by Derek Landy
From down here, she was seeing the city from a new angle, and realised that this was the street she’d visited earlier. It looked quite different now, like a playset. Rubble and glass covered the road, and all the little Cadaverous-people had scampered away. It was quiet and still, so that when Valkyrie glimpsed movement it stood out like it was caught in a spotlight. She watched Skulduggery – tiny, tiny Skulduggery – creeping up, using the debris for cover.
Cadaverous, all the way up there, hadn’t noticed him yet.
“You’re not worthy of this,” Cadaverous said. “You know that, don’t you? You’re not worth the time and the effort that has gone into killing you. You should have been just another name added to the list of the people I’ve killed. That’s all you deserved. And yet somehow, somehow, you’ve survived up until now. Why is that, do you think?”
Skulduggery crouched, waiting for something, waiting for Cadaverous to look away. Valkyrie didn’t know what he was planning to do, or what he even could do. He was about the size of her thumbnail.
“Do you think you’re special?” Cadaverous asked. “Do you think you’re unique? Do you think I view you as a mortal enemy?”
Skulduggery launched himself forward, flying low to the ground, and disappeared under her bracelet.
The sound of Cadaverous’s voice changed slightly, and Valkyrie knew he was looking down at her. “I do not view you as any such thing,” he said. “You are an annoyance. That’s all you ever were. And you’re lucky. I will give you that. But luck, like blood, runs out eventually.”
Cadaverous gave Valkyrie’s head a push, then stepped away. Clutching her left wrist to keep her injured hand steady, she hid Skulduggery from view as she sat up slowly. Cadaverous hunkered down next to her.
“This was a good attempt,” he said. “Growing a new hotel, smashing your way into it … That shows ingenuity. It shows initiative. I respect that, much as it pains me to admit it. Jeremiah … Jeremiah wouldn’t have thought of something like this. It would, sadly, have been beyond him. It’s even got me confused, and I’m a very smart man. Let me see if I’ve got everything in the correct order. The hotel you dropped into – that’s what we’re in right now, yes? We were all teleported into it the moment it took root. But then you left the hotel we were in, and dropped into here, which is still the hotel we were in, but … not. Am I right? Am I making any sense? I don’t think I am. Let me try again.”
He laughed, closed his eyes, focusing, and Valkyrie did her best not to gasp as the bracelet sprang open and magic flooded her body. She immediately twisted her arm so that Cadaverous wouldn’t see what had happened. Skulduggery vanished behind a building.
“Let’s think about exits,” Cadaverous said. “If we were to walk out of here the way we came in, we’d emerge into the first hotel, wouldn’t we? And when we walked out of that the way we came in, we would actually be outside, wouldn’t we? I think we would.” He laughed again, and clapped. “This is wonderful! Are we caught in a paradox? I’ve never been caught in a paradox before. It’s quite fun. And why haven’t the old versions of the hotel withered away yet? Are we damaging it beyond repair by forcing previous versions to maintain their structures? Will I need to find a new home when all this is over? Oh, I do hope not, not after all the work I’ve put into the place.”
“I should never have come in here,” Valkyrie muttered.
“What was that?” Cadaverous asked. “What did you say?”
She cleared her throat, and spoke more clearly. “I should never have come in here.”
Cadaverous nodded. “Obviously.”
“Will you let her go? My sister? She hasn’t done anything. She’s a child.”
“She is a child, yes,” said Cadaverous, “and a relentlessly upbeat child, at that. It would actually please me no end to allow her to leave after I’ve killed you and the skeleton.”
“Thank you,” said Valkyrie.
“But I’m afraid I can’t do that,” he continued. “In ten years, she’ll be formidable – especially if she follows your example. And she’ll remember me, and she’ll come after me. I’m dreadfully sorry, I just can’t have someone out there who harbours any kind of grudge, let alone a vendetta. I’ll have to kill her.”
“Cadaverous, she’s a kid. Please.”
