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Source ISBN: 9780008266448

Ebook Edition © ISBN: 9780008266455

Version: 2018-11-06

This book is dedicated to me.

Derek, without you, I would not be where I am today.

Words cannot convey how much I owe you for the guidance you’ve shown me – for your wisdom, your wit, your keen insight and your keener intelligence, your taste, your strength, your integrity and your humility. I won’t mention the charity work you do, or the political activism you’re involved in, or the ecological work you’ve spearheaded. And it’s not just because you won’t talk about it – it’s because no one else does, either.

You have taught me how to be a better person.

Nay – you have taught us all.

Epigraph

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1: Meek Ridge

Chapter 2: Living in the Shadow

Chapter 3: Throwing Down the Gauntlet

Chapter 4: Friends and Foe

Chapter 5: To Watch the World Burn

Chapter 6: My Normal Life

Chapter 7: Visions

Chapter 8: Curiosity

Chapter 9: Signate

Chapter 10: Girls’ Night Out

Chapter 11: Honey, I’m Home

Chapter 12: The Cauldron

Chapter 13: My Friend. My Furniture.

Chapter 14: A Common Enemy

Chapter 15: Finbar’s Dream

Chapter 16: The National Black Belt Review Board

Chapter 17: A Voice from the Darkness

Chapter 18: Brogues and Burrs

Chapter 19: Me and Her

Chapter 20: Home Delivery

Chapter 21: The Eviction

Chapter 22: The Return of Valkyrie Cain

Chapter 23

Chapter 24: A Fine Pair of Specimens

Chapter 25: Going To America

Chapter 26: Weird Feelings

Chapter 27: The Gnarl

Chapter 28

Chapter 29: Those Who Live in Darkness

Chapter 30: Forgiven

Chapter 31: Creepy Kid

Chapter 32: The Job Offer

Chapter 33: Misadventures in Babysitting

Chapter 34: Saying Goodbye

Chapter 35: The Loss

Chapter 36: Joining the Stream

Chapter 37: Brooking No Argument

Chapter 38: Enemy Territory

Chapter 39: Finding the Fountain

Chapter 40: Famous Last Words

Chapter 41: Here Be Dragons

Chapter 42: Brainstorm

Chapter 43: Shunting Ravel

Chapter 44: A Better Person

Chapter 45: A Brutal Act of Kindness

Chapter 46: The Conversation

Chapter 47: The Death Bringer Wakes

Chapter 48: A New Roarhaven

Chapter 49: Stopping for Gas

Chapter 50: The Card Trick

Chapter 51: The Temple of the Spider

Chapter 52: The Devil Comes to Play

Chapter 53: The End is Nye

Chapter 54: The Deal

Chapter 55: The Exiled

Chapter 56: Toe to Toe

Chapter 57: A World of Pain

Chapter 58: Valkyrie’s Affliction

Chapter 59: The Corpse Trail

Chapter 60: Freaks

Chapter 61: The Plan

Chapter 62: The Knock on the Door

Chapter 63: The City Below

Chapter 64: Chasing Alice

Chapter 65: The Second Test

Chapter 66: Table Manners

Chapter 67: Lightning

Chapter 68: The Hourglass

Chapter 69: Strange Bedfellows

Chapter 70: Return of the Living Dead

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Chapter 89

Chapter 90

Chapter 91

Chapter 92

Chapter 93

Chapter 94

Chapter 95

Chapter 96

Chapter 97

Chapter 98

Chapter 99

Chapter 100

Chapter 101

Chapter 102

Chapter 103

Chapter 104

Chapter 105

Chapter 106

Chapter 107

Chapter 108

Keep Reading …

Read on for a taste of Resurrection

The Skulduggery Pleasant series

About the Publisher

ive in the morning and Danny is up, rolling slowly out of bed, eyes half open as his bare feet touch the floorboards. Getting up this early is worse in the winter, when the cold threatens to push him back under the covers. Colorado winters are something to behold, as his dear departed dad would say, and Danny isn’t one to argue with his dear departed dad. But the summers are warm, and so he sits on the edge of his bed without shivering, and after a dull minute he forces his eyes open wide, stands up and dresses.

