He left them, heard them bickering behind him, and then Valkyrie was laughing and Skulduggery was acting offended. Scrutinous emerged into the midday sun, took a deep, calming breath, and headed off in search of some lunch.
Possibly seafood.
In December 2011 Derek launched a competition on his blog (dereklandy.blogspot.com) to find two characters for a new short story, to be published exclusively in this book. One of them had to be Australian, and one of them had to be New Zealandish… New Zealandan… um, from New Zealand.
After much deliberation over all the fantastic entries, Derek chose:
Tane Aiavao, of New Zealand, created by Josie. Tane is a laid-back Maori Elemental with zero planning skills.
Hayley Skirmish, of Australia, created by Sparky Braginski. Hayley is a strong-willed, plain-speaking Adept with the ability to jump, flip, and run along walls and ceilings.
Congratulations to Josie and Sparky! And now read on for the brand-new story featuring their amazing characters…
ombies,” Tane Aiavao muttered as they crept closer to the mausoleum. “I hate zombies.”
The night air was filled with the stench of the dead. It wafted through the headstones and played with the long grasses of this remote Brisbane cemetery, and it was all Tane and Hayley could do to stop from gagging whenever one of the shambling, rotting things got too close. They stayed low, moving through the shadows, ready to run or fight in an instant should their luck change.
Hayley Skirmish, her brown hair tied back in a ponytail, held the axe in a two-handed grip. Tane, his own hair sticking up in a clump, followed behind her and did most of the complaining. Unlike his Australian companion, Tane didn’t cherish these calm moments before the storm, and he cherished the storm even less. Tane was a New Zealander, a Kiwi, and even more than that he was a Maori, and he reckoned Hayley could learn a thing or two from him on how to relax. Not that he’d ever suggest it. Tane was a big guy, but not all of it was muscle, and there was something about Hayley that was just flat-out intimidating to a bloke like him. She was athletic and pretty and impressive, looked to be around seventeen, so she was a bit younger than he was – but even so, she was in charge, and that was the end of it.
Hayley moved her hand in a quick motion and they stopped where they were, within sight of the rusted iron gates of the Doherty family crypt. They could hear movement all around them. Tane peered about and caught glimpses of things that had once been people, lurching with each step. He disguised his whimper behind a terrified moan, and realised that Hayley was looking at him, like she was waiting for something.
“What?” he whispered.
“The amulet,” she whispered back impatiently in that broad Aussie accent. “Hurry.”
He frowned at her. “I don’t have the amulet.”
“What? You were meant to bring it!”
“I thought you were meant to bring it.”
“I brought the axe!”
“No one told me I had to bring the amulet.”
“I told you! Before we left!”
He let a moment pass. “I thought you were joking.”
“Right,” she whispered decisively, turning so she was facing him. “I’m going to kill you.”
He flinched away from the axe. “I thought we didn’t need the amulet – didn’t Skulduggery say they’d be able to do this without it?”
Her grip on the axe was turning her knuckles white, and she had that look in her eye, the look that meant she was barely controlling her anger. “He did say that. And then Valkyrie said no, they hoped they’d be able to do this without the amulet, but that if they couldn’t, they’d use the amulet as a last resort.”
“A last resort?”
“To save the world.”
Tane gave a feeble smile. “See? We’ve got nothing to worry about. I mean, when was the last time we used a last-resort-type weapon?”
“Monday.”
He chewed his lip. “I’m sure we won’t need to do it again so soon, though. It’ll be fine.”
She leaned in close, real close, close enough to bite his nose clean off. “You,” she said in a whisper so coarse it was sliding off sandpaper, “are an idiot.”
He shrugged and muttered something and went to retie his bootlace before he remembered gumboots don’t have laces, and eventually Hayley looked back at the mausoleum. When they were sure they wouldn’t be seen, they hurried to the gate. The lock had been snapped, but the hinges still creaked as they slipped through. Tane’s feet crunched on pebbles, but Hayley’s bare feet moved over them with barely a sound, and within moments they were passing through the heavy door into the dank confines of the final resting place (in theory, anyway) of the once great Doherty clan. Two flaming torches, held in wall brackets on either side, illuminated the ancient coffins that lay empty and broken all around them. Moving slowly, they approached the crumbling hole in the ground, a pit so impossibly dark it could have led into the infinitely fathomless depths of Hell itself.