He waved a hand. “I don’t see why you’re getting upset. You’re going to die now. Why should you care what happens to anyone after you’ve died? It seems to me to be a waste of energy.” He stood, towering over her. “You really shouldn’t have come in here. Look at you. You’re growing smaller every moment.”
He was right. The hotel must have hit a growth spurt in its final stages, because cars that Valkyrie could have crushed between two fingers a moment ago were now bigger than her hand.
“I suppose your failure isn’t entirely your own fault,” he said. “It’s not every day you fight a god.”
Gritting her teeth against the pain from her broken ribs, Valkyrie started getting up. “Actually, I’ve fought gods before.” She straightened, and flicked her wet, filthy hair out of her eyes. “They’re not so tough.”
Cadaverous looked displeased, opened his mouth to say something and she raised her right hand and sent an arc of lightning straight into his face.
He stepped back, cursed, turned away, the damage already fading, but Valkyrie hopped on to a nearby building and sprang at him, crying out in pain as she wrapped an arm round his throat.
First rule of fighting gods is to keep them off balance. If they can’t form a coherent thought, they can’t assert their power.
Valkyrie kicked at the back of Cadaverous’s leg and his knee buckled and they toppled backwards. She tried to steel herself before they landed, Cadaverous on top, but her ribs sent daggers shooting through her side. Tears streaming from her eyes, she wrapped her legs round his waist while she locked in the sleeper choke. He thrashed wildly, pulling at her arms, almost breaking the hold by pure strength alone. If he’d kept at it, he could have snapped her bones, but both air and blood were being cut off from his brain, and Cadaverous was doing what everyone did in that situation – he was panicking.
Valkyrie clung on as he rolled to his hands and knees. He tried standing but she pulled at him, toppling him again. He was shrinking now and she had to adjust her position, had to tighten her arms. There were a few moments when they were of equal size, but he was shrinking faster than she was.
She squeezed. She squeezed with everything she had left. Her exhausted arms were little more than useless bands of rubber, and still she squeezed. She didn’t stop. She couldn’t. Her sister was in here. She had to save her sister.
Valkyrie squeezed and squeezed and shut her eyes and gritted her teeth, and when she let go it wasn’t because she wanted to, it was because she had no other choice. Her arms failed her and sprang apart as she collapsed back, Cadaverous rolling off to one side.
But he didn’t get up. He just continued to shrink.
She took a few deep breaths, then heaved herself on to her knees and, moving slowly and awkwardly, with her left hand held away from her body, she stood. Skulduggery ran up, Alice in his arms. Valkyrie was twice as big as him.
Skulduggery put Alice down and turned Cadaverous on to his belly. He tried snapping the cuffs on, but Cadaverous’s wrists were still too thick.
Another few seconds. That’s all they needed. Another few seconds and this would all be over.
Cadaverous opened his eyes.
He threw Skulduggery back and ignored Valkyrie’s lightning as he got to his feet.
“That was close,” he said. “That was astonishingly close. Congratulations might well be in order – but failure is failure, and the game is at an end.”
“Not yet it isn’t,” Valkyrie said.
“What else do you have?” Cadaverous asked. “What else is there? You have nothing. Do you still think your little bolts of lightning are going to hurt me in here?”
“I’ve got more than lightning.”
&nb
sp; “Do you now? And what might that be?”
Valkyrie showed him.
76
Omen and Temper dragged Caisson out through the front door of the Midnight Hotel, and Temper collapsed and Omen dropped to his knees beside him.
“Car,” Temper said. “Leaves. For the pain.”
Omen looked around. “There is no car. Temper, there is no car. Listen to me, I need your phone. Temper, please, your phone. I can call Never. I can call for help.”
Temper dug into his pocket, came out with the phone and unlocked it, then handed it over and lay back and blacked out. Omen jumped up, dialled a number –
– and Razzia snatched the phone from his hand and tossed it behind her.
“Oh, hell,” said Omen.
Nero walked by, stood over Caisson and nudged him with his foot. “He’s still alive,” he announced.
“She’ll be happy about that,” Razzia said, then looked down at Omen. “Where is she, mate? Where’s Abyssinia? I haven’t heard her voice in my head since she told me to come here.”
