Chapter 29 - Eden #2
Malachi wastes no time, rifling through the velvet back and spilling the remaining hoard of teeth onto the steel. “I’ll give you forty-five molars. Mortal. Roots thick enough to grind bone.”
The butcher looks at the pile of teeth and picks one up, inspecting it with a bored expression, then flicks it away. It skitters across the metal and falls into the muck beneath our feet.
“Boring.” The butcher inhales deeply, his nostrils flaring as he turns those dead, black eyes onto me.
“I don’t want teeth,” he purrs. His hand drifts down to the front of his blood-stiffened trousers, adjusting himself with a lewd, heavy-handed groping motion that makes bile rise in my throat. “I’ll take the leg instead.”
“Excuse me?” I squeak, shrinking back against Chain-Chewer’s flank.
“The left leg. Thigh to ankle,” the butcher bargains, licking his lips as his gaze drifts to my corset-covered midsection. “Or maybe the stomach. Yes... look at her. She looks soft. Doughy. A prime cut.”
He leans over the counter, the smell of musk and iron rolling off him in waves.
“I could make a killing off that stomach,” he whispers with a sick, cannibalistic lust. “That kind of blubber... I’d carve her up like a roast and sell her by the ounce to the highest bidder. Give me the fat, and I’ll give you the blade.”
I’m paralyzed, my boots glued to the sticky floor as the weight of the butcher’s gaze feels like physical hands mapping out the softest parts of me to carve away.
But before I can retch or even flinch back, the temperature around the stall spikes twenty degrees, and Chain-Chewer moves.
The Hellhound steps between me and the counter, his rocky hide scraping against the metal frame with a sound like nails on a chalkboard.
He growls so low that the jars of preserved organs on the shelves shake, the liquid inside frothing.
The butcher freezes, his black eyes flickering to the beast.
“Call off your hound,” he sneers, though his voice wavers as Chain-Chewer’s jaws part, revealing a cavernous gullet. “Unless you want me to skin him, too.”
“No,” Malachi says calmly, though his muscles are coiled tight enough to snap under his shirt. “And I’m not paying for the scalpel.”
The butcher blinks, brow furrowing. “What?”
Malachi smiles, the expression not reaching his eyes. “I said, I’m. Not. Paying.”
Malachi moves with that terrifying, liquid speed that makes him look like a glitch in reality—one second he’s standing still, the next he’s a blur of silver violence.
He lashes out across the counter, not to barter, not to haggle, but to take.
His fingers close around the Void-Glass scalpel, snatching it right out from under the butcher’s nose with a grip tight enough to draw his own silver blood against the blade.
The butcher roars and brings the cleaver down with enough force to split an atom. It misses me by a fraction of an inch, embedding itself deep into the steel with a deafening, spark-throwing clang.
Malachi spins, his hand slamming into my chest and shoving me backward so hard I nearly go flying into a stack of crates filled with God-knows-what.
“Run!” he bellows. “Move your ass, Eden! Go!”
I scramble backward, my boots skating on the gore-slicked floor like I’m on ice, and then I turn and run. I run like the Devil herself is snapping at my heels—which, considering where we are, is a distinct statistical possibility.
“Thief!” the butcher shrieks. “Stop them! Rip the skin from their backs!”
We tear through the crowd, a battering ram of adrenaline and terror.
Chain-Chewer is a blurred streak of magma and noise, barking with a sound like cannon fire as he snaps at anything stupid enough to block our path.
He barrels through a stall of hanging meats, sending carcasses flying like morbid confetti, creating a path through the crush of startled, screeching demons who scramble back into the shadows to avoid the heat radiating off him.
I’m sprinting, my lungs burning like I’ve swallowed a mouthful of broken glass, and my legs feel like they’re filled with lead. I’m slipping on grease, dodging elbows and claws, my vision tunneling to Malachi’s silver skin ahead of me.
“Malachi!” I wheeze, the cry tearing out of my raw throat.
“You are dragging,” he snaps, stopping for a split second to scoop me up into his arms. He holds me tight against his chest, one arm hooked under my knees, the other clamping my ribs to his so hard it bruises.
“Hold on,” he growls against my ear. “And for the love of everything unholy, do not vomit on me.”
He hits the base of the rickety metal staircase at a dead sprint, taking the rusted steps three at a time. The entire structure groans and shrieks under the impact of his boots, swaying over the abyss of the market below like a pendulum of death.
We breach the invisible membrane of the barrier with a wet, pressurized pop that makes my ears ring, and suddenly, the roaring chaos of the Slag Heaps is severed.
I bury my face in his neck, inhaling the scent of spice and fire to scrub the smell of the market out of my nose, while my brain frantically tallies the score like a demented cashier.
We have the Stasis Rattle, purchased with a bag of bloody molars and a lie about a baby that doesn't exist. We have the Void-Glass scalpel, stolen from a cannibalistic pervert who wanted to turn my thighs into steaks.
It’s the most fucked-up scavenger hunt in history, and I’m just the mortal baggage being carried away by the demonic thief.
But as the hush dies and the Vein comes back into view, I don’t care. We’re one step closer to having this bind severed.