He goes downstairs, puts the coffee on while he opens the store. Five thirty every morning except Sundays, the General Store is open and ready for business. It was that way when Danny was a boy and his folks ran the place, and it’s that way now that Danny is twenty-seven and his folks are cold and quiet and lying side by side in the ground. On his more maudlin days, Danny also likes to think his dreams are buried down there with them too, but he knows this is unfair. He tried to be a musician; he moved to LA and formed a band and when it didn’t all happen the way he wanted he scampered back home to take over the family business.

He quit, and there’s no one to blame but himself.

By six, the town of Meek Ridge is awake. People stop by on the way to work, and he speaks to them with none of that easy patter his mom had been famous for. Back when she was alive, she’d talk the hind legs off a donkey, and she’d always be quick to crinkle up her eyes and laugh. His dad was more measured, more reserved, but people around here still liked him well enough. Danny doesn’t know what they think of him, the wannabe rock star who lit out as soon as he finished school and skulked back with his tail between his legs years later. Probably just as well.

Early morning grows into mid-morning, and mid-morning sprouts wings and becomes a hot, sun-blasted afternoon. Unless there’s a customer perusing the shelves, Danny stands at the door, cold bottle of Coke in his hand, watching the cars pass on Main Street and the people walk by, everyone seeming like they have things to do and places to go. By around three, business has picked up, same as it always does, and that keeps him busy and away from the sunshine, until finally he raises his head and it’s coming up to seven in the evening and his favourite time of the week.

He takes out the list even though he doesn’t need it, just to make sure he hasn’t missed anything. When he’s done, he’s filled two large grocery bags – the reusable canvas kind, not paper or plastic. He locks up, puts the bags on to the passenger seat of his dented old Ford and drives out of Meek Ridge with the window down, his busted AC not doing a whole lot to dispel the trapped heat. By the time the road gets narrower, he’s already sweating a little, and as he follows the twisting dust trail, he can feel the first trickle of perspiration running between his shoulder blades.

Finally, he comes to the locked gate and waits there, the engine idling. He doesn’t get out and hit the intercom button. Same time every week, he’s here and she knows it. Hidden somewhere in the trees or the bushes, a camera is focused on his face. He’s stopped trying to spot it. He just knows it’s there. The gate clicks, opens slowly, and he drives through.

The previous owner of this farm died when Danny was a teenager, and the buildings fell into disrepair and the fields, hundreds of acres of them, got overgrown with weeds and such. Now the fields are meadows, lush and vast and green, and the buildings have either been salvaged or rebuilt from scratch. A fence encircles the property, too tall to climb over, too sturdy to break. There are hidden cameras everywhere, and every last thing is rigged with alarms. Stories of the farm’s new owner swept through Meek Ridge like a tidal wave when she first moved in, and ever since the waters have been unsettled.

There are those say she’s an actress who’s had a breakdown, or an heiress who rejected her family’s lavish lifestyle. Others reckon she’s in Witness Protection, or the widowed wife of a European gangster. The tidal wave has left behind it pools and streams of gossip in which rumours and stories and outright lies ebb and flow, and Danny doubts any of them even remotely touch upon the truth. Not that he knows what the truth is. The farm’s new owner is almost as much a mystery to him as to anyone else in town. Only difference between them is that he gets to meet her once a week.

He pulls up to the farmhouse. She’s sitting in a rocking chair, an actual rocking chair, in the shade on the porch, something she likes to do most warm evenings with her dog curled up beside her. He takes the grocery bags, one in each arm, and walks up the steps as she puts down the book she’s reading and stands. She looks to be nineteen or thereabouts, with dark hair and dark eyes, but she’s been living here for over five years and she hasn’t changed a bit, so he reckons she’s somewhere around twenty-four or so.

