Page 67 of Bloody Bargain
I began to rethink Roanoke Island.
But there were signs. A bag of mail that had been dropped in the middle of the road. A little cottage with foggy windows thanks to its dangerously overheated stove. Laundry soaked through on a clothesline. A restaurant full of tables with half-eaten food and personal effects. Purses, phones, a pair of sandals, a pacifier.
My skin prickled as I walked between buildings in silence, my boots crunching on the damp grit of the cobblestones and roads. The ghostly remnants of interrupted lives haunted the village everywhere I looked, no different than the evacuation zones around Chernobyl or Fukushima. Like people that visited those abandoned zones as morbid tourists, I felt the wrongness breathing down my neck.
The veil had crushed the slip between realms and now the world was too quiet.
“You are famished, beloved.”
D’abel’s clawtips brushed gently at my dry curls as we walked through the rain. I felt each drop, but none of them dampened my skin or hair. My clothes on the other hand…
“How far out did you check?” I asked, annoyed that I couldn’t put my hands in my pockets without feeling like they were encased in vinyl gloves and shoved in some jelly. My brain wasn’t programmed for the odd sensation yet.
“About one hundredmille,if that is still a unit of measurement. There are abandoned chariots and broken windows. Very few people, but those I saw were moving quietly.” He stroked my cheek, stopping us in the middle of the path that would lead out towards Porthdinllaen as I took that in.
Gamil had given me exactly what I wanted at a terrible cost. How many people would have preferred to live with the shell of their loved one rather than see the monster within? More than wanted the truth, I knew that from experience. My compulsion had ripped lives apart and there was no healing that.
I closed my eyes and reminded myself of why I’d taken so many lives in the last three years. Forty-seven, excluding Morfa Nefyn. I would never forget them. The schoolboy, the grandmother, Matthew… Glenn. I bit my lip at thinking his name. I pictured him in my mind for the first time in more than a year. My favorite picture of Reed, Glenn, and I at a park drinking sneaky margaritas while we fed the ducks.
Tears threatened to bead up in the corners of my eyes and I clenched my jaw hard. I hadn’t stayed around long enough to know… I’d just gutted him and fled. And I would never know. I’d never look to confirm one way or the other because if he hadn’t been a fiend and I’d murdered him, my soul would die.
With a deep, long inhale, I bottled it all back up. Buttoned my grief away and walled it off with ice. I reminded myself that a fiend had rippedmylife apart too. They’d stolen someone thatIloved. Had desecratedmyfriend’s body. My compulsion didn’t come from some broken thing inside me. It came from empathy. And it was right, even if it was the hardest thing to do. Even if I was a villain. I felt that down to my soul.
“My wife is deep in thought,” D’abel said gently, pinching my chin until I blinked away from the steaming sea and looked up at him. His double pupils were pressed together so that all four vertical slits drank me in. “You must eat. I insist.”
I cleared my throat, pulling my chin out of his forefinger and thumb. The tip of his tail wrapped around my ankle instead, possessive and stubborn.
“You need to go see your brother. And thank Gamil.”
We stared off, D’abel’s jaw clenching. I’d told him what happened, of course. As soon as the sun rose and we’d survived the night. I tried to pull him towards the maw of lava pouring into the sea, but he’d resisted. There had been hundreds of fiends, and we’d barely cleared the area surrounding the pub by morning. His brother had been chained for hundreds of years. He could wait another day. It was fear hiding behind common sense, and I’d caved to it.
Not anymore though. The human corpses had been fed to the sea, and theaufhad all disintegrated into piles of soil, sand, and seafoam.
“They did it for you,” he reasoned. “Surely no thanks are needed. I would much prefer to eat them than thank them.”
It was my turn to pet him, brushing my fingers down his chest as I combed his perfectly straight white hair. His scales were raised and rough under my fingers like hackles.
“Go,” I told him. “And no eating meddlesome gods. I’ll get breakfast for us both, then come find you.”
I stopped by the pub and greeted Dafydd. He was trembling and had cut himself more than once as he chopped vegetables, but hummed and smiled as if it was a beautiful, peaceful morning. I frowned as he whipped up four omelettes filled with chunky mushrooms, carrots, onions, and spinach.
We’d found him trapped inside the walk-in fridge while two fiends writhed on the kitchen tiles the morning after the fight. He’d latched onto me, insisting that he owed me his life. I tried to soothe him, but D’abel told me it was a product of my glamour. The cook felt a sense of loyalty so strong that it had stitched his spirit to mine. My very own Renfield. It was an uncomfortable thought, and I didn’t have the bandwidth to examine it just yet.
Omelettes stacked neatly in a paper bag, I picked my way down the damp and sandy trail to that little sliver of beach. I wasn’t surprised when I found Gamil crushed against the cliffs, D’abel’s mouth unhinged as he pressed his elbow into their neck. His tail lashed the sand, spraying grit across the lava flow that was still glowing red on the inside. Tsemkhoa hadn’t woken up yet, nor had anyone unbound his arms.
“I brought breakfast,” I said, waving the bag. D’abel licked his tongue back into his mouth, shoving off Gamil as he pointed a claw in their face.
“You must tell her,” he hissed at the deity.
I sat down on a rock–making sure it wasn’t a dollop of cooling lava, of course–and waved my bag of breakfast at them.
“Is it a matter of life or death?” I asked, brow piqued.
“No,” Gamil said easily. We both turned to D’abel.
“No,” he ground out. He huffed through his nose, loosening his shoulders. “But it is important.”
“Time sensitive?”
