The soothsayer fled the room. Her sudden movement wrestled Silas from his appalling stillness.
‘Stop. Stop, that is enough.’ Silas moved quickly, trying to outpace the mortifying truth that he’d waited too long. ‘I said stop. Now.’
He grabbed Lucifer’s arm.
And was ill-prepared for the blow. He did not see the daemon’s fingers come away from the kitsune’s chin, did not feel his muscles flex, nor his body turn. But all at once, Silas was thrown across the room and slammed so hard against the stone wall that pieces broke away. He rebounded forward to land flat on his face.
Winded, Silas strained to inhale, dragging himself as quickly as he could to his knees. Convinced Lucifer would be there already to knock him back down.
But the king was still beside the struggling kitsune, wiping at his fingers with the kerchief daintily while Ernest gurgled and frothed inky-black foam.
‘Don’t touch me again, ankou. Or no matter your goddess, you will die another of your deaths. Do you understand me?’
‘What did you learn, Lucifer?’ Silas ignored the daemon’s question, presenting one of his own. ‘Surely, with all your might, you’ve found something useful? Or are you just a cat toying with an injured mouse? Amusing yourself while time passes us by?’
Lucifer folded the kerchief into precise triangles, tucking it away in his breast pocket. He fixed a lick of wayward hair before he replied. ‘I’ve learned that the kitsune’s mind is not strong enough to withstand both the sorcerers’ spellwork and my intrusion. His mind is as thick and muddled as the stew we ate last night.’
Silas had eaten nothing.
‘So you learned nothing from him at all? Nothing of Pendle Hill?’ He could not shake a sense of the place’s importance.
The kitsune’s high-pitched whimpering subsided into a long dragged-out moan that made Silas’s stomach turn.
‘The Lady has dismissed that place, ankou. Whatever your monsters saw, it is there no longer, or never was.’ Lucifer breezed past him, as though sauntering out of the library after a day spent reading.
Silas watched him move. ‘What of the angel then? The one who brought Sybilla down….what do you know of their identity?’ Lucifer reached the door, showing no sign of slowing, and Silas hated him in that moment. ‘Nothing then? I suppose that makes sense that you’d know absolutely nothing of what the angels are doing. It was that way with Seraphiel, wasn’t it?’
The king stopped beneath the frame of the door. ‘Careful, ankou.’
But Silas wanted toknow–something, anything, that might give him a trail to follow. ‘I’m told you shared a great intimacy with Seraphiel, yet he had a Sanctuary you were uninvited too, and he was lying with Pitch whilst you were walking the halls of White Mountain alone.’ Silas had no idea if the place even had god-damned halls. Christ, he was being callous, and hurting himself in the process. He did not wish to think of the angel and his daemon together. ‘I think you either oblivious, or a fool, and I do not trust your assumption that this kitsune had nothing important to say. Tell me all that was said.’
‘Pathetic creature.’ Lucifer’s eyes glowed like a furnace. Silas took an unwitting step backwards.‘You are not fit to speak the Seraph’s name. Watch your tongue, or it isyourmind I shall break next. You know nothing, nothing of what I shared with the angel.’
There was an ever-so-slight waver in the king’s voice. Lucifer snapped his gaze away, leaving Silas staring at the back of his head. The king was adept at hiding it, and Silas so distracted he’d not been watching or listening carefully enough.
The King of Daemonkind grieved, with an intensity that rolled off the daemon’s shoulders. It was there in his naming melody, scorched upon him. Silas had heard it at their first meeting in Holly Village. Lucifer’s mourning notes were as dark as the Wild Hunt’s storm. The daemon carried his grief like a heavy cloak, woven through with hatred to make it easier to wear.
Of course Lucifer would despise Pitch.
Seraphiel had forsaken the king and taken Prince Vassago to his bed. He’d let dark secrets bloom between the sheets. Secrets he’d not shared with Lucifer. And Christ Almighty, it made the daemon’s grief complex, so tangled and destructive that Silas could taste its bitter tang.
‘You cast accusations, ankou, but if I recall, it was you who left the prince unattended,’ Lucifer snarled. ‘You who went too far into the woods and brought our enemies upon him. What has befallen Vassago isyourfault. And if he is dead, and Seraphiel’s plans for him destroyed, then I shall consider you to blame.’
Lucifer stepped from the room, leaving behind his sharpened words so they might puncture Silas’s wildly beating heart. The door slammed shut. Weatherby’s cries rose, filling the room till it was straining.
Silas swore beneath his breath, despising himself for allowing a battle of words to distract him. He pulled the ring from his finger, the scythe transformed at once– a slender, fine-tipped blade, like a rapier made miniature. He hurried to the kitsune’s side, kneeling beside the tormented man. The creature’s melody swayed terribly from its original score.
Weatherby’s veins bulged, the dregs of the daemon’s interrogations still beneath the skin. Still hurting.
‘I am sorry,’ Silas whispered. ‘I should not have allowed this.’
Ernest Weatherby stared at him with the strangest look upon his face. A vacancy there for the most part, but a single spark remained, fighting its way through the emptiness.
He opened his mouth. And it was mostly drool that came, yet also a slurred sound that Silas could not decipher.
‘Steady now, and I shall see this done swiftly.’
Weatherby made a hiccoughing sound and found the wherewithal to shift his stiffened body in such a way that his fingers glanced against Silas’s wrist.