Pretty. Real pretty. She has a single dimple when she smiles, which isn’t quite so much a rare sight any more. Her legs are long and strong, tanned in cut-off jeans, scuffed hiking boots on her feet. This evening she wears a sleeveless T-shirt, the name of some band he’s never heard of emblazoned across it. She has a tattoo on her left arm, from the shoulder to the elbow. Some kind of tribal thing, maybe. Weird symbols that almost look like hieroglyphics.

“Hi there,” he says.

Xena, the German shepherd who never leaves her side, growls at him, showing teeth.

“Xena, hold,” she says, talking quietly but with an edge to her voice. Xena stops growling, but those eyes never leave Danny’s throat. “You’re early,” she says, focusing on him at last.

Danny shrugs. “Slow day. Decided to give myself some time off. That’s one of the advantages of being your own boss, you know?”

She doesn’t respond. For a girl who lives up here with only a dog for company, she isn’t someone who embraces the gentle art of conversation.

She pulls open the screen door, then the door beyond, beckons him through. He brings the groceries inside, Xena padding behind him like an armed escort. The farmhouse is big and old and bright and clean. Lots of wood. Everything is heavy and solid, the kind of solid you’d grab on to to stop yourself from floating away. Danny feels like that sometimes, as if one of these days, he’d just float away and no one would notice.

He puts the groceries on the kitchen table, looks up to say something, realises he’s alone in here with the dog. Xena sits on her haunches, ears pricked, tail flat and still, staring at him.

“Hi there,” he says softly.

Xena growls.

“Here,” she says from right beside him and Danny jumps, spins quickly to the dog in case she mistakes his sudden movement for aggressiveness. But Xena just sits there, no longer growling, looking entirely innocent and not unamused.

Danny smiles self-consciously, takes the money he’s offered. “Sorry,” he says. “I always forget how quietly you walk. You’re like a ghost.”

Something in the way she looks at him makes him regret his choice of words, but before he can try to make things better she’s already unpacking the bags.

He stands awkwardly and tells himself to keep quiet. He knows the routine by now. As she busies herself with packing away the groceries, she will ask, in the most casual of tones—

“How are things in town?”

“Good,” Danny says, because that’s what he always says. “Things are quiet, but good. There’s gonna be a Starbucks opening on Main Street. Etta, she owns the coffee shop on the corner, she’s not too happy, and she tried to have a town meeting to stop it from happening. But no one went. People want Starbucks, I think. And they don’t really like Etta.”

She nods like she cares, and then she asks, just as he knew she would, “Any new faces?”

“Just the usual number of people passing through.”

“No one asking about me?”

Danny shakes his head. “No one.”

She doesn’t respond. Doesn’t smile or sigh or look disappointed. It’s just a question she needs answered, a fact she needs confirmed. He’s never asked who she’s waiting for, or who she’s expecting, or if someone asking about her would be a good thing or a bad thing. He doesn’t ask because he knows she wouldn’t tell him.

She closes the kitchen cabinet, folds one of the canvas bags into the other, hands them both back to Danny.

“Could you bring some eggs next time?” Stephanie asks. “I think I’ll be in the mood for an omelette.”

He smiles. “Sure,” he says. He’s always been a sucker for the Irish accent.

he flickering lights of the trashed supermarket threw deep shadows from dark places, and Stephanie stepped through it all with one hand wrapped tightly round the golden Sceptre. Rows of shelves lay toppled against each other in a domino-sprawl of scattered food tins and ketchup bottles. She caught the scent of a small ocean of spilled vinegar and glanced to her right in time to catch a flash of pinstripe. Then she was alone again in this half-collapsed maze, the only sound the gentle hum from the freezers.

She edged into the darkness and out again into the light. Slow steps and quiet ones and once more the darkness swallowed her in its cold hunger. The maze opened before her. A man hovered there, a metre off the ground, as if he were lying on an invisible bed. His hands were clasped on his belly, and his eyes were closed.

Stephanie raised the Sceptre.

