Copyright
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books 2014
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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Derek Landy blogs under duress at
www.dereklandy.blogspot.com
Copyright © Derek Landy 2014
Cover illustration © Tom Percival;
Illuminated letters © Tom Percival; Skulduggery Pleasant™ Derek Landy; Skulduggery Pleasant Logo™ HarperCollinsPublishers
Derek Landy asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas, from The Poems of Dylan Thomas (Dent), used with permission from David Higham Associates
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780007489251
Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007489299
Version: 2014-08-05
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.
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
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
1. Meek Ridge
2. Living in the Shadow
3. Throwing Down the Gauntlet
4. Friends and Foe
5. To Watch the World Burn
6. My Normal Life
7. Visions
8. Curiosity
9. Signate
10. Girls’ Night Out
11. Honey, I’m Hom
12. The Cauldron
13. My Friend. My Furniture.
14. A Common Enemy
15. Finbar’s Dream
16. The National Black Belt Review Board
17. A Voice from the Darkness
18. Brogues and Burrs
19. Me and Her
20. Home Delivery
21. The Eviction
22. The Return of Valkyrie Cain
23
24. A Fine Pair of Specimens
25. Going to America
26. Weird Feelings
27. The Gnarl
28
29. Those who Live in Darkness
30. Forgiven
31. Creepy Kid
32. The Job Offer
33. Misadventures in Babysitting
34. Saying Goodbye
35. The Loss
36. Joining the Stream
37. Brooking No Argument
38. Enemy Territory
39. Finding the Fountain
40. Famous Last Words
41. Here Be Dragons
42. Brainstorm
43. Shunting Ravel
44. A Better Person
45. A Brutal Act of Kindness
46. The Conversation
47. The Death Bringer Wakes
48. A New Roarhaven
49. Stopping for Gas
50. The Card Trick
51. The Temple of the Spider
52. The Devil Comes to Play
53. The End is Nye
54. The Deal
55. The Exiled
56. Toe to Toe
57. A World of Pain
58. Valkyrie’s Affliction
59. The Corpse Trail
60. Freaks
61. The Plan
62. The Knock on the Door
63. The City Below
64. Chasing Alice
65. The Second Test
66. Table Manners
67. Lightning
68. The Hourglass
69. Strange Bedfellows
70. Return of the Living Dead
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
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108
Also by Derek Landy
About the Publisher
1
MEEK RIDGE
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.
2
LIVING IN THE SHADOW
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.
r /> 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.”