Page 89 of The Fulbourn: Pitch & Sickle

Damn it, he could not hear the daemon. Pitch should have been shouting all kinds of foul things as he stoushed with the other teratism. Silas dared turn his head, as much to avoid the spittle that flew from the violently shaking creature as to search for the prince.

He ran cold with the horror of what he saw.

Pitch was backed into an alcove, a space barely large enough to contain even his slight figure. He was tangled in the ivy. It wrapped about his neck and legs but teasingly left his arms free.

Free to clutch at the arrows embedded in his chest. Two of them, nearly side by side.

His shirt was soaked through with blood, a deep scarlet that veered towards black in the light of stuttering torches. His face was a mask of confusion, his eyes wild.

‘Christ. Pitch.’

The teratism bucked weakly beneath him, in its last throes, while the other stood by, watching the daemon prince pressed into his corner, a cruel smile upon its lips. Silas scanned about wildly for the archer, but the shadows made for drapes in all the corners he could see.

A terrible gurgle came from the teratism he straddled, and Silas tightened his grip. His fingers sank into the melted wet wax of the creature’s flesh.

God damn the bandalore for not heeding him. And bloody hell, why would this forsaken creature beneath him not die?

The courtyard lit up with amber-yellow light, the prince’s flame burning bright.

‘Hang on, Pitch.’

‘Fuck, cunts, this ivy…’ Pitch cried. ‘Tore this castle down once before…do it…again.’ He was gasping, spitting with a fury that could so readily consume him.

‘Keep calm, Pitch. I’m coming.’

But the light only brightened, harsh enough to have Silas blinking where he clung madly to the teratism’s neck.

A ribbon of flame shot out and wrapped around the teratism that stalked the prince, causing it to screech like a cat tangled in carriage wheels. He lifted the creature off its gangly legs, the duckweed swaying and dripping.

The daemon’s scream came a moment later.

Another arrow had struck, this time in his thigh. Pitch’s eyes blazed like a blacksmith’s furnace. He was beyond any semblance of calm. Macha’s archer had pushed him towards the edge.

A knot clenched in Silas’s chest, dragging at something weighty within and hauling it to the surface.

With a roar, he bore down with all the might the goddess had invested in him. His fingers hit bone, a spinal cord perhaps on this vile manifestation. It crumbled at his touch. He wrenched his arms upwards, and the teratism’s head came away, the lengths of duckweed flapping about and catching Silas in the face with the wild swing of his arms.

He thought for a moment he heard a voice at his ear, a whisper so hushed he could make no sense of it. A chill struck him, one that sank into his marrow.

The teratism’s crooked melody, faulty and strange, ceased.

But there was no silence.

Fire hissed and popped and crackled, and the teratism screamed its agonies. Pitch held the creature before him like a shield against the archer’s arrows, the remnants of the ivy that had bound him now hanging like scarves of charcoal. He had made the contorted soul as much of a fireball as the Dullahan had been. But just as it was with the fae, a daemon’s flames offered only temporary eradication of the pest. And with the teratism ablaze, Silas had no hope of getting close enough to cease its existence.

‘Set it down!’ he shouted, trying to make himself heard over the woeful squeals of the burning soul. ‘Stop the fire.’

‘Archer!’ Pitch shouted back. He tried to take a step, but his arrow-punctured thigh put paid to that, and he went down onto one knee.

Silas dashed towards the daemon, flinching at the pure unrelenting heat that came from the burning teratism. The creature’s sky-rending cries had fallen silent. It burned at the centre of Pitch’s shield like a grotesque coat of arms.

‘Pitch, steady now.’

Every inch of visible skin on the daemon glowed. The emerald in his eyes was entirely submerged beneath the glare of gold.

‘Then they best stop shooting fucking arrows at me.’ The prince spat a glob of claret that landed near Silas’s feet. ‘Did you see the archer?’ Still holding the burning teratism aloft, he wrenched the remaining arrow from his thigh with his free hand. In his chest, the twin punctures were gelatinous, bloody holes, more disturbing to Silas than his own act of severing a teratism’s head with his bare hands.

‘I haven’t spotted them.’ Silas shook his head. ‘But they can only be in one of those two passageways.’ He gestured, though it was difficult to see much at all through the hovering inferno. ‘I was near the third. There was no one there.’