Page 107 of The Fulbourn: Pitch & Sickle

Don’t.

Leave.

Us.

‘I won’t leave you.’ Silas ground his teeth as another violent shudder took hold of the Sanctuary. ‘Pitch, damn you. You had best be causing this strife on purpose.’

Imagining this calamity was intentional was far better than imagining the daemon was being consumed by his wildness.

As he continued his search for the barrier’s weakness and his own strength, Silas pictured the prince at his sublime best. In a rage, but in control. Giving this Sanctuary utter hell.

He imagined Pitch tearing that ballroom apart. He pictured the terror on the sorceress’s face, the pale horror overcoming Onoskolis as the daemon showed them his true worth.

Silas drove into the ecstasy of his thoughts, as he drove his fists into the soul trap.

There. There it was. A give in the barrier.

He laughed. A startled, rather manic sound. The sound one made when one was so filled with panic they were going to burst from it.

‘Easy now,’ Silas urged himself.

He returned to thoughts of the prince, to Pitch finding Edward and freeing him. Moving on to what came next.

Surpassing that bastard angel’s expectations. Surpassing Lucifer’s.

Destroying that damned, fucking halo.

Good lord, it would be magnificent. His daemon would be astonishing.

Silas’s fervent punching of the barrier faltered.

He had intended to be at the daemon’s side to the very end of all this. Now though…

But he could not leave these souls.

He kicked out at the barrier, the impact vibrating up his leg.

Idiot. He was fooling himself. He was making no headway on breaching this fortress. The tiny give in the magick he’d felt seemed no more than a tease.

The Sanctuary seemed to laugh at him, a deep chuckle that made the stones grind against one another. The platform beneath him juddered, and Silas braced against a pillar. It felt as though a monster were stirring beneath the ground, readying to rise up and strike at him.

Silas glared at the heart of the monopteros, a fire in his belly, fists balled. The statue of the Watcher King had its ruby eyes fixed on him, the twin-pronged tip of the spear aimed at him.

Silas planted both hands against the barrier and spread his fingers. ‘Whatever remains of you in this world,’ he hissed at the stony Watcher King, ‘will not withstand the prince, I promise you. He will rid this world – all the worlds – of you, once and for all. And he does not need me there to see it done.’

‘Is that so, Mr Mercer?’

Silas spun about, pulse thudding.

The sorceress stood in front of one of the archways as though she had emerged from the stonework itself.

‘Macha,’ he breathed.

Christ almighty. He had just handed her Pitch’s deepest secret.

CHAPTER THIRTY

PITCH FOLLOWEDthe bulge of the tree root and cursed at the stiffness in his hip. His strides were uncertain, tilted and ungainly, made more so by the frequent shivers that ran through the Sanctuary. The forceful shakings had him wobbling on his feet when they struck.