Fintan was closest. She reached out with her left hand, feeling the air against her skin. He ran at her and she felt the space between them, felt how it connected, and when she found the right spot she splayed her hand and snapped her palm and the air rippled and hit Fintan like a truck. He flew back and smacked into the church wall.
The fire in her other hand was burning fiercely and she threw it. The fireball hit Colm’s ragged coat and he shrieked and stumbled back, tearing it off. He raised his head to see her running straight at him, but couldn’t do anything to stop the elbow that smashed into his jaw. He spun around, then tipped over backwards and didn’t get up.
Liam rushed her and she tried to move but she wasn’t fast enough. She was taken off her feet and slammed into the ground, Liam’s hands at her throat, trying to throttle her.
Behind him, she saw Peg strike Skulduggery. He hurtled into the shadows.
Valkyrie tried breaking Liam’s grip, but his fingers were short and thick and she couldn’t pry them loose. She grabbed his wrist and twisted, but he was too strong. His fingers dug into her throat and black spots flashed in her vision, her head swimming. She brought her hands in, felt the air between herself and the goblin, but Liam scuttled up, knelt on her left hand and pinned it to the ground. He took one hand from her throat and held her right wrist away from him.
“Try your little tricks now,” he snarled, his foul breath hot on her cheek.
Blood pulsed through her temples. Her lungs burned, and although her struggles were getting more frantic, she could feel herself growing weaker.
Spittle dripped from Liam’s lips on to her face. Her muscles ached and her body was tired, and darkness seeped into her vision. She couldn’t hear anything over the beating of her own heart.
Liam was kneeling on her left hand. His right knee was pressed into her belly, leaving her legs to kick uselessly behind him.
She brought her legs in, bent them, the soles of her boots flat to the ground. With the last ounce of her strength, Valkyrie lifted her backside off the church floor. Liam lurched forward a little and laughed.
“Think that’ll do it? I’ve tamed wild horses, little girl, and they buck a lot harder than you.”
Valkyrie took her right foot off the ground. She could feel the air on her face, on her hands, on her exposed skin. Now she struggled to feel the air through her boot. It was possible. She knew it was.
And as her consciousness ebbed, she thought she felt it, a slight resistance, and that’s all she needed. She stepped on the air and it shimmered, and Valkyrie’s body flipped over backwards, and the goblin screeched as he was catapulted away.
Valkyrie landed on her belly and gasped, sucked in breath hungrily. Tears had sprung to her eyes and she wiped them away, in time to see Skulduggery reach out a hand. A large piece of rubble lifted off the ground. Skulduggery made circular motions and the piece of rubble started to move. Faster and faster it went, in an ever-increasing circle.
The piece of rubble slammed into Peg’s jaw and before she could even growl, it had made its way around and slammed into her jaw again. It struck her repeatedly until Skulduggery’s hand stiffened, and the piece of rubble hurtled into Peg’s face and shattered.
Peg fell back to a sitting position. She held a huge hand to the side of her face and moaned.
Valkyrie stood, and saw Liam. He was on his feet and sneaking towards the babies.
She ran at him and he snarled. She ducked under a punch and he twisted to get at her again. His fist swung and she blocked but her block wasn’t strong enough, and his knuckles hit the side of her face and she staggered. He grinned and she smacked him, and goblin blood, the colour of mucus, sprayed from his lip.
In the middle of the church, Peg had Skulduggery wrapped up in a bear hug. He was trying to hit her with a section of a broken pew.
Liam ran at Valkyrie, yelling out a war cry. She clicked her fingers and he stopped and cowered, expecting the fireball. But instead she moved in, stiffened the fingers of her other hand and jabbed into his neck. His head swung around, offering up the perfect target. Her elbow connected with the hinge of his jaw, and Liam the goblin crumpled to the ground.
“You don’t really love me,” she heard Skulduggery say.
Peg was sitting against a wall, Skulduggery standing over her, the remains of the broken pew in his hands.
