Scepter of the Ancients

  Stephanie smiled again and nodded. Then her smile dropped and she shook her head vehemently. “I’m not getting it.”

  “You’re going to have to.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Just pay them a visit—”

  “Why can’t you break in? You broke into the Vault.”

  “That was different.”

  “Yes, it had alarms and vampires—this’ll be so much easier!”

  “There are times when extreme measures are unnecessary.”

  “Extreme measures are very necessary here!”

  “Valkyrie—”

  “You can’t ask me to visit them!”

  “We don’t have a choice.”

  “But I never visit! They’ll suspect something!”

  “Being a detective isn’t all about torture and murder and monsters. Sometimes it gets truly unpleasant.”

  “But I don’t like them!” she whined.

  “The fate of the world may depend on whether or not you can bring yourself to visit your relatives.”

  She turned her head, looking at him out of the corner of her eye. “It may depend?”

  “Valkyrie—”

  “Fine; I’ll go.”

  “Good girl.”

  She crossed her arms and didn’t respond.

  “Are you sulking now?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she answered curtly.

  “Okay.”

  Nineteen

  THE EXPERIMENT

  THE CLEAVER LAY strapped to the table. Fluids ran through the clear rubber tubes that pierced his skin, flowing into the quiet machine behind him. That which was unnecessary was removed, replaced with liquid darkness, with concoctions that mixed science with sorcery. The Cleaver’s face was unremarkable and expressionless. He had stopped struggling over an hour ago.

  It was beginning to take effect.

  Serpine stepped into the light, and the Cleaver’s eyes flickered to him. They were glassy and dull, without any of the fierceness that had met his gaze when the Hollow Men had brought the Cleaver to him and removed the helmet. Even as Skulduggery Pleasant made good his escape, Serpine had been given a new captive, and he knew what he would do with him.

  It was time. Serpine held up the dagger he was holding, let the Cleaver see it. No reaction. No wariness, no fear, no recognition. This man, this soldier, who had lived his entire life in blind obedience to others, was now about to enter into death, equally as blind. A pathetic existence. Serpine held the dagger in both hands and raised it above his head, then brought it down, and the blade plunged into the Cleaver’s chest and he died.

  Serpine removed the blade, wiped it clean, and put it to one side. If this worked, some changes would obviously need to be made, some alterations, some improvements. The Cleaver was a test subject, after all, no more than an experiment. If it worked, a little refinement would be in order. It wouldn’t take long. An hour at most.

  Serpine waited by the Cleaver’s corpse. The warehouse was quiet. He’d had to abandon the castle, but he had been well prepared for that eventuality. Besides, in a matter of days, his enemies would be dead, and there would be no one left to fight him, and he would have everything he would need to usher in the Faceless Ones—a feat his old master, Mevolent, had never managed.

  Serpine frowned. Had it been a trick of the light, or had the Cleaver moved? He looked closer, searching for the rise and fall of the chest, searching for a sign of life. But no, no sign of life. The Cleaver’s pulse, when he checked it, was absent.

  And then the Cleaver opened his eyes.

  Twenty

  THE FAMILY CURSE

  STEPHANE HAD CLIMBED through her bedroom window to find her reflection sitting on the bed in the darkness, waiting for her.

  “Are you ready to resume your life?” it had asked.

  Stephanie, who was finding it very disconcerting to hold a conversation with herself, merely nodded. The reflection went to the mirror and stepped through, then turned and waited. Stephanie touched the glass, and a day’s worth of memory flooded into her mind. She watched the reflection change, the clothes Stephanie was wearing appearing on it. And then it was nothing more than a reflected image in a mirror.

  Stephanie woke the next morning, not happy with what she had to do. Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, she thought about calling on the reflection to imitate her again, then decided against it. The reflection gave her the creeps.

  Realizing that she could not put it off any longer, Stephanie trudged over to her aunt’s house and knocked on the door. The sun was shining and the birds were singing and Stephanie forced a smile onto her face, but it wasn’t a smile that was returned when the door opened and Crystal looked out at her.

  “What do you want?” her cousin asked suspiciously.

  “Just thought I’d call around,” Stephanie said brightly. “See how you all are.”

  “We’re fine,” Crystal said. “We’ve got a stupid car and a stupid boat. How’s your house?”

  “Crystal,” she said, “I know you’re probably angry about the inheritance and everything, but I don’t know why I was left all that either.”

  “It’s because you were sucking up to him.” Crystal sneered. “If we’d known that all it took was just to be all smiles and have conversations with him, then we’d have done that stuff too.”

  “But I didn’t know—”

  “You cheated.”

  “I didn’t cheat.”

  “You had an unfair advantage.”

  “How? How could I have even known he was going to die?”

  “You knew,” Crystal said. “You knew that sooner or later he was going to die, but you got in so early, the rest of us didn’t stand a chance.”

  “Did you even like him?”

  There was that sneer again. “You don’t have to like someone to get something from them.”

  She resisted the urge to punch Crystal’s smirking face long enough for Beryl to pass the doorway. She saw Stephanie, and her eyes widened in surprise.

  “Stephanie,” she said, “what are you doing here?”