One thought would be all it’d take for a bolt of black lightning to turn him to dust. One simple command that, less than a year ago, she wouldn’t have even hesitated to give. Ferrente Rhadaman was a threat. He was a danger to her and to others. He had stepped into the Accelerator and the boost to his powers had turned him violent. Unstable. Sooner or later, he was going to kill someone in full view of the public and, just like that, magic would be revealed to a world that wasn’t ready for it. He was now the enemy. The enemy deserved to die.

And yet … she hesitated.

She was not one to second-guess herself. She was not prone to introspection. For the majority of her existence, Stephanie had been all surface. She was the reflection, the stand-in, the copy. While Valkyrie Cain had been out playing hero, Stephanie had gone to school, sat at the dinner table, carried on with normal life. People viewed her as an unfeeling object. She had been an it.

But now that she was a she, things were murkier. Less defined. Now that she was a person, now that she was actually alive, she found that she didn’t want to deprive any other living thing of that same opportunity – not if she could help it. Which was, she openly admitted, hugely inconvenient.

Wearing a scowl as dark as her hair, she stepped out from cover and advanced on Rhadaman slowly. She took a pair of shackles from the bag on her back, made sure the chain didn’t jingle. She kept the Sceptre pointed at him – she didn’t want to kill anyone if she could help it, but she wasn’t stupid – and chose her steps carefully. The floor was littered with supermarket debris. She was halfway there and still Rhadaman hadn’t opened his eyes.

The closer she got, the louder her pulse sounded in her head. She felt sure he was going to hear her heartbeat. If not her heartbeat then at the very least her ridiculously loud breathing. When had she started breathing so loud? Had she always breathed this loud? She would have thought someone might have mentioned it.

Three steps away Stephanie paused, looked around, watching for pinstripes. Nothing. Why hadn’t she waited? Why did she have to do this on her own? Did she really have that much to prove? Probably, now that she thought about it. So would capturing Rhadaman single-handedly make her a worthy partner? Would that justify her continued existence?

She wasn’t used to all these conflicting thoughts ricocheting around in her head.

Three more steps and she reached out, shackles ready.

Rhadaman’s eyes snapped open.

He stared at her. She stared at him.

“Um … This is a dream?” she tried, and a wave of energy threw her back.

She went tumbling, realised in some dim part of her mind that her hands were empty, and when she came to a stop she looked up and Rhadaman was standing there holding the Sceptre.

“I’ve seen this in books,” he said. He was American. “It’s the real thing, isn’t it? The Ancients actually used this to kill the Faceless Ones, to drive them out of this reality. The original God-Killer.” He pointed it at her as she stood, then frowned. “It doesn’t work.”

“Must be broken,” said Stephanie. “Could I have it back?”

She held out her hand. He looked at her a moment longer, and his eyes widened. “You’re her.”

“No,” she said.

He dropped the Sceptre and his hands started glowing. “You’re her!”

“I am not!” she said, before he could attack. “You think I’m Darquesse, but I’m not! I’m her reflection! I’m perfectly normal!”

“You killed my friends!”

“Stop!” she said, pointing at him. “Stop right there! If I were Darquesse, I could kill you right now, yes? I wouldn’t need shackles to restrain you. Listen to me. Valkyrie Cain had a reflection. That’s me. Valkyrie Cain went off and turned evil and became Darquesse, but I’m still here. So I am not Darquesse and I did not kill your friends.”

Rhadaman’s bottom lip trembled. “You’re not a reflection.”

“I am. Or I was. I evolved. My name is Stephanie. How do you do?”

“This is a trick.”

“No,” said Stephanie. “A trick would be much cleverer than this.”

“I should … I should kill you.”

“Why would you want to do that? I’m working with the Sanctuary. The war’s over, right? You do remember that? We’re all back on the same side, although you guys kind of lost and we’re in charge. So, if I tell you to surrender, you have to surrender. Agreed?”

“No one gives me orders any more,” said Rhadaman.

