Page 122 of The Death Wish

‘Do you? You are so careful with your hatred now. You hold it in check too well. That is not how you lived before. You had no regard for its collaring, you were careless with its distribution. Quick to a fury that left you mindless and almighty. Your time here has reshaped you. I should have put an end to your partnership sooner.’

‘Partnership?’ he asked, though he knew her meaning well.

‘You and the ankou. I had not expected the alliance to bear anything but tolerance and strength. Instead, this closeness you have formed weakens you both.’

‘I am here in your fish’s gut because of that alliance.’ The realisation formed even as he spoke. ‘If not for the ankou, for all those along the way who helped us, I’d not be here.’

The lady hissed, her scales clacking with her annoyance, and he was glad to see he had pissed her off. ‘You should be here because you hunger to destroy, as you did upon the Hellfield. Ido not see the mad prince before me. I see one possessed of a broken heart at leaving behind his dead lover. I see grief, not rage.’

‘Keep talking this way and you’ll see enough of the latter to satisfy you.’

‘But that is my point entirely. You are in control. You hold your temper, your nature, in check, despite what I know to be a great turbulence inside you, a turbulence that needs your ferocity to feed on. Let him return, Vassago. Stop denying yourself. Allow the Berserker Prince to take hold. Remove this disguise you wear, for you know as well as I, it is false. You play a game here, as surely as the angel does with his simurgh.’

Pitch’s skin glowed with barely suppressed flame as the lady chipped away at him, breaking down his charade piece by piece. Seeking to expose the beast at its core.

Satine’s head swayed low, quartz eyes shifting away from him. ‘Let go the false belief there was ever a place for you in this world. You ride the Red Horse. And she will accept none but those who carry the flames of strife and carnage. You are my Horseman of War, Vassago. That is the nature of you. The ankou may love Pitch or Tobias–he has fallen for the illusion you made for him–but he could never love that which lies behind the mask. And you know it.’

He’d lied earlier when he said he knew what it was to hate. He’d forgotten, somewhere in the gardens of Holly Village, and the hold of a dead man; what it was to hate so fiercely his blood caught fire.

But he recalled now.

He despised her, because every word that left Satine’s mouth was true.

Even his fucking horse had known it. He was corporeal chaos.

Had he not told Silas from the beginning that he was a terrible creature? That he was one of those harbingers of death the ankou fought against.

Pitch could change his appearance but this pretty body had only ever hid a savage core.

The ache in his chest splintered.

The simurgh stretched itself, its wingtips caressing the bones in his arms, its tail moving through the columns of his legs, making his marrow itch.

An inferno ignited at the tips of his toes, eating its way upwards, urging the simurgh ever higher, ever closer to the surface. The Cultivation wrapped itself around every vein.

‘Let me out.’

‘We’re not close enough.’

‘Command your leviathan to release me. Now, Satine.’

It was not the voice of Tobias Astaroth that left him. It was not even that of Vassago.

Pitch heard himself as though listening to a stranger. A stranger who could command a thousand legions.

The serpent, the Lady of the Lake, retreated from him. Sliding back to create a distance. One she bowed low into.

‘Your Highness,’ she said in a small voice. He’d never thought of her as small. Satine had always been a force to be reckoned with. ‘May the gods go with you.’

‘I need no gods.’

His insides swelled, and the simurgh grew ever larger. His flame lit up the insides of the Leviathan, as if every gas lamp from the London streets was planted in its flesh.

The beast tilted at a sharp angle upward, and Pitch allowed threads of his flame to release from his back and splay out like tentacles to brace him. The roar from the beast reverberated through Pitch’s body. His feeble body, dressed in all the whimsy and ineptitude of the purebreds. He was a child’s fable; the wolfdressed in sheep’s clothing. And he could barely wait to shed its layers. He relished the damage the flames did to the delicate garb now; the first of much destruction to come.

Shifting bones and half-digested corpses were cremated in his fire, their fine ash coating the leviathan’s innards like cruel bruises. The creature levelled out, and Pitch straightened, setting his shoulders back. He made his way forward, and Satine slithered ahead, clearing the detritus, removing all obstruction from his path.

Vassago paid her no mind.