  “She thought she’d call around,” Crystal said, “to see how we are.”

  “Oh, that’s very nice of you, dear.”

  Crystal took this opportunity to walk away without saying good-bye. Stephanie focused on Beryl.

  “You’re not wearing the brooch Gordon left you?”

  “That horrid thing? No, I am not, and I don’t think I ever will. It doesn’t even sparkle, for heaven’s sake. People know something is cheap if it doesn’t sparkle.”

  “That’s a shame. It looked pretty, though, from where I was standing. It would have looked nice with one of your cardigans—”

  “We saw you yesterday,” Beryl interrupted.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “In a horrid yellow car, with that dreadful Skulduggery Pleasant.”

  Stephanie felt the instant flutters of panic in her belly, but she made herself frown and give a puzzled laugh. “Um, I think you may be mistaken. I was home all day yesterday.”

  “Nonsense. You passed right by us. We saw you quite clearly. We saw him, too, all covered up like last time.”

  “Nope, wasn’t me.”

  Beryl smiled piously. “Lying is a sin, did you know that?”

  “I’d heard the rumor. …”

  “Fergus!” Beryl shouted back into the house, and a few moments later her husband walked out of the living room. He was at home every day now after suffering a “serious fall” at work. He was in the process of suing his employers, claiming that it was their negligence that resulted in his debilitating injuries. He didn’t look too debilitated as he approached the door.

  “Fergus, Stephanie here says she wasn’t in the car with that awful Mr. Pleasant.”

  Fergus scowled. “She’s calling us liars?”

  “No,” Stephanie said with a half laugh. “Just that it must have been somebody else.”

  “Stephanie,” Beryl chided, “let’s not play games.
We know it was you. It’s such a tragic thing to see, a dear sweet innocent child like you falling in with the wrong crowd.”

  “Wrong crowd?”

  “Weirdos,” Fergus said with a sneer. “I’ve seen their kind before. Gordon used to surround himself with people like that, people with … secrets.”

  “And why does he hide his face, anyway?” Beryl asked. “Is he deformed?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Stephanie said, fighting to keep her voice even.

  “You can’t trust people like that,” Fergus continued. “I’ve been around them my whole life, seen them coming and going. Never wanted anything to do with them. You never know who you’re dealing with, or what sordid little things they get up to.”

  “He seemed all right to me,” Stephanie said, as casually as she could. “He seemed quite nice, actually.”

  Beryl shook her head sadly. “I don’t expect you to understand. You’re only a child.”

  Stephanie bristled. “You’ve never even spoken to him.”

  “Adults don’t have to speak to other adults to know if they’re bad news or not. One look, that’s all we need.”

  “So anyone different from you is bad news?”

  “Anyone different from us, dear.”

  “My parents always told me never to judge someone by how they look.”

  “Yes, well,” Beryl said primly. “If they think they can afford to live in ignorance, then that’s their mistake.”

  “My parents aren’t ignorant.”

  “I never said they were, dear. I just said they lived in ignorance.”

  Stephanie couldn’t take this anymore. “I need to pee,” she said suddenly.

  Beryl blinked. “I’m sorry?”

  “Pee. I need to pee. Can I use your bathroom?”

  “I … I suppose …”

  “Thanks.”

  Stephanie stepped past them both and hurried up the stairs. She went into the bathroom, and when she was sure Beryl wasn’t going to follow her up, she crept into the master bedroom and went straight to the jewelry box on the dresser. It was a massive thing, each of its compartments bulging with tacky trinkets that sparkled and twinkled and glittered. She found the brooch in a slide-out compartment at the base of the box, where it nestled with a single hoop earring and a pair of tweezers. She stuck it in her pocket, closed the jewelry box, and left the room, then flushed the toilet in the bathroom and bounded down the stairs.

  “Thank you,” she said brightly, and Beryl opened her mouth to continue their conversation, but Stephanie was already halfway down the garden path.

  Stephanie sat on one of the boulders that sealed off the north end of the beach, waiting for Skulduggery. The weather forecasters had been predicting an end to the dry spell, but the morning sky was blue and cloud free. There was a shell on the boulder next to her, a pretty shell, a shell she suddenly found herself loving.

  It moved. The air didn’t do that cool rippling thing around her hand, but the shell still moved, and it wasn’t because of the breeze, either. Stephanie’s heart quickened, but she didn’t let herself celebrate. Not yet. It could have been a fluke. If she could do it a second time, then she could celebrate.

  She concentrated on the shell. She held her hand up, seeing the space between her hand and the shell as a series of interlocking objects waiting to be moved. Her fingers uncurled slightly and she felt it, she felt the air against her palm, solid somehow. She pushed against it, and the shell shot off the boulder.

  “Yes!” she exclaimed, sticking both arms up in the air. Magic! She’d done magic! She laughed in delight.

  “You look happy.”

  She turned so suddenly, she almost fell off the boulder, and her dad grinned as he approached. She blushed deeply and dug her phone out of her pocket without him seeing, then held it up.

  “Got a good text message,” she said, “that’s all.”

  “Ah,” he said as he sat beside her. “Anything I should know about?”

