Page 94 of The Herlequin: Pitch & Sickle 6

Horrified cries rang out from the fleeing forest folk. Run. They cried. Run.

Which is what Pitchshouldbe doing.

Find Silas, and keep running. Escape in the chaos.

The clearing shone with the purity of the halo’s white-and-gold-dashed glare. The forest’s bulwark shattered. Pitch threw himself over the helpless dryad.

Placing himself right back where it had all begun.

In the path of a halo’s strike.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

PITCH REGRETTEDhis decision to play living target immediately. To know what it was to be struck by an angelic flame was to know that it should be avoided at all costs. Yet, here he was.

The pain of impact was astonishing. A strike at his shoulder, just above Seraphiel’s mark. He may have screamed, rather uncouthly, as he tumbled through the air, flipped over and over by the power of the blast. There was no telling where up began and down ended, and his head filled with a strange hum. Not a melody or anything pretty, just a resonance that deadened everything else. Silas’s coat tangled around him, wrapping him tight about the legs. Pitch’s back was alight with inglorious flame, and yet he only found concern with how badly burned the Inverness would be if the fire was not put out at once. Silas would want his coat when he returned. And Pitch had bloody well ruined it.

While his thoughts jumbled, his flight came to a violent halt. Pitch was slammed against the Major Oak, where the leshy was all but entirely turned to stone. He bounced clear and thumped down on his belly, landing against hardened moss. Thin shapes skittered out of the way, kodami perhaps, slow to heed the evacuation order.

The sudden stop nearly knocked Pitch senseless, and certainly did knock the air from his lungs. His lip must be bleeding, for there was a tang against his tongue.

‘Pitch. Pitch!’

He thought for half a heartbeat the ankou called him, but realised before he’d finished wondering, it was not. He knew every intonation of Silas’s voice too well. Robin called for him, the fae’s horror echoing faintly in his ringing ears. Pitch groaned, testing how well he could turn his head so he was not face-first against moss grown hard and rough as coral. He was fearful that some of his fingers were broken. He hoped for dislocation at best but the throb at his right thumb suggested that was too optimistic. The waft of his smouldering flesh was appalling, not least of all because of the memories it stirred. Twice now he’d received a direct blow from a halo; twice he’d survived. The scent of charcoaled skin had been different on the Hellfield, of course. Seraphiel had struck when Pitch was in his true Dominion form, but purebred or daemon, no one smelled pleasant when they burned.

Gods, he was hazy, floating somewhere between conscious and not. It took a moment to recognise the sound of footsteps approaching, feet crunching down on the solidified moss.

‘Pitch, please…get up. You must–’

What Robin intended to insist was cut clean from the air, the dryad falling silent in a way that had Pitch fighting to lift his head.

‘Robin?’ He bubbled the name through blood-rich lips, the humming in his ears keeping it dull. Pitch frowned, at a loss as to which muscles must be used to move from prone to standing.

Hands grasped the back of his collar and dragged him roughly to his feet. The righting was nearly as violent as the crash-landing had been. He was shaken with a force that had his aching head snapping back and forth and tugging cruelly against the burn on his back. He wasn’t even certain the flames were out.

‘Your Highness.’ The snarl licked at Pitch’s deadened ear.

He fought to clear his vision, to make out the surrounding shapes in the blur. The air shifted with the unmistakable currents of an angel’s aura. Not one, but two. The dryad had been right about there being more than one angel, but they’d spoken of three. Where was the last little bastard hiding? But seeing a foot ahead of him was hard enough, and looking around was out of the question with the way his vision rolled and tilted and his knees felt made of jelly. So Pitch studied what was right in front of him.

The angels, one to either side, held his arms as though they meant to crush his bones. They were indistinct silhouettes, but their auras were clear and notable for how they lacked the usual vibrancy of an angel’s morphing colours. These lackadaisical spectrums seemed stuck on one shade only, a rather insulting mud brown that shifted to ditch water beige and back again. Angels, preening arseholes they were, usually pranced about like peacocks on display, showing off a collection of colours in their auras the way a colonel showed off his medals. Pitch could only hope it meant the cretins manhandling him were unwell. That would be lovely. And might account for why the blast had not done far more damage. Halos were a conduit for an angel’s inner flame. An ailing angel was less likely to cause as much harm.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ Pitch could barely understand himself. His mouth was thick with blood.

‘Ensure he is secured.’

The command came not from either of the two angels who were lifting Pitch off his feet but another who had yet to reveal themselves. Not that they really needed to step out of whatever dark corner they hid in, for Pitch knew Dr Severs’s tone.

The human form of Iblis. The Watcher angel who had imprisoned them at the Fulbourn. One tended to remember a creature like that. Pitch squinted, trying to make out if any of the shapes around him were the good doctor. He looked away quickly when his gaze found the crouching greyness of the hamadryad. They’d been made statuesque where they knelt, every inch of them petrified by the cruelty of divine magick.

‘A pity Silas did not tear you apart as he did those teratisms, dear doctor,’ Pitch said. ‘But plenty of time for that I suppose.’

He really was making an appalling mess of speaking. One of the angels near him actually turned their head to avoid the flying blood.

‘A threat is more significant if it is real, Mr Astaroth.’ Iblis had not yet shown himself, or if he had, Pitch had not yet gotten coordinated enough to notice him. ‘The ankou would need to exist in order to tear anyone apart, but I regret to inform you that is no longer the case.’

Of course the comment was intended to inflame, and of course Pitch should have kept his calm, but he went quite mad regardless.

‘Liar! Fucking liar.’ Pitch lashed out, kicking out feet that had barely been touching the ground as it was. The jolts caused to his shoulder were more than a little eye-watering, but he persisted. He was aiming for angelic balls, but the angle was impossible, rage and trauma making him foolish. He ended up imitating a person seeking to skate the ice for the very first time, legs flailing. An appalling display of ineptitude which did nothing to strengthen the threats of extreme violence he was levelling at his captors. One of the bastards had the audacity to chuckle.