Resurrection (Skulduggery Pleasant, Book 10) Page 20

  Melior paled. “No. No, please …”

  “Richard, even if we found Coldheart, even if we were able to break in … there’s no guarantee that Savant would still be alive.”

  “I don’t accept that and I don’t believe it. He’s alive. I would know if he wasn’t alive.”

  “It’s been five years.”

  “And if we were mortals that’d mean something. But we’re not, are we? Five years apart means nothing to people like us.”

  Skulduggery looked at Valkyrie, then shrugged, and put on his hat. “So let’s go rescue the love of your life.”

  He led the way out of the apartment and down the stairs. Melior followed, his hands still shackled, and Valkyrie came last. She switched on the aura-vision again, focused on Melior, examining how the shackles dimmed his light. She looked at her own hand as they descended, at the ever-shifting luminescence that refused to be contained by her physical form. Her strength, her magic, her life beamed out through her skin. She was like a child’s drawing of herself, where the child hadn’t bothered to colour inside the lines. And, down below, Skulduggery, with his aura of raging red, unlike any other aura she’d seen.

  They emerged on to the street and Smoke was waiting for them. He reached out for Skulduggery and Skulduggery batted his hand away, then grabbed his jacket, moved to take him down. But he stopped suddenly, and Valkyrie watched Smoke’s aura, dark grey and crackling with yellow, flow over Skulduggery’s.

  Skulduggery had been wrong. Smoke didn’t need a physical brain to override because he didn’t corrupt people’s minds – he corrupted their very essence. And not even Skulduggery was immune to that.

  Melior spun to her. “Run,” he said, fear jolting through his eyes, and Valkyrie backed off, climbing the stairs again.

  Skulduggery turned, looked up at her and tilted his head. “Yes,” he said, amusement in his voice. “Run.”

  34

  Melior’s door was locked, and sturdier than it looked. Valkyrie slammed her shoulder against it and bounced off, cursed and went running for the window down the length of corridor. Her hand lit up with lightning and the glass exploded, and she glanced over her shoulder just as Skulduggery reached the top of the stairs.

  She jumped through the window.

  Fell.

  She hit the roof of the Bentley and all the air rushed from her lungs even as she rolled off. She managed to land on her feet – by luck more than design – and pushed herself on, struggling to breathe. She forced her staggered run into a sprint, and veered between parked cars, heading for the first open door she could see.

  Once more, she glanced over her shoulder, saw Skulduggery floating out through the broken window, legs crossed beneath him in the lotus position.

  Valkyrie dodged right, into a bakery, and slid over the countertop. She passed the startled baker, dashed through the back room that smelled of fresh bread and flour, and then she was out through a narrow door and had the road under her feet again. She ran through traffic, ignoring the shouts and the blaring horns. A cyclist hit her and she fell, spinning, to the pavement, and watched Skulduggery floating gently over the bakery roof. He took out his gun and Valkyrie scrambled up, shoving her way through the people who’d stopped to help her.

  She reached the corner, turned on to Horizon Street and ducked under the shutter of a restaurant. Inside, the staff was setting up tables.

  “We’re not open yet,” one of them said to her, frowning and coming forward.

  “Call the Cleavers,” she said, batting aside his grasping hands. “Tell them it’s an emergency.”

  “You can’t go back there, that’s for staff—”

  “Call the Cleavers!” she snapped, and bolted through to the kitchen. There were some delivery guys here, bringing in crates of fresh food, and she slipped past them, emerged into an alley barely wide enough to fit the van. She squeezed by, stumbling on her last few steps, and checked the empty sky before she broke into a run. She just needed to stay out of sight while she put distance between them. That’s all. That’s all she needed to do.

  She got to the mouth of the alley, sticking to the wall, and then bolted for the adjoining street, into a clothes shop where a woman was arguing with her children. There was a door in here with a bead curtain, and beyond that the interior of another shop. Valkyrie ran through one bead curtain and then the next, shimmying and juking her way around display stands and customers, leaving swaying waterfalls of rattling beads in her wake as she traversed the entire street without having to set foot outside. She got to the final store and left through the back.

