Page 21 of Bloody Bargain
“If you can see in the dark, you could go find my first aid kit. I think it’s that way,” I said with a hoarse sniff, nodding towards a black lump that might have been a rock or might have been my bag.
Or the head of the body that was still warm at my back.
“Your blood, my blood.”
I glanced at the heavens for a breather. Just a few minutes of normalcy,please.I’d just survived an encounter with fiends that definitely would have raked my guts through the mud if it weren’t for a snake man I’d freed from an anchor that fell into a black hole inside the earth. Maybe I should have expected that the things I killed unseen meant there were many thingsunknowntoo, but it was too much at once. I needed to just… sit.
So I did. I took my time while the wet ground seeped through the butt of my pants and the pain deepened, throbbing up the length of my arm. There was ligament and nerve damage, by the tingling in my fingers–something I couldn’t simply stitch up.
“What does it mean?” I croaked with defeat, a fog rising from the earth as dawn drew nearer, lightening the cloud cover on the horizon. “Your blood, my blood?”
D’abel was still crouched before me, leaning into my personal space and crowding my knees. I got the impression he was balancing on the base of his tail, but still couldn’t see well enough to tell. He shifted at my question, reaching for my hand.
“My lady’s blood is rich with iron,” he murmured, lifting the wrist of my uninjured arm. He looked at the sky and pressed my fingertips to his neck. I squinted, brushing his scales as I tried to feel what he was showing me. Rows of vertical indentations like blackened razor scars banded his neck in a thick collar.
“What is this?”
“My bondage. Your blood will give mefrijaz.Sweet… liberation,” he tried. “Your blood will take the iron, and I will hunt theaufagain, by your side.”
Something in his neck pricked my finger and I pulled back with a hissed curse, sucking the tip between my lips. A shiver ran through my chest as I leaned in closer, feeling with more intent.
Those weren’t scars.
Those wereneedles.
And they weren’t just lined along the surface of his flesh. As I gently pushed, I found them nestled in the space between his trachea and his jugular. Speaking, moving, breathing, swallowing, eating. D’abel must have been in utter agony.
“How much do you need?” I asked, feeling sick with both empathy and terror. I’d seen how he sucked that woman dry in mere moments while her doe eyes went wide and she realized it was over. Whether it was desperate hunger or not, I couldn’t shake the imagined sensation of D’abel’s teeth latching onto my neck instead of hers. The heat pulled out of me, from my toes to my ears.
“I give youmyn…my spirit in exchange.” He lowered my good fingers and pushed up on my bloody sleeve. I grimaced as he revealed my arm, sticky with blood. “You will be whole.”
Dawn was coming quickly now. I could see D’abel much better in the diffused grey glow rising over the hills. His hair was long and white–not black–and draped behind his pointed ears. The swelling was gone and his scales were no longer yellow with infection. Veins of black still crept beneath his flesh like branches of a deathly mycelium, radiating out from his neck.
Those needles are what rotted him down to goop and bones. Not the chains or the prickly shed. Not the torture.
The real iron maiden was his fuckingcollar.
“How much, D’abel?”
“All of it, in time. Mine will be yours,on oþre wisan.You will purify me and I will strengthen you.”
An ambiguous description for an ominous exchange. Deeper and more meaningful than I was willing to entertain. But just like before, I felt it in my bones and accepted it anyway. Not because D’abel was inevitable, but because my arm was ruined.
I couldn’t go to a hospital for treatment. It was too much of a risk.
“How about just enough to fix this?” I asked, staring at my arm as wet blood dripped from my sleeve.
D’abel bowed his head, but I caught the strain on his features in the growing light. He breathed in my scent with flared nostrils, all four pupils transfixed by the rivers of red that painted my sleeve and skin. He clenched his jaw and rubbed his bloodied claws against his thumbs absently, as if he could absorb it through his skin like lotion.
“Yes,” he agreed on a tense breath. He pressed one claw into the pad of his finger and black blood swelled up, a shiny beetle ready to take flight. It was almost nothing, just a tongue’s swipe. D’abel held his finger before my lips and stared at my mouth.
I leaned into his finger and cushioned the tip with my tongue.
The flavor of his blood wasn’t like my own. It was spicy like sweet chilis. Complex like oyster sauce. Ancient and vast, and against my better judgment, Isavoredit, swirling it across the roof of my mouth with my tongue.
I wasn’t able to savor it for long though. A scorching pain rose in my arm. Only a little at first, and then into a stinging, angry inferno. I cried out with a grimace, held my bicep, and rocked back and forth.
“You will be whole. Heal,” D’abel rasped, watching my arm with wonder.“Myn chalis.”
