looked at her, her blue eyes bright, and she hugged Valkyrie. “Thank you for doing this,” China said into Valkyrie’s ear.
China stepped away and Valkyrie turned to the portal. It was taller than she was now. She licked her lips and walked forward. The wind whipped her hair and she could feel the gravitational pull, eager to welcome her. Valkyrie hesitated and then ran, straight into the yellow.
pringheeled Jack missed London. He missed its rooftops and its towers and its parapets. He missed the way he could dance, high above it all, watching the people pass below him. He missed the way Londoners sounded as he killed them – like they were offended that anyone would even dare.
Jack hadn’t been home in over a year. They were hunting him there. He’d tried Paris, he’d tried Berlin, and he’d liked them well enough, but he knew he was homesick when he realised the only people he was killing were English tourists. That had sent him into a spiral of depression that lasted months. Finally, in an effort to confront this problem, he had made a list of everyone he viewed as being responsible for his exile, and he marvelled at the way the depression quickly turned to anger. Every name on that list worked for various Sanctuaries around the world, and suddenly Jack’s mission was clear.
Destroy the Sanctuaries.
And now here he was, serendipity be praised, back in Dublin, working with two men he had never expected to share the same space with again, Billy-Ray Sanguine and Dusk. But since Sanguine was no longer palling around with those Faceless Ones nutters, and since his fight with Dusk hadn’t been personal to begin with, Jack was willing to forgive and forget. They were all working towards the same goal after all – revenge on those who had wronged them.
“I want Tanith Low,” he said to that other bloke, Scapegrace, while they were lounging about in the castle.
Scapegrace looked up, startled that anyone was talking to him. “I’m sorry?”
“Tanith Low,” Jack repeated. “Her of the brown leather and the singing sword. I want to be the one to get her.”
“Oh,” Scapegrace said.
“In a way, you know, she’s responsible for me bein’ hunted. She arrested me – put me in that cell where Sanguine found me. If I hadn’t agreed to help him in return for freedom, I’d never have been hunted in the first place.”
“Right,” Scapegrace said.
“What about you then?”
“Me?”
“Who do you want revenge on?”
“Oh, uh, Valkyrie Cain.”
“She’s a popular one to get revenge on. What age is she, fifteen? Fifteen years old and already four people want to kill her.”
“Well,” Scapegrace said, leaning forward, like he was confiding, “she’s responsible for foiling my plans, you see.”
“That so?”
“Oh, yes. I’m an artist. I make murder into art. That’s kind of what I do – that’s my whole thing. And she has repeatedly stopped me from doing that. Also, one time, she beat me up when I was already really badly injured.”
“A fifteen-year-old girl beat you up?”
“When I was badly injured, yes. And she was fourteen at the time.”
“Well, I suppose in the right environment, Elemental magic is hard to defend against.”
“Oh, she didn’t use any magic.”
“So she just…beat you up then?”
“When I was injured, yes.”
“How injured were you?”
“Very.”
“You were very injured?”
“Yes, I was. Have you ever been beaten up by a fourteen-year-old girl?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“It’s not very nice.”
“I wouldn’t say it is.”
“So that’s why I want revenge.”
“Listen, mate, I don’t mean to pick a fight or nothin’, but you call yourself the Killer Supreme, right? Have you ever actually killed anyone?”
Scapegrace erupted into horribly forced laughter, desperate and panicky, and Jack could have sworn he started to blush.
Jack didn’t much care of course. They were here to make up the numbers, to sit here while Scarab and Sanguine called the shots. And then, when it was time, they would strike.
Jack was looking forward to that bit.
The sun, directly above her, was a ball of fire. It was big and hot, and closer than the sun back home.
Once the city would have been impressive. Its inhabitants would have lived in the towering cliff, using the caves as homes, carving doors and windows from the rock, before extending outwards. The stone houses that they built, on top of each other, jutted from the cliff face and reminded Valkyrie of pictures she’d seen of mountain towns in Brazil. She imagined that it had been a city teeming with life, energy and noise, with hundreds of thousands of people packed in together and forced to get along.
It was quiet now though. Quiet and dead.
The portal closed behind her and Valkyrie was in a narrow alley of white, sun-bleached stone that hurt her eyes. She followed the alley down, her footsteps crunching on the cracked ground. She peered into half-crumbled houses as she passed, but every room was empty, stripped bare by the elements and whatever else was around here.
The alley plateaued and opened into a square, and she walked to the middle and turned in a slow circle, scanning her surroundings. She looked up at the cliff face, the sheer size of it finally becoming clear. It wouldn’t have been hundreds of thousands of people living here, she realised – it would have been millions. A thought struck her. She was
