Skulduggery Pleasant: Books 1 - 12. Derek Landy

I shouldn’t even be here. You call that justice?”

      “I call that amusing,” Valkyrie murmured.

      Scapegrace ignored her. “Where are you taking me? This isn’t the way to the interrogation rooms. Why do you want me?”

      “Because you’re great company.”

      Scapegrace slowed and all the colour drained from his face. “You’re going to execute me, aren’t you?”

      “We’re not going to execute you,” Skulduggery said.

      “That’s why this is all hush-hush. Oh, God, you’re going to execute me.”

      “We’re not, I promise.”

      “But why? Why am I going to be executed? You fear me, don’t you?”

      “That’s not exactly what’s happening here.”

      Scapegrace’s legs gave out, and Skulduggery caught him and kept him walking.

      “You fear my wrath,” Scapegrace said weakly.

      Skulduggery stopped him, undid the shackles and gave him a small push. “Run away now.”

      Scapegrace spun to face them. “Why? So you can have your bit of sport? That is cruel.”

      “We’re not going to execute you,” Valkyrie insisted.

      Scapegrace fell to his knees. “Please don’t kill me.”

      Skulduggery shook his head. “I should have picked someone else.”

      “We just want you to distract some people,” Valkyrie told him. “We need you to divert their attention.”

      “I don’t want to die,” Scapegrace sobbed.

      “Vaurien, seriously, get up. We’re not going to hurt you.”

      “Once I turn my back—”

      “We’re not going to do anything. We need you to distract some people, but this isn’t just about us. This is your chance to escape. Look at yourself. No shackles. No injuries. What’s to stop you from just running out of here?”

      “OK,” said Scapegrace, getting back to his feet. “So I just run, right?”

      “That’s right.”

      “And what about if—”

      Scapegrace bolted past them halfway through his question, hoping to take them by surprise.

      “Wrong way,” Valkyrie called.

      Scapegrace staggered to a stop and turned.

      “If you go that way, you’ll just arrive back at the holding cells.”

      Scapegrace looked around, getting his bearings, then nodded and walked back.

      “Just because I’m helping you,” he warned, “does not mean we are allies.”

      “We know that,” Skulduggery said.

      “The next time I see you I will be trying to kill you.”

      “We know that too.”

      “How do I get out of here?”

      “Go straight ahead and turn left. Follow your nose from there.”

      Scapegrace stopped beside them and snarled. “Until we meet again.”

      He jogged to the corner and glanced right, shrieked and sprinted left.

      “We probably should have told him he’d be running from Cleavers,” Skulduggery said, as they watched both Cleavers blur past the intersection.

      They hurried to the Repository doors, and just before they slipped inside, Valkyrie looked back as the Cleavers pounced on Scapegrace and he squealed.

      

      kulduggery took a small spool of thread from his pocket and started wrapping it around the door handles.

      “That’ll hold?” Valkyrie asked sceptically.

      “This is Resolute Thread. The more pressure applied, the stronger it gets. It’s very rare. They say it was made from the stomach lining of an emperor dragon, over 2000 years ago.”

      “Was it?”

      “No, it’s just really strong thread.”

      The door handles tied together securely, they walked deeper into the room. The Repository was vast and dark, with rows of shelves and tables groaning under the weight of the magic artefacts it contained. In the centre, where once the Book of Names had stood on its pedestal, there was now a cage of black steel, about the size of a small truck. The remains of the Grotesquery, little more than a torso and head wrapped in soiled bandages, hung suspended off the ground by a dozen taut chains. There were symbols carved on each of the cage bars, and they started to glow as the two of them neared.

      “Don’t touch the cage,” Skulduggery warned.

      “How do we open it?”

      “Very, very carefully, I’d imagine. I’m not as fluent in the language of these symbols as China is, but I know enough to recognise a death field when I see one. It’d kill anyone who even puts a hand inside those bars.”

      “Can we turn it off?”

      “If we knew the right symbol to touch, yes. Unfortunately, if we touch the wrong symbol, the field will swell and kill everything in the room.”

      “Would it kill you?”

      “Seeing as how I’m already dead?”

      “Well, would it? Serpine used his red right hand on you and it didn’t have any effect. Maybe this would be the same.”

      “If I knew a little more about how I ended up as a living skeleton with impeccable dress sense, I could give it a try. But there is every chance that the death field would kill whatever’s left of me.”

      “So how are we going to get the Grotesquery?”

      Skulduggery walked in among the shelves. “There has to be something here that will help us,” he said.

      Valkyrie followed, browsing the artefacts on display, although she really had no idea what she was looking for, let alone how they could use any of it to open the cage.

      She picked up a wooden sphere, about twice the size of a tennis ball. It had a thin groove running all the way around its circumference.

      “And this is …?” she asked, holding it up for Skulduggery to see.

      “Cloaking sphere,” he said. “Not very many of those around actually.”

      “What does it do?”

      “It makes magic people invisible.”

      “Cool.”

      Valkyrie replaced it and turned to follow him, but Skulduggery was gone.

      She heard a sound from somewhere in the stacks and saw movement. There was a grunt and Skulduggery came flying over the shelves. He hit a table and smashed the vials that had been sitting there, then rolled off the edge, hit the ground and groaned. A big man with long silver hair strode out after him. Valkyrie recognised him from the description she’d been given. Gruesome Krav.

      The Diablerie were here to steal the Grotesquery before them.

      Valkyrie backed off, her heart suddenly slamming against her chest, and then