Page 65 of Bloody Bargain
My boot caught her in the groin, and I propelled her over my head into the surf. I scrambled back, nursing my shoulder, and the water swallowed her whole.
I didn’t have time to pause. Another vicious growl sounded from above me and my head snapped up just in time to catch a droplet of saliva on my cheek. A fiend was several meters above me with its arms outstretched as it wriggled towards the edge of the cliffs. If it dropped, it would land on my head.
Swinging around the corner of the cliffs, I ran straight into a wall of heat so strong it raised goosebumps on my arms and bristled my cheeks. My eyes dried out instantly as I blinked, momentarily blinded and swinging my dagger in case something was ahead.
And there was. As my eyes blurred and my lungs filled with white-hot steam, I heard bubbling, clinking, dragging…
“Stay back!” a deep, strained voice ordered.
I gasped, shuffling away from the roasting steam far enough to keep my eyes open. Tears streamed down my cheeks and evaporated before they reached my chin. But squinting against the bleary glow, I saw a black silhouette heaving in the middle of a glowing pool of yellow and red.
“Holy shit,” I breathed, pressing myself against the entrance I’d flung myself into. It was a new crevasse brought on by the earthquake, and in the center of it was Gamil, with their tall ears and glowing white eyes, wrapping iron chains around their forearms and pulling until the muscles of their bare shoulders bulged taut.
The fallen god looked over their shoulder at me with a strained grin.
“We can’t die, but you can,fyxen,”they called, wincing as the magma bubbled up and splashed across their skin. “Go, hurry!”
I stumbled back out into the chilly autumn sea air and swerved around the side of the slit in the rock. It glowed like a molten sword, casting a long ray of golden light across the dark tide. Gamil followed on my heels, stumbling to their knees. I reached for their shoulders, but they hissed, all seven eyes as bright as flashlights.
“Don’t,” they warned as their hands and arms charred to the bone and disintegrated into the sand. “Too hot–”
I grabbed them under the arms anyway, dragging them out of the path of the growing yellow light and heat. A heartbeat later, the crevasse erupted with lava like someone had popped a cork on the Earth’s mantle. Its roiling stream spilled into the ocean with the force of a freight train as I collapsed into the sand with Gamil sprawled over my legs.
But only half of them.
“What were you doing?” I hissed, shoving my hands into a puddle of saltwater caught in the rocks. The salt stung, but it was better than the burns bubbling on my palms. The pain fizzled out like pop rock candy.
Gamil smiled breathlessly, looking up at me from my lap. They hadn’t stumbled onto their knees when they’d escaped the cave. They’d melted down to a stumpy torso with blackened bones for arms. Rivers of yellow yolk pumped through the holes that lava had eaten through their skin. The yellow goop coated their fangs and festered where their skin peeled up like a roasted pig. How they were alive, I couldn’t fathom.
“We’re a god, love. ‘Tis but a scratch. Just a flesh wound.”
My brow creased and I scoffed, indignation flashing in my glare. “Did you just quote Monty Python?”
“Today was the first day anyone has spoken to us in a long while,” they continued without acknowledging, well,anythingelse. The lava, their leglessness, the fiend clinging to the grassy overhang above us. They just stared at me with a doped up smile that alarmed me.
“Gamil, you’re in shock,” I said calmly. I pressed my raw palms into the sand and dragged us further away from the heat now that my palms had stopped bubbling with blisters. The god was so toasted, they could have been Anakin Skywalker’s body double. There was nothing I could do, but the urge to dosomethingplagued me anyway.
“Certainly,” they sighed dreamily, watching the fiend looking for a way down as spittle foamed at its mouth. “We have not been honored in battle since the b’adruokh were last free. Yet here we lay, honored once more.”
I grunted absently in response and pressed my fingers carefully against the pulse in their neck. It was erratic but strong. Confusing. I should have been comforting them, but why comfort a god that brought out vintage movie quotes while roasting alive?
Instead my frayed temper colored my tone as I slid out from under their head. “Yeah, well, I don’t know if a simple thanks really counts.”
Gamil’s glowing white eyes slid to mine and they winked every other one with a snaggle-toothed grin. “We’ll take the win regardless.”
The lava belched from the scar in the cliffs with a knot of shackles and blackened stones speared through with massive red-hot bolts. All at once, the river slowed as if the pressure had equalized within the earth, and it pooled like asphalt tar, slowly eating away the rocks and beach as it flattened like a pancake.
“Gamil,” I warned, my eyes growing wide as I stared at that knot of iron. “What did youdo?”
They lifted their head with a wince, then let it fall back on my thigh.
“Meet Tsemkhoa ad B’adruokh,” they coughed, groaning as the sand streamed over their burned flesh like mycelium. “Your snake’s brother.”
I jumped to my feet, dumping Gamil like a lap full of hot potatoes.
“Cnych,hey!” they complained. But my lungs pumped as if I was running a marathon and my heart beat its wings like it was trying to escape a cage. There, in the middle of the pool of red molten earth, was a mass of black hair and delicately pointed ears. Shoulders ripped ragged and bound too tightly with chains wrapped from wrist to bicep. A tail that was barely intact, bones bubbling along the surface of his hell water as it clung to itself by shreds of skin and scales.
He was a corpse. A familiar corpse. One that I desperately never wanted to see so mangled and close to death ever again.
