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. She got to the final store and left through the back.
But the air snagged her feet, lifted her by the ankles and she flipped, head over heels, into the alley wall. She cracked an elbow when she hit the ground and howled, clutching her arm even as she scrambled up. Then she froze.
Skulduggery dropped slowly out of the sky. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said, emptying the bullets from his gun and pocketing all but one of them. He touched down. “You’re thinking, Oh, God, oh, God, I’m going to die. You’re thinking, How can I stop him? Can he even be stopped? Is this the end of the infamous Valkyrie Cain?”
She forgot about the pain in her elbow. She just stood there, her back to the wall, watching him slide that single bullet back into the chamber, then spin the cylinder and click it closed.
“I don’t have an answer for you, Valkyrie. For today, I’m leaving your fate up to chance.” He raised the gun and thumbed back the hammer. “Six chambers, one bullet. Do you want to find out if the universe still loves you?”
He didn’t wait for an answer, he just pulled the trigger and Valkyrie flinched, but no shot came.
Skulduggery thumbed back the hammer again. “Have you ever thought about this? What it would be like to go up against each other? I don’t mean as Darquesse and Vile – I mean you and me. Do you think you stand a chance?”
She swallowed. “I don’t know,” she said. “But if you really—”
He pulled the trigger and she cried out, but no shot came.
“Sorry,” Skulduggery said, thumbing back the hammer a third time. “What were you saying?”
“You’re … you’re not going to kill me,” she said.
“I’m not?”
“You won’t. You can’t. I mean too much to you.”
His head tilted. “You should understand, Valkyrie, that I really don’t care about you any more. In fact, I genuinely want you to die, and I want to be the one to kill you.”
Her teeth. They were actually chattering, she was so scared. “You think you do,” she said, her voice a trembling mess, “but you’ve been corrupted. Skulduggery, you have to remember.”
“Well, of course I remember,” Skulduggery said. “And of course I only want to kill you because of Smoke’s pesky little power. But that doesn’t change the fact that I genuinely want to kill you.”
“Please, you’ve got to fight it.”
“No, I don’t.” His finger tightened and she dodged left, but the gun moved with her as the hammer landed on an empty chamber. “Today really is your lucky day, isn’t it? Tell you what – if the next two are empty, for the last one I’ll only shoot you in the leg. How about that?”
She held up her hands, the way he’d taught her. “You’re being manipulated. Are you OK with that? With someone pulling your strings?”
“I’ll deal with all that in my own time, don’t you worry.”
“Skulduggery, you’re my best friend and I love you.”
“That,” Skulduggery said, the hammer clicking back again, “is so sweet of you to say. Put your hands down, Valkyrie. I’m too far away to hit, and we both know you can’t rely on your new powers. They’re far too unstable. So are you, for that matter.”
She hesitated, then dropped her hands and stood up straight. “Fine,” she said.
“Fine?”
“If you’re going to kill me, kill me. I’d rather you do it than anyone else.”
Skulduggery took a moment. “Oh, I see,” he said. “You think I’ll stop myself. You’re betting your life on it.”
“Yes,” she said.
“And what if you’re wrong? What if, the moment I stop speaking, I put my gun to your head and blow your semi-remarkable brains out? In your final moments, how much are you going to regret these last five years? How much are you going to regret that you’ve refused to rejoin your family, that you’ve cut yourself off from so many of the vulnerabilities that make you who you are? Are you going to find yourself wishing, as the bullet pulverises all that grey matter, that you’d let yourself enjoy the life you’d made for yourself? Or are you just going to stand there with a terrified look on your face and hope beyond hope that I don’t … stop … speaking?”
Skulduggery stepped to her quickly, pulling the trigger twice and then placing the muzzle against her forehead. She stiffened, her breath caught somewhere in her throat, her hands splayed by her sides.
“Tell me honestly,” he said, “are you happy you’re back yet?”
He dropped his arm, pressed the gun into her left thigh and pulled the trigger. The shot was deafening and Valkyrie cried out and collapsed, clutching her leg, the cry turning to a wail of pain and panic as she watched the blood pumping through her fingers.
“I