“Looks pretty deep,” Tane said.
Hayley didn’t bother answering him. She did a quick check around to make sure all the coffins were indeed empty, and then moved back to the door. Hayley was good at standing guard. She was alert, and she didn’t get bored as easily as Tane did, and she didn’t start fidgeting or go for a wander, the way Tane tended to.
His eyes scanned the crypt, not finding a whole lot of interest. The plan was that they wait here for the sign, and then they help Skulduggery and Valkyrie close over this gaping pit, which was the reason the dead were walking. Skulduggery had explained it to them that very afternoon, how they had figured it all out, about the centuries-old family curse and the last of the Doherty bloodline and something else about how the wicked shall not rest and something about a dog. Or a bog, or something like that. Maybe a log.
“What does a log have to do with all this?” he asked Hayley.
“Nothing whatsoever.”
He nodded to himself. It was definitely either dog or bog. He looked down into the pit. Could it really be called a pit? What made a hole a pit? It was about two metres in diameter and very dark, but apart from that, it was just a hole. He picked up a small piece of rubble and dropped it into the darkness. He listened for the sound of it hitting the bottom. Nothing. Either the hole was very, very deep or the piece of rubble was way too small. He picked up another piece, a heavier, chunkier piece.
“What are you doing?” Hayley asked suddenly.
He hid the chunk of rubble behind his back. “Nothing.”
“You’re doing something. What are you doing?”
“I’m not doing anything,” he said. “I’m standing here, that’s all.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Stay away from the pit.”
“It’s more of a hole, really.”
“Shut up, and stay away from it.”
He didn’t respond. She glared at him once more, then went back to peering out of the door. In Tane’s experience, Australians were fine most of the time, but whenever they were in dangerous situations they tended to lose their sense of humour. Making sure he wouldn’t be caught, Tane tossed the chunk of rubble into the hole and listened for a sound. It came almost immediately, a soft thud and a moan. Tane frowned. A moan?
The zombie pulled itself up and grabbed his ankle and Tane shrieked. He kicked out and fell back and the zombie was clambering from the hole/pit/whatever it was, its flesh rotten and disgusting. Tane was aware of Hayley dragging him away as the zombie reached for him again.
“What did you do?” she hissed.
“I just wanted to see how deep it was!”
“I told you not to go near it!”
“Who are you to be giving me orders?”
She dropped him and strode forwards. “I’m the one with the axe.”
Zombies are scary and all, and there’s the whole loss of identity and mindless savagery side to them, but one on one, they’re not very effective. Now in an enclosed space, if you’re outnumbered and there’s nowh
ere to run, you can offer up a prayer to whichever god you believe in and prepare to have your brains eaten. In that kind of situation, you’re pretty much doomed. But when there’s only one of them, and they’re as slow and clumsy as they usually are, and they’re facing an Australian girl who’s had experience wielding an axe, they don’t really stand much of a chance.
The zombie had only just got to its feet when Hayley swung, and Tane had to admire her proficiency. The only way to kill a zombie is the tried and true – destroy the brain or sever the head – and where Tane would have chopped and hacked and made an unholy mess of it, one swipe was all it took for Hayley to get the job done. The head hit the ground and the body crumpled, and she glanced back at him and her eyes widened.
“Look out!”
Tane twisted just as the mausoleum door burst open and the zombies staggered in. He scrambled up as they poured through the doorway, a seemingly endless parade of decomposing corpses, moaning and snarling in that guttural way of theirs.
He pushed at the air and a few zombies went stumbling back, but he’d be the first one to admit that he wasn’t the best Elemental the world had ever seen. Hayley was doing better, jumping and flipping and taking off heads, but there were just too many of them. Enclosed space. Outnumbered. Nowhere to run.