  But the air snagged her feet, lifted her by the ankles and she flipped, head over heels, into the alley wall. She cracked an elbow when she hit the ground and howled, clutching her arm even as she scrambled up. Then she froze.

  Skulduggery dropped slowly out of the sky. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said, emptying the bullets from his gun and pocketing all but one of them. He touched down. “You’re thinking, Oh, God, oh, God, I’m going to die. You’re thinking, How can I stop him? Can he even be stopped? Is this the end of the infamous Valkyrie Cain?”

  She forgot about the pain in her elbow. She just stood there, her back to the wall, watching him slide that single bullet back into the chamber, then spin the cylinder and click it closed.

  “I don’t have an answer for you, Valkyrie. For today, I’m leaving your fate up to chance.” He raised the gun and thumbed back the hammer. “Six chambers, one bullet. Do you want to find out if the universe still loves you?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer, he just pulled the trigger and Valkyrie flinched, but no shot came.

  Skulduggery thumbed back the hammer again. “Have you ever thought about this? What it would be like to go up against each other? I don’t mean as Darquesse and Vile – I mean you and me. Do you think you stand a chance?”

  She swallowed. “I don’t know,” she said. “But if you really—”

  He pulled the trigger and she cried out, but no shot came.

  “Sorry,” Skulduggery said, thumbing back the hammer a third time. “What were you saying?”

  “You’re … you’re not going to kill me,” she said.

  “I’m not?”

  “You won’t. You can’t. I mean too much to you.”

  His head tilted. “You should understand, Valkyrie, that I really don’t care about you any more. In fact, I genuinely want you to die, and I want to be the one to kill you.”

  Her teeth. They were actually chattering, she was so scared. “You think you do,” she said, her voice a trembling mess, “but you’ve been corrupted. Skulduggery, you have to remember.”

  “Well, of course I remember,” Skulduggery said. “And of course I only want to kill you because of Smoke’s pesky little power. But that doesn’t change the fact that I genuinely want to kill you.”

  “Please, you’ve got to fight it.”

  “No, I don’t.” His finger tightened and she dodged left, but the gun moved with her as the hammer landed on an empty chamber. “Today really is your lucky day, isn’t it? Tell you what – if the next two are empty, for the last one I’ll only shoot you in the leg. How about that?”

  She held up her hands, the way he’d taught her. “You’re being manipulated. Are you OK with that? With someone pulling your strings?”

  “I’ll deal with all that in my own time, don’t you worry.”

  “Skulduggery, you’re my best friend and I love you.”

  “That,” Skulduggery said, the hammer clicking back again, “is so sweet of you to say. Put your hands down, Valkyrie. I’m too far away to hit, and we both know you can’t rely on your new powers. They’re far too unstable. So are you, for that matter.”

  She hesitated, then dropped her hands and stood up straight. “Fine,” she said.

  “Fine?”

  “If you’re going to kill me, kill me. I’d rather you do it than anyone else.”

  Skulduggery took a moment. “Oh, I see,” he sa
id. “You think I’ll stop myself. You’re betting your life on it.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And what if you’re wrong? What if, the moment I stop speaking, I put my gun to your head and blow your semi-remarkable brains out? In your final moments, how much are you going to regret these last five years? How much are you going to regret that you’ve refused to rejoin your family, that you’ve cut yourself off from so many of the vulnerabilities that make you who you are? Are you going to find yourself wishing, as the bullet pulverises all that grey matter, that you’d let yourself enjoy the life you’d made for yourself? Or are you just going to stand there with a terrified look on your face and hope beyond hope that I don’t … stop … speaking?”

  Skulduggery stepped to her quickly, pulling the trigger twice and then placing the muzzle against her forehead. She stiffened, her breath caught somewhere in her throat, her hands splayed by her sides.

  “Tell me honestly,” he said, “are you happy you’re back yet?”

