The Dying of the Light (2 page)

“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.