“This is bad,” he said to Hayley as they backed up to the edge of the pit.
“Yes, it is…”
“OK, listen,” he said. “I’ve got a plan. You run at them, do that jumping-around thing you like to do so much, let them eat you, and I’ll try to escape.”
“Good plan.”
“Thank you.”
“Or how about you run at them,” said Hayley, “do that standing-around thing you like to do so much, let them eat you, and I just stay and watch?”
“I think I prefer my idea.”
They were doomed. There was no way out. The zombies were closing in. Tane looked at Hayley. So much he wanted to tell her. So much he wanted to say. And then they heard a voice behind them.
“Thought I told you to stay away from the flesh-eating zombies from beyond the grave?”
They whirled as a skeleton in a mud-stained suit and a seventeen-year-old Irish girl with blood-matted hair climbed from the pit. Skulduggery held a wooden staff and Valkyrie threw him a headpiece carved from stone. He fixed it to the staff, then held it up for the zombies to see.
The shuffling stopped. The moaning stopped. They stared, transfixed.
“Hear me,” Skulduggery said loudly. “You are the Doherty clan, the last of the great families. You have been cursed to an un-death, cursed to never know peace because of the sins of one man, centuries ago. That man, your ancestor, has now been punished. I have seen to it myself. The curse is lifted. This staff belonged to the one who cursed you. It is yours to destroy.”
Skulduggery stepped back, held the staff over the pit they had just emerged from, and let it go. A moment passed where nothing happened and then, as one, the zombies lurched forward. Skulduggery and Hayley went one way and Valkyrie and Tane went the other, parting so that they wouldn’t be caught in the surging mass of bodies that started to topple into the hole. Like lemmings they went, albeit uglier and smellier, without even a murmur as the darkness swallowed them. When the last of them disappeared into the pit, the pit itself closed over, and so was neither a hole nor a pit any longer.
“Told you we wouldn’t need the amulet,” Tane said, wiping the dust from his combats.
“How did you do it?” Hayley asked Skulduggery as he checked his pocket watch. “What’s down there? What happened?”
“Assorted things,” Skulduggery said as he led the way to the door.
“We’ve got to kind of hurry a little bit,” Valkyrie said, walking after him.
“But how did you lift the curse?” Hayley asked. “How did you punish their ancestor?”
Skulduggery was already out the door, but Valkyrie hesitated just as she was about to leave, and turned. “He lied. We didn’t lift the curse. We didn’t punish anyone. We stole the staff to get the zombies to go away. And if we’re not out of this graveyard by the stroke of midnight, in exactly seventy seconds, we will inherit the curse. Providing the Hound doesn’t kill us first.”
The Hound. So it was dog, not bog, and certainly not log. Tane remembered it now. The Hound was the spectral guardian of the curse on the Doherty family, and it was meant to be very, very mean. Feeling pretty chuffed with himself that he had managed to remember that much, Tane spoke up.
“So how big is it, this Hound? Big as a German Shepherd?”
Skulduggery stepped back inside the mausoleum, and nodded to just over Tane’s shoulder, said, “Oh, it’s about as big as that one,” and Tane looked back.
The Hound stood where the pit had been. It was huge and scarred and ravaged and it was sniffing at the ground and pawing at the earth. And then it looked up at them with fiery red eyes and its hackles rose and it growled, and Tane felt very strongly that they should be running away now.
They bolted from the crypt. As they sprinted over people’s graves, Tane could hear Hayley hissing apologies. He felt no such remorse. He’d run across a thousand graves if it meant delaying his entry into one of them.
The Hound burst through the mausoleum door, taking it from its hinges, but it hit the gate and for a moment it stalled, unable to find a way past. It solved its dilemma by leaping clean over the rust-tipped spikes, and landed on the far side in a crouch, its muscles rippling beneath the welts and the fur.
The road outside the cemetery was ahead. They were halfway there when the Hound caught sight of them and gave chase. Tane started laughing, one of his nervous reactions when being pursued. Skulduggery and Valkyrie and Hayley were ahead – if the Hound was going to pounce on anyone, Tane knew it was going to pounce on him. He was unlucky that way, always had been.
