Page 91 of The Fulbourn: Pitch & Sickle

‘I’m still with you, Sickle.’

Likely it was too rough for the stained and gasping daemon, but Silas wrapped him in his arms and kissed him hard, tasting grit and ash and divine bittersweetness. He pulled back, just an inch, and whispered into the warm space between them.

‘My heart.’

Silas froze. Christ, had he said that out loud?

Pitch raised his head, Cupid’s bow lips still perfect, despite the ruin of the rest of him, and damp with Silas’s kiss. ‘What did you just call –’

‘I said…my heart cannot take much more of this place.’ Silas tugged at the rags of his shirt, the strips plastered to his damp body. ‘Let’s move on.’

And pretend he’d not just let his tongue run away with him.

The daemon gave him an odd look and brushed off Silas’s attempts to assist him. ‘Do you not see they are running us like rats in their maze? Just like Macha wished. The necromancer and her Child are deciding our every turn.’

Silas glanced at the brickwork, a strange scar against the rougher grey stone of the castle, as though it had been patched up badly and without any regard for the original materials. And blast if he did not hear those whispers again, coming from behind it.

‘Macha is not deciding everything.’ He stalked across the courtyard, up to the red bricks to where the daemon’s flame had left a sooty mark of night black. Silas pressed his hands to the wall. His fingers were sticky with what was left of the teratism.

He listened, eyes closed, dipping himself into the bleakness behind his lids, seeking out the hint of desolation and despair that seemed closer to him now. Clearer.

He ran his hands over the space where the entrance to the passageway had gaped not so long ago.

There. Faint but sure, as though the sound were the very last resonance of an echo. Silas dug his fingers into the blackened wall.

‘What is it?’ Pitch asked, coming to stand behind him.

‘I can hear lost souls again… I think perhaps they know I am here.’ He glanced at the ashen remains of one teratism, the pulled-apart ruins of the other. ‘There was something very wrong with the songs of those. I wonder…’ Silas swallowed. For century after century the cursed halo had found those most vulnerable among the souls, those with all-consuming rage and resentment, and slowly poisoned them. Turning them into monsters. The Morrigan were meddling with that process. They’d been testing it with the Verderer. But had they perfected it here?

‘You wonder what, Silas?’ Pitch was busy with wrapping a torn strip of his shirt about the wound on his leg.

Silas balled his fists, too preoccupied to answer.

These werehislost souls. Silas was their guide, their light in the darkness, the goddess’s messenger. He could give them resolution and peace, but Macha was stealing that from them.

From him.

‘Silas?’

Silas felt Pitch’s warmth before the daemon reached his side. ‘She is not just stealing corpses,’ Silas said quietly. ‘She has been gathering souls too. There are so many of them here…too many to be natural. And those teratisms that attacked us…they were…wrong. They were not as the others I’ve met.’ He paused. ‘She is making them. The Verderer was not an anomaly. She is striving to create teratisms. If ever there was a hell, then we have found it.’

A heated hand was placed over his. ‘And I dare say they’d like to keep us in it. But could not a horde of lost souls be of use to you? You seem quite popular with them.’ He flung his hand towards the decapitated teratism. ‘When they’ve not reached the stage where you need to rip their heads off.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘That was quite the display, my dearest.’

But Silas was distracted by his horde of lost souls.

‘Suppose they can tell us something of this Sanctuary? Perhaps even the part of it where Charlie and Edward lie?’

‘You are the ghost whisperer, that’s for you to learn. Do you want to drag us through this wall?’

‘I think it is the way we should go, yes.’

Pitch sighed. ‘Wall walking is not pleasant, I have to say.’

‘There’s something I must do first though.’

Silas left him to move quickly to where the teratism still smouldered. All sign of flames were gone, but a smoke the colour of dishpan water lifted from the body, dirtying the air. The teratism’s dreadlocks of duckweed had burned clear, and the head was nothing but the stark white of an exposed skull. Actually that could be said of most of the creature’s body, a skeletal ruin. But the hands still twitched, the body jerking and shuddering. True death had not yet come.

He knelt at the side of the teratism. It was odd how the burned flesh did not smell truly wretched. The creatures had smelled far worse when dripping with the horrors of the Blight’s contortions. Silas placed his hands just below the exposed jaw. He flicked his wrists and pulled away at the same time, his formidable strength severing the head from the spine in one quick motion. He set down the head gently, cleaned off his hands, and moved back to Pitch.