Page 122 of The Fulbourn: Pitch & Sickle

‘Edward,’ Charlie gasped.

Pitch stared at Edward’s arse, the only part of the man he could see. A cold knot gripped Pitch’s chest. He could count the number of times Edward had ever raised his voice to him. A grand total of zero. Seraphiel, on the other hand had made a sport of it.

The lieutenant slumped onto his backside, ducking his head to peer back at them through the gap. ‘I’m sorry? Is there something wrong?’

Charlie glanced at Pitch, confusion seeing him knit auburn brows together. ‘Wrong? You were a bit of a prick just now. I know it’s been a bad day, but…we care about Silas. We are not leaving him here.’

Edward’s confusion matched the lad’s. ‘When did I say to leave him here?’

‘You didn’t. But your dear friend the Holy One seems to have made himself very clear. Give him a message, will you?’ Pitch glared at Edward, at whatever he was: the prophet, a vessel for the angel’s ghost, the angel himself. None of it fucking mattered. ‘Tell him that if he ever commands me to abandon the ankou again, then I will seek out the Morrigan myself and submit to them. I shall betheirpuppet instead of his, and he shall have not one but two monstrous mistakes to be remembered by. Does he understand?’

Pitch rumbled along with the Sanctuary, deep and insidious, and never more clear-headed in his life. They would not take the ankou from him. None of them. Without Silas to steady him, Pitch was only broken pieces, one strike away from shattering entirely. Without the ankou, he forgot why he was eventryingto hold himself together.

‘Does he understand, Edward?’

The lieutenant swallowed. ‘Honestly? I don’t know…butIunderstand. For now, I hope that can be enough?’ He waited until Pitch nodded, then turned and continued to crawl his way free of the tree.

‘Ah…Tobias,’ Charlie whispered.

‘Just leave me be.’

‘You need to look up.’

‘If you are trying some form of motivational nonsense, I will hurt you.’

‘Lookup, damn it.’

The urgency in the lad’s voice had him doing as he was told. ‘Shit.’

The barn had vanished, the illusion wiped like a blackboard scrubbed clean. The only source of light now came from the coffin itself, a delicate silver gleam more intense where the silver trim edged the glass. But the faded hue of a full moon only went so far to penetrating the shadows that surrounded them.

Pitch pushed past Charlie, who crouched to negotiate the low-set exit from the trunk’s embrace. Pitch scrambled through on hands and knees this time, admonishing the berries as they made the way slippery. He got to his feet and added red berry smears to the bloodstains on his atrocious trousers.

‘The barn door was this way, was it not?’ He pointed ahead.

‘Barn? I saw nothing when I crawled through,’ Edward said.

‘Not so all-knowing after all, then,’ Pitch muttered, for his own benefit and no one else’s. He strode forward, heading in the direction he thought the door to have been. He was working on a hunch that though the vision of the entrance was gone, the opening itself might still exist.

‘Tobias, be careful,’ Charlie called.

‘Bloody coddling,’ Pitch sniffed. ‘He’ll be so fucking proud.’

He’d taken precisely three steps, each one punctuated by an unpleasant prick of gods-knew-what against his bare foot and was still within the realm of the silvery light when a branch rose from the ground ahead of him. A considerable limb, one that would rival the width and length of a rowboat’s oar. With no rower in sight.

With a sharp exhale, he summoned the flame, trying not to groan with the weight of doing so. Gods, he was so near to done he could fairly taste it.

‘Wait.’ A shrill cry. The tree limb jabbed at him. It wobbled wildly as though far too heavy for whoever held it, but they were trying to joust nevertheless. ‘Stay. Coming.’

The words were snatches of sound, like the sharp bark of a cough or a sneeze.

‘Show yourself.’ Pitch grabbed at the trembling branch. ‘And stop waving that bloody thing in my face.’

Pitch wrapped his smouldering hand about the rough limb, the few clinging leaves crackling against his palm and igniting in flares of abrupt and short-lived flaming life. There was a shriek, and the far end of the branch fell to the ground with a thump.

‘Rude.’

He was certain he heard a watery sniff. Pitch dropped the branch, thin lines of smoke coiling from the bark. ‘Who are you?’