  He dropped his arm, pressed the gun into her left thigh and pulled the trigger. The shot was deafening and Valkyrie cried out and collapsed, clutching her leg, the cry turning to a wail of pain and panic as she watched the blood pumping through her fingers.

  “I should be heading back to my new friends,” Skulduggery said, putting his gun away. “I don’t know how close they are to resurrecting my ex, but I certainly want to be there when it happens. So hey, if you don’t bleed out and die right here, I’ll see you soon, OK? Maybe I’ll get a chance to introduce you to Abyssinia before I kill you.”

  He lifted up off the ground, rising high above the rooftops, and then he let the wind take him.

  35

  Air Force One touched down at Joint Base Andrews a little after two. The stair truck was there immediately to meet it. Six minutes later, President Martin Maynard Flanery emerged, the wind lifting his hair, playing with his tie, flapping his jacket.

  He tried keeping the jacket closed over his gut as he descended. He didn’t like the wind, and he didn’t like stairs. He preferred air conditioning and elevators. There was no one on the ground to greet him, just the usual soldiers and Secret Service agents and the huge, armoured Cadillac they called the Beast. The photographer was there, too, taking snaps from ground level. This irritated the hell out of Flanery, as he knew damn well that every single one of those snaps would add a couple of chins to his jawline.

  He reached the bottom of the stairs and got into the Beast without even glancing at the photographer. Wilkes got in after him.

  “I want the photographer fired,” Flanery said the moment the door was closed. “Get me a new one. A better one. One who knows how to take a good picture.”

  “Yes, Mr President,” Wilkes said, nodding. “Of course.” He tapped on the glass partition, and the car started moving. “We have a couple of things to get through, sir, starting with—”

  “Hold on,” Flanery said, cutting across him. He could feel that old familiar rising tide of anger. “Where’s Lilt? You found him yet? Hey? And I don’t need any more excuses from you. I’ve had enough of excuses. Excuses don’t get me what I need. Are we understanding each other?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Wilkes.

  “So? You found him?”

  “I’m, ah, waiting for a call, sir.”

  Flanery locked eyes with the wilting man. “You’re waiting for a call? You’re waiting for a call? Let me tell you something. Let me tell you something because I don’t think … What is it, three years? Three years you’ve been working for me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Three years. You’d think you’d have picked this up after three years. When you wait on a call, I wait on a call. You see that? See how that works? When you wait, I wait, and the President of the United States of America does not wait. I do not wait, Wilkes. I tell you to do something, I tell you to speak to someone, or find someone, or get something, or go somewhere, then you do it. I want it done. I want it done immediately. If I have to ask you to find out why Parthenios Lilt has suddenly gone dark on us, my time is already being wasted. But you know what is unacceptable? What’s unacceptable is having to wait on you to get me an answer. I do not accept that.”

  “I am sorry, Mr President. My contact is checking with—”

  Flanery held up a hand. “Details. Details, Wilkes. What have I told you about details?”

  “You don’t need to—”

  “I don’t need to hear them. They don’t interest me. Results interest me. Answers interest me. Details? I don’t give a damn about details.”

  Wilkes’s phone buzzed in his hand, but Wilkes didn’t look down. Flanery almost wished he would. Then he’d have something else to get angry about.

  “Check your damn phone,” he said sharply.

  Wilkes did so. A single glance.

  “My contact has been in touch,” he said. “We’ve located Lilt.”

  “He better have a good story,” said Flanery. “His story better be great. Better be magnificent. He’s missed two calls. Two. No one misses calls with me. Martin Flanery is not the kind of man to call back later. I’m not that kind, Wilkes. Where the hell is he?”

  Wilkes hesitated. If there was one thing Flanery hated more than time-wasting, it was hesitation.

  “Spit it out, for God’s sake.”

  “Parthenios Lilt has been arrested,” said Wilkes.

  Flanery froze. “What?”

  “Apparently, it happened three days ago, sir.”

