orchestrated wars to get their agenda just a little bit further along the line. I know what you’re thinking. I thought it, too. How could it even exist? How could an organisation like this be responsible for centuries of murder and upheaval and yet no one knows anything about them? But that’s why they mostly recruit Neoterics. They’re looking for outsiders, sorcerers with no links to the Sanctuaries. They’re careful. They’re unbelievably, impossibly careful to not leave any fingerprints that’d lead people like you back to them. Or they were, at least. Their endgame is in sight. They’re coming out of the shadows.”
“What do they want?”
“War,” said Melior. “A proper, full-scale war, at the end of which the mortals will be our slaves. They want sorcerers to rule the world.”
“Who’s in charge?” she asked. “Smoke? Lethe?”
“Smoke’s a lackey. He doesn’t have one original thought in his head. Lethe’s different. He’s smarter. Very talented, very dangerous, very cunning. I’ve never seen him lose a fight. He plays with them at first, lets them think they’ve got the upper hand … I think he does it because he’s bored.”
“Why does he wear the suit?” Valkyrie asked.
“I don’t know, but I’ve never seen him without it.”
“What about the Teleporter?”
“Nero,” said Melior. “An arrogant little creep. In love with himself. Don’t know much about him. Don’t know much about most of them, to be honest.”
“The guy who slowed time …”
“Ah,” said Melior, “Destrier. He’s not really part of the team, as far as I can tell. He helps out, but he’s got his own thing going on. I get the feeling an arrangement has been reached there. They call what he does temporal manipulation.”
“Last person I saw doing that was a serial killer.”
“He’s a weird one, I can tell you that. I’ve seen him talking to himself – practically the only person he does talk to. I’ve certainly never spoken to him.
“Then there’s Memphis. He’s got this thing about Elvis. Apparently, he met him once, when he was a kid. But he’s dangerous. His power manifested as some form of hyper-agility. I’ve seen him flip around like a trapeze artist without the trapeze. He used to have a sister, but Lethe killed her. As far as I know, Memphis doesn’t hold a grudge.”
“Who’s the Australian?” Valkyrie asked.
“Razzia. She’s completely off the rails. I never know what she’s going to do from one moment to the next. She’s got a creature living in her arm, a parasite of some sort. I’ve asked several times to examine it, but she hasn’t let me get close.”
“Tell us about Smoke,” Skulduggery said.
“All I know about him is what he can do. I’ve seen him touch people – not even skin-on-skin contact, but through their coat sleeves – and they’re corrupted. Ordinary, decent people turned into psychopathic versions of themselves. I’ve seen it go on for weeks – every two days, Smoke just taps them and it starts all over again. I’ve seen people under his influence kill their entire families and laugh while they do it.”
“We’ll stop him,” said Skulduggery. “We’ll stop all of them. Anyone else we should know about?”
“There are others, though they come and go. But that’s the main group.”
Skulduggery leaned back in his chair. “I’ve read a bit about you, Doctor. Your power manifested in medical school, didn’t it? Up until that moment you had no idea magic existed.”
“That is correct,” Melior said, nodding. “I did some haphazard research after it happened, managed to talk to a proper sorcerer and had my eyes opened. After that, I met Savant and fell in love, and … well, never looked back.”
“And then Parthenios Lilt talked to you.”
Melior’s face soured. “Yes. He’d heard about me and came to interview me, to run some tests … The term Neoteric was actually my suggestion. We became friends, or so I thought. This was back in the 1960s. Savant and I were living in San Francisco, because where else would you be living in the sixties? Parthenios introduced us to his friends – mostly other Neoterics. For a while, it was fun – we even had our own bowling team, as lame as that sounds now and, in fact, back then. But then we met more of his friends. People like Bubba Moon. Have you heard of him?”
“We have,” said Skulduggery.
“That’s when the alarm bells really started to ring. This was an insane man sitting at the table with us, talking about the tyranny of mortals, about how we should rise up against them and join with the being who lives beyond our reality.”
“We met him,” Valkyrie said. “The being beyond our reality, I mean. His name was Balerosh.”
Melior blinked. “Moon was telling the truth? He exists?”
Valkyrie shrugged. “Not any more.”
“Anyway,” Melior said after a moment, “I didn’t like the way things were going, and I wanted nothing more to do with any of them. Savant took a little longer to come to the same conclusion, but then he sees the good in everyone. His power is knowledge; he absorbs vast quantities of information at a glance, but he’s also a pacifist. He’s never hurt a soul in his life. I fell in love with him because of that quality, but it also meant that he couldn’t understand the destructive urge that I could see in the people around us.”
“But you understood it,” Skulduggery said.
“I did. When I was a kid, I hurt people. It’s why I became a doctor, to make up for the pain I’d caused. So yeah, I understood it.”
“What happened then?”
“Nothing,” said Melior. “For a long time, nothing. We moved around a bit – it’s very hard to stay working in a hospital when you don’t age. We learned to forge new certificates with each passing decade. Eventually, we went back to my hometown, to Baltimore. More time passed. We hadn’t even thought of Parthenios or any of them in forty years.”
“Where’s your husband now, Doctor?”
“They have him. Parthenios Lilt and three others broke into our apartment, beat me half to death and took him away. I went to the Sanctuary, but they didn’t do anything. Two months later, I woke up to find Lethe standing over my bed. He told me who he was with, said they’d kill Savant unless I joined them.”
“When was this?”
“Five years ago.”
Valkyrie frowned. “Savant’s been gone five years?”
“Every so often, I’ll get a voice message telling me he loves me, telling me to be strong …” Melior’s voice cracked.
“Why go to the trouble of kidnapping him, though? Why doesn’t Smoke just corrupt you?”
“His touch doesn’t work on healers,” Melior said. “I don’t know why. I think it’s something to do with our power, maybe it acts as an immune system to his influence.”
“Your aura’s different,” Valkyrie said. Skulduggery looked at her and she shrugged. “It’s a different shade of orange.”
“I don’t know anything about auras,” Melior said, “but, whatever the reason, they needed some other way to control me.”
Skulduggery asked, “And Lethe’s in charge?”
“No,” Melior said. “He does what he’s told, same as everyone.”
“So who tells him what to do? Is there another Balerosh that we don’t know about?”
“Not as far as I’m