Page 104 of The Herlequin: Pitch & Sickle 6

Iblis’s instructions were absently given. The angel was distracted, his gaze shifting between Harut with his horn and the opening burned through the brambles.

Pitch’s fragile instincts locked in on the glances, even as Zaquiel behaved like an utter prick, grabbing his coat near enough to the halo burn to agonise. But Pitch barely whimpered.

The Watcher angel was unhappy.

Pitch’s mind raced, finding its way, throwing off all that lingered of Azazel’s hex. Did the Wild Hunt not heed the angel’s summons?

Hope dared bloom, a mangled, ugly little flower, but one that pressed through the cracks regardless.

‘Again,’ Iblis snapped.

Harut obeyed. And the solemn note from the horn hung cold and lonely in the air. The forest held its breath, defying the angels and holding silence like a shroud around its boughs. Pitch swore the grimace upon Robin’s petrified face was not so terror-stricken as when he’d last cast it a reticent glance. Was it possible the hamadryad was not so easily felled? Did they see what Pitch saw? A trio of angels too disturbed to bother concealing their unease. Pitch smiled like a madman behind unmoving lips .

Oh the Hunt was not done with Silas at all. For the ankou was not done with the Wild Hunt.

And the truth of it was written all over Iblis’s mediocre face. The angel was fucking furious.

A sob of relief entwined with laughter behind Pitch’s sealed lips, and he loosened a positively marvellous string of vulgar taunts at all the angels. Wonderful vitriol that was wasted upon this party, who paid him as much attention as a mannequin standing in a dress shop.

Pitch’s delightful, momentary smugness vanished with the next few simple words from Iblis.

‘We shall take to the sky. Wings, gentlemen.’

CHAPTER THIRTY

SILAS PURSEDhis lips, his eyes locked on the scythe in Balthazar Crane’s beefy hand. He was not a small man, the other ankou, but to Silas’s eye he certainly seemed so in that moment. The ankou’s aura coiled in tight against his body, tentacles retracting, seeking shelter.

‘Oh, Mr Mercer, you shall have to do far more than ask for my scythe.’

Glaring, Crane wielded his scythe one-handed, as though readying for attack, but he was afraid. It was written all over him. And well it should be. He suffered a noticeably broken wrist, and the fight between skriker and Nephilim was ripping holes in the air, with both creatures making sounds not fit for ears to hear. More distantly the teratism made its mark upon the forest with equally unsettling noise, fighting off an enemy Silas had yet to lay eyes upon.

How had he ever imagined himself alone here?

His lips shifted into the briefest of smirks before Silas reshaped them, letting his tongue curl, ready for the note he would need. And in one long exhale, he called on Izanami’s lost scythe.

The whistled note cut at the air as well as any sword might. The finality of death was always sharp.

‘Dullahan!’ the ankou cried, for Crane heard all that Silas’s note contained and the seething unhappiness of the goddess he’d betrayed. ‘I command you–’

Whatever he thought to demand from the absent headless horseman, Silas did not learn, for Crane’s cry was consumed by his efforts to keep hold on the scythe. He lurched bodily forward, and it was miraculous the ankou kept his footing. His fingers curled about the hilt. He slapped both hands to it, a choked cry escaping him as his broken wrist was forced to action. The ankou’s feet braced, body tilted back, as though he were wielding a kite so huge that it threatened to lift him from his feet.

But the scythe did not seek to rise to the sky. It sought to heed the note Silas whistled to it, to return to the true messenger of death.

‘Fuck…’ Crane spat, veins bulging in his neck with the strain upon him. To his credit, or rather that of the goddess Morrigan he bowed to, the ankou put up a considerable fight, proving himself no walkover. Crane held a depth to his strength that had not been evident on their first encounter. At Gidleigh Park House the traitor seemed more sycophant than challenger.

Not so now.

But good luck to goddess and turncoat, both. Silas had no time for either. This was not where he needed to be.

With Forneus’s screech and the Herlequin’s jarring cries chaotic in the background, Silas drew on deeper reserves, his own note strengthening. His call was greater than that of a hundred sirens unified as one. His lungs sent forth more air easily, as though he’d inhaled all there was available in the world and it was at his disposal now. The note would not end until his cause was met.

And that end was so exquisitely, tantalisingly close.

Crane’s heel slipped in the mud, a damp and unexpected ally in this forest of friend and foe. The ankou’s precarious balance shifted irreparably. The twin blades ripped from his grasp and arrowed straight at Silas.

He met them halfway, snatching the weapon from the air, settling it in his grasp as he ran on.

Crane had no time to get his wits about him before Silas was on him, landing his full considerable weight upon the slighter ankou. He heard joints pop beneath him, heard the ankou’s curse fly free with a gasp.