  “Who was it? Us or them? Who was it arrested him, Wilkes? Normal people or freaks?”

  “Oh,” Wilkes said. “Them, sir. Freaks, sir.”

  The anger in Flanery’s chest was a distant memory. Now Flanery was a volcano. Flanery was the goddamn atom bomb. Upon explosion, Flanery would flatten every town and village in the land.

  But he couldn’t explode. He had to be calm. Just like his father had taught him.

  “What’s the charge?” Flanery asked, keeping his voice low.

  “Sir?” Wilkes said, leaning closer.

  “The charge. What’s the charge? What has Lilt been charged with?”

  “Oh,” said Wilkes. “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Find out. Get on that phone and find out. By the time we reach the White House, I want answers. You hear me? You understand me?”

  “I understand, sir. But there are other issues we—”

  “Forget about everything else. I don’t care. I don’t care about policies or regulations or the House or the Senate or anything. Don’t care. Only thing I care about is what Lilt is charged with and what impact that has on me. You get that? You understand?”

  “Sir, yes, sir.”

  “Then get it done.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr President.”

  36

  Idiot.

  There was no other word for it, really. Only idiot summed up the magnificent stupidity that Omen was capable of displaying at any moment and in any situation. Only he could have hitched a ride from relative safety to absolute jeopardy without actually needing to, at all, in the slightest. He had been fired, for God’s sake. Skulduggery Pleasant himself had told him to leave all this danger stuff to the professionals. He was no longer involved in whatever the hell was going on.

  And yet who had teleported, with a man who had already tried to kill him, moving in the span of an eyeblink from beneath a bed in the dormitories of Corrival Academy to the cold floor of what appeared to be a prison? That would be Omen Darkly, yes, sir, it would. No one else could have managed something like that. The Boy Most Likely to Get Himself Killed.

  What had he been thinking? What the hell had possessed him to do something so bloody stupid? He hadn’t had anything even remotely resembling a plan. He was impossibly lucky that Nero had just walked off when they’d arrived. If he’d looked around, he would have seen Omen lying there on the ground with his hand outstretched. He might have accidentally trodden on him, which would have been a ridiculous way to be discovered.
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  And, as Nero had walked away, did Omen spring to his feet, stealthy as a ninja? Or did he roll sideways into an empty cell, and then crawl under another bed to hide?

  The word repeated itself in his head, just for good measure. Idiot. Idiot. Idiot.

  He peeked out. The cell was old-fashioned, the kind he’d seen in movies like The Man in the Iron Mask. Rough-hewn walls. A door of thick metal bars. The only nods to any kind of civilised living were the toilet and the sink. Omen recognised binding sigils carved into the stone. They were dull, which meant inactive. That was good.

  He took out his phone. No signal. Omen, like most other sorcerers on the planet, had boosted it to work anywhere. It was a quick and easy procedure – not even he could have messed it up. But it seemed that prisons operated under different rules. Omen reckoned he was in a considerable amount of trouble now. Trapped, alone and with no way of calling for help, the only things he had to rely on were his own magic and ingenuity.

  He was, he realised, totally screwed.

  Crawling out from beneath the bed, he did his very best not to hyperventilate. He was suddenly freezing. His hands shook and he looked at the open cell door like it was a mouth waiting to spring shut the moment he passed through.

  Slowly, slowly, Omen got to his feet and peeked out. The other cell doors were open, too. Empty. They were empty. For the moment – for the fleeting moment he currently existed in – he was safe. Relatively.

  He tucked in his shirt, then walked quietly in the direction Nero had gone. The light out here wasn’t good, and he welcomed the cold shadows. All the better to hide in, my dear. He laughed a little, and the laugh died and his eyes widened. His laugh had sounded a lot like panic.

  He clamped both hands over his mouth as a high-pitched whine started up from somewhere within him. He shook his head, but the whine kept growing. The more he tried to stop it, the louder it got. He took a deep breath and balled his fists, thumped them against his forehead while he screwed his eyes shut.