Page 77 of The Fulbourn: Pitch & Sickle

He spoke of Pitch’s fire in the way Pitch thought of it himself. As though it were a separate entity, a challenge to be handled, an adversary to be managed. For the first time since he’d first felt the shift in his power, he was not alone in trying to hold himself together.

‘Even when you did relent,’ Silas went on, ‘you were precise, not mindless. Besides, you could not have done anything sooner, for you were in chains. Astonishingly strong chains. They can’t have been human-made?’

‘They were nekhri, the same as those blasted arrowheads… But I could have ruined them.’ His cuff was soaked through with blood, making his attempts at cleaning detrimental now. ‘I could have broken free, if I –’

‘Let go entirely? Let the wildness take over?’ Silas shook his head. ‘You were right to restrain yourself.’

Pitch gave up with the cuff and used the pad of his thumb to vanish a tiny speck of blood that hid in the faint bristle of Silas’s already-returning beard.

‘Edward or not, if they touch you again like that, I shall reduce this place to ash.’

Silas tried awfully hard to make his smile reach his eyes, but the attempt was a failure. He looked dreadful. His skin held a tinge of greenish grey, and the ring of black around his irises seemed thicker, pressing in on light brown as though the darkness they’d fallen through had seeped into him.

The ankou touched his hand to the wound on Pitch’s neck where the kitsune had taken his bite. ‘I wasn’t sure this had truly happened,’ Silas said.

‘On account of being thrashed to senseless by that piece of shit upon his horse?’

‘Was the rest of it true? The Erlking claiming our deal with the –’

‘Can we focus instead upon the task at hand here, instead of fae nonsense?’

Silas did not seem keen to do so, his eyes still fixed on the wound, which was really not much more than a graze now.

‘Silas?’ Pitch nudged him.

‘Yes, yes, of course. Edward and Charlie.’

‘That’s the pair. Do you have any idea where they might be?’ He fluttered his hands. ‘Does your bond with the vagabond tell you anything? Perhaps you set some of your ghostly friends to work to find him?’

‘I am not connected to Charlie in that way, though I wish it were so.’ Silas wrinkled his nose. ‘And as for the ghosts…that’s the odd thing. I’ve yet to sense any lost souls here at all.’

‘Why is that odd?’

‘So many must have died here…so many unhappy souls. And not one lingers in a place like this? Neither in the corridors upstairs, if we are still under the asylum as you believe, nor down here. That strikes me as surprising. But then, most everything about the Fulbourn is an unwelcome surprise.’

And by the Archangel’s cockheads, Pitch should have known it would be so. He should have taken Silas back to the Village. Bend for him there until he was so punch-drunk from fucking he could do nothing but sleep like the dead he loved so much. Then Pitch could have crept away to make this foolish journey on his own. Dealt with the repercussions of his arrogance and petulance alone. But he had not. And here they were. In the veritable lion’s den. So they must take from that what they could and survive to tell the tale.

‘Can you walk on, do you think?’

‘Yes.’ Silas nodded, tending more of his weight towards Pitch. ‘The healing is not so fast as I’d like, but the bleeding has stopped I think.’

‘Shall I check?’

‘No, it will be ghastly to look at.’

‘I manage well enough with your face each day.’

Silas laughed, and it really was a cruel thing to make him do, but by the gods it was wonderful to hear.

‘Oh shit,’ he gasped. ‘I think I’d rather the pain stop than the bleeding.’

Pitch gave him a moment to gather himself, and at his nod, they set off on their snail’s pace again.

The corridor stretched ahead into a narrow point of darkness, places where the gaslight could not seem to penetrate. It was the same behind them too, Pitch noted. As though the lights had been snuffed out as they moved along. There was not a painting upon the walls nor a plant in a pot upon the floor. And not a single door. Nothing to indicate they had moved at all. Each step they took just delivered them to an identical place. As though they were walking on the spot.

‘This feels rather pointless,’ Silas said after a few quiet minutes. He leaned his weight towards the wall. ‘Are you feeling any kind of pull towards one direction?’

‘No. No, there’s nothing.’