“Ferrente, you don’t want to do something you’ll regret. The Accelerator boosted your magic, but it made you unstable. We need to take you back and monitor your condition until you return to normal. You’re not thinking clearly right now.”

“I’m thinking very clearly. Killing you may not bring my friends back, but it’ll sure as hell make me smile.”

“Now that,” Skulduggery Pleasant said, pressing the barrel of his gun to Rhadaman’s temple as he stepped up beside him, “is just disturbingly unhealthy.”

Rhadaman froze, his eyes wide. Skulduggery stood there in all his pinstriped glory, his hat at a rakish angle, his skull catching the light.

“I don’t want you getting any ideas,” Skulduggery said. “You’re powerful, but not powerful enough to walk away from a bullet to the head. You’re under arrest.”

“You’ll never take me alive.”

“I really think you should examine what you say before you say it. You’re not sounding altogether sane. Stephanie, you seem to have dropped your shackles. Would you mind picking them up and placing them on—”

Rhadaman moved faster than Stephanie was expecting. Faster even than Skulduggery was expecting. In the blink of an eye, Skulduggery’s gun was sliding along the floor and Skulduggery himself was leaping away from Rhadaman’s grasping hands.

“You can’t stop me!” Rhadaman screeched.

Skulduggery’s tie was crooked. He straightened it, his movements short and sharp. “We wanted to take you in without violence, Ferrente. Do not make this any harder than it has to be.”

“You have no idea what it’s like to have this kind of power,” Rhadaman said, anger flashing in his eyes. “And you want me to give it up? To go back to being how I was before?”

“This power level isn’t going to last,” Skulduggery said. “You know that. It’s already starting to dip, isn’t it? In fifteen days, there’ll be more dips than peaks, and by the end of the month you’ll be back to normal. It’s inevitable, Ferrente. So, do yourself a favour. Give up before you do any serious damage. We’ll get you the help you need, and when it’s all over, you’ll return to your old life. The alternative is to keep going until you hurt someone. If you do that, your future will be a prison cell.”

“You’re scared of my power.”

“As you should be.”

“Why should I be scared? This is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“This?” Skulduggery said. “Really? Look around, Ferrente. We’re in the middle of a supermarket. The greatest thing that’s ever happened to you and you choose to trash a supermarket? Are you really that limited?”

Rhadaman smiled. “This? Oh, I didn’t do this.”

“No? Who did?”

“My friends.”

Stephanie couldn’t help herself – she had to look around.

“And where are your friends now?” Skulduggery asked.

Rhadaman shrugged. “Close by. They don’t wander off too far. There were loads of them around after the various battles, and I found a group and adopted them. They don’t say a whole lot.”

Stephanie picked up a faint whiff in the air. “Hollow Men?”

“I’ve given them names,” Rhadaman told her. “And I’ve dressed them in clothes. I’ve called them after my friends, the ones Darquesse killed. I think they like having names, not that they’d ever show it.”

“Hollow Men don’t like anything,” Stephanie responded. “They don’t think. They don’t feel.”

“Reflections aren’t supposed to feel, either,” Rhadaman said. “But you say you do. What makes you any different to them?”

“Because I’m a real person.”

“Or you just think you are.”

“If you surrender,” Skulduggery said, “I promise we’ll take your friends in and treat them well. Once the effects of the Accelerator wear off, they’ll be returned to you. Do we have a deal?”

“You know what they do enjoy?” Rhadaman asked, as if he hadn’t even heard Skulduggery. “They enjoy beating people to a pulp. They enjoy watching the blood splatter. They love the feel of bones breaking beneath their fists. That’s what my friends enjoy. That’s what will make them happy.”

“You don’t want to do this,” Skulduggery said.

Rhadaman smiled, curled his lip and gave a short shriek of a whistle.

Skulduggery flicked his wrist as he ran at Rhadaman, sending the Sceptre flying into Stephanie’s hands. Rhadaman caught him, threw him and leaped after him, and before she could run to help, the Hollow Men came at her, stumbling through a mountain of cereal boxes. Hollow Men dressed in clothes, ridiculous in badly-fitting suits, ludicrous in flowing floral dresses.