He didn’t dare look back. He didn’t need to. He could hear the Hound gaining on him. It was all over. He thought it had been all over before, in the crypt, but he had been premature. Now, now it was all over. His life, snatched away, extinguished like a candle in the wind, like in that song, ‘Candle in the Wind’. And then Tane tripped and fell on his face and the Hound passed right over him, snapping at the space where his head had been.
Strewth, bro, that was lucky, a chirpy little voice in the back of his mind piped up.
The Hound landed and skidded on the gravel but snapped its body around, eyes fixed on Tane, saliva dripping from its bared fangs. Its body tensed, coiled, prepared to spring. One lunge would be all it took to close the distance between them, and Tane, lying belly-down on the ground, was in no position to even try to escape.
The chirpy little voice wasn’t saying much of anything now.
There was shouting. Valkyrie and Hayley were at the very edge of the cemetery, calling out to the Hound and hurling stones. One of the stones, probably hurled by Hayley, hit Tane, but he didn’t utter a sound. The beast snarled and reluctantly shifted its stare, snapping its jaws in the direction of the other two.
And then Skulduggery came darting out, waving his arms, and the Hound took a single step towards him and Tane kept his head down, didn’t move an inch, and proved to be such an uninteresting target that the Hound quickly switched focus. It leaped for Skulduggery and Tane scrambled up and ran straight at Hayley. As he ran he saw Skulduggery sprint for a large Celtic cross, made from stone and standing as a proud testament to some dead guy’s life. Right before he ran straight into it, Skulduggery turned his body sideways and let his momentum carry him forwards. His shoulder collided with the cross and he spun and hit the ground, but the Hound hit it head-on.
Tane noticed something approaching from in front of him and realised it was Valkyrie, but she was standing still, and in fact it was he that was moving. He crashed into her and they tumbled back over the low wall and sprawled on to the road in a mass of flailing limbs and cursing. It was mostly Valkyrie cursing. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Skulduggery running for
them, the Hound, having recovered, right behind him. Skulduggery dived out of the cemetery and the Hound leaped after him and then kind of faded into nothing, like the air had come and whipped it away. Skulduggery landed and rolled and was on his feet again, checked that the Hound was gone, and then looked down at Tane and Valkyrie.
“Having fun?”
Valkyrie hit Tane and got up.
“Is it over?” Hayley asked, looking around warily.
“It’s over,” said Skulduggery, straightening his tie. “Stroke of midnight, so it was in the nick of time, but when isn’t it for us?”
“Always in the nick of time,” Valkyrie mumbled. “Why can’t we ever solve a problem early?”
Skulduggery tilted his head at her. “Where’s the fun in that?”
Hayley peered at Tane. “You OK down there?”
“A dog tried to eat me,” Tane said, not getting up.
“If it’s any consolation,” Skulduggery told him, “it tried to eat me, too.”
“Yeah, that’s no consolation at all.”
“I need a shower,” Valkyrie said. “I’m covered in gore and zombie guck, and I don’t want to get on the plane reeking. It’s a long flight back to Ireland.”
“Was this your first trip to Australia?” Hayley asked her, suddenly all friendly now that the threat was averted. Bloody typical, that.
“No, but it was definitely my goriest. Are you sure your friend is OK?”
Hayley scowled down at Tane. “He’s not really my friend. He’s just an idiot that I know.”
“She loves me,” Tane whispered. The others talked a bit more, discussed this and that, but Tane stayed on the ground and didn’t join in. He was alive. He was alive and he was going to stay alive, and he was going to enjoy living again. He suddenly had a mad urge for fishnchups. He poked his head up. “Anyone hungry?”
“I don’t eat, I’m afraid,” Skulduggery said, “and we really have to get going.”
Valkyrie smiled. “Thanks for the offer, though.”
Hayley looked at him and sighed. “Fine,” she said, “I’ll go get some grub with you. But you better not talk to me.”