“She, um, she’s in there,” Omen said, jerking a thumb at the hotel.
There was another woman with them, a dark-haired lady with an angry scowl on her face. “Go get her, or we’ll kill your friend.”
Omen’s eyes widened. “No, no, don’t do that! I can’t get her – I don’t know where she is. Inside there, it isn’t like the inside of the hotel, it’s a whole other—”
“We know what Cadaverous can do,” Razzia said.
“All I know is that Cadaverous has Abyssinia,” said Omen. “They fought, kind of, and he … well, he beat her. And he took her away.”
Razzia frowned, and looked at Nero. “We’d better go in.”
Nero made a face. “In there? The old man will murder us.”
The scowling woman stepped forward. “Valkyrie Cain,” she said, “is she in there?”
Omen nodded, and the scowling woman turned that scowl on Nero. “We’re going in.”
77
Valkyrie reached for Cadaverous’s thoughts with her mind. She could hear them, faint though they were, like a muffled conversation held behind a closed door. She had to get closer. She had to open the door.
Valkyrie lunged at him and he laughed, let her come, let her clamp her right hand on to his head, and suddenly the door burst wide open and his thoughts became loud and clear and overwhelming.
But she expected this and so narrowed her search, cutting through to his memories, just like Abyssinia had done. Valkyrie copied her technique precisely, following those memories down a flickering tunnel of sights and sounds and emotions, burrowing past his adult life, past the people he’d killed and the people he’d met and the people he’d known, back and back, deeper and deeper, to a childhood that was sharp at the edges and cold in the centre.
Time stopped. Cadaverous’s childhood didn’t so much lie before her as unspool around her. Suddenly Valkyrie knew. She knew his earliest memory as surely as she knew her own. She knew the smells of the cabin he lived in. She knew the hunger. She remembered his mother. She remembered his father.
His mother was her mother. His father was her father. Valkyrie was Cadaverous. His hatred and frustrations crowded her mind. She knew now why he killed. She understood now the compulsions that drove him, the urges that twisted his potential, that set his life on the course it took. She had killed the same people he had killed. She had killed for the same reason.
Her mother and her father. She had watched her mother die at her father’s hands. He had beaten her, and strangled her while Valkyrie screamed, while she tried and tried to pull him away. But Valkyrie was small, and her father was big and strong and even as Valkyrie struggled harder, her mother’s struggles weakened.
Her heart broke. The only love she’d ever known in the world drifted from her mother’s dull eyes. Now it was just the two of them, her father and her, alone in those mountains. Without anyone to protect her, Valkyrie was beaten by hand, by belt, by branch. She knew pain, and fear, and helplessness. Her life progressed in cuts and bruises and broken bones. They were how she measured the passing of time.
He was going to kill her. He was going to use her up and discard her, a rattling thing of jangled bones with dull eyes. So she picked up that hatchet, and she cleaved his skull in two while he slept, and she felt relief and a peculiar kind of joy. It would be a long time before she felt that joy again. Killing small animals would only offer a taste. She would have to wait until she had been taken to America, until she had killed that homeless man, until she had bashed his head in with a broken brick and watched his blood drip on to her shoe, watched the gentle way it splashed—
No. That wasn’t her. That was Cadaverous. That had happened to Cadaverous and Valkyrie could see it, his memories playing all around her like projections on the walls of an attic, projections she could walk into. Touch.
Change.
She went back to Cadaverous’s father strangling his mother, and she thought about his hands lifting away from her neck, then watched it happen.
This was hard. This was worse than hard, this was painful. She couldn’t feel her body any more, but she could feel the pain this was causing her. Nevertheless, she persisted.
She thought about her own life, the love her own parents had shown her, had demonstrated for her again and again, and she took that love and released it here. She fed Cadaverous the love she had known, the smiles and the laughter. She fed him the support and the understanding. She fed him the light, a light that beat the darkness back.