“I’m flattered,” he continued, “really I am. I’m sure you’re a lovely girl.”
Peg moaned.
“But the truth is, we don’t know each other. Not really. I don’t know what your favourite song is, or what flower you like most, or what you like to do on long summer evenings. And what do you really know about me?”
“I uv oo, Skuluggy.”
“No, you don’t, Peg. This isn’t real love. This isn’t true love. You deserve someone who can give you true love.”
“Oo?”
“No, not me.”
“Moh.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”
Peg sniffled.
“He’s out there, you know. Your Mister Right. And I’m sure he’s looking for you.”
She looked up. “Eally?”
“Really. You just have to find him.”
Peg nodded, then nodded again, with renewed determination. Skulduggery stepped back as she stood up and brushed some of the dust off her wedding dress.
“Stay away from your brothers, OK? They’re not a very good influence on you.”
She nodded, and marched for the church door. Before she stepped out, she stopped, and looked back tearfully. “I awah ink awoo, Skuluggy.”
“And I’ll always think of you, too,” Skulduggery replied.
And then Peg was gone.
Valkyrie stood beside Skulduggery. “Anything you want to tell me?”
“No,” he said. “Not really. Are all the babies safe?”
“Safe and unharmed. Their folks will be glad to have them back. Are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me? To share?”
“Relatively positive, yes.”
“She seems nice. Peg, I mean.”
He looked at her. “It’s going to take you a while to stop teasing me about this, isn’t it?”
She grinned. “Oh, yes.”
He sighed. “Then you may as well get started.”
lack Annis didn’t like living in a ditch, but times were changing, and the England she had known as a child was long gone. She narrowed her eyes – left eye blue, right eye green – and tried to remember what she had been like as a child. It had been so long ago she had quite forgotten.
Had she laughed and played, like other girls? Had she giggled and joked, and run through the meadows and the fields of Leicester, letting the sunshine warm her skin? Highly unlikely. The more she thought about it, the more she remembered. She couldn’t recall any friends, nor could she recall any giggling or joking. She seemed to remember a lot of screaming, though. Oh, yes, a whole lot of screaming.
Annis walked to the cave mouth, her feet crunching on bones and human remains. It was almost morning. She hated mornings. She hated the morning, the noon, the early afternoon, the late afternoon, and bright evenings. She hated a lot of things.
What had she been thinking about? Oh, yes, her childhood. Now that was a time of her life that had outstayed its welcome. Her parents had been terrified of her. Her father had thought she was the spawn of the devil, but she’d always taken that as a compliment. Whenever she got angry her fingernails would grow long and pointed, and her teeth became jagged and her skin turned blue. She’d never really understood why her skin turned blue, or what purpose it served, but her parents used it as an early-warning system. Annis’s temper was not a pretty sight.
All in all, it had probably surprised no one when she started eating people. Her parents’ friends had probably nodded when they’d heard, maybe shrugged, saying something like, “Aye, doesn’t surprise me one bit, her eatin’ people. Always had that look about her, didn’t she??
?? Black Annis didn’t mind. By the time she was twenty she’d eaten everyone in her village, parents and all.
That had been… how long ago? Two hundred years, maybe. Now she had streaks of grey in her black matted hair, and her face was lined and she wore her age like an ugly shawl. This was her life – living in a cave that opened into a ditch, kept awake during the day by the tractors that ploughed the field above.
A rat scampered in from the ditch outside and she snatched it up. It was thin and mangy and squirmed in her grip, but she hadn’t eaten in a week, so she bit down and the rat squealed and its warm blood ran down her throat.
She munched through it, not bothering with the tail, which was always too chewy, and dropped the remains at her feet. She coughed up a hairball and spat it out, then wandered back to the fire at the centre of the cave.
