Chapter 6
Six
Elaine
Ifollowed Timur silently across the desert, my feet sinking into the black sand. He’d offered me a ride the moment we’d left the tent, but I’d refused. The image of the white skull with red ruby eyes floated in my mind, overlapping with the image of his face split between a living being and a bone.
“What are you?” I’d asked Timur before and never got an actual answer.
Maybe the question should've been “What happened to you?”
Though, I doubted he would’ve answered that either. The one question I had to answer for myself was whether I even needed to know anything about him. Did I want to care?
At the edge of the cliff, I caught up with Timur and asked the most important question that I definitely needed him to answer.
“Timur, am I safe with you?”
He stopped at the top of the path to go down.
From where I stood, it looked like he hovered over the dark abyss, on the precipice of a fall.
But if he fell, I’d fall with him to whatever end, whether I wanted it or not.
Because my life was tied to his now. I hadn’t planned for it and certainly didn’t wish for it, but it happened, and I had to know what to expect.
“Tell me,” I demanded. “Tell me how safe I am with someone like you.”
“Someone like me…” he repeated bitterly.
He raised his head. With him sitting in the chair, we were at the same eye level.
He freed his hand from his cloak, his right hand that looked like a snow-white sculpture of bones and claws.
He raised it to his hood, then pulled it off his head, exposing his face, all of it, including the half-mask of bone on his right side.
I shrank back with a gasp, not expecting the gesture. However, now that he wasn’t roaring and screaming, it really looked like the face of a handsome man with ink-black shimmering skin wearing a white skull mask of a beast.
“You’re afraid of me,” he said with a long sigh.
It wasn’t a question. He didn’t ask because he already knew the answer. But he was wrong, I realized. I wasn’t afraid. Or at least not as much as I was before.
“What you do is far more important to me than what you look like,” I explained. “That’s why I’m asking you. What are you planning to do to me? Not just tonight or tomorrow, but a week from now, a year? A decade?” The last word fluttered from my lips on a trembling exhale.
Was this really my future now? Was I going to live and die as someone’s property? Would I never belong to myself again?
He took the leather purse of gold that I’d earned for him tonight and set it heavily on his knee.
“I bought you for this, Sweet One. The gold I spent for you? I need it back, all of it and more.”
“I never asked to be sold or bought,” I scoffed. “I don’t care how much you paid for me. It doesn’t obligate me to you in any way.”
“Yet you will have to work to earn it all back.” His voice remained infuriatingly calm.
The red eye in the white socket of the skull glistened menacingly in the dark.
He didn’t look like a human or a fae, but like some demonic entity—cold and unyielding.
And that scared me. Fear urged me to run.
I trembled head to toe, but I stood my ground.
My courage was fueled by desperation and undoubtedly by the wine I’d drunk at dinner.
“What if I refuse?” I challenged. “What if I don’t do a fucking thing for you?
You can bring the entire city of Kalmena here, with all its wealth and glitter.
You can tie me up and have a million tendrils shoved into my emotions.
But you can’t force me to enjoy dinner the way I did tonight.
This gold there…” I tipped my chin at the bag on his knee.
“You only have it because I wanted you to have it.”
He sat in silence for a moment, as though contemplating my words.
I knew I’d pushed it, and I hoped it wouldn’t turn things for the worse for me.
What I said was true only as far as my joy from food or wine went.
But there were many other forms of pleasure, some of which could be forced by that fucking golden flower.
I said he couldn’t force me, but the truth was, he really could.
Thankfully, Timur never wore the flower on his clothing.
I hadn’t seen it in his dwelling on the beach either, and I hoped that he either didn’t know about the flower’s effects on humans or just couldn’t get his hands on it.
For as long as that remained the case, I held leverage in this negotiation.
He lifted his right hand, and I stepped back again, afraid he might strike me, but he brought it to the clasp of his cloak at the base of his throat.
“What if I told you what I need the money for?” he asked in a quiet, low voice as if revealing a secret. “Would honesty earn me your cooperation?”
Honesty was a good start.
“There’s one way to find out, isn’t there?” I said tentatively. “What do you need the money for, Timur?”