  “Probably not.” She looked around as casually as she could, praying that she wouldn’t see the Canary Car suddenly pull up. “Why aren’t you at work?”

  Her dad shrugged. “I have a big meeting this afternoon, but I left the house without something important, so I thought I’d nip back during lunch.”

  “What did you forget? Architect’s plans or something?”

  “Something like that,” he said with a nod. “Actually, nothing like that. I forgot my underwear.”

  She looked at him. “What?”

  “When I was getting dressed, my mind was on other things. It happens sometimes. Usually it wouldn’t bother me, but these trousers really itch—”

  “Dad, ew, don’t want to know!”

  “Oh, right, sorry. Anyway, I saw you walking down here so I thought I’d say hi. You used to come down here all the time when you were younger, sit here and look out there, and I always wondered what was going through your mind. …”

  “Lots of clever little things,” she responded automatically, and he smiled.

  “Your mother’s worried about you,” he said after a while.

  She looked up at him, startled. “What? Why?”

  He shrugged. “You just, you haven’t been yourself lately.”

  So they had noticed the difference between her and her reflection.

  “I’m fine, Dad. Really. I’ve just, you know, I’ve been going through some moods.”

  “Yes, yep, I understand that, and your mother explained the whole thing to me, about young girls and their moods. … But we still worry. Ever since Gordon died …”

  She kept her frown to herself. So this wasn’t just about the reflection.

  “I know you were close,” he continued. “And I know you got on so well, and I know that when he died, you lost a good friend.”

  “I suppose I did,” she said quietly.

  “And we don’t want to stop you from growing up, even if we could. You’re growing into a fine young woman, and one that we’re really proud of.”

  She smiled awkwardly and didn’t meet his eyes. Gordon’s death had changed her, but the change was far more drastic than even her parents realized. It had set her on the course she was on now, the course that had led to her becoming Valkyrie Cain, the course that would lead to whatever fate was waiting for her. It had changed her life—given it direction and purpose. It had also put her in more danger than she or they could have ever imagined.

  “We just worry about you, that’s all.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “It’s a parent’s job. You could be fifty and we’d be stuck in the old folks’ home, and we’d still be worrying about you. It’s a responsibility that never stops.”

  “Makes you wonder why anyone has kids.”

  He laughed softly. “You’d think that, yes. But there is nothing more wonderful than watching your child grow up, nothing more fulfilling. Of course, there’s a certain age you wish they wouldn’t go beyond, but there’s not a whole lot you can do about that.”

  Not unless you have magic on your side, Stephanie said to herself.

  “Beryl called,” her father said. “She said you’d just been to see her.”

  Stephanie nodded. She couldn’t have noticed already that the brooch was missing, could she? “I felt like calling around, seeing how everyone was. I think, you know, Gordon’s death has made me value the family we have left, or something. I think it’s important that we stay close.”

  He looked at her, a little startled. “Well, that’s … that is a really lovely thing to be able to say, Steph, it really is. It’s a beautiful sentiment.” There was a brief pause. “I don’t have to call around, do I?”

  “No.”

  “Oh thank God.”

  She didn’t like lying to him. She had made it a point, years before, to be as honest as she could where her parents were involved. But things were different now. She had secrets. “So what else did Beryl say?”

  “Well … she seems to think she saw you wi
th Skulduggery Pleasant yesterday.”

  “Yeah,” she said as casually as she could, “she told me. That’s weird.”

  “She thinks you’ve fallen in with the wrong crowd.”

  “You should hear her, Dad, the way she talks about him, and she doesn’t even know him. She probably thinks I’m part of a cult or something. …”

  “And are you?”

  She looked at him, appalled. “What?”

  Her father sighed. “Beryl has good reason to think that.”

  “But it’s insane!”

  “Well, insanity runs in the family.”

  She could see something in his eyes, a reluctance, but also a resignation.

  “My grandfather,” he said, “your great-grandfather, was a wonderful man; we kids loved him. Me, Fergus, Gordon, we’d sit around and he’d tell us all these fantastic stories. My father, however, didn’t have a lot of time for him. All the stories he was telling us were ones he’d told my father when he was a kid. And when my dad grew up, he realized it was all nonsense, but my granddad refused to see it. My grandfather believed … he believed that we were magic.”

  Stephanie stared at him. “What?”

  “He said it’d been passed down, this magic, generation to generation. He said we were descendants of a great sorcerer called the Last of the Ancients.”

  The sound of the sea faded to nothing, the sun dimmed, and the beach vanished, and the only thing that existed in the world was her father, and the only sounds were the words he was speaking.

  “These stories, this belief, has followed the family for centuries. I don’t know how it began, or when, but it seems like it’s always been a part of us. And, now and then, there have been members of our family who have chosen to believe it.

  “Gordon believed. A rational man, an intelligent man, and yet he believed in magic and sorcery and people who never age. All the stuff he wrote about—he probably believed in most, if not all, of it.

  “And because of this, he got involved in things that were … unhealthy. The people he mixed with were people who fed into his delusions, who shared his madness. Dangerous people. It’s a sickness, Steph. My granddad had it, Gordon had it … and I don’t want you to get it.”