The remaining two traders abandoned their fight with Timur and lunged for me instead. Timur swiped with his tail, knocking one of them off his feet. Sinking his claws into the trader’s eye sockets, he snapped his head back, breaking his neck.
The second trader rushed to me. I tripped in the sand and fell on my ass. Panic rolled through me. Afraid to look away from the advancing trader, I searched around me blindly for something…anything to help me fight him. My hand fell on the hard, smooth handle of Piara’s spear in the sand, and I closed my fingers around it.
The trader ran to me, tucking his knife into the sheath on his belt. He wasn’t planning on killing me. He wanted to grab me, carry me away…steal me.
I held up the spear, and he smirked. A lone human woman facing him with a spear she could barely lift clearly didn’t seem like a threat to him.
My arms shook from strain. I staggered back as he approached like a wall of dark shadows and hard muscles ready to overrun and crush me. My legs trembled. I fell down on my knees, but held on to the spear, my only weapon.
Propping the back of the spear into the sand, I aimed the sharp end at the trader’s chest.
Faced with the spear pointed at him, he came to a halting stop. Flailing his arms, he sucked in a breath to avoid my spear, and he would’ve avoided it. But with a flash of white wings, Timur appeared behind him and shoved him forward, right onto the sharp end of the spear.
Through my hands gripping the spear, I felt the nauseating sensation of the point going through the living, breathing flesh. Warm dark blood poured from the wound, running down the wooden handle and coating my hands.
I jerked away, letting go of the weapon. The fae and the spear tipped sideways before crashing onto the sand.
With a heart-wrenching roar, Timur bent over in pain.
“Timur!” I rushed to him, but he hit the ground, and I leaped away, lest he knock me off my feet.
I took a frantic look around, searching for more attackers, but there was no one left alive. Timur had torn them all to pieces. Their bodies littered the beach. The storm was burying them with sand already, and the wind was shredding the black shadows of decomposition that rose from the dead.
Fae weren’t easy to kill. Bullets would cause them very little damage. Cuts and gashes healed quickly, leaving no scars on their perfect bodies. Only Nerifir iron could kill them, and only if it pierced their vital organs or stayed in the wound long enough to lethally poison their blood.
Yet being torn to pieces brutally and savagely like this left no one a chance for survival. All my attackers were now dead.
But were there more coming?
I spun around, trying to peer through the storm. The steel-gray waves rolled ashore, the surf beating frantically against the beach. Wind slammed into the Wall, howling through the caves. Sand churned in the air, blocking sunlight and obscuring my already impaired vision. I couldn’t see much, but no one else seemed to emerge from the storm.
A gust of wind tore the roof of our hut and hurled it my way. I dropped to the ground, cowering under my bent arm. The roof flew over me, then slammed into someone else’s hut. The debris then rolled along the beach, tossed and kicked by the storm until it crashed into the Wall with a sound I couldn’t hear over the wind, the raging ocean, and the roars of agony.
“Timur!” I fought the wind on my way to him.
He rolled on the ground, crushing his wings under him. His tail lashed, raising clouds of sand in its wake. He arched hisback with a tortured scream, his fingers and claws digging deep grooves in the ground. The next moment, he folded into himself, breathless from pain.
His torture was never-ending. Moving hurt him, but he couldn’t stop moving. Pain wouldn’t let him rest.
“Timur, please…” Crouching down, I tried to get to him.
His tail lashed over my head. Its sharp end embedded into the beach less than a step away. He’d kill me. And he wouldn’t even know what he did. But if I didn’t stop him from rolling and thrashing, I feared he’d break his wings and possibly many other bones in his body.
“Timur! Look at me!” I screamed through the wind and the waves.
But he didn’t hear me. Or maybe he couldn’t process what he heard, blinded by the unimaginable pain.
His injured wing stretched over me like a torn sail, then collapsed, folding like a broken shelter. I dropped to my hands and knees and crawled under it.
Timur rolled onto his back, and I climbed on top of him, straddling his thighs and pressing his legs into the sand with my weight.
“Keep still. Please, please… Just try,” I pleaded with him, ducking from his wings and tail that kept lashing and swinging above my head.
He didn’t look at me, didn’t give me a single sign that he heard me. But he could’ve swept me away like a fly, and he didn’t.
I leaned over, crawling closer to his head. My body splayed atop his, with my chest pressed to his and my legs on his thighs, I took his head in my hands.
“Look at me, Timur. Don’t move. Try to relax, and the pain will go away. It always does, doesn’t it?”
