Page 66 of Bloody Bargain
I took a step and a spindly, skeletal hand clutched my ankle.
“No,fyxen,”Gamil said slowly, scowling at me with all their fangs bared. “You arenotgoing to wade through lava to go save another pet.”
I blinked at the warbling heat of the blackened pool. The bottoms of my boots were hot and my cheeks were sharp with blistering pain. I shuffled back, dumbfounded. What the hell had I been thinking?
Gamil sighed with relief, dropping their head in the chilly sand.
“What did you–”
“Just wait for it, love.”
And then I felt it. That unmistakable pull of gravity on my fingers and toes, knocking my equilibrium off balance. I stumbled sideways into the cliffside like a sailor tossed in a storm at sea, and I pinned the god with a glare of disbelief.
The anchor hidden inside the crevasse Gamil had gouged out of the peninsula groaned. Without the b’adruokh to hold its anchor aloft, the corner of reality buckled and fell.
An earth-shattering gong resonated through the air and shook the ocean like there was a drumhead beneath the waves. I held my ears and gnashed my teeth, leaning against the stones as waves of sickness crashed through me. It was soloudthis time.
“The veil has fallen. They’re trapped here now,” Gamil said. Their voice was quiet, reflective, but cut through the terrible ringing in my ears. I managed to open my eyes and their image swam where they looked up at me with a sad smile. “For you, Tessa. We hope you’re prepared for the purge ahead.”
The sea sloshed and calmed as the vertigo passed, and I staggered upright. I couldn’t believe such words, could I? Gamil had betrayed their own children? It wasn’t possible. Millennia defending them, protecting them, hoping…
But the sounds of the battle above had changed. I glanced up at where that fiend had been trying to find a way down and saw that it was gone. The pounding rumble of feet was gone, replaced now with high-pitched screeches of frustration and pain. A sharp pang of worry hit me as I realized I couldn’t hear D’abel either.
I licked the sweat from my upper lip in thought. The lava blocked my path, but desperation was a motivating muse. I glanced back up where the fiend should have been slobbering down on us and grabbed the slick grass with determination.
“Thank you,” Gamil said. I paused, looking down at them. They were healing gruesomely, their arms and legs crawling with millions of grains of yolk-soaked sand and charred meat. “For thinking of us.”
“Yeah, well,” I hoisted myself up, S’ba catching a glimmer of moonlight. “Thanks for the dagger.”
Gamil laughed, but I didn’t look back at them. I kept my eyes firmly planted on that outcropping of dark grass and rocks. There were other steep footholds, as if beachgoers slid down to that little beach to steal moments of passion or quietude once in a while, so scrambling up was fast.
I gasped when I rolled over the ledge onto flat ground.
D’abel stood in the middle of a pile of bodies like a sandbank around an old tree stump. He was covered in blood, both his and theirs, breathing heavily with his teeth bared. Even from so far away, I heard the rasp of his lungs. His massive eyes found mine from across the distance, questioning.
Because the bodies around him weren’tdead.They writhed and twitched and clawed at themselves. I broke from his stare, walking up to the fiend that had been looming over the beach. It pierced its own face with its claws, remnants of human flesh hanging off its arms like a ratty old sweater.
It didn’t notice me. Because it was eating.
It snarled and tore chunks away from itself with piercing whines of agony. It rolled back and forth, a ghoulish creature like the one I’d seen at Riggles Station bursting from within the corpse it had been wearing like a sack adhered to its own flesh.
I knelt beside it, my dagger ready. It continued scraping its cheeks into its mouth, sickening globules that slithered down its throat without needing to swallow. It should have terrified me like Riggles did, but instead I saw its emaciated elbows and ribs, the sunken well of its eyes and cheeks, and I wondered what Gamil had ever seen in these monsters.
I slid S’ba between the creature’s arms and throat, then slit its trachea open. It noticed me then, but it was too late. I stood up as it gurgled and found D’abel was still watching me.
“You are well,myn chalis?”he asked with a hoarse breath, his voice so vast that it echoed along the coast. I couldn’t yell that far, so I waved my arms above my head and moved onto the next fiend.
Then the next, and the next, making my way towards my b’adruokh. Eventually he did the same, crushing theaufunder his claws and shoving them into the hungry ocean with his tail. I kept my eyes down, focused on the task of clearing the mindless undead from the battlefield.
It was grueling work. Traumatizing. Awful.
And despite the many questions swirling between D’abel and me, there was recognition that we needed to make short work of this. Theaufmight regain their senses once their cannibalistic feast was over.
So we helped the dead rest. Everything else would wait until morning.
26
Morfa Nefyn was purged two days later. Every home, business, and street was empty. No survivors, but no sign of a struggle either, as if everyone had been taken in their idle moments. Waiting for their tea to brew, napping by the windows, rocking their babes to sleep. The bloody peninsula had even been washed clean by a steady rain. Nothing appeared to be amiss, as if everyone just… vanished.