She heard Scrannel returning, heard the clanging of his armour, and she allowed a spark of hope to permeate her usual dour humour. He was hurrying. Maybe that meant he’d been successful. Maybe he was struggling with someone. She heard him lose his footing and splash and crash into the ditch. She didn’t care who he’d brought with him – child, adult, old person, she genuinely didn’t care. She was regretting eating the rat now – she should have held off a little longer. She heard Scrannel hiss in pain – either the meal had struck him, or he’d become tangled in the thorns again. Black Annis licked her lips, picturing a plump child, maybe ten years old. She was starving.
But when Scrannel appeared at the cave mouth, he was alone. Disappointment became a weight in the pit of Annis’s stomach.
“Hullo,” Scrannel said, his armour dripping with ditch water. “I’m back.” It wasn’t real armour, of course. He had made it from an assortment of tin products and segments of corrugated iron. It was held together by nuts and bolts and pieces of frayed string. It clanked when he walked. It clanked when he didn’t walk. It just clanked.
“Where’s my dinner?” Black Annis asked, even though the answer didn’t interest her. The only thing that mattered was that she wasn’t going to eat. Again.
“No one’s about,” Scrannel said, giving an apologetic shrug that kicked up quite a racket. “Everyone’s asleep.”
“Of course everyone’s asleep,” Annis snapped. “It’s night. You were supposed to sneak into a house and grab someone.”
“I tried,” Scrannel claimed, eyes wide with earnestness. “But every time I got close to a door or window, the lights would come on and I’d have to run away. I don’t know how they knew I was there. It happened six or seven times.”
Annis crossed her arms. Her dress was shapeless and made of sackcloth. “Do you think,” she said, her voice quiet and filled with barely restrained rage, “that maybe they hear that stupid armour you insist on wearing?”
Scrannel frowned. “They hear this? I don’t think that’s very likely, Annis. They’re probably all psychics. That’s what I think.”
She resisted the urge to tear him limb from bloody limb. Scrannel was, for lack of a better word, a pet. His mother was a troll, to whom his father was nothing more than a drunken blur one dark and stormy night, and so Scrannel himself was a crossbreed, a mongrel, an oddity. He had milky-white eyes that were set too far apart, he had no nose to speak of and a mouth wide enough to swallow a decent-sized rock. He had tiny teeth and high cheekbones and only the barest hint of a chin, upon which he was trying to grow a beard. He had been trying to grow this beard for the past three years. His chin looked vaguely fluffy, but that was as far as it had got.
Scrannel was an idiot of a creature, who actually enjoyed living in a ditch, and the only reason Annis had not eaten him was because he tasted dreadful. The first time they had met she’d torn off a chunk of his leg, chewed it for a few moments before spitting it out. She’d spent the rest of the night being sick in a stream, and Scrannel had stuck around, eventually offering to hold her hair back while she vomited.
That had been twelve years ago, and he still hadn’t left.
“I have a bit of news,” he said, trying to sound casual. “I think I was followed.”
She stared at him. “What?”
“I can’t be sure now,” he said hurriedly. “But there was a woman, and she had blonde hair and a long coat, and I’ve never seen her before, and she looked, you know, out of place.”
“And why do you think she was following you?”
“Because when I ran away, she ran after me.”
Annis could feel her skin starting to turn blue.
Scrannel spoke quickly. “I might be mistaken, of course. Could just be coincidence. She might be a jogger, or something.”
“A jogger?” Annis growled. “In a long coat? At night?”
“Carrying a sword.”
“What?”
“I’m fairly certain she was carrying a sword.”
Annis felt her fingernails grow long. “That doesn’t sound like a jogger, now, does it?”
Scrannel pondered, then shook his head. “To be honest, no, it doesn’t. And now that I think about it, I don’t think she was even wearing jogging shoes. What kind of jogger doesn’t wear jogging shoes?”
“You’re an idiot,” Annis snarled.
His armour clanked when he nodded.
There was movement at the cave mouth. Scrannel scuttled away, and a young woman with tousled blonde hair, wearing a long coat over brown leather trousers and a brown leather tunic, stepped into the cave holding a sword in her right hand.
“That’s her,” Scrannel said unhelpfully.
The woman was holding a coil of thick rope in her other hand, which she let drop into the human remains at her feet.
