Skulduggery Pleasant: Books 1 - 12. Derek Landy

puddle, for she could still see the bottom of the hole. Rather, the reflection was climbing out of the surface of the puddle, and changing from a two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional person before her eyes.

      Skulduggery took its hand and helped it out the rest of the way, and it stood there and didn’t speak. It wasn’t even curious about why it had been summoned.

      “We’re going to kill you,” Valkyrie told it.

      It nodded. “All right.”

      “Can you cry?”

      The reflection started weeping. The sudden change was startling.

      “Dead man,” the Torment called. “Your minute is up.”

      Skulduggery rested his hands on Valkyrie’s shoulders. “Push me away,” he said.

      He moved in to hug her and Valkyrie turned so that he blocked her from the Torment’s view, and she shoved him back and switched places with the reflection. She pressed herself against the wall of the building and didn’t move, expecting to hear a shout of alarm. But no shout came. They hadn’t noticed the switch.

      Skulduggery and the reflection walked back around the corner, and Valkyrie made her way to the cover of the trees. She moved quietly, keeping low, and she didn’t once peek. At first, she reasoned that she didn’t want to risk being discovered, but she knew it wasn’t that.

      The truth was, she didn’t want to see herself being killed.

      She flinched when she heard the gunshot. Her skin was cold and she had goosebumps. She rubbed her arms through her coat.

      A few minutes later she heard Skulduggery and Scapegrace approaching. She watched them go to the Bentley. Skulduggery placed the reflection’s body in the trunk. It looked so limp. Valkyrie took a deep breath. Tearing up a photograph. That’s all it was. That’s all.

      The Torment had disappeared back into the town, having suddenly lost all interest. Scapegrace probably expected Skulduggery to rip him apart, but Skulduggery was too busy teasing Valkyrie. She came out from hiding and strolled over, her unease fading. If he was joking, that meant the plan had worked.

      “She hardly ever shut up,” Skulduggery was saying. “I pretended to be friends with her, but honestly, I just felt sorry for the poor girl. Not the brightest, you know?”

      “You’re such a goon,” Valkyrie said, a grin forming, and Scapegrace turned and squealed. She ignored him. “Did we get what we need?”

      “Bancrook,” Skulduggery said. “Vengeous probably has Vile’s armour by now, but the Grotesquery should still be in Bancrook. We got what we need.”

      “You’re dead,” Scapegrace said in a small voice. “You’re … you’re lying in the boot.”

      “Sorry to disappoint you, but my reflection is lying in the boot.”

      “No,” Scapegrace said. “No, I’ve seen reflections, you can tell if something’s a reflection …”

      “Not this one,” Skulduggery told him. “She uses it practically every day. Over the past year, it’s kind of … grown, so if I were you, I wouldn’t feel bad about being fooled. If I were you, there’s a load of other things I’d choose to feel bad about.”

      “Like how you could have got away,” Valkyrie said, “if you’d just kept walking, instead of coming over to gloat.”

      “I could have got away?”

      “Free and clear.”

      “And … and now?”

      “Now we’re going to Bancrook,” Skulduggery said, “and we’re dropping you off at a holding cell along the way.”

      “I’m going back to jail?”

      “Yes, you are.”

      Scapegrace sagged miserably. “But I don’t like jail.”

      Skulduggery snapped the shackles into place around Scapegrace’s wrists. “Today is not a good day to be a bad guy.”

      

      he remains of Bancrook Castle stood on the top of a small hill. Valkyrie followed Skulduggery through the gaping hole in the wall that acted as its doorway. The castle was dark and quiet, and most of the roof had fallen in. Above them the sun was setting, and a startling orange had bled into the sky.

      They hadn’t had time to stop off at Haggard after depositing Scapegrace at the Sanctuary, so the body of the reflection was still in the Bentley. It was a creepy sensation, looking in at it, seeing it lying there, cold and unmoving. Valkyrie kept expecting to see it breathe, or to see some flutter of the eyelids, like it was only sleeping. But it just lay in the boot, a thing, a corpse with her face.

      Skulduggery held up his hand and read the air, then nodded with satisfaction. “No one has been here for a long time. The Grotesquery must still be around here somewhere.”

      They walked deeper into the ruins, clicking their fingers and summoning flames into their hands. The light flickered off the moss-covered stones that made up the walls. They took the steps leading down, and passed beneath ground level. It was cold down here and damp. Valkyrie pulled her coat a little tighter around herself.

      Skulduggery hunkered down, examining the ground, looking for any sign that the Grotesquery was buried underneath, and Valkyrie went up to a section of the wall and scraped away at a covering of moss.

      “Anything suspicious?” Skulduggery asked.

      “That depends. Are we treating ordinary walls as suspicious?”

      “Not particularly.”

      “Then I got nothing.”

      She abandoned the moss-scraping and glanced at her watch. Dinner time at home. God, she was hungry. She thought of her reflection, about all the times it had sat at the table, pretending to be a part of the family, eating Valkyrie’s dinner and speaking with Valkyrie’s voice. She wondered if her parents were starting to love the reflection more than they loved her. She wondered if it would ever get to the point where she would be a stranger in her own home.

      She shook her head. She didn’t like thinking those thoughts. They came regularly, unwelcome visitors in her mind, they stayed far too long and they made too much mess. She focused on the positive. She was living a life of adventure. She was living the life she’d always wanted. It was perfectly understandable, every now and again, if she missed the simple little luxuries that she didn’t have time for any more.

      She frowned and turned to Skulduggery. “It’s probably a bad sign when you start to think of your parents as mildly distracting luxuries, isn’t it?”

      “One would imagine so.” He looked up at her. “Do you wish you could go to the family reunion?”

      “What? No, no way.”

      “Have you been thinking about it?”

      “I haven’t really had time, what with the world being in danger and all.”

      “Somewhat understandable. But still, these things are important. You should try to seize the opportunity to reconnect with the people who matter to you most.”

      Valkyrie nearly laughed. “Are we talking about the same family here?”

      “Family’s important,” Skulduggery said.

      “Tell me, and be honest, did you ever have an aunt as bad as Beryl?”

      “Well,