Page 101 of The Fulbourn: Pitch & Sickle

What if they plunged him into a vast lake at the bottom of that pit…a place to drown a man endlessly…

Pitch coughed against pungent dread. The flames sparked to life around the beast’s cage. ‘Shit,’ he hissed through clenched teeth.Stay calm, stay fucking calm, idiot.

Keeping calm involved chasing his thoughts from the ankou. He twisted his hips, knowing it would drive the barbs of bone deeper.

Thatwould give him something else to think about. Being impaled often did.

Macha wanted to see him glow, and by Enoch’s sphincter he wished to show her just how well she could burn, but that was not the game to play here. The sorceress was likely madder than any up in the Fulbourn, but she was not a fool.

Onoskolis had torn his weakness from him in violent thrusts, finding Silas there in the cracks Pitch tried to hide, and run screaming. Nemain had feared a daemon taking back what was his.

Macha would keep Silas alive. Keep him here so Pitch would not dare burn her little Sanctuary to cinders before the rest of her vile tribe could arrive – and make this Sanctuary a coffin for Silas and Pitch both.

Another hiss came from him. Not because he was being ricocheted off the walls as the Dullahan’s roan cantered down corridors, but because he knew his edges were fraying.

The Morrigan would barely have to work to see him lose control. He’d been dangerous long before Seraphiel’s meddling. He’d always been monstrous, the angel had just given him sharper claws, stronger teeth, and manipulated his natural wildness into something malformed and even more horrifying.

Something that could not endure being so helpless for much longer.

Pitch forced the image of Silas into his mind’s eye. Gods, let that be enough to hold on to.

The corridor took a sudden, sharp turn right. The Dullahan’s horse was not ready for it, and its hind legs skittered out from under it as it negotiated what should have been an impossibly sharp turn for such an animal.

But the steed was about as ordinary as Lalassu and Sanu.

The roan found its hooves before Pitch had time to brace for a nasty collision with stonework. He squeezed his eyes shut, hunching into himself as best he was able. Which was not really much at all.

He hit the wall back first and screamed his unhappiness as the impact crushed the bones deeper into his body, and he was dragged down the length of a new passageway, this one plain dirt. Dusty as a desert. He trailed skin and shirt behind.

‘Fuck…fuck.’ He spat blood and decided that the next death he delivered to the Dullahan was going to be monumentally miserable. So would the one after that, and the next after that.

The section of dirt ended, thankfully, quickly. Pitch blinked, tears sweeping away the grit in his eyes. Dirt gave way to smooth floorboards, the passageway widening in this godsforsaken Sanctuary. Maybe this is what had happened to the Child Jacquetta, supposedly the greatest of the Melusine builders. Old Bess said she’d been missing for years. Pitch suspected Palatyne had locked Bess’s sister in a fucking labyrinth.

‘Gods, damn it.’ Pitch coughed out the remnants of the dusty corridor. His patience for this carnival ride came to an end.

He brought the flame to hand, very carefully. But therein lay a problem.

He was faced the wrong way for throwing it at the Dullahan.

Pitch strained against the whip’s pressured coils, trying to gain some wriggle room, tilting his wrist to attempt to angle it so he could direct a river of white-hot pissed-off-edness at the Dullahan.

The canter turned to a trot, the slam of hooves a calamity upon the floorboards. Pitch, distracted, didn’t realise he’d kept sliding over the smoothness of the polished wood, the chalk-white bone leaving gouges in the floor as it went.

He was almost beneath the roan’s hooves before he realised it. And to top off his most ridiculously horrid day, he could not move himself to avoid a hoof strike to the side of his head.

The crack was sickening. He definitely saw stars.

And then flames. So many flames.

‘You fucking great bastard!’ someone roared. Him, most likely, though his own voice seemed to come from the bottom of a well.

He was on his feet – at least, he thought he was. Hard to say with all the pulsing, burning madness around him.

A horse screamed. And the bone whip fell away, puddling at his feet, a glare of white amongst autumn’s bonfire. He stood right at the heart of an inferno.

‘Fucking cunt.’ He chewed up the words and spat them out with all the copper flooding his mouth.

What a waste of time it had been to attempt to stay calm. He’d rather this. Not even remotely placid.