Page 61 of The Fulbourn: Pitch & Sickle
Dr Severs stood right behind Charlie, who was so utterly still it was hard to say if he breathed or not. Pitch was struck by the grisly notion that perhaps they were worrying over a corpse. He touched his hand to Silas’s hip to brace the ankou for what he would say next.
‘You may well have stuck a dead body there. The lad is stiller than a statue,’ Pitch said, trying to ignore the distressing sound that came from the ankou. ‘You’d best give us a reason to act like mindless slaves to your whims, or you’ll find us very disagreeable.’
‘The lad is not dead,’ Dr Severs scoffed. ‘Your pet is the strings, you are the puppets, as it were. It’s hardly the time for cutting any ties just yet.’ He muttered a few throaty words and touched his finger to the side of Charlie’s neck.
The lad’s eyes flew open, so wide the whites showed in a clear circle around his irises. His blue gaze landed on Silas. He blinked, and his face creased with confusion.
‘Charlie!’ Silas banged at the door anew. ‘It’s me, it’s Silas.’ The bewilderment slid from Charlie’s face, and desperation and relief replaced it. Stifled sounds followed as he sought to be heard through his muzzle.
‘Charlie, it’s all right.’ Silas was anything but all right himself. He sought to shake the place apart.
‘Steady there, Mr Mercer.’ Dr Severs scowled. ‘If you don’t behave, the delinquent will suffer.’
Charlie shouted against his gag. He wriggled madly beneath the jacket, the veins in his throat standing out as he cried himself hoarse behind the leather. The lad’s anguish spilled in a steady flow of glistening tears.
‘It’s all right, Charlie. We’re here.’ Silas ceased his assault on the cell door and worked instead on a forced calm. ‘Stay still, Charlie. We will have you out of there in no time. Do you understand?’
Charlie nodded, wetness running from his nostrils. His eyes darted to Pitch, and once again he seemed unsure, reminding Pitch of how different they must appear.
‘Satisfied?’ Dr Severs said. ‘Alive, as you can see. And no doubt ruing the day he hid among my patients, thinking the chaos here would conceal him from notice.’ The doctor’s carefully cultivated veneer of calm slipped. His scowl held an undercurrent of something far more dangerous. ‘Now, I grow tired of your disobedience. Get in the wretched cell.’ He took the talon and pressed the tip to Charlie’s neck. Even through his gag, the lad’s terrified cry was evident. A thin line of blood ran the short length of his exposed neck.
‘No! No. Stop.’ Silas’s distress buckled his cry.
‘We will step into your precious cell.’ Pitch held up his hands and took a step towards the cell opposite. The door was open, the interior as plain as the one Charlie was being held in. Plainer, for there was no chair in sight. ‘But tell your master they best hurry this along. We don’t have all day.’
‘No.’ Severs’s grin was lascivious. ‘You certainly don’t.’
Pitch grabbed Silas’s arm and pulled him away from his continued efforts to take the door off its hinges. ‘Come, Silas. Let’s humour this dear chap.’
‘But Charlie –’
Pitch drew up close to the ankou, hissing in his ear. ‘Is at their mercy, as is Edward, most likely. Which means, for now, we are too.’
Silas took some dragging, all the while assuring Charlie he was not being abandoned. Making promises about the lad’s safety that Pitch was afraid they could not keep.
The doctor watched them go. His calm was not admirable; it was unnatural. If this man was purebred, then the sorcerers must have spliced the fear out of him, because he had not so much as flinched while Silas turned himself into a battering ram against the door. Nor when he’d stared Pitch down and suggested he knew exactly who the daemon was.
Dr Severs took his bloodied talon and pressed it against his own fingertip, drawing new blood. He brought the talon near to his mouth and began to speak.
The words were strange, as though they sought to be familiar but failed. It reminded Pitch of when Silas went on and on about the botanical names of his beloved plants, the unfamiliar names not quite foreign enough to be unrecognisable, but nor did he understand what they referred to. What was far more troubling than the words themselves was the tongue they were spoken in. Dr Severs was speaking Arcadian with impressive mimicry. The man’s precision with the accent was disturbing. How were the sorcerers learning Azazel’s magick? Pitch stared at the doctor, who in turn did not look away as he continued to whisper to his talon. The man’s mastery of the Arcadian tongue seemed too adept to have come simply from reading a grimoire.
The door slammed shut, the bolt turning.
‘My god, what have we done?’ Silas whispered.
Pitch had a direct line of sight to where the doctor stood beside Charlie, the lad manic in his attempts to find a way out of his restraints, throwing his hips and shoulders about in a way that would only see him hurt himself. It was a terrible waste of his energies. The Morrigan had no intention of setting him free. But for now, at least, they had use for him alive.
‘Gods, I’m so sorry, Silas.’
For Pitch had fucked things up supremely, and if ever an apology was to grace his lips, it should be now.
But he did not learn if the ankou heard him.
The door to their cell crumbled away, pieces falling soundlessly and vanishing before they struck the ground. There should have been a gaping empty doorway left behind, but now there was only stone, great bricks of rock identical to the rest that made up the walls of the cell. One small gap remained at the centre, just wide enough to see the doctor across the way.
Dr Severs smiled, a self-satisfied smirk that Pitch would one day burn from his face. ‘Until we meet again, gentlemen. Behave now, won’t you? She doesn’t like belligerence.’ He uttered one last word. Hammered one last nail of maleficium home to seal them in.
‘No!’ Silas ran at the wall, one arm thrown forward as though he thought to punch his way through the gap, the other pulling the bandalore from his pocket, the blade unfurling like a flashing silver flag.