He unclipped the clasp and opened his cloak.
It caught on his wide shoulders. With a wince, he yanked the fabric down, revealing a wide white plate that covered his right shoulder.
With a cluster of bumps and spikes sticking out, it looked like a skeletal version of medieval armor.
The hard, exposed bone descended down his right arm, turning to white, flat scales where it connected with his skin.
The scales ran down his upper arm, then merged with the solid bones of his right forearm that then extended into his skeletal right hand.
It looked as if the skeleton of a mythical beast had half-swallowed a man. Resulting in something unnatural and grotesque.
“How…” I blinked, but the image wouldn’t change. Because it wasn’t an illusion. It was real. “How is it even possible?”
“It shouldn’t be possible. That’s what everyone told me. The bite of a virutu dragon is deadly. I was supposed to die, but I killed him first. Then, instead of dying, I lay paralyzed by his venom as it slowly dripped into me from his teeth embedded right here…”
He found the side slit in his skirt and flung the fabric aside, revealing his legs.
A scream caught in my throat. The gleaming white bones stood in a stark contrast to the darkness of the night.
His feet were shaped like those of an animal, with his heels extended into hocks that bent backwards.
The long bones of his toes ended with curved talons.
His left thigh remained normal with skin stretched over hard muscles and a triple sheath with throwing knives strapped to it.
But his right leg was just bones below the knee. The outside of his right thigh was covered by the white, flat scales, similar to the scales on his upper arm. A crescent-shaped indentation marred the scales in the middle of his thigh, as if the flesh under them had sunk into the bone beneath.
Timur dug the claws of his right hand into the indentation.
“Right here,” he said, grinding his teeth. “The dragon’s bite. This is where his poison seeped into my body for several weeks after his death until they found me. For weeks, I just lay there, unable to move a muscle, as it spread through me, rotting my body from the inside.”
“Oh God…” I closed my eyes, unable to imagine the full horror of what he must’ve felt while dying a slow torturous death and fully aware that he could do nothing to stop it. “How did you survive? Why didn’t it kill you?”
He exhaled a long breath.
“I don’t know. Nobody knows. A hag told me that because the poison was not released all at once but instead dripped into my body slowly for weeks, it didn’t kill me outright. But it will still kill me.”
“What do you mean?” I swallowed hard as worry dried my throat. “The poison is gone, isn’t it? The dragon is no longer here.”
“The dragon isn’t, but his poison remains in my veins, and it never stopped taking over my body.”
I ran both hands through my hair, staring out into the vast darkness of the ocean below. Still a day ago, I didn’t care whether Timur lived or died. Maybe I would’ve even preferred him dead if it gave me my freedom back. Now, dread seized my heart with icy fingers.
Was compassion at the root of it? Maybe.
But I also dreaded for my future. As a human, I feared I had no chance of survival in Ashgate on my own.
One way or another, a fae would claim their ownership over me.
At least Timur was someone I could communicate with, which was infinitely better than being at the mercy of someone cruel like Ray.
“What if it takes over your body completely? Will you die? Or will you turn into a dragon?” I asked, holding my breath in anticipation of his answer.
“I’m not turning into a virutu dragon, Sweet One.
Not exactly,” he replied slowly, as if unsure of the answer himself.
He gestured at his face. “This is not how they look. Virutu dragons are creatures made of blood and flesh. They have black scales on the outside and black skin underneath. Their bones are white, but they’re inside their bodies, covered with flesh, skin, and scales.
What I am…” He glanced down at his deformed, skeletal feet, then yanked the fabric of his skirt over them, hiding them from view.
“No one knows what I am or what I will become at the end. What happened to me has never happened to anyone else. All I know is that it’s been ten years since the bite, and all these years, I’d been slowly losing parts of my body to the poison and pain.
I’ve lost everything of the life I used to have—from the people I held dear, to the position I honored, to the status and respect I’d worked hard to earn. ”
His voice remained even. He wasn’t bemoaning his fate but simply telling me the facts.
“I’m so sorry, Timur,” I said and meant it with all my heart.
He held my gaze for one long moment, not searching for sympathy or even an acknowledgement but simply giving me time to absorb his words.