Page 51 of The Death Wish

Silas held up his hand. ‘Hush. Please.’

There was something there. Distant. Sweeping through the noise, like wind through a wheat-field. But so desperately faint. Charlie shifted, and Silas tightened his grip on the lad’s hand.

‘Wait.’

Silas closed his eyes, shaping his senses towards that faint whisper. Sifting his way through the clamour, the chaos that had been more of his making than that of the souls. But now his old mind, ancient and tired as it had been, was rejuvenated by Ambleside’s dead. Revived in its ability to understand the notes he heard.

Teratisms, certainly, but they could be counted among those who had learned to struggle against the grip of the Blight.

‘What do you wish to tell me?’ he whispered. ‘Speak up, just a little louder.’

Silas squeezed his eyes tighter shut, sinking down into that fathomless place in the darkness where the quiet held court. He drew the whispers to him there. Encouraged them closer.

Ankou of the Pale Horse.

‘Yes. Are you there?’

The noise that came was grating, the slash of the needle on a phonograph, the rusty drag of a prison cell door.

Interference. Whoever sought to reach him had those who wished them stopped.

For all the teratisms he had saved, converted, there were many more being birthed anew by the Blight. But Silas had experienced a rebirth of sorts, too; he was not so feeble now.

He let go of Charlie’s hand. And sank into the ocean of sound before him.

If the teratisms could not reach him, he’d move closer to where they were.

Silas wove his mind through the tangle of death notes, through the anguish that drifted there, ever-present, through the rotten grief and profound regret that the Blight stirred.

‘Are you there?’ he asked again.

We are, Lord Death. Here at the graveyard.

Which bloody one? Silas wanted to shout. Make your damned point. But he caught his fury in time, reeled in it, and letgentler thoughts go ahead. ‘Where might you be? What do you need me to know?’

The sombre tunes surrounded him; death notes that lashed out at the intrusion of his own melody. There came again the cringe worthy grating, the harsh crunch of cog wheels being broken.

‘Speak now. Quickly.’

We stand by the church you bade us guard. Where the witches lay.

Silas’s shock nearly cost him the frail connection he held. These were the teratisms who’d aided Sybilla and the Dullahan in keeping open the entrance to the cockaigne; still at their posts, just as he’d asked. ‘And what do you know?’

The answer was nearly buried beneath an onslaught of targeted grief, a wave in the ocean that sought to catch Silas in its whirlpool.

But familiarity not only bred contempt, it bred resilience. Silas was no stranger to the machinations of the Blight.

‘What do you know?’ His note resonated through the depths, an ironic lifeline, one the teratisms clung to now.

An angel came for the bones of his kind, those beyond the church.

‘In the cockaigne? Someone has entered?’

Yes.

‘Who is it?’ Christ, were they not done with nefarious angels?

A great one. White as lightning. We will not go closer. He frightens us. He frightened the fae.