flash made them bigger, made them older, made their hair paler and wilder. Their faces changed, from pretty and blank to contorted and tortured. Lines appeared on smooth skin. Mouths opened, lips cracked and white teeth became yellow, became brown, became blackened, and still they came forward.
Skulduggery’s gun went off, again and again, the bullets passing through the flickering creatures. Valkyrie hurled fire, threw shadows, but the Jitter Girls, all three of them now, advanced impervious.
Skulduggery was yanked from Valkyrie’s side. One of them had him, her fingers pressing into his clothes, sliding between his ribs. He screamed.
Valkyrie lunged for him, but slipped, splashing down in mud and muck, her hair in her eyes, calling his name. And then one of them was right in front of her, standing over her, her hand pressed against Valkyrie’s forehead, pressed into her skin. Valkyrie screamed as the fingers melted into her skull, poked through her brain. White daggers of blinding light seared across her mind. Her body seized up and her jaw locked. She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t think. Images played in darkness as the little girl-monster wriggled her fingers. Images and memories, sensations and emotions, mixing up, matching up, latching on to each other, splitting off from each other, and still the little girl-monster played, curious, sifting through the insides of Valkyrie’s mind like she was looking for something, searching for someone, and she found it, found it waiting, found it watching. Found it ready.
Valkyrie went away, and Darquesse wrapped her hand around the little girl-monster’s wrist and she crushed it as she pulled the fingers from her mind.
Darquesse stood, still holding on to the wrist. The Jitter Girl screeched and contorted and jittered, but her arm remained in Darquesse’s grip. Darquesse watched her, fascinated. She poured magic out through her fingers and the little girl-monster returned to her normal size and screamed. It was like no human scream. It was like no animal scream. It was the scream of a creature who had never felt the need to scream before. It was new, and raw, a freshly born thing of exquisite agony and sudden, overwhelming fear.
Darquesse dropped her. Another was coming, jittering across the mud, eager to play, and there was so much magic in Darquesse’s veins, broiling and coiling and boiling inside her, that she just had to share it. The power leaped from her hand in a twisting, turning stream, crossed the distance between them and washed over the Jitter Girl, taking her off her feet. Unable to escape the flow, the little girl-monster squirmed and kicked and writhed in the mud, and Darquesse increased the intensity until she became bored of the screeches.
She turned to the last little girl-monster, who held her gaze for a moment before releasing Skulduggery. He fell, gasping. The Jitter Girl returned to her normal size and shape, regarding Darquesse with those wonderfully blank eyes, then moved to the box. Her sisters dragged themselves, in that flickering manner, to join her, and one by one they climbed back inside. Once all three were in, the top of the box closed over.
Darquesse turned back. Skulduggery Pleasant got to his feet, his exquisite suit covered in muck. His hat was in the mud somewhere, and the rain ran off his gleaming head.
“Hello,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
Darquesse smiled, walking towards him.
“You’re very impressive,” he continued. “That’s a kind of magic I don’t think I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen every kind of magic. You are quite the curiosity, aren’t you?”
Darquesse could have turned his bones to splinters where he stood.
“Is she in there?” Skulduggery asked. “Valkyrie? Can she hear me?”
Darquesse said nothing.
Skulduggery’s head tilted. “Are you going to let her come back? That’s her body you’re wearing. That’s her face you’re using. You can’t keep her sleeping for ever. It isn’t your time yet. This is still Valkyrie’s time. She gets to walk around. She gets to live. Not you.”
She could see his consciousness. It formed a shell around his skeleton, a shell of multicoloured lights. It sparkled prettily. This shell was how he thought. This shell was how he felt. When he had pulled himself back together, all those hundreds of years ago, he recreated himself in a form that only she could see. She reached out and gently dug her fingers into the shell of light. Skulduggery gasped and went rigid. She turned her hand, twisting his consciousness, feeling and understanding how she could tear through it or pull it away, shred it to pieces or turn it to vapour. What she held, buzzing, between her fingertips, was life itself. It was a wonderful thing, a glorious thing. She released him and he staggered back, but she was already forgetting he was there.
She rose off the ground, into the rain-filled air, floating high above the cottage. She could see across the countryside from here, to the city in the distance. She wondered how easy it would be to turn the whole city to dust. Probably not that hard. Not if she focused.
Somebody rose up to meet her.
“I want Valkyrie back,” Skulduggery said. “Give her back right now. I’m not going to ask again.”
Darquesse smiled at him. She liked him, she really did. He was unique. She didn’t want to kill him. Not yet. Not when there were still ways for him to amuse her.
Darquesse went away, and when Valkyrie blinked her wet hair was in her face and she was falling to the earth.
“Bloody hell!” she hollered.
Skulduggery swooped down, caught her, held her close as he descended.
“No need to shout,” he told her.
She clutched him tightly. “What’s happening? How’d we get here?”
“You don’t remember?”
“How I got into the bloody sky? No, I don’t bloody …” She trailed off. “Oh, wait. I do. It was her.”
“Indeed it was.”
She sagged in his arms. “Great,” she mumbled.
They touched down. Valkyrie swayed on her feet a moment then nodded, and they walked over to the wooden box.
“So that’s it, then?” she asked, a headache starting up behind her eyes. “She can just come and go whenever she likes? Every time things get too dangerous, am I just going to Hulk out, change into the person who’s going to kill the world?”
“I don’t think it’s quite so simple,” Skulduggery responded. “From what I could see, the Jitter Girl literally had her hand inside your head. That would shake anything loose. And I know you don’t want to hear it, but Darquesse did save us.”
Valkyrie folded her arms, shivering. “You’re right. I don’t want to hear it.”
“You saved us, then. Does that sound better?”
Valkyrie glared at him through the rain. “I had nothing to do with it.”
“Yes, you did. You are Darquesse, Valkyrie. Darquesse isn’t a different person, no matter how many times we talk about her like she is. At its simplest level, Darquesse is a state of mind.”
“I’m sorry?”
“She’s you, without your conscience, or your feelings. She’s you without your humanity.”
“You’re saying she’s a mood swing?”
He shrugged. “Or maybe you are her mood swing.”
“Don’t even joke about that.”
Skulduggery picked up the wooden box and they started back towards the cottage. “I’m not joking. The fact is we have no way of knowing if the person who we think we are is at the core of our being. Are you a decent girl with the potential to someday become an evil monster, or are you an evil monster that thinks it’s a decent girl?”
“Wouldn’t I know which one I was?”
“Good