Page 144 of The Death Wish

‘Silas, do they harm –’

‘Do what you must, Pitch.’ The thunder rolled. ‘And leave them to me. I will hold them back.’ Silas lifted his other hand, rattling the chain of an enormous mace; its spikes glinting silver.

Pitch’s grin was vicious, a flicker of bloodlust rising. The simurgh brushed a wing against the back of his eyes. What a sweet fucking irony this was. A child of Samyaza would deliver his destroyer to the halo.

His eyes blazed, his skin stretched with the strain of a rising inferno. His mind was as crystalline clear as the lake. All the bitter, soul-eating destitution of earlier was vanished. He was washed clean of doubt. And there was no entrance for it to return.

Pitch looked up at his favourite monster.

‘Oh, I do love you, Mr Mercer.’

Silas smiled, and the merest rise of his lips cast a breeze in the stagnant air. Thunder prowled. ‘Then I need no death wish. All that I desire, I have already.’

Pitch rose to his feet, teeth sharp at his bottom lip. He would give Silas one last gift, if such a thing could be said of standing naked with all ugliness exposed. But he knew the ankou wanted all of him. So he would give it.

‘I am ready.’

Silas’s pond-wide eyes glittered, and the slow nod of his head was like the felling of an oak. Slow and steady and irreversible.

Pitch reached his fingers to his own cheek and dug his fingernails into his beautiful disguise. Silas’s eyes never left him, as all of Blood Lake screamed. The clatter of the bones grew frantic, manic. There was chaos below. But not above.

Pitch shed his skin.

Tore strips from the facade he had built, and let go the delicate beauty he so coveted. He laid himself bare beneath the unwavering gaze of the Nephilim. Showing Silas his true self, wanting him to know every layer that existed before all was said and done.

The Dominion emerged; his true daemonic form. Black and hard as basalt, with rivulets of fire running like magma througha spiderweb of veins. Rough-hewn, and impenetrable. And though he bore the same limbs as purebreds, his were harsher in their lines; cut carelessly, with need only for bestial strength.

Little trace of beauty was found in the brutish assembly of a daemon.

His flesh fell away, his bloodless skin gathering in Silas’s palm.

Vassago grew, swelling so large his lithic physique dangled over the edges of the ankou’s colossal hold. But still their eyes did not leave one another.

Vassago’s burned like the belly of a volcano; while Silas’s were warm and brown as tilled earth.

The ankou’s fingers splayed, giving a daemon space to grow. Unafraid of touching what so many feared.

No words moved between them as they drank in all of each other. They hid nothing from one another. No more secrets existed.

Silas delivered Vassago to the very top of the pyre, gentle to the last. A look passed between them, volumes said in the glance.

Pitch turned, ready.

He leapt.

The journey from haven to cursed halo was a short one.

And the final game play began.

The screams that came from the lake matched those of the fiercest battle on the Hellfield, but Pitch did not utter a sound as he lunged. He wrapped daemonic hands around the black leather hilt, dug his feet into the pitiful dead, and welcomed the surge of the simurgh within.

The wildness poured from his natural seams, unifying his fire with the Cultivation’s subtler hues, casting a spotlight upon all that remained of the traitor king.

Pitch hauled on the hilt, while the calamitous crunch of bone grew louder. He knew Silas held back the tide that threatened. Vassago relied on it.

There was no shift in the sword from its bedrock of bone.

Once more, Pitch heaved on the ancient weapon. Again, there was nothing. The simurgh pressed beneath his hardened skin, billowing, eager to be set free. Pitch ground teeth of rock, his fury cracking open new fissures in his form.