Black lightning flashed from the crystal set into the Sceptre, turning three of them to dust without even a sound. Lightning flashed again, and again, but they kept coming, and there were more Hollow Men behind her, and they were closing in. They had that knack. They were slow and clumsy and stupid, but it was when they were underestimated that they were at their most dangerous.

Stephanie darted right, clearing a path for herself, ducking under the heavy hands that reached for her. She led them down a narrow aisle, big heavy freezers on both sides, turned to them and backed away as they gave lurching chase. Numbers mean nothing if the enemy can be corralled. Skulduggery had taught her that. It’s all about choosing where to fight.

The black crystal spat crackling energy. If it could kill insane gods whose very appearance drove people mad, then artificial beings with skin of leathery paper and not one brain cell between them didn’t stand much of a chance. They exploded into dust that drifted to the floor and was trodden on by their unthinking brethren. They didn’t stop. Of course they didn’t. They didn’t know fear. They had no sense of self. They were poor imitations of life, much like Stephanie herself had been. Once upon a time.

But now Valkyrie Cain was gone, and Stephanie Edgley was all that was left.

From elsewhere in the supermarket, she heard a crash as Skulduggery fought Rhadaman. She wasn’t worried. He could take care of himself.

The shadows moved beside her and a fist came down on her arm. Her fingers sprang open and the Sceptre went spinning beneath an overturned shelf. Stephanie ducked back, cursing. Her only other weapon was the carved shock stick across her back, which had a limited charge and was useless against anything without a nervous system. She ran by a shelf of microwaves and blenders, past pots and pans. She grabbed a stainless-steel ladle that felt unsurprisingly unsatisfying in her hand, and immediately dropped it when she saw the one remaining box of kitchen knives. She dragged it from the shelf, threw it straight into the face of the nearest Hollow Man. The box fell, knives scattering across the floor.

Stephanie snatched up the two biggest ones and swung, the blades slicing through the Hollow Man’s neck. Green gas billowed like air from a punctured tyre. Even as she ran on, she could taste the sting of the gas in the back of her throat.

Two Hollow Men ahead of her, one in a shirt and tie and no trousers and the other in a silk dressing gown.

She dropped to her knees, sliding between them, cutting into their legs as she passed, and even as they were starting to deflate she was already on her feet again, stabbing the filleting knife into the chest of a Hollow Man wearing pyjamas. She spun away from the blast of gas, coughing, her eyes filling with tears. Something blurred in front of her and she hacked at it, shoved it away, her vision worsening, her lungs burning. Her stomach roiled. She tasted bile. She slipped on something. Fell. Lost one of the knives.

A hand grabbed her hair, pulled her back and she cried out. She tried slashing at it with the second knife, but the blade got tangled in her jacket and then it too was lost. She reached up, dug her nails into rough skin, tried to tear through. Her hair was released. Something crunched into her face. The world flashed and spun. She was hit again. She covered up, her arm doing its best to soak up the heavy punches, her head rattling with each impact. If she’d had magic, she’d have set the Hollow Man on fire by now or sent her shadows in to tear it apart. But she didn’t have magic. She didn’t have such a luxury to fall back on, to get her out of trouble. She wasn’t Valkyrie Cain. She didn’t need magic.

Stephanie brought her knees in and spun on her back. The Hollow Man loomed over her, little more than a black shape. Its fist came down on to her belly like a wrecking ball, would have emptied her lungs were it not for her armoured clothes. She braced her feet against its legs and pushed herself back out of range, rolling backwards into a crouch, the Hollow Man stumbling slightly. She plunged her hand into the display stand next to her, scrabbling for a weapon, fingers curling round a mop. The Hollow Man came at her and Stephanie rose, swinging the mop like a baseball bat.

12 3 След.

The Dying of the Light

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Epigraph

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