Page 100 of The Fulbourn: Pitch & Sickle

Hewasthe bandalore. The scythe. The final nail driving into the coffin the creature should have been laid in well before now.

‘Are you all right?’ Silas pushed the carcass aside. The weight slopped heavily, with a wet sound, the flesh dissolving even as he reached to help George to his feet.

Not in the slightest. I thought you were going to let it eat me.

The petulant reply caused a pinch in Silas’s chest. The snide words would have been at home upon Pitch’s lips. God, he’d been away from the daemon far too long.

‘Let’s move on.’ The ground shuddered. ‘There are teratisms approaching too.’

Coming here?

‘I thought that self-explanatory, but yes. Where do we go?’

George spared a moment for a nervous glance up and down the corridor as another disturbing grinding of stonework came from further up the passageway, where the masonry was shaking apart.

Well, we’re right on top of where we need to be. It’s here. Follow me.

Of all places to go, the ghost child went down. Sank right into the floor, a waving hand the last of him to disappear. Silas sighed and took one last lingering look about, searching for a glimpse of a gold-threaded head of hair, a flash of emerald, and a careless wave. The teratisms sent their song ahead of them. Their caustic melody filled the passageways as they worked their way through the labyrinth that was this Sanctuary, finding their way slowly but very surely towards the ankou.

With a grim set of his mouth, Silas concentrated on the floor beneath him. He sank into the ground, shifting himself so easily and readily he might have thought it marvellous if he were not so twisted with worry for the prince who faced this Sanctuary’s cruelties alone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

PITCH WASdragged facedown along rough cobblestones. The Dullahan’s whip impaled him where it coiled like an enormous viper around his chest and thighs, pinning his arms to his sides. So long as he kept his head bent back at an excruciatingly uncomfortable angle, he was not in danger of having his face scrubbed off by the asperous surface. And with his hips lifted, his prick wasn’t in any similar danger of being whittled away. So far, the majority of his trousers had escaped utter ruin.

But those good fortunes aside, there was not much else to be said for the situation.

He kept playing over in his mind the image of Silas being wrenched away. The sudden savagery of it widening the ankou’s eyes to saucers, his mouth like the teacup to pair with them. But the stupid, stupid oaf had been so bloody absorbed by something Pitch could not discern, he’d not even been holding on properly, dangling like an enormous apple ready to drop.

The Dullahan dragged Pitch across a pothole as wide as his hips, and the resulting thump of his body had him crying out with the vilest admonishment he had the energy to summon. The segments of bone that made up the whip were considerable. Evidently, it was a spinal cord, though of what monstrous creature, he could only imagine. Nephilim crossed his mind, but he did not like that idea and threw it away. It was bad enough to know the Unseelie Court played their cards with the Morrigan. Spiteful, vain, duplicitous creatures the Unseelie were.

The piece nearest the Dullahan’s hand was double the size of his fist, and even those smaller sections nearest the tip were thick as Silas’s wrist. All were spiked like cudgels, as though the creature had been inflicted with a deforming disease upon its bones.

Pitch was trussed up like a bird being prepared for a roast. His arms were pressed tight to his sides, his corset and shirt ruined, his trousers heavy with blood. He was growing rather tired of the sickening dig of the spikes, gouging soft flesh at every bump. Of which there were a tremendous amount.

Making it all tenfold worse was the halo wound. The absolute prick of a thing pressed like an iron, fresh out of the oven, against his skin. The amuletum’s normally soothing influence stretched taut and thin. Pitch quashed a scream at the back of his throat as a particularly harsh jolt had the still-knitting wounds from the nekhri arrowheads tearing open anew.

Oh fuck, it would be terribly easy to just throw open the cage and set the wildness running rampant. The gods knew it strained to do so.

Pitch could destroy the Dullahan again, that was not in dispute. But in doing so, he would push himself ever closer to his rapidly approaching limits of control. The remains of the amuletum were a flimsy barrier, fluttering like a torn veil between a prince in vague control and utter mayhem.

The Dullahan raced him along like he were a plough meant to till the cobblestones. Fine. Let the fucking Dullahan run itself ragged with a good gallop. They both knew he wasn’t about to die from being dragged. And if the servant of the Erlking thought this might make him suitably weak enough to enable it to haul a broken daemon back to the Unseelie Court, the headless cunt was to be very sorely disappointed. The Dullahan may have his name, the Unseelie Court may have taken over Pitch’s broken oath to the bluecap queen, but a Dominion prince would need to be good and pummelled before they had any chance of claiming him.

Which was exactly Macha’s intent, wasn’t it?

Goad on the crazed daemon until he was lost to himself…to whatever Seraphiel’s interference had made him…and place him in danger of succumbing to a rage that yearned to devour him.

The sorceress wished to see beneath his skin and ruin him in the process.

‘If you are trying to upset me,’ he shouted, ‘I must say you are terrible at it.’ He might have sounded impressive had they not hit another depression in the cobblestones. The jolt made his teeth crash, and he uttered an embarrassing squeal.

The Dullahan said nothing in reply of course. The fiend had no head nor tongue to speak with. It made for a dull journey. But perhaps it was for the best. It was far easier to keep some modicum of calm when your opponent was not egging you on. If the Dullahan had laughed and told him that Silas had been harmed, sent to the bottom of the black pit he’d fallen into, Pitch might have grown angrier. If the Dullahan said there was no way out for the ankou, that Silas was trapped, as Pitch had been in the abaddon, he may have found himself pissed off beyond measure.

Pitch swallowed, his mouth rich with copper and bitter things.

He truly must not think on all the torments the sorceress and her daemon strumpet might be casting on Silas. He should be thinking on the watch, should be listening carefully, trying to decipher a pattern in the pains it sent to him. But still…

What if that darkness they’d sent Silas into was unending? Oh, gods.