Page 56 of The Death Wish

‘Stop it,’ he snapped.

‘He wants you to get up.’ There was more than one piskie in the horse’s mane. This second one was woven from stouter sticks, with three dew drop eyes and white flower petals in some semblance of hair.

‘I’m well aware,’ Lucifer snarled.

‘Then why aren’t you moving?’

‘I would say that is self-evident.’

‘Bit beaten up, aren’t you?’ This came from a hobgoblin of all things, peeking from behind a refuge of ploughed earth. ‘Scruffy, dirty too. But we probably don’t have time for bathing. The angel flew off pretty fast.’

Lucifer cursed at the waning afternoon that settled around him. ‘How long ago?’

Several gnomes pushed their heads from the soil, which formed peaked caps on their heads. ‘‘Not more than ten minutes,’ one of them said. ‘Are we going?’

‘Going where?’ Lucifer’s voice lifted with tired exasperation. ‘How can the likes of you find them?’

A plethora of indignant gasps erupted from the ever-widening audience, the bells tinkling madly. ‘Just as well we aren’t doing this for your sake. The likes of us are all too small to be noticed by the likes of you.That’show we can find them. Because no one gives a damn if we see things or not.’

‘Also, Chollima used to be ridden by him who is the Erlking, but the horse is free now. Still carries the duty-bind to the ankou, though. So that helps.’

Lucifer had not one ounce of energy to correct them on the fact Chollima’s rider, the headless horseman, was no king. He sat with both hands cradled in his lap, one with its amputation, the other with its crippling cut. Both now cauterised, both still aching. This was likely the most rotten he’d felt in all his long years.

‘And,’ another of the gnomes chimed in, ‘the kodama will send word through the trees to guide us. Them boys saved the Forest of Dean after all, so the trees like them a lot, which means we’ll know the shortest way. Least we can do for those fellows.’

The hobgoblin bravely stepped from behind his pile of dirt. ‘Them angels killed my second cousin, six times removed, down Mordiford way, too. Tried to blame it on that daemon the ankou likes, dirty rotten scoundrels.’

A crowd, a human crowd, was gathering on the far side of the field, the faint murmur of voices reaching him. The very last thing Lucifer wished to do was find himself trapped amongst frantic village folk. They had a history of using pitchforks to stab at anything they did not understand, and he was done with being the object of assault.

The tinkling of tiny bells drew his attention back to his smaller audience. Chollima’s reins were held aloft by a small group of ethereal little creatures, no bigger than the finger that Lucifer had lost, and with silver hair that flowed like quicksilver down their backs, the strands tinkling like bells. Peri. He shouldhave guessed from the bells, but the nymph-fae hybrids were such rare folk he’d never glimpsed one.

A string of peri held Chollima’s reins aloft, so that they dangled as though held by an invisible rider.

Lucifer groaned, at himself, more than at the presumptive creatures.

The blame for this entire, farcical episode, must, in great part, be laid at Lucifer’s own feet. His actions had revived an angel’s harebrained scheme.

Lucifer should have laid everything to rest, Seraphiel included.

Should have; but could not. Even now, barely conscious, he intended to chase after a Seraph. Mad, did not adequately define him.

Lucifer crawled on hands and knees to where the Dullahan’s black stallion sat waiting. He took Chollima’s reins from the peri, who made music as they fluttered away.

With an undignified amount of assistance from this strange gaggle of creatures, he dragged himself onto the back of the black stallion. And did his level best not to pass out as the horse galloped him away.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

LALASSU HELDPitch and Silas securely, their legs and lower backs wrapped in her storm-cloud strands as she travelled along the road at a gallop. Silas’s eyes watered. The air, which had been cold enough to begin with, now turned icy with the pace. The blood that had run from his ears was dry and stiff along the sides of his neck, on the left more than the right, as Charlie had insisted on trying to clean him up a little before Silas demanded that both he and Pitch stop fussing.

He had some inkling how frustrating all the coddling he was accused of, could be.

Up ahead, between the ears of the brown gelding, Scarlet was a minute beacon of rainbow light, having decided that being pressed in Pitch’s pocket beneath the layers of horsehair was not to their liking.

Silas was almost thankful for the presence of the brown horse that Charlie rode. The gelding held no magickal properties, so Lalassu could not launch into her insanely quick pace. Which meant their noses and lips were not in danger of freezing off in the wind blast it produced, and their nethers were not punished further upon her bare back. But it did concern him that the mare could not seem to navigate her way without the lad ahead. Lalassu did not try to overtake Charlie and his mount,and she’d shown them nothing in her mane to suggest that she knew the way.

‘Was Sanu with you?’ Silas said, too loudly, as he struggled with the whispering voices that remained. He was improving though, according to Pitch, and not yelling loud enough for all of London to hear now. Silas’s worries could be thanked for that, along with his improving ability to place the hum of the dead at the far edges of his mind.

‘Yes, she is with Edward, I promise,’ Charlie returned. ‘What worries you?’