Page 45 of The Death Wish

And it was that thought that had him lunging.

‘Come to me. Now. I command you.’

He grabbed at whatever first came to hand. As it turned out, it was the simurgh’s slender neck. The growl that came from the creature would make any troll envious.

‘Shut up,’ Pitch hissed.

A blast of something unseen, a torrent of power, ran beneath the pretty skin and nearly launched Pitch’s Christmas dinner into the room. He hissed again, this time with sheer discomfort.

The creature thrashed, and Pitch was dragged across the bed, holding on for dear life. The simurgh pulled them to the far edge, and they tumbled off, taking quilts and pillows with them. The girth of the creature’s neck was no more than that of an actual swan, but Pitch had the sense of holding on to something much, much larger. Overwhelmingly enormous.

Pitch landed on his hip upon the hardwood floor, and promptly bit his tongue.

‘Fuck,’ he said through a mouthful of warm blood. ‘Fuck you.’

The urge to let go was intense, but he knew only a part of that urge was his.

The simurgh was mammoth, far more than its form belied, that much was true. But Pitch did not wish to give up now.

‘I don’t like it,’ he grunted as they rolled, and something fell from the bedside table, ‘any more than you…but we are too close…’

He’d been ruled by this confounded arsehole of a creature and its powerful magick, for too long.

He was tired of being overruled.

‘Still yourself, you fucking imbecile.’ The simurgh’s attempts to escape him had them rolling again, and he ground his shoulder into the knotted fringe of the rug. ‘We are on the same side. Stop, damn you.’

The next bodily shift saw Pitch’s legs slip beneath the bed. The simurgh’s one good claw found purchase on the wooden bed frame. Stunning pink diamond talons dug in.

There was a violent wrench upwards, and Pitch’s groin was slammed into the bedframe. The shock of pain through his balls was truly eye-watering, but there was little time for crying over such things. The sudden stop had thrown the simurgh off-kilter, and in that pause as the creature gathered itself, Pitch tried to wriggle beneath the bed once more, as a way to anchor himself down.

The simurgh recovered too quickly, and flew upwards once more. Glass shattered as the tips of its wings hit the window, and Pitch’s knee met the solid mass of the mahogany bedframe. His kneecap dislocated, before his shins were dragged at a painful angle against the immovable solidness of the four-poster. Thesimurgh pecked at his arm, not breaking skin, but giving very clear encouragement to let go. The pastels of its feathers shone brighter, causing him to blink against their brilliance.

‘Stay still, curse you.’

The downdraft from sweeping wings ruffled his hair, and Pitch was drawing his flame to hand, ready for more drastic manners of control, when Scarlet flew in, nearly blinding him entirely with its added glare.

‘Get back!’ he shouted.

But the simurgh was not the only creature ignoring him. The wisp darted off, right up close to where topaz eyes were luminous, and a golden beak was parted, ready to strike. Pitch squeezed his eyes shut against the onslaught of pretty hues: sunrises, sunsets, fields of lavender and groves of fruiting lemon trees.

The wisp began to hum. A tuneless sound that rose in volume; slowly, assuredly, over the frantic clawing and beat of pink wings. The intonation was deep–astonishingly so for such a tiny thing–and it was not a melody, nor a language. At least, not one he knew. This was more than either, greater than their sum; it was the rumble of the earth as it quaked, the groan of an ancient tree as it fell, the crack of a glacier. And all came from a creature that could be swatted from the air like a fly.

The sound touched at his ribs, at his sinews and that empty place inside.

His body hummed, not with the power of the simurgh, but with this strange sonority.

Pitch, still barely able to see, had the strangest compunction to still, and listen.

So did the simurgh.

The creature gave up its manic efforts to flee him, relaxing in his grasp. He softened his hold as the beast settled on the rug beside him, lowering its head, all the fight leaving it. Pitchblinked his eyes open. The light was not so harsh now, as the simurgh calmed. The Cultivation glanced at him, but only briefly, for its attention was all for the wisp.

Pitch released the simurgh, and dragged his legs from beneath the bed, rocking onto his knees. He stared, as the Cultivation was doing, at the tiny creature who perched on the fallen pile of bedclothes, like a victorious mountaineer upon a linen Mount Everest.

Scarlet did not hum, nor sing. They played a harp. Surely the smallest harp in the world. One of tangerine, glowing like a tiny setting sun in the wisp’s hold. Scarlet plucked at strings no thicker than spider’s web, and in fact, Pitch was quite certain that is exactly what they were.

The wisp swayed back and forth, like a rainbow metronome, strumming at the harp with fingers like bloated little sausages, setting off those deep, resonating, Earthly notes that tickled at Pitch’s ribs. Scarlet saw him staring, mesmerised. The cheeky sod blew him a kiss.