Skulduggery Pleasant_ Death Bringer - Derek Landy [137]
“They just fell,” Gordon said, from the far side of the room. His eyes were wide, his voice hollow. “They were standing and talking and laughing and then they… they stiffened, and breathed out, and fell.”
Valkyrie frowned. “Melancholia?”
“She’s not dead,” Skulduggery murmured, and then his head tilted to the people around them. “Which means neither are they.”
“What?”
“She sucked their lives from them, drank those lives in, used them to make her stronger. If we can get to her before she wastes that strength, we can force her to return those lives to their owners.”
“That’ll work?”
Skulduggery raised his hands, fingers flexing. “In theory.”
Valkyrie’s breath became a cloud in the air. “What are you doing?”
“Cooling things down,” Skulduggery said. “Their life forces won’t do them a whole lot of good if we allow their brains to die. You have a change of clothes, I expect?”
She hugged herself as the temperature plummeted. Particles of frost began to glisten on the faces around her. “In the Bentley.”
He threw her the keys. “You might want to hurry.”
She nodded, backed off, turned and ran.
There was a commotion. Rippers had run in from outside, congregating at the door to the basement. Valkyrie ran past, out of the house, kicking off her shoes and unlocking the Bentley with a beep. The boot opened and she grabbed her trousers from her bag, pulled them on under her dress, buckled them, pulled on her socks and boots. She searched for the zip on her dress, cursing, yanking the whole thing round her body till she found it. She whipped the dress off, stuffed it into the trunk, couldn’t find her T-shirt so she just grabbed her jacket, put it on as she ran back to the house. It was freezing in there, so cold it actually made her hesitate. She zipped up her jacket as Skulduggery walked from the room beside her, and he joined her as she ran for the basement.
They passed three bloodied bodies, and Skulduggery went first down the steps. Dead Necromancers and Rippers covered the floor like a carpet. The White Cleaver stood half-crouched, his back to the wall, his scythe swinging. The remaining Rippers had him surrounded.
“A girl,” Skulduggery said, ignoring the Cleaver situation as he started turning over bodies, “blonde, scars on her face. Is she here?”
The Rippers didn’t answer.
“She’s not here,” Valkyrie said, running her eyes over the upturned faces. “Neither is Craven. If she shadow-walked, she could be anywhere up to two kilometres in any direction.”
Skulduggery picked a stone up off the floor. He was quiet for a moment. “They’re in the caves,” he said, dropping it. “They had someone down there already, searching for the other side of the entrance. If they shadow-walked anywhere, they’d have shadow-walked down there.” He went to the wall, removed the brick and twisted the key behind it. A section of the floor rumbled and opened. Valkyrie followed him to the stone steps, looked back at the Rippers.
“Any of you coming?” she asked, but they didn’t move.
“They’re not Cleavers,” Skulduggery said, already halfway down the steps. “They’re mercenaries. They were paid to provide security, not chase after people. Their job is everything above ground – which means the White Cleaver.”
The Rippers paid her no attention. They started to close in on the White Cleaver, and Valkyrie left them to it. She hurried down the steps as the floor closed above. “They didn’t do a very good job at providing security,” she pointed out to the back of Skulduggery’s head. “Everyone’s dead.”
“True enough,” he said.
They emerged into the caves. A Necromancer woman lay dead before them – proof, if any was needed, that they were on the right track. They summoned flames into their hands and ran.
Valkyrie had been down here before, and each time she’d been lucky to escape with her life. The tunnels twisted into each other, opened out into vast, empty spaces and closed down into the narrowest of gaps. Travellers needed to respect the caves as much as any adversary – a wrong turn could lead to a step off a precipice