Page 20 of Bloody Bargain
08
A black shadow stood not ten feet from me, frozen in the frigid blue night.
It hadn’t moved or made a sound as the wind howled, racing over the hills and shivering the bushes. But I was certain it was real.
They will come.
Heart in my throat with twists of hair beating my face like twine, I stared without blinking at the black silhouette and slowly threaded my right hand through my duffel’s strap so that its weight hung from only one shoulder.
In all the hours I’d been walking, I’d kept my chipped iron knife in my hand, the textured hilt imprinted on my palm. I'd been expecting a sound before they found me, like a monster film. Growls, howls, snarls… anything but this eerie silence. Quiet before a storm. I'd been sure that the figures in the dark, first one, now two, were a product of my paranoia. Getting so close to one now, I knew that I'd fucked up.
My only chance was to make myself look like easy prey, and even then, I wasn't likely to last long. So much for building an uneasy alliance. I took a fortifying breath and lowered my knife with a loosened grip.
“Just my imagination,” I said, teeth clenched against the cold.
Then I turned my back on the figure and walked away.
Three steps later, a heavy weight fell on my duffel and ripped into its contents like a sack of flour. Claws caught on my hair as I stumbled backwards and fell with purpose, pinning the fiend beneath my supplies.
Knife hand already free from the straps, I scrambled to my knees and sliced wildly at the air behind me as I turned. The monstrosity shrieked in rage, tossing the pack across the rocks with ease. As its arm extended to fling the duffel out of its way, I took a chance and tackled it, pushing my forearm up against its chin.
With a violent wail, I pressed my jagged knife to its throat and tore through its trachea with all my might. Its claws grappled with my arms, slipping for purchase as it drowned in its own blood. It wore the face of an old man with drooping earlobes and a thin, hooked nose. Dead-fish eyes swam and needle teeth clicked as it sputtered and coughed, filling my nose with the scent of decay and old tobacco.
Just as I put my knife to its throat again, something as unyielding as a tree trunk wrapped around my waist and yanked me back. I flew, dropping my knife when the breath was swept out of my lungs in a crushing grip. The world spun like I was dancing, and a thick arm banded my biceps to a hard chest coated in a cold sheen of mist.
D’abel held a young woman by the neck at arm’s length, just out of reach as she cried and reached for me with blackened fingertips. Warmth blossomed in my chest looking at the round whites of her eyes in the darkness, the silky black fan of her long hair, the curve of her shadow that promised she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.
The b’adruokh crushed her windpipe without ceremony, then unhinged his jaw and brought that fang-filled maw down onto the meat of her shoulder. His shoulders tensed in pain as the angry black infection in his skin swelled. The woman hissed and released me from her thrall, struggling to be free as his throat scales glowed soft white and he drank her soul dry.
I struggled too, fixated in horror as the young woman’s face shrank like a raisin, hugging her bones in dark, leathery folds. Her flesh cracked like the desert and crumbled, falling in clumps of dirt at D’abel’s feet within seconds. He let me go as she whittled away in his embrace and I fell on my butt, scurrying to get out of the range of his twitching tail. I bumped into another body, this one much less elegantly decomposed, with an arm torn asunder and its face an indistinguishable mush at the end of its neck, whittled down like an old anthill. I screamed, then clapped my hand over my mouth and huddled in place.
D’abel snapped his attention towards me, panting for breath with hunched shoulders that now glowed a dim white from his meal. His veins pulsed in stark relief like black spiderwebs against the glow, and an angry void vibrated against his throat, thousands of bees fighting to get free. He glanced between the three dead fiends and down at the pile of earth at his feet. The wind still blew, but all I could hear were his lungs pumping and my heart having a tantrum, screaming in my ears about why I wasn’t fleeing for my life.
“I found you,” D’abel rasped, watching me with his side pupil as if he was afraid to move. Afraid I might run. His voice was worse than when I’d left him and he swallowed with a wince, baring his fangs. Soft pulses of moonlight slid down his throat and chest like the bioluminescence of a deep sea creature. “As you willed it. I found you,” he sighed in a relieved whisper
“You’realive,”I grunted, trying to sound impressed rather than rooted in terror to the damp rocks. I held myself up on shaking forearms, one elbow weaker than the other. Adrenaline coursed through my blood, causing tremors that made my teeth chatter and my abdomen clench.
D’abel cocked an exhausted sideways grin and turned to face me, his muscular hips shifting with his weight.
“I am, my lady.”
“I told you to stop calling me that,” I said between chattering.
Snapping was easier than letting the fear seep in, but I recognized that I was a cornered kitten, not a tiger. Maybe D’abel recognized it too, because he knelt in front of me in slow deliberation. I couldn’t make out much, but he no longer smelled, and both of his arms were in the right places. Similar to a glowing sticker on a kid’s bedroom wall late at night, his edges and details were hazy.
“I have no other name to call you by… my lady,” he murmured. Withamusement.
I shut my mouth tight as he curled one hand gently around the base of my neck and lifted my weight off my palms. I slouched forward but turned my head sideways, not wanting to share breath. It felt too… intimate.
Instead, I searched for the wreckage of my duffel, grappling with the fact that he’d been right when he’d said he was a man. D’abel wasn’t an injured animal. He was a person with a personality, and the dark simmer of his voice made me uncomfortable. Little hairs of warning rose on the back of my neck as soon as his hand left it to the biting cold.
“You are injured.”
“So are you. Right?”Please let him still be injured.It was a brittle, callous thought, but I needed to know he didn’t heal in the blink of an eye. The fact that he was walking at all…
D’abel swallowed and it sounded like a tumbler full of razor blades. “Yes.” His pink eyes descended to my arm. “But I will be whole soon.”
At his words, I started to feel the numb sting of cold flesh and hot lacerations. I held up my arm, touching the shreds of my jacket. I felt exhausted by the thought of solving any problem at all, but that wouldn’t stitch up my arm or sterilize it.
