Page 96 of The Herlequin: Pitch & Sickle 6
‘Where is it they are trying so desperately to take you? Do they truly believe because luck was with you once, when you destroyed one maddened Seraphim, that you can stop us heeding our master’s call?’ The smirk upon the angel’s face said he gave that idea little value.
Pitch poured his hatred into his gaze, for his lips would not allow him to tell the angel what he thought of his questions.
The wildness slipped away, quickly as it had appeared. Falling back through whatever crack had formed in the seal to allow it forth. But its brief reappearance buoyed Pitch no end.
His eyes stung with the flame. A fire greatly reduced but more than enough, he knew, to ensure his verdant eyes now raged with tiny infernos.
Pitch knew it was so by the subtle flinch that came from the angel and the wildly unpleasant shift of his knife tip.
‘Your theatrics do not impress me, daemon.’ Iblis scowled, and lied. ‘And you stretch the patience of those above me.’ He raised his free hand, a conductor readying to start his orchestra. ‘Let this be done with. Let him see you.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
BALTHAZAR CRANE’Sblade searched its way through Silas’s innards. And sweet mercy, it was horrific in its relentlessness. Silas’s cry slipped between lips bitten together, pushing through cracks formed when pain overwhelmed him. He’d tried so very hard not to indulge the ankou with a cry or even a whimper.
Silas’s body convulsed, his knees lifting, back arching, shoulders digging into the soft ground as agony took hold. And he was so very close to calling on the bandalore, demanding the scythe heed him, return to him and help end this. But as soon as the thought crossed his agonised mind, it was banished by a strange certainty it should not be done. That he was the bandalore, and the bandalore was he. And he did not need that scythe to exact his will.
Just as his time in the Fulbourn had shown him.
All the while the Nephilim stood over him, boot pressed so hard against Silas’s forehead that if the knife did not end him, the crack of his skull would.
Crane twisted the blade, searching for the heart of the goddess. Searching for Silas’s unnatural beat. Morrigan’s ankou, traitor he was, buried his goddess deep. The loosening inside Silas was a whitewash of devastation, clearing a tumultuous path to the place where the tie that bound him to Izanami lay raw and delicate and ripe for unravelling. The power of Crane’s dark goddess was eye-watering. This was not the same ankou Silas had encountered on the road to Gidleigh Park House.
As Silas drew blood from his own lips, his pain-struck mind filled with memory of his vision: the horrendous spectacle of ravens devouring teratisms. What part did that play here? A certain one, for sure. A part that bestowed Crane’s blade with a power Morrigan should not possess. The goddess was strengthening. Just as the sorcerers claimed the Watcher King to be.
Crane muttered beneath his breath and dragged his blade free. Silas gasped as the serrated edge carved a deeper cut into his ribs.
Silas panted into the relief of the knife’s withdrawal, returning to testing the Dullahan’s confining hold. There again was the slackness in the whip’s embrace, one the headless horseman did not attempt to correct when Silas shifted his arms and squirmed as best he could against the coils of bone. He was barely impaled by the shards; only one or two had broken skin. The oversight seemed strange. Or perhaps the horseman was just so certain that Silas could not escape, he did not bother too greatly.
He could not move his head with the Herlequin’s boot upon him, nor could he shift his eyes far enough to get a glimpse of the Dullahan. From where he lay, all he could see was the Nephilim’s single eye, his dry and cracked lips pulled back to display blackened teeth, oversized and with jagged breaks giving them the appearance of stalactites hanging from grey gums. If it was a smile, it was a truly foul one.
Crane stepped closer, back into Silas’s scope of vision. He held his blade over Silas’s face, the metal coated and dripping with blood. The scythe transformed itself once more: twin blades off a singular hilt, more deft at probing all the space beneath Silas’s ribs and reaching the heart that eluded the ankou so far.
Silas rolled his hips, digging his heels into the ground where he’d already dug a hole in his failed efforts to free himself. For all the carelessness of the Dullahan’s hold, each attempt at freedom had been as futile as the last.
‘You are found wanting, Crane.’
The ankou ignored his remark, looking to where Silas knew the Dullahan to be upon his mount. ‘Take him to the brook. Over there.’ He jerked his chin to a place beyond Silas’s head.
Before Silas could truly fathom what Crane intended, the Herlequin withdrew the pressure of his boot, and the whip tightened around Silas’s middle. He was dragged along the ground with no regard, sticks and stones catching at Silas’s underside, shredding what remained of the back of his shirt and dragging his trousers low. He thought himself about to be made naked, adding insult to injury, when the faint bubbling of the brook met his ears. The narrow stream of icy water he’d foolishly chosen to go to, instead of returning at once to the clearing and his waiting prince. Christ, let Pitch have fled this madness.
Take what you want from me, just see him safe,Silas begged his goddess.
If Izanami gave any sign she’d heard, it was lost with his dunking in icy waters. The familiar surge of revulsion arrived, and thousands of years of habit had Silas crying out, pleading. ‘No! No, wait!’
Silas barely had the words free and the Herlequin was there again, with a hand this time instead of a boot. He planted his enormous palm to Silas’s face, squashing his protest, crushing his nose, and pushing him beneath the water. The brook was not deep. When Silas’s head hit the rocky bed, his face was barely beneath the surface.
But his mind did not care. Under was under.
The familiar terror rushed through him, as much a part of him as his own skin, as attached as the lashes over his eyes. Despite his work at the pond with the kappa, the well-stained fear took its place, knowing it intimately. It shoved aside resistance as easily as a crumb swept from a tabletop, leaving him nearly mindless in his panic to lift his head above water. A creature of terror-borne habit, automated to flail and cry and lose his fucking mind at finding himself submerged.
Crane struck. Drove his blade down once more, his image flickering as Silas’s cries bubbled the water.
The twin blades were buried higher up his chest, piercing through lungs emptied by Silas’s screams.
The agony was a much-needed slap to the face, a punch in the guts that, quite unexpectedly, did the very opposite of what Crane must have intended. It did not paralyse Silas. Rather, it jolted him from his panic, knocking sense in as water endeavoured to wear it away.
Silas coughed against the press of the brook. There was no time for this. This ridiculous, pointless panic. And heknewhe could overcome it. Bloody hell he’d sat at the bottom of that pond with weeds and kappa holding him down and survived it. He’d only reemerged because Pitch had disturbed the waters. The prince had searched for him. Traipsed out into the chill and drizzle and lost his wits when Silas could not be found.