She knew Cadaverous, knew what drove him, but now she also saw this clumsy veil she had pulled over his pain. It was stretched tight, and wouldn’t last, and was already beginning to tear as she backed out of his thoughts. But it was love, and it was something Cadaverous had never truly known.
Valkyrie blinked. She was standing, her hand pressed against his head. Cadaverous’s eyes were glazed. She let go, almost stumbled.
His voice cracked when he spoke. “What did you … what did you do to me?”
She stepped back, ignoring the headache. She felt blood run from her nose and wiped it away.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
He focused on her, and frowned. “I don’t … What did you do to me?”
“I don’t know,” she answered honestly.
She heard footsteps behind her. The teenage boy walked forward. Cadaverous stared at him.
“Help me,” Cadaverous said.
Slowly, the boy put his hand on the old man’s face. “I don’t think I can.”
Tears rolled down Cadaverous’s cheeks. “Please,” he said.
“We’re too damaged,” the boy said, and smiled sadly. “You didn’t have a chance.”
“It hurts.”
“I know it does.” The boy turned to Valkyrie. “Go,” he said. “Thank you, and go.”
Valkyrie turned, tried to pick up Alice, but her ribs wouldn’t let her. Skulduggery put his hand on her arm. She looked up.
Abyssinia stood there, with Nero and Razzia and Skeiri.
“You’ve been in my head,” Abyssinia said. Her face was bruised and bloody, and she was standing like her bones were broken. “Don’t look so surprised: you left footprints all over the place.”
Skeiri’s face was pure hatred. Her teeth were bared, her eyes narrowed to slits. Violence radiated from her whole body.
“You’re powerful,” Abyssinia continued. “You don’t know how powerful you are. But you’re … inelegant. I could trace you from one memory to another. You crossed the bridge between us, Valkyrie, and then walked through my memories.”
“I didn’t build that bridge,” Valkyrie said. “That was you.”
Skeiri suddenly launched herself at Valkyrie, but Abyssinia caught her and in an instant had drained her, healing her bones and her bruises.
Abyssinia sighed, much happier. “Ooh, that’s better,” she said. “And it doesn’t matter who built the bridge, Valkyrie. What matters is you c
rossed it. This cannot go unpunished.” Her eyes flickered briefly to Cadaverous. “You went trampling through his memories as well, didn’t you? I can see the alterations you made. A clumsy … what did you call it? A clumsy veil. Clumsy but effective. You’ve actually cured him. Temporarily, of course, and with significant flaws … Cadaverous, how does it feel to have love in your life?”
The boy stood in front of Cadaverous. “You could have done this for him,” he said. “You could have helped him.”
“Perhaps,” said Abyssinia. “I would assuredly have done a better job. Maybe I’d have cured him completely, taken away this urge to kill that has haunted him since he was a boy.”
“Leave,” Cadaverous said, his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “All of you.”
Abyssinia smiled. “You can feel it beginning to slip away, can’t you? Do you want to spend your last few minutes alone with your memories? They’re not yours, you know. She’s merged her memories with your own. The people you’re thinking of have never been your real parents.”
“I don’t care,” Cadaverous said. “Leave me.”
“Of course. There’s just one thing I need to do.”
Valkyrie felt Abyssinia’s thoughts dart into Cadaverous’s mind, piercing the clumsy veil and slashing it open. Cadaverous cried out, hands at his head as he fell to his knees, the teenage boy doing his best to catch him.
Abyssinia looked at Valkyrie. “Stay out of my head,” she said, and Nero teleported them away.
Skulduggery picked up Alice, practically threw her into Valkyrie’s arms. “Get her out of here. I’ll hold him off.”
“Won’t do any good,” Cadaverous said, and let the boy fall, his neck broken. “You should have killed me when you had the chance. Now no one gets out of here alive.”
Valkyrie crouched wearily. “Don’t worry, Cadaverous. I’m not done with you yet.” She took a seed out of her pocket, showed it to him before dropping it on the ground and covering it with dirt.
His eyes widened.
“What,” she said, “you thought I only grabbed one of these things? If the last few years have taught me anything, it’s to always have a back-up plan. Skulduggery, some water?”