Page 94 of The Fulbourn: Pitch & Sickle

Cries of torment scratched at him, utter anguish mixed with a seething rage and a blazing, righteous indignation.

Fucking hell. They had struck him with the Blight.

Silas buckled in on himself, trying to make himself smaller so this despair could not find so great a target.

There was no hope here. No light. Barely air enough to breathe.

There was only ruination. Utter and total. Defeat.

Little wonder this drove the lost souls mad. The legacy of a ruined angel. A legacy of loss. Of failure. Of Samyaza’s sheer and undeniable hopelessness. And not just his, but of all those who had followed the Watcher King and died for him.

Silas staggered, knees giving way beneath the onslaught of such unbridled grief. The ground seemed to shudder with the force of his fall.

Somewhere in the distance, way, way off in the black cloud that had filled the room, Silas heard a voice.

‘Hold on,’ it commanded. ‘Do not let go.’

Silas blinked through the haze, one formed by his own tears. The ash man was gone. He did not grip broken bones now, but hard wood, the edge of a gaping hole in the ground. The floorboards had vanished beneath him. There was ash everywhere, black specks floating like rotten snow about him. He dangled in a pit, crying, with just one hand fastened to torn and splintered wood. He struggled to work out why he should not just let go. The weight of the Blight’s despair urged him to let go. What point in holding on?

‘Fuck, Silas. Give me your other hand.’

A beautiful green-eyed man appeared overhead, his hair a lovely tangle about his sublime face. A stirring of happiness came with looking at the man. So odd and misplaced amongst the doldrums.

‘Give me your other hand.’ His pretty mouth uttered a fierce directive. ‘Don’t you dare let go.’

Silas felt a pain at his chest, a sharp thud of his heart, and he sobbed. He should reach for this man.

A force tugged at him from the abyss below.Here is where you belong.The harsh, grating sound was barely a voice at all.

The wood at his fingertips crumbled away.

Come home.

The words cut at him, sure as the tip of a blade, and set his very blood to quivering.

And the darkness grabbed his ankles and wrenched him down.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

SILAS FELL. His tears streamed, falling with him.

The beautiful man cried out with a desperation that the Blight thrived upon. He shone like a summer morn, brilliant and wild-eyed. But a great shadow appeared at his shoulder, looming over him thick and heavy as a storm cloud. A headless figure upon a horse, arm raised, a whip streaming overhead like a strand cut loose from a maypole.

Silas saw only a glimpse. He opened his mouth. To say what?

Utter a warning?

Yes.

He wanted to warn the beautiful man. He wanted to protect that precious soul like he did no other.

Silas sobbed. The desolation of insurmountable grief dragging at him. Pulling him down. He had dared to let go; he’d defied that glorious face.

Now he was tumbling down, sinking. To somewhere he hoped this grief, this agony of loss, might not follow.

Return to whence you came.

Silas winced at the added blow of misery the voice brought. And his fall quickened.