“Nice place,” she muttered, almost to herself. She had a London accent. Annis liked Londoners. They tasted great.
Scrannel let out a battle cry, then he ran forward. The young woman didn’t use her sword, as Annis expected. Instead, she swayed to one side and slapped Scrannel on the back as he hurtled by. He ran into the cave wall.
Annis could feel her teeth start to lengthen in her mouth. “Who are you?”
“Tanith,” the young woman said. “Tanith Low.”
Scrannel charged at her again and she kicked out, slamming her boot heel into the piece of tin wrapped around his knee. He hit the ground with his insignificant chin.
Tanith ignored him as he rolled around in pain. “And I’m just guessing here, so don’t be offended if I get this wrong, but you must be Black Annis. I’ve heard an awful lot about you.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes indeedy. The blue skin, the nails, the cave littered with the bones of your victims. It’s all very impressive.”
Annis’s jaw dislocated with a loud pop, and her mouth hung open – impossibly wide – to accommodate her growing, jagged teeth.
“Why, granny,” Tanith said with a smile, “what big teeth you have.”
“You don’t know everything about me,” Annis said. “If you did, you wouldn’t have dared set foot in my home.”
Tanith shrugged. “I know that you’re under arrest, and I know you really shouldn’t resist.”
Black Annis laughed.
Scrannel forced himself to his feet and threw a punch, but Tanith struck his forearm with the hilt of her sword. The piece of tin that covered that section of arm now had a large dent in it. She kicked him and the corrugated iron that made up his chest-plate rattled as he fell back.
Tanith looked over at Annis. “I know enough. I know that sunlight turns you to stone for all eternity. I know that you’ve killed and eaten hundreds of people over the years.”
“Thousands,” Annis corrected.
“Well, in that case, you are doubly under arrest.”
“You shouldn’t have come here alone.”
Scrannel ran to the dark corner of the cave where he kept his stuff, and grabbed the wooden spear he’d been working on for weeks. He ran back towards Tanith and when he was close enough so there was no way he could miss, he hurled the spear and missed. It sailed pa
st her, right out through the cave mouth. She didn’t even have to duck.
Tanith jumped and spun, a leg snapping out from nowhere and hitting Scrannel in the jaw. He whirled and clanked and fell and clanked and hit the ground and clanked, and then he lay still and didn’t clank any more.
Annis bent her knees, ready to spring. “Any last requests?”
Tanith shrugged. “Fall over and go to sleep?”
Tanith dodged the first swipe of the nails, but only just. Annis pressed the attack, forcing the intruder to retreat. Tanith, panic showing in her eyes, blocked with the sword, but Annis had both hands working, which was the equivalent to ten long knives slashing through the air.
A boot found Annis’s knee and she stumbled back and hissed. Tanith came forward, thrusting the sword high then sweeping it low, but Annis had anticipated the feint and the nails of her left hand connected with the blade and forced it down, while her right hand went to carve up Tanith’s pretty face.
At the last moment Tanith raised an elbow, striking Annis’s arm and making her miss, but the move meant that she had taken one hand off her sword. Annis flicked her left hand and tore the sword from Tanith’s grip. It fell between them, then Annis stepped over it, hands flashing.
Tanith stumbled back, desperately trying to dodge another few swipes. Annis’s nails struck the cave wall repeatedly, but she was grinning now, looking forward to the meal that was about to come.
Tanith kept moving, however, swaying just far enough so that the nails would miss and hit the wall. Annis was growing impatient, and Tanith moved in, punched her right on the nose, before moving away again.
Annis could see, by the skin of her hands, that she was at her bluest. She felt the anger build, and she let out a roar and her attack became a frenzy of slashing claws that hit nothing but cave wall. She rushed at Tanith, who leaped to the wall and ran sideways along it. Annis howled her rage and tried to reach her. But now Tanith was upside down, above her, and as Annis whirled Tanith jumped and flipped, landed beside her sword, snatching it up.