Page 33 of Bloody Bargain
I scooped up my hair and held it with a sigh, resting my fists on the top of my head. Whatever reservations I had about D’abel, no matter that he’d turned out to be an ancient fuckboy, I’d decided when I left the United States that I would put my all into this compulsion of mine. There was no other path for me anymore.
So what did it matter if I gave him my blood and my body? The fact that I was still denying him proved that I wasn’t as selfless as I’d thought. Blood in exchange for heightened senses? A hunting partner for life? I could kill so many more. I could be absolutelysure…
My heart skipped again, but rather than hope, I felt worry for D’abel.
Screw the shower and the lotion. My boots were dry enough to go on a hike and look for–
“Dew, dew,if I’d have known you were such a delicious tart, I’d have come for you earlier, love.”
I spun toward the door, automatically holding out a fist as if I had my knife. Stark terror gripped me when I realized it was still under my pillow on the other side of the room.
The woman from the corner store glanced from my face to my hand. A smile crept slowly across her mouth, distorting what was once a sweet face into a monstrous expression. She had painted her lips the same sickening color of salmon pink as her nails, and she now clasped her hands in front of her, tapping a little hum against her stomach with her thumbs.
“Rumors do fly about you,” she giggled, pushing off the door.
“I don’t leave anything alive to spread them,” I retorted carefully. I put the bed and stool between us, slowly stepping back as she stepped forward. Soon, I’d hit the window, trapped against the cold panes.
“Exactly,” she said, eyes alight with excitement. “We’d thought you were one of our own gone rogue. But here you are!” She shrieked a high-pitched laugh, doubled over in mirth. She thrust her finger out at me. “Just a humangirlwith a pet!”
My hands trembled and my vision blurred from an intense rush of adrenaline. I’d always been so careful to surprise my victims, to catch them off guard with normal human conversation and reactions to their suggestive magic. Even in the heathlands when the shadows found me, I had protection and a plan.
But what could I do in the yellow suite in nothing but my underwear? There wasn’t even a lamp for me to brandish or a bottle to break. My whiskey was already packed in my duffel by the door.
Faced with my worst nightmare–an inevitable nightmare–I recited my daily cannon to myself.
As long as I take one with me, I'll die happy.
I lunged for my pillow.
The fiend was lightning quick. Salmon pink claws dug into my arm, but my other hand closed around the hilt of my busted knife. She was on top of me, reaching for my neck, a knee jammed into the small of my back and grinding down on one of my kidneys. She giggled, a girlish, gleeful sound. When I looked up at her, I didn’t see her face. I saw Riggles Station. I saw the hollow faces of the homeless.
Don’t help her.
I heard thatfuckingtrain…
I twisted beneath the curtain of her red hair and slammed my knife through the lumpy goose down pillow.
She howled in pain as the point bit into her torso. I couldn’t see where, focusing all my effort on driving up and up and up, muscles burning with fire. I needed to do as much damage as possible before she got the upper hand if I had any hope at all.
I slammed my hand under her chin, blood from her ruptured guts pouring all over my sheets and arms and feather down. My hand was bright red, slick, and unsteady. Still, it was enough to shut her up. As I squeezed her trachea, she coughed violently in my face, spraying spit on my cheeks that smelled like old xylitol gum. She latched onto my hair and dragged me sideways, trying to force my head down.
I ripped my knife back and left it in the pillow where it snagged on the cotton pillow case and feathers. She held my hair in a vise grip that obscured my vision, and I stabbed myself in the thigh as I flailed.
This was it.
I let go of fighting her as she pushed me down face first, smashing my nose and mouth into the fluffy mattress topper. I was twisted, my neck and back screaming for the corkscrew she’d made out of my spine. There wasn’t much left I could do except conserve my breath and try to die happy.
I felt around her face with my weakened left hand, shaking and numb, until I found her eye socket and dug two fingers in, hooking them under the lip of her cheekbone.
The fiend shrieked, trying to wrestle me off as my nails scratched at her cornea, but my death grip was driven by the self-destructive confidence that I was about to be snuffed out. She scrambled, letting go of my head, and I gulped down air with a painful inhale.
When I hammered my knife into her body, I didn’t expect for it to find her throat. It caught on the corrugated cartilage of her esophagus and tore through her carotid artery on one side. The spray was immense as she gurgled. She fell into the hand-made quilt, lurching as her blood vessels blackened and air whistled through the bubbling gash of her esophagus instead of making it to her lungs.
Big, blood-shot eyes stared up at me, violently angry. I shook all over, breathing harder than if I’d run a marathon. But the knife–my dearest friend–was stuck in the bitch fiend’s throat and I was standing.
“You should have listened to the rumors,” I quivered.
When her glare fogged over, I dropped to my knees involuntarily, unable to stand on my own.
