Page 118 of The Fulbourn: Pitch & Sickle

Find saviour.

‘Oh god, please don’t call him that to his face. I’ll never hear the end of it.’

A shudder took hold of the chamber. The archway the sorceress and Onoskolis had used cracked in half, releasing chunks of thundering, dust-billowing stone. The pieces skidded as far as they could before the corpse-soaked ground brought them to a standstill.

A gaping wound opened in the wall. An escape. As though the Sanctuary were turning on itself, abandoning its attempts to hinder him.

‘Find him!’ he shouted, racing at the opening. ‘Take me to Tobias.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

PITCH RANat the coffin, jumping over the shattered branches. His boot slipped through piled leaves, the debris catching between his bare toes. His back was plagued with needling points, and his arm…gods, it was like an oversized bird upon a cuckoo clock was trying to hammer its way through his bone. The watch was well aware of who was in this room. But Edward would have to wait.

‘Charlie!’

There was a narrow opening in the wood, an upside-down V-shape that demanded he crouch to negotiate it. He grunted his way through, bent knees none too pleased, the arrow punctures on his thigh making themselves known.

‘Pissy, fucking, headless fucking horseman.’

He finished his tirade and his squeezing through and stood up just in time to see Charlie attempt to do the same. Only the lad was far less capable of the task. Pitch’s naked foot squelched something soft and damp as he covered the two steps needed to reach Charlie. The ground was covered in a thick layer of rowan berries, some of which he’d just pressed like he were making a summer wine.

‘Easy, easy.’ Pitch grabbed beneath the lad’s armpits. He was clad in the institution’s garb: starch-stiff linen and a baggy shirt and trousers with unappealing chequered panels of contrasting greys, a size too big for the slight vagabond.

‘Don’t touch me.’ Charlie put up a pathetic fight, despite the fact that Pitch was all that kept him on his feet. The bracelet’s holly leaves scratched against Pitch’s wrists as he easily overrode the feeble resistance.

‘It’s me, Charlie,’ Pitch said. ‘Tobias.’

The silver hue that lit the barn made the lad appear shockingly white, doubling the vibrancy of his cornflower-blue eyes and causing the freckles upon the bridge of his nose to shine like tiny beacons against his paleness.

‘Pitch?’ Charlie sighed and collapsed against the daemon. ‘Thank god. Is Silas with you?’

The question stung. ‘No. He’s not…’

Charlie inhaled sharply, eyes darting to take in Pitch’s state. He was a ruin with his shirt entirely done for, only the corset to cover him in any way, and garish pink wounds and all manner of grime and dirt and blood staining the rest of him. ‘You look terrible –’

‘It’s been a shitty day.’

‘Silas…he’s all right, isn’t he?’ Great orbs of blue were set on Pitch.

‘Of course he is,’ he snapped.

‘But he doesn’t have this.’ Charlie’s right hand had been curled in a fist, and he relaxed his fingers now. ‘It came to me…I don’t understand how…but it saved my life.’

Silas’s bandalore sat on his palm. Its mahogany tones were made darker by the wavering silver light, but Pitch would know the damned thing if they were in near darkness.

‘How do you have that?’ He wanted to snatch it from the lad and only just held himself back. ‘He’s been trying to…he needed it…’ And was still in need of it now.

‘I don’t truly know… I don’t understand how I came to be holding it, but I am so very glad that I did.’ Charlie winced as he settled himself.

‘Are you hurt?’ Pitch had discomfort of his own. The bloody pendant watch was trying to tear a hole in his skin now he was alongside Edward. But the lieutenant showed no sign of rousing. Not even a flicker beneath blue-veined eyelids.

‘Just a bruise here and there,’ Charlie said, far too wide-eyed, horribly pale. ‘But the lieutenant…I don’t know what they’ve done to him. I went to see him in his room. I’d been doing that since they brought him to the asylum.’ The lad dashed his tongue against his lips. ‘But he was gone, and the next thing I know, I’m waking to see you and Silas peering in through the glass and myself in a straitjacket. Then that tosser threw me in a bloody glass coffin, and next time I woke, I was surrounded by shattered glass with the bandalore in my hand.’ He spoke far too fast and feverishly, shaking as he caressed the scythe like it were a damned kitten. ‘I don’t understand it…but I felt compelled to move. To find Edward…’ Charlie pushed up his sleeve, revealing more of Ottelie’s braided holly-and-rowan-wood bracelet. There were finer tendrils coming off the larger stems, hints of green at their tips, like new shoots rising after winter, lying across Charlie’s skin as fine as spiderweb. ‘I found him. The bandalore, it was, god you’ll think I’m mad, but it led me to him.’ He flicked his gaze to Pitch, who said nothing. ‘I found Edward, and when I did…god, Tobias…I could feel the bracelet grow. I felt it take from me, like I was the soil it was lacking…using me to grow…and I didn’t mind…I didn’t mind…’

The respite from the growling of the Sanctuary’s foundations ended, returning with a crisp vengeance. The tremor shook the illusion of the barn with nasty vigour.

Charlie cried out, the bandalore cracking against the glass as he braced himself. Pitch too used the coffin to stay upright, glancing down at Edward. The man was handsome, no nefarious sorcery seemed capable of stealing that, but his hair and beard had gone a shocking grey, as though the colour had fled all this unhappiness.

‘Do you think he’s…’ Charlie rubbed at the bracelet. ‘Please tell me he isn’t –’