Page 82 of The Fulbourn: Pitch & Sickle

He imagined Charlie gone.

A quiet fury bubbled along with a stinging grief, and the sweat on his face all at once felt dreadfully cold. He pictured the corpse of the lad in his mind, letting the spears of grief drive into him. The pain of mourning trumped anything the Dullahan’s whip could deliver.

Silas’s fingertips sank into the wall, through the arsenic-embellished wallpaper.

The teratisms’ refrain grew louder, a clatter and bang of nonsensical notes like the orchestra had lost all semblance of sanity. He felt Pitch shift beside him and heard the daemon curse beneath his breath.

‘My dear,’ he said. ‘We have to go. I think your monsters are here.’

A heated tear slid down Silas’s face, and his hands sank from sight. He was buried to his wrists in the wall. The staircase shuddered beneath his feet, a great weight setting upon them.

The bone-jarring cries of the teratisms rang again, and he felt Pitch startle. The daemon heard the Blight’s creatures now too.

‘Silas, if we are going, we go now.’

‘Hold on to me.’ The wallpaper curled in torn licks around his arms, as though seeking to tear itself away from his invasion.

‘Hold on to you?’

‘Quickly, Pitch.’ He pulled one arm free of the wall and grabbed at the daemon, catching the lip of his corset, gripping it tightly. Pitch let out a startled cry, noticing for the first time Silas’s arm sunk into the wall, nearly up to the elbow now.

‘Fuck, Silas, what –’

‘It’s all right, Pitch.’ The stairs shook with the thump of heavy footfalls, the groan of timber mixing with the calamitous songs. ‘Don’t let go of me. Stay close.’

‘Of course.’

Pitch trusted him easily, readily, and Christ, it made the ankou tremble. The prince found his place beneath Silas’s arm, and his warmth chased away the chill.

Silas shut his eyes and fell once more into his well of sorrow, floating in the embrace of death, feeding on her exquisite agonies as he thought on his friend, taken too soon. Silas allowed his grief to coax from him the spectre that he was. The Nephilim spectre he had been for thousands of years. He’d forgotten it all. But he remembered so much more now.

He was death’s messenger.

He was Samyaza’s monstrous creation. A forging of skin and bone and angelic ambition.

An anomaly of life and death.

Silas swept an arm about the daemon and gathered up his slight but weighty body, fairly certain he’d lifted Pitch off his feet, but he needed him close. He wanted to feel him living and breathing against him. He knew exactly who he was around the daemon prince. A protector. Guardian.

The teratisms shrieked, and the walls shuddered. Silas did not waver from his introspection, eyes shut fast. He could count their number now.

Three calamitous, contorted ghouls came for him. He glimpsed them in the darkness behind his eyelids. Sallow and pitted faces, haggard with the bereavements that had transformed them into inhuman tragedies.

‘Hold tight, my dear,’ he whispered to the prince, who nestled in tighter against him.

Silas edged himself so that he would meet the wall first, and with teeth bared, he drove them both into it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

PITCH PUSHEDup against the ankou as the teratisms lurched out of the darkness. Claws that would have made Black Annis wild with envy swiped at his ankle, nicking thin skin. He swore, but the curse didn’t have time to leave his lips before they were slamming into the wall.

Or, as the case may be,notslamming into the wall. Silas clutched him close and drove them into the tasteless wallpaper. There was no neck-jarring, skull-cracking thump of their bodies against it. The wall seemed to give way, the air pressure altering as though a door had been opened somewhere and a powerful draught let loose.

It turned out that moving through the walls of a Sanctuary was as unappealing as it sounded.

Pitch retched, stomach rolling. He was dizzier than when Jane had swept him up in a whirlwind after discovering he’d stolen a pair of her favourite heels.

What would the air elemental think of her favourite ankou now? Likely far too much. For Silas was astonishing. He was dragging them both through a fucking wall…in a Sanctuary no less…like they were mere beams of light through glass.