Page 64 of Bloody Bargain
D’abel’s scales smoked black and his shadow warped into a monstrous eel looming in his wake, haunting his heels. It swam in and out of the wet grass, longer than a semi truck. When it reared up, it opened its maw and swallowed my b’adruokh whole.
D’abel’s lindwyrm form clawed its way into the corporeal realm with its two front claws. His tail spiraled out behind him and spikes erupted from his long spine like sheets of metal warped to make thunder sounds. It clashed and echoed, piercing my ears as they dueled with each other.
When the firstaufreached him, he used those blades to swipe them off the cliffs and cut their legs open. Those that fell into the water met black whirlpools with frothing white seafoam that sucked them under and smashed them against the rocks.
D’abel opened his maw and bellowed in a long, eerie call, shaking out his spines like hundreds of swords. He smashed a fiend beneath his claw, tore into another with his teeth, crushed two with his tail like an anaconda. They climbed the spines on his back with bleeding hands as it cut their forearms to ribbons. Some made it to his face, but many more slid off when their arms stopped working. When that happened, they split their human faces open to expose rows and rows of teeth to attack him with their mouths instead.
D’abel bled and my heart did too. I squeezed S’ba harder as theaufbathed themselves in his inky blood. He spent more and more time clearing the field with his tail and using his claws to rip shoulders from necks where teeth were clamped into his scales. He was slowing down, probably in a lot of pain…
And then one slid out of the grass behind him, a skull-white forehead with thin black hair that glowed against the evening blue. The fiend was dressed in dark silk pajamas, clawing his way through the blood-slick grass until his bare feet found purchase. Another pulled itself from the rocks, narrowly escaping the whirlpools that would have ripped its stolen body apart. It stumbled sideways, then ran after the first, half its body now covered in smears of blood and soil.
“Go,” I told myself, forcing my feet to carry me forward. I walked slowly as they raged, sprinting faster than humans were built for. My heart raced with them, but I forced myself to breathe deep, to walk, not run. I needed every ounce of stamina to survive.
The first was twenty paces ahead of the second, snorting and sniffing and giggling as it caught my scent. I twisted S’ba across my body as it approached, probably smelling of fear as I counted like a metronome in my mind. I paced my breathing and my thoughts to overcome the terror seeping out of every pore. And when the first fiend flew at me, I jumped back, swiping S’ba across its abdomen with wrenching force. Its nails raked down my arm, but it fell to the ground with a shriek. It writhed and roiled, clutching itself as it twitched.
I lifted my arm as it stitched itself closed again, leaving just a few thin streaks of red streaming down my fingers. Maybe I really could make it until dawn. S’ba was sharper than any knife I’d ever held, and it felt longer than reality… A morphing, shifting sort of magic that I couldn’t define.
And didn’t have time to.
The second fiend knocked me to the ground. I jammed the knife into its ribs, my hand bruising against the crossguard. It opened its mouth and I heard the sounds of the Ruggles train passing by. Saw its headlights as they flashed through the benches and lampposts…
I grabbed the thing’s hair and jerked it hard to the side just in time. Its teeth sank into my shoulder as I withdrew my dagger from its ribs and punched it back in, searching for vital organs. Its mouth went slack and I pushed it off, tossing it to the side with a breathless grunt.
The first time I’d felt my own body stitch closed, it had been nauseating, but now it was a comfort. I climbed to my feet to check on D’abel and what other fiends might be coming for me. He was holding the line, but my blood chilled when a fiend launched itself at his tail, impaling itself on one of his spines. They weren’t even fighting him anymore…
They were trying to weigh him down instead.
My eyes went wide with fear. “No,” I breathed, taking a step forward as flashes of my greatest fears filled my mind like ice. “D’a–ah!”
The peninsula quaked so hard under the weight of the battle that I fell to my knees. S’ba clattered out of my hands and I scrambled after it, taking my eyes off of D’abel as he whirled and clutched at the bodies piling on his spines. He threw several off, three stumbling to their feet behind him and locking eyes with me.
I stepped back behind the bodies I’d already dropped so they couldn’t trip me, and resumed breathing. Counting.
D’abel would bail when he needed to. I trusted him.
Something hissed at my back. I gasped, whirling with my dagger up. There were no fiends behind me, but steam rolled out of the base of the peninsula’s tip in a thick plume of white that glowed in the worsening darkness. The cliffs shook again, splitting the ground into deep crevasses that bled more steam into the air around me.
Whatever was happening below my feet, it wasn’t D’abel. He was snarling in a rage, thrashing his encumbered tail. He understood what the fiends were trying to do too, and he wasn’t going to let them do it. His attention was devoted to smearing bodies off his spines while keeping the fresheraufat bay.
If I jump, the sea will catch me.
I glanced at the fiends closing in, then turned and ran for the edge of the cliffs. It was up to me if we held our ground or jumped into the sea, so whatever was happening beneath our feet was my responsibility. What if the fiends had stood at the edge of Morfa Nefyn as a distraction from others digging a hole behind our backs?
The eerie silence of the fiendish swarm erupted into shrieks and snarls. They howled like sirens, raising the hairs on my arms and neck. I didn’t know what it meant, but a sense of doom misted like sweat on my skin, twisting up my guts and my soul…
So I ran harder.
25
I slid down the sandy slope of a worn-down trail towards a hidden sliver of beach at the tip of the peninsula, my arms crossed over my head as rocks the size of my fist tumbled from the quaking cliffs. It was worse down here, and my feet sifted through the sand, sucked into the ground so that it was difficult to run. I weaved like a drunk on a ship, thudding elbow first into the cliffs when the earthquake threatened to toss me straight over the edge of the trail.
Savage snarls ripped through the rumbling air. I glanced back with wild eyes, my hair stuck to my sweaty forehead and temples. One of the fiends was right on me, its guts bulging from a slit in its abdomen. It must have been one of the bodies that had piled onto D’abel’s spines.
Our eyes caught, and she bared her teeth. Too many of them, with thin lips stretched over her gums. She clicked her tongue with excitement, stumbling down the path towards me.
I kept one arm over my head and held out S’ba, feeling for a spot on the slope that might give me more stability. To the fiend, I looked trapped, but the ocean was a wind at my back. She had the high ground, but I had everything else. My hands trembled, but I managed a cocked smile.
She launched into me, her saw-blade teeth aimed at my soft abdomen. I jammed my dagger’s hilt into the back of her head as I pulled her hair, keeping her teeth inches from my skin as we tumbled. I cushioned our fall into the craggy trail, taking a smooth boulder to the hip, several jagged ones to the shoulder and the back of the arm. The water licked my hair and I kicked with a desperate growl, trying to dislodge her. She barked into my face with decaying breath.
