Page 47 of The Death Wish

Pitch bit at his lip.

Fuck, he did not want to do this. But what choice was there? So close to the end? He suddenly abhorred his choice to do this alone. To keep Silas away.

Something touched at his knuckles. Warm. Gentle.

He dared look down.

Pitch nearly embarrassed himself with a cry of relief. Scarlet was there. Wriggling in between his clenched thumb and forefinger. Laying their head against his hand, and crooning whilst they caressed the curve of his knuckle.

The wisp did not stop, even as Pitch’s back arched, and his teeth cracked, even as he held in screams that punched at the back of his throat.

The simurgh’s return was only marginally less painful than its removal, forced as that had been. The agony was exquisite, but it was not his alone. The Cultivation’s movements were not fluid, there was a resistance there. Pitch swallowed, seeing for the first time what his own self-absorption had blinded him too. There was not one prisoner to Seraphiel’s machinations here…but two. Some part of this being, this magickal creation, knew itself bound, and did not enjoy it. The primordial flame perhaps? Too ancient and powerful an entity to submit to being kept in a cage.

With diaphanous wings jerking unbecomingly, the simurgh began to disappear into him, sinking into Pitch’s skin as if it were a pale sea.

Submitting, albeit with obvious protest, to its cage once more.

Perhaps knowing, as he did, that the only way for them to escape one another was to reunite now.

The creature’s ruined claw dragged at his skin, the injury striking like a branding iron where it sought to enter him. Pitch flung up his hand, sending Scarlet scattering. He grabbed at a pillow, covering his face so he could release the scream that no measure of pressed lips could suppress.

The agony echoed through him, made his marrow fight to be free of its bones. His tendons stretched, straining to free from where they anchored his joints.

This was not right.

This was most certainly not right.

He had underestimated the damage done to the simurgh by Azazel.

And it hurt. Sweet taints of all the highest Celestials, it hurt.

Until it did not.

The Cultivation’s broken parts finally drew into him, and he sobbed. Scarlet returned, with a warm touch that soothed; a glow that worked at loosening the tightness of his muscles.

The pain wrought on him by the damage done to the Cultivation was no small thing.

‘Find Silas. We must go now,’ Pitch rasped.

The journey to the Sanctuary needed to be swift. So they’d learn sooner rather than later, if this whole fucking quest was in vain.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

IN THEgloom of the dwindling afternoon, only Herbert and Phillipa had stood waving them off. The boy was none the worse for wear after his run-in with the goddess, though he’d been found fast asleep in his bed, rather than the stables, and was too groggy to join their impromptu Christmas dinner. He was a tad sniffly, perhaps a bit feverish, but really did not need any of the worried looks that Silas sent him.

‘Is he dying?’ Pitch had asked, a bit harshly.

‘No,’ Silas had cried. ‘Of course not.’

‘Then stop fussing over him.’

Herbert had left Silas with an odd parting message. ‘Don’t let them distract you, Mr Mercer. They do not sing louder, you now hear more keenly.’

‘Silas?’ Pitch had frowned at the odd comment.

‘Nothing to worry about. Do you need a leg up onto Lalassu? It’s not so easy with her being bare-back.’

That of course had been the perfect distraction. ‘Of course I don’t need a bloody leg-up.’