Page 117 of The Herlequin: Pitch & Sickle 6
But doing what? Was the wisp carrying a box of matches? Because it sure as blazes felt as though he was being stabbed with a head of smouldering sulphur. Barely had he begun to lift his head and his wrist was freed from its restraint.
His arm dropped, his hand, almost entirely numb after so long in that position, smacked at his hip, dragging a fold of Silas’s coat with it, his arm dangling like an anchor below him. The pain at his shoulder joint was exquisitely intense, but that hardly mattered.
A will-o’-the-wisp was somehow, impossibly, granting his daemonic wish to plummet to his ultimate demise. Either the creature despised him far more than he’d imagined, or there were greater things at play here. Pitch dug his teeth into his lip as the blood returned to his limb. The dangling royal-blue coat covered his partial escape well enough for now, but it surely wouldn’t be long before one of the dunderheads flying with him noticed.
How had Scarlet defied the nekhri? In Arcadia the metal could hold Nephilim bound in the bowels of White Mountain. What Iblis used here must be weakened somehow. With time, maybe? The weary state of the halo might account for that.
The pinch of discomfort moved to Pitch’s left wrist, but desperate as he was to see what was being done, the muscles in his neck defied him. A spasm jerked his head back down.
Zaquiel cried out, and Pitch feared his release discovered. The ravens’ cawing magnified, and a crack opened in the densely packed flock. Light, bright as the midday sun, poured in, highlighting the battle beyond the shroud. Pitch blinked madly, fighting to keep his eyes open in the glare.
There raged a storm beyond his prison. A blinding, flashing, maniacal storm that brewed between two angels.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
IBLIS ANDSybilla tore the sky apart with their angelfire. Or certainly the Valkyrie did. It was evident when Iblis’s more paltry halo took its shots, for Pitch had no need to grimace at the brightness.
Both angels were silhouettes in the light show, but he could have picked Sybilla from any lineup, with the smooth roundness of her head and a particular heft to her shoulders giving her away. She flew slightly above Iblis, lunging down at the angel, her halo, her rapier pointed ahead of her like the prow of a ship breaking the ice. The sirin, the few Pitch glimpsed, focused their efforts on the barricade of ravens.
Brilliant white light pulsed from the rapier, swift as a piece of lightning moving at Sybilla’s behest. But Iblis was quick where he was not powerful, and twisted out of strike range with irritating aptitude, wings cocooned against his body.
That was Pitch’s last view of the confrontation, with the parting of the raven curtain closing over, the birds reassembling themselves despite the fierceness of the fight at their edge.
Pitch had no time to be frustrated by his obscured view. The burning at his left wrist grew intense, almost too much to bear. The tight clench of the metal released, and Pitch’s arm was free.
The relief was utter painful bliss, and mildly terrifying. Pitch dropped, eyes flaring wide with the horror of the short fall. He hung like a trapeze artist beneath Harut, Silas’s coat a draping curtain of blue at the back of his head. Most of his fingertips were numb and all his joints throbbed. Especially where Scarlet clung to his thumb, heavier than he’d known the wisp to be. The wisp pressed something into his deadened hand. A knife, compact, the hilt bigger than the blade. A whittling knife? Small as it was, it was double the size of the wisp, and yet somehow the creature had handled it to hack through his cuffs.
‘The daemon is free!’ Harut shouted, sounding only half as surprised as Pitch was.
The angel shifted his trajectory, body tilting upright, wings pounding the air to bring him to an abrupt halt. The stop swung Pitch forward, and he grasped at the opportunity the momentum gave him.
Pitch threw his body into the reverse swing, curling in on himself like the trapeze artist he wished he truly was. All he knew of the act had been glimpsed through whisky and boredom at a circus he’d only attended so he could bed the ringmaster when it was finally over.
The fellow had been a dreary fuck. Pitch should have watched the damned show.
Muscles he did not know he possessed, and overburdened ones he did, clenched and twinged like they’d suffered an electric shock, but the path of the swing was true. Silas’s coat flared out behind him like a singular blue wing, and Scarlet screeched a battle-cry worthy of the Berserker Prince himself. Pitch’s momentum took him just high enough that he could reach and plunge the knife into the swell of Harut’s curious unified calves.
The angel let loose a gratifying bellow, slashing at Pitch with his wing and making blood run at his neck. But worse, far worse, the brutality of Pitch’s blow brought on unwelcome transformation. Harut swore, appearing to lose control of his own abilities to morph his figure as he pleased.
‘He has a weapon!’ Harut screamed, while his legs took on bizarre shapes, none fixing long. All of them were precarious in their hold on the dangling daemon. That perfect idea of allowing himself to fall to his doom was abhorrently stupid in this stark new light.
‘Steady, you fool! Do not lose him.’ Zaquiel was somewhere nearby, shouting instructions Pitch thought fairly fucking obvious.
Scarlet squealed, its meagre weight painful when it was dragging at a fine strand of his hair.
‘Fuck, fuck.’ His vocabulary was reduced to that solitary word, his hand so tight around the whittling knife that he was likely to crush the hilt.
Harut was not steady. He let his passenger go. Or could not hold him. It hardly mattered which. Either way, Pitch fell.
From a staggering height.
His scream was trapped, a violent expulsion of sound against the back of his throat that burned.
And gods what he wouldn’t give totrulyburn now. Even if it were that winged inferno he’d seen in the vision with Edward. Anything to stop this fall.
But Pitch was a stone. And the wildness was trapped beneath its weight, unmoving. He flailed his arms, clawing at the air as though somewhere in the nothingness there would be a handhold. But even the ravens had abandoned him. Their cawing was still evident, but he plummeted through the fog unaccompanied by their black shadows. His stomach felt as though it was lodged in his throat. And his heart?… Well, that had stopped beating altogether. Will Scarlet, confound the blasted thing, fell with him, still tangled somewhere in his hair.
Pitch’s descent reached a breathtaking speed. He was fairly certain he’d wet his trousers, absolutely certain all the screaming would ruin chance of ever speaking again. He would die with his lips knit together and his final cry embedded in the backs of his teeth.