Page 50 of Bloody Bargain
“D’abel!” I yelled, halfway down the beach. I dropped my duffle and tugged off my boots and socks. “D’abel, Iknowyou’re there!”
A fresh wake sidled in from the ocean, breaking white seafoam across the cliffs to either side of the bay. The boats wobbled in the waves one by one as the water swelled and the tide inched closer to my feet. I stopped, staring at an older couple hunkered down in their thick cable knit sweaters and galoshes. They were walking towards me but hadn’t noticed me. I watched them as I unbuttoned my pants and shoved them down my legs.
Not a blip of recognition.
I tore my clothes off, nipples pebbling in the chilly air, and walked naked into the icy waters with my knife.
“D’abel!” I roared, my teeth chattering as the surf swallowed me to my thighs. I held out my forearm and pumped my fist until my veins swelled, nails biting into my palm.
I swiped the kitchen knife’s edge over my pale skin. Garnet red blood bloomed across the deep cut, slipping off my elbow and into the water. The tides shifted, rising higher with each drop that met the sea. The waves turned into a diamond pattern as opposing swells crashed into each other, disturbing the dinghies moored in the bay.
A fishing boat on the horizon blew its horn, raising its nets early and turning towards the harbor. Whatever they saw coming into port was worrying enough to lose their morning catch. I looked to the sky and found it darkening quickly. The green tinge of the morning thickened with storm clouds, a wall of marine fog coming in from the open ocean that towered high above the cliffs.
Panting, I dropped my arm and let the icy tide tickle my fingertips. The wound on my arm stitched itself closed just like the first night in the heathlands, when D’abel licked my fingers clean and ignited the change in me.
“This is what you want, isn’t it?” I asked, surprised by the sob in my voice. “All of me for all of you? Well I’m here! I’ve accepted every ounce you’ve given me, so let’s finish this! Why won’t you come to me? Where are you, D’abel? Fucking snake, where are you?!”
The frosty wall of sea fret gave me no answers as its silence engulfed the fishing boat and its horn. The dinghies in the bay disappeared into its grey mist one by one by one. I opened my arms as it hit my front with a soft chill that transported me into limbo.
I was nowhere, standing in the waters off Porthdinllaen. Liminal and timeless. At least it felt that way as my heart pounded in my ears and my blood scorched me from the inside like magma.
“Curse my name again, mine Tessa. You do it so prettily,”D’abel’s voice came from the fog, intimate, teasing, overpowering. Something big and soft brushed against my legs, disturbing the surface of the water like liquid glass. I chased it with my eyes, trying to catch a glimpse.
I turned, and there he was. D’abel, but not as I knew him. The creature that pulled on my heart and led me to Porthdinllaen was floating before me, the final two meters of his tail sliding against my skin as he wound his mass through the waters.
D’abel was a lindwyrm with four ruby eyes. His mass was like looking into oblivion, dark and endless, the edges warbling like a mirage to a dying man in a desert. Two draconic forelegs dug into the surf, gouging out new sandbanks while the rest of his body spiraled over itself like a sea serpent in ancient maps. Rather than long, silvery hair, rows and rows of spines twanged together down the ridge of his back, echoing across his domain like power lines in high wind.
As I gaped, he opened his mouth in a crocodilian grin. The interior was pillowy and muscular, sporting two rows of his wicked, curved teeth. Thousands of them. Thousands. A forked tongue slithered from the channel in his jaw as he tasted the air.
“It takes a lot to impress you,myn chalis,”his voice teased, though his mouth didn’t form words. It was bigger and deeper than the bass at a concert. World-shifting, sky-filling,monstrous…
Realizing that my jaw had dropped, I snapped my mouth closed and tightened my hold on the kitchen knife.
“It does,” I agreed, holding out my arm. I sliced it open once more and lifted it towards his curious tongue. “Now take it.”
20
Blood roared through my writhing lengths.Myn chaliswas here. In my waters. She’d hunted me to the ends of the continent, just as I’d hoped she would. She’d turned her cheek to me at last because she’d decided that I was her chosen fate. A creature she stared up at in awe rather than fear, her hair a wild tangle, her cheeks bristled from the cold wind…
Andgloriouslynaked.
Unguarded, she was blinding. Vulnerable like porcelain, but just as enduring and pristine as the relics of hundreds and thousands of years beneath my waves. I shivered, my spines snapping with a bright cacophony as they clashed like giants’ swords.
I wanted to shatter her.
My instincts roared louder than a storm in my mind. I was locked on mine Tessa like she was prey. Her acceptance was paramount to my survival. As her pulse thumped in her neck and her silky flesh pebbled up, I knew that I was on the brink of being saved. She saw me andliked it.She saw me andyearned.
I grinned, flexing my thousands of teeth, each one dripping with venom that spilled into the sea as if I were salivating. I tasted the air and wished the forked prongs were between her legs where they belonged.
“It takes a lot to impress you,myn chalis,”I teased, sensing her agreement. My muscles flexed as I tore through the sand with my claws, digging up the bedrock beneath like an eager hound.
She snapped her mouth closed and shuttered her expression, remembering herself and her layers of defensive stoicism. I smiled wider, appreciating the unmoored flutter of her lashes and the way her throat bobbed as she swallowed.
“It does,” she confirmed, holding out her arm to me. She closed her hand in a fist and I stared lovingly at the delicate green veins just beneath her transparent skin. And when she ran her blade over her flesh and dark red lifeblood swelled from the slice, I tensed, transfixed and hungry.
“Now take it,” she demanded, an unwanted warble in her tone.
I ripped my gaze from the ambrosia of her body and forced myself to look in her eyes. There was fear, the same as I’d seen in sailors for eons. An acceptance of the unknown.Me.
