Page 88 of The Herlequin: Pitch & Sickle 6

Surely this number of riders was not responsible for the quaking of the forest floor? Or was this only a portion of the Hunt, the rest elsewhere?

The thought spilled ice into Silas’s veins, cooling the heat there and allowing quiet terror to trickle in. He could try to break himself free of the whip, a move unlikely to succeed and more likely to see him trampled by the Herlequin’s mount, but at the very least it would keep this party occupied. Distracted from the forest’s heart, where he fervently hoped his precious daemon no longer waited.

‘Well this is quite the vigorous conversation. Am I being accosted by mute fools? The silence is rather dull.’ Such bravado, and not a whit of it real.

The stallion held perfectly still, only a faint huff of white coming from its nostrils as it breathed, with the Herlequin as statuesque as his horse, and his darkness a mere shade less than his mount’s.

‘You trespass in this forest, Herlequin.’ Silas could barely stand the weight of the silence. ‘The Wild Hunt is banished from this world.’

Did the Nephilim recognise one of his own? There’d been no sign of anything from the rider, not even that he was aware of the man kneeling in the dirt before him.

At last the creature spoke. And what a noise it was.

‘The Wild Hunt has no boundaries.’ The scratch of his voice was like wind-tossed branch tips across a windowpane. Silas winced, hunching his shoulders. Jesus, he’d have preferred the Nephilim stayed silent. ‘The Erlking’s riders cannot be banished, no matter how your masters wish it were so, ankou.’

Ankou…perhaps the Nephilim did notseeSilas after all. Or perhaps, after so long, there was nothing left of his original life left to notice. Oddly, that foolish notion pained him. Silas had no wish to be known for the perversity of his birth, but nor had he ever been so aware of the distance stretching between him and the living.

Silas fought off foolish, ill-placed melancholy. He stared at all he could see of the Herlequin: a gleaming silver stirrup on which rested a boot so large that he could have slid both his feet into it at a push. The leather was strange, a whirling pattern that suggested animal skin, though of what species he could not guess. One not of this world, he suspected.

‘The Erlking has made a grave mistake in siding with sorcerers and errant angels.’ Silas rose as high as the Dullahan’s hold would allow, which was further than he’d thought possible. The headless horseman was being merciful with his whip, his cuts not deep nor too painful. ‘It will cost the UnSeelie Court dearly.’

Branches and glass met again, this time in one calamitous sound that was very likely laughter. ‘Grave mistake? Says the man of death on his knees in the dirt, his masters nowhere to be found.’ The Nephilim’s voice felt as though it was scraping the skin from the channels of Silas’s ears. ‘You have partnered with the daemon too long; his belligerence coats you.’

Silas’s gut twisted with the desire to reach out and tear the rider from his horse for mentioning Pitch at all.

‘I’d say far more than Tobias Astaroth’s belligerence coats him.’

Silas’s terror stretched and widened at the new voice. He turned his head, the only part of his body allowed such freedom, to search out the speaker. ‘Crane.’ The name escaped him as a dying whisper. Cool fear evaporated, replaced once again by heat. A heat borne of rage, not merely the closeness of another Nephilim.

Balthazar Crane edged back the fringe of his hood, settling it so Silas had a clear view of his aura-touched face, the familiar thin threads of silver snaking from him. The only aura Silas had yet been able to see.

And one he had come to detest.

No melody arrived with the other ankou, but Silas did not need it. Crane’s appearance was imprinted upon his mind. A portrait that would stay with him forever. Crane’s betrayal of Silas had been shocking, but nothing compared to the part he’d played in sending Pitch to that upstairs room at Gidleigh Park House. Delivering him to the Alp daemon while knowing what she intended.

Silas seethed, repulsed anew by the unforgivable abuse.

Crane touched at his spectacles, urging the dull silver frames up his nose. His ridiculous muttonchops were as flamboyant as Silas recalled, but the ankou’s face was so utterly commonplace, so devoid of any hint he was such a treacherous bastard.

‘Hello, Mr Mercer.’ Balthazar Crane’s air held more flint than when they’d last met. ‘Lovely to see you again. How is your pretty daemon? No, wait.’ He fluttered a gloved hand. ‘Don’t tell me. We’ll learn soon enough.’

The ankou’s smile was a match to Silas’s kindling of tinder-dry fury. He abandoned his attempt to keep his wits, to hold his audience’s attention from the forest’s heart.

‘You fucking bastard.’ Unadulterated hatred poured from him, and its suddenness, its ferocity caught them all unawares. Silas drove himself to his feet, taking the weight of the bones with him. ‘I will kill you for what was done to him.’

He threw himself at the stallion for balance, driving the barbs into the horse’s soft chest. The Herlequin’s horse screamed and drew back into a half rear, but Silas was already moving, turning, hauling the Dullahan and his binding with him. He lunged for the traitorous ankou as though there was not a mass of horseflesh and a weighty bone anchor seeking to hold him back.

Silas was vaguely aware of the fact that he’d made far more ground than seemed tenable and had not been impaled to his core by the whip’s teeth. The Dullahan’s blue roan danced about, its long mane fanning as the animal tossed its head. Silas sought to lift his arms from where the whip held them pressed against his sides and found slight movement possible.

It buoyed him. His anger fed on the possibility of freedom and pushed him another step closer to the Morrigan’s ankou.

‘Bring him down, you fools! Herlequin!’ Crane shouted, pulling hard at his horse’s mouth to turn the steed about. ‘Get him down, now!’

Silas imagined his hands around the other ankou’s neck, squeezing the goddess-granted life from him. Just as he’d done in the Fulbourn with the teratisms. Silas let sharp loathing consume him.

Too late he noticed the loom of the Herlequin.

The blow was staggering.