Page 109 of The Herlequin: Pitch & Sickle 6

Scarlet nestled into him, bringing Pitch back to his senses.

The will-o’-the-wisp couldn’t seem to get close enough. Was the blasted thing trying to burrow under his skin? At least Scarlet had sense to subdue its colours. Pitch caught no hint of a glow from where it bothered about at his collar, no rainbow hues reflected off the starkness of the swirling fog to draw attention.

The angels flew. And flew. Undiscovered. Uncommunicative. The storm mumbled away in the background, and it all became rather monotonous and strangely hypnotic. After all the violence and turmoil, this was a queer calm. Well, as calm as one could be when being whisked away by one’s enemies, with arms and legs turning numb from being held in such a distorted way. In the lull Pitch could almost…almost…imagine himself still at the country house, wrapped in sheets and an ankou, his biggest decision how best to avoid Tilly and her games that day.

When one of the angels spoke, Pitch was startled out of an odd, and very unrestful, doze.

‘Iblis.’ Zaquiel was sharp. ‘There is–’

‘I’m aware. Keep your calm, damn you.’

The first words anyone had spoken in a decent while, and the conversation was stunted with concern.

‘What do you propose, Captain?’ Harut kept his voice low, the fog deadening it further.

‘That we hold our course,’ Iblis returned. ‘She is not the threat she imagines. Hold your tongues.’

But Pitch had heard enough to encourage him to raise his head, even as his neck muscles cursed him for doing so.She.The tension surrounding the angels was palpable. Whoever she was, she was making a mockery of Iblis’s assertion that she was no threat. The Lady? Showing her face at long fucking last? His breath caught, his throat strangled by fledgling hope.

The fog hemmed them in, giving the sweep of the angels’ wings a deadened air. There was barely a sense of being airborne at all, which suited Pitch just fine, keeping his head clear enough of panic. He paid close attention to the group and was there to notice it when their flight path took a subtle shift, a veering to the left.

Pitch could nothearZaquiel’s displeasure so much as feel it in the hunching of his shoulders that saw Pitch shifted up and down, the quick mumble beneath his breath as he banked. But the change of direction did not bring the angels the change of fortune they must have sought. They’d not flown the new course more than a few minutes when Iblis erupted.

‘Fuck, that whore persists.’

‘Iblis, what would you have us do?’ Harut cried.

‘Send the daemon to Harut, Zaquiel,’ Iblis barked. ‘You have faced the Valkyrie in battle, have you not?’

It was not the Lady lurking in the fog; it was her angel. Her warrior. Rider of the White Horse. His fledgling joy faltered to think on Hastings, of what had become of the mare.

‘It has been thousands of–’

‘Do it!’

Zaquiel jerked at the unequivocal command. ‘Captain.’

With no warning, not the slightest, Pitch was swung and then released. He sailed through the air, thrown like a newspaper towards the doorstep. Scarlet was as unprepared as he and was whipped from his neck, managing to snag itself in his hair, dangling there like a heavy earring caught in the strands.

Pitch was hurled away from the meagre safety of the angel’s hold. He cried out. He bloody well screamed. Harut swooped in, shifting his body so his feet jutted ahead of him, working his great shimmering wings with all the dexterity the angels were renowned for. As he moved, readying for the catch, he pressed his legs together, reshaping toes and heels to form a single great talon, though more hooked than any bird could manage, and thick and large enough to lift netted cargo with ease.

Pitch despised himself for being utterly relieved to see the angel manoeuvre himself in close, clearly readying to catch a falling daemon. The halt was problematic though, for Harut did not snatch him at the wrists but slid the great hook his feet had become around the backs of Pitch’s bent knees. He found himself dangling upside down, swinging wildly back and forth, blinking through threatening blackness as the sudden stop nearly dislocated his hips. His bothersome side blasted him with pain, the old wound vastly unhappy. As was he.

Scarlet screeched its tiny lungs out, managing to drag itself to his ear, where it clung to the ear’s curve as though it were the only solid ground left on Earth.

You can fly, you stupid cretin, he wanted to shout.Save yourself and get the blazes away from here.

Pitch shook his head, trying to loosen the wisp. Whatever comfort he might find in its presence hardly mattered now.

Will Scarlet would not be moved and nattered away in his ear. Encouraging him to what? Not be smashed to a pulp when landing upon the ground?

Harut swept right, doubling back on their direction, flanked at a cautious distance by Zaquiel still, but Iblis was nowhere to be seen.

Pitch hung like a pendulum, sweeping through the fog, which parted only momentarily before it rushed back in to cover the path of moving bodies. The wind strengthened, a headwind that whipped up the length of Silas’s coat and flared it out on either side of Pitch’s folded legs. Despite the strength of the breeze against them, Harut was unhindered, his wings barely visible as they drove up and down, the occasional glance of light against the whisper-thin skin all that betrayed their existence.

Pitch’s eyes streamed with the touch of the air. Night air? Morning air? He had no fucking idea what time of day it was, nor what day in particular. Only that the pit of his stomach sought to find the back of his throat, and he was so very fucking tired of playing punching bag.

He blinked in crazed flutters as he sought desperately to clear his vision. His world was actually upside down, but it all looked the bloody same as it had done when he was horizontal. White.