go first.”
“They will come?”
“Yes. The anchor…”
He didn’t need to tell me who. A fiend would come to check on what had happened. All of Wales had probably heard the anchor wail as it snapped and fell into the underworld.
“Won’t they imprison you again?”
“No. I will find you.”
He would find me. He would become whole and he would find me and then he would want to trade. My blood for his blood. That was the deal I’d made, and he would hold me to it. Because he would become whole and he would find me. He could scent me.
My lizard brain begged me to run. Sweat broke out on my neck and beneath my arms. My heart and lungs raced, and my knees wobbled like jelly. Every flight instinct in my body wanted me to scramble away.
But my desperation was stronger. It would always be stronger.
I’d spilled plenty of blood in just thirty-three years of life. I would gladly spill my own too. If I needed to sign my name on the dotted line with the red stuff, so be it.
