Page 125 of The Fulbourn: Pitch & Sickle

Silas stared at Ottelie’s gift, a swathe of emotions chasing themselves across his strong features. Despair, relief, concern, and confusion. He looked so lost.

‘Oh Charlie…’ Silas said. ‘I’m so sorry for all of this.’

The ankou’s tedious habit of lending apology to all and sundry shook Pitch from his self-pitying quagmire, and he turned about. ‘Now you have the bandalore, maybe you can break through more than a few walls,’ he said. ‘You need to find us a way out of here.’

And he needed to be nearer to the ankou.

Pitch stepped forward. The grind of his heel came at the same time as a frightening lament rose from the earth.

The Sanctuary keened. There was no other word for it. An awful, rending groan that spoke of the end of all things.

Pitch saw Silas reach for Charlie, then for Edward, and gather them to him. He felt the teratisms sweep past him, their scent a scar upon the air as they moved to their ankou. They assembled around him, arching their deformities over the trio that huddled against what remained of the tree trunk. As though that might be enough to protect them from the Sanctuary as it turned on itself.

Silas called out. ‘Pitch, hurry.’

And Pitch was running to him again, dragging daemonic power to the surface once more. The flame tore through his body as the sounds of destruction came from all the darkest corners. Stones pelted down, falling from places unseen, lost to the shadows. White rage gripped him. After all they’d endured, they were to be crushed by something so paltry as a godsdamned rock?

Not so damning for him and Silas as it was for Edward and Charlie. Whatever Edward was, he was not, so far as Pitch knew, immune to heavy, flattening objects.

He slackened his grip on the weakening reins that held the flame in check. His hands were ablaze, snaking lines of fire so long they got in the way as he ran. Pitch got as close as he dared to those of flesh and bone and raised his arms. He sent a plume of melting heat and shielding fire over the huddled group.

‘Careful, go carefully.’

It was Edward. Or the angel within. Perhaps recalling how terribly a daemon’s control could escape him.

Heat roared through Pitch, the last of the amuletum eviscerated in a heartbeat. A heartbeat Pitch could no longer feel as the wildness tore a hinge off its cage and took one step towards absolute freedom.

The taste of blood filled Pitch’s mouth as he bore down, trying to cling to the last of his control. But by the fucking gods, he was losing it.

If the Sanctuary didn’t kill them all, he would.

He screamed his fears, his panic, into the crackle and snap of the blaze that fought for its head. Pitch was brittle and thin in places where it was dangerous to be so. He was too weak for this onslaught. He knew it.

The flame knew too and was champing at the bit, eating away at his resolve.

Around them the death cries of the Sanctuary rose. It was as though the place was folding in on itself, precise as origami, taking its corridors and passageways and all the illusions packed into them, and imploding.

He sobbed with the weight of it, feeling his shoulders bend and the protrusions of his spine trying to tear through his skin. Fuck, how Mr Ahari’s cane would be welcome now, anything to siphon the flame’s torrent, make it barely manageable…instead of this…nearly ripping him apart.

So much for being Seraphiel’s vessel. He was useless. Embattled, within and without.

While one beast clawed at his heart, another surrounded him. The fae magick that had made this vile place was transforming it. Reducing it. Turning upon them. Making its endless walkways finite. Pressing them all down on him like he was trapped in a godsdamned concertina.

And the weight was all too much.

Pitch blinked through the glare, a blinding firestorm of his own making. Impossible as it seemed, he saw his way to Silas. The ankou’s eyes were fastened on him already, a fierceness in the depths of narrowed brown eyes, a fearsome determination in the set of his mouth. He held his scythe overhead, and death’s blade was a wondrous sight. The blade was formidable, the grandest Pitch had seen it. A curving half-moon of razor-sharpness that was deflecting the flame. If it had been stretched straight, it would have easily run the length of Silas’s body. The ankou held the crudely carved shaft aloft, a warrior crying out for the charge to be led. The air about the scythe’s blade shimmered as the flame was repelled from its surface like the heat off a tin roof on a summer-sodden day.

Silas and his blade were guardians against the scorching heat of Pitch’s fire. Charlie and Edward sat as huddles of shaking humanity, sheltering as best they could beneath the scythe’s considerable shadow. And around them knelt the four teratisms, staying true to their master.

‘What do we do?’ Silas shouted, his face glistening. Even the scythe could not protect him entirely from the inferno above. ‘I cannot see a way out.’

‘Because there is not one.’ Pitch grunted, setting his feet. The caps of his knees felt ready to snap, he was bowed beneath the pressure that was closing in, and the flame was scraping him hollow. ‘No yet.’

There was chance perhaps that he could blast his way out of this forsaken fucking hole in the earth. In truth he had no bloody idea if such a thing was possible. He was no master of fae magick nor divine, for that matter. But hewasa master of sheer force.

He’d been made so when he was created Dominion. With Seraphiel’s meddling…well, who knew what his limits were? Perhaps Edward knew them. Though right now the man seemed capable only of knowing how to look utterly terrified.

Pitch let out a burdened growl.