we get here?”
“You don’t remember?”
“How I got into the bloody sky? No, I don’t bloody …” She trailed off. “Oh, wait. I do. It was her.”
“Indeed it was.”
She sagged in his arms. “Great,” she mumbled.
They touched down. Valkyrie swayed on her feet a moment then nodded, and they walked over to the wooden box.
“So that’s it, then?” she asked, a headache starting up behind her eyes. “She can just come and go whenever she likes? Every time things get too dangerous, am I just going to Hulk out, change into the person who’s going to kill the world?”
“I don’t think it’s quite so simple,” Skulduggery responded. “From what I could see, the Jitter Girl literally had her hand inside your head. That would shake anything loose. And I know you don’t want to hear it, but Darquesse did save us.”
Valkyrie folded her arms, shivering. “You’re right. I don’t want to hear it.”
“You saved us, then. Does that sound better?”
Valkyrie glared at him through the rain. “I had nothing to do with it.”
“Yes, you did. You are Darquesse, Valkyrie. Darquesse isn’t a different person, no matter how many times we talk about her like she is. At its simplest level, Darquesse is a state of mind.”
“I’m sorry?”
“She’s you, without your conscience, or your feelings. She’s you without your humanity.”
“You’re saying she’s a mood swing?”
He shrugged. “Or maybe you are her mood swing.”
“Don’t even joke about that.”
Skulduggery picked up the wooden box and they started back towards the cottage. “I’m not joking. The fact is we have no way of knowing if the person who we think we are is at the core of our being. Are you a decent girl with the potential to someday become an evil monster, or are you an evil monster that thinks it’s a decent girl?”
“Wouldn’t I know which one I was?”
“Good God, no. The lies we tell other people are nothing to the lies we tell ourselves.”
“You have an amazing ability to depress me sometimes, you know that?”
“I try my best.” Skulduggery gestured, and his mud-soaked hat rose into his hand. He gazed at it forlornly. “How are you feeling?”
“Headachy. But fine. Bad man got away.”
“Yes, he did.”
“He killed Paul Lynch and now the little old lady Lynch confided in. Somebody doesn’t want us to know anything about the Passage. You think he was a Necromancer?”
“Even though dressing in black is in no way an indication – yes, I quite do.”
She nodded. “Me too. Plus, he had a ridiculous beard. I should probably ask Solomon about him.”
“I should probably help.”
“No hitting.”
“A small amount of hitting.”
Fletcher lunged out of thin air before them, his eyes wide, fists clenched, ready to fight. He looked at them, spun round, spun back again.
“Where are they?” he asked.
“Back in the box,” Valkyrie told him. “Did you find out anything?”
“China wasn’t at the library,” he said, the rain flattening down his hair. “Nobody there could help me. How did you beat them?”
“With unimaginable skill,” Skulduggery said. “Valkyrie, I’ve got a two-hour drive back to Dublin where dry clothes await me.”
She nodded. “I’ll be ready.”
He walked to the Bentley. Fletcher turned to Valkyrie, hands loosely holding her arms. “I didn’t want to leave,” he said quietly.
She smiled. “I know.”
“You should have come with me.”
“Let’s not ruin a nice moment by arguing, OK?” She kissed him.
He sighed, and instead of rain on her face there was sunshine, and instead of being outside a small cottage with a broken window they were behind a tree in her back garden. “Much better,” she murmured. Dripping wet and covered in mud, she took Fletcher’s hand and they stepped out from behind the tree.
Her parents, cousins, aunts and uncles, friends and neighbours, people she’d known all her life and people she’d never met stood around the barbecue pit and stared, their chatter dying away.
“Uh,” said Valkyrie.
“Curiosity,” she said, and Prave’s bulbous eyes snapped open and he jumped to his feet. “That’s what brought me here. Who, I wondered, would be audacious enough to summon me to a squalid little house of worthless worship such as this? Surely, I told myself, it can’t be this man Prave, this snivelling little toad-person with a penchant for bad suits and terrible shirts.”
“What … what’s wrong with my shirt?” he burbled in a Yorkshire accent, his voice a nasal whine that triggered a primal urge within China’s psyche to hit something.
“It’s orange,” she told him. “It can’t be him, I thought. The man has no backbone to brag about, no spine to speak of. Who, then? Who is pulling the strings of the weasel-faced toad-person? So it is curiosity that brings me here, Mr Prave. Unveil your hidden master or risk me growing bored. I do terrible things when I grow bored.”
Prave stared at her with those round, wet eyes of his, and China heard slow, measured footsteps in the other room – high heels on wood. China knew who it was instantly.
Eliza Scorn walked through, dressed in black trousers and a jacket. She had left her long red hair to fall round her face, framing those cheekbones, those
