Skulduggery Pleasant: Books 10 - 12. Derek Landy

My uncle was such a good man and he was murdered. How is that fair? If it wasn’t right to kill him, then how can it be wrong to bring him back?”

      “Valkyrie,” Skulduggery said quietly.

      “What?” Valkyrie said, speaking too quickly, the words tumbling out of her mouth before she knew what she was saying. “How many people have you lost that you would love to see again?”

      Skulduggery’s head tilted ever so slightly, and Valkyrie felt herself flush.

      “There are a few,” he said. “But I wouldn’t presume to have the right to drag them out of their slumber.”

      “Yeah,” she said. “Sorry.”

      Skulduggery nodded, and turned to Melior. “The circumstances you would need in order to bring Abyssinia back – what would they be?”

      “When I revive people on the operating table,” Melior said, “I transfer some of my energy to them. It weakens me, but after a few days my life force replenishes and I recover. Something like this, though … I’d need to take a life force and transfer it to her remains. More than one, actually. Two, possibly three. I’d need a modified Soul Catcher to harness it all, and life forces from mortals wouldn’t be enough. I’d need sorcerers, whose unique energy signatures conform to specific …” He trailed off. “Oh, dear God. They knew I’d need Neoterics. That’s why they’ve been recruiting them.”

      Skulduggery nodded. “So not only has Abyssinia built up a small army awaiting her return, but she’s also been using the process to hunt for donors. Infuriatingly clever.” He walked to the window and turned. “But if they took your husband to force you to work for them, and nothing has changed, then why come to us now?”

      “Because things have changed,” said Melior. “They’re so close to getting what they want that they wouldn’t dare kill him now. They need me too much. So I figure there’s an opportunity, right? Now is the time to strike, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

      Valkyrie looked at Skulduggery.

      “You actually have a point,” Skulduggery said. “Savant’s probably never been safer than he is right now.”

      “Exactly!” Melior said, clapping his hands. “So we go after him. The three of us. If they’re keeping Savant anywhere, they’ll be keeping him in that prison, right? That makes sense, doesn’t it? Where better to keep a prisoner?”

      “How much do you know about Coldheart?” Valkyrie asked gently.

      “I know it’s pretty much impenetrable,” Melior said. “Only two people have ever escaped from it. I’m not saying it’ll be easy, but you two have accomplished miracles together. I’ve heard the stories.”

      “And did you know that it moves?”

      “What moves?”

      “The prison,” Skulduggery said. “It doesn’t stay in one place. It’s a floating island. It could be anywhere in the world right now.”

      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.