The Dying of the Light (17 page)

“Looks like they’ve hired more security since we were here last,” he said softly. “This might be a tad trickier than I’d anticipated.”

They chose another route and moved up a set of stairs silently, Skulduggery taking the lead, reading the air around them. They got to the dark café, passed chairs stacked upon tables in the gloom. To the left of the tables was the balcony overlooking the exhibits in the room below.

They looked over. The Vault was down a narrow corridor marked Staff Only. Stephanie could see the sign from where they stood. Skulduggery nodded to her and she threw one leg over the balcony, then the other, and perched there, ready to jump. Skulduggery merely rose into the air, floated over the balcony, and descended until Stephanie could wrap her arms round his neck. Then they drifted low, skimming over the exhibits, and landed gently by the Staff Only sign.

Down this corridor was a wooden door criss-crossed by metal. Skulduggery picked the lock while Stephanie kept watch. No vampires passed. She sneaked back to Skulduggery when the last tumbler fell, and they passed through. Skulduggery closed the door behind them, as gently as he could, and clicked his fingers. Guided by his light, she followed him down the steps. It was cold down here. Cold and creepy. They passed half a dozen doors, each etched with a unique shield.

“Are you ever going to reclaim your family crest?” she asked, keeping her voice down.

“Now is not the time, Stephanie.”

“I think you should. Reclaim it, I mean. You’ve saved the world, for God’s sake. That has to make up for all the bad stuff you’ve done.”

“That’s the thing about redemption,” said Skulduggery. “If you’re looking for it, the chances are you’ll never find it.”

“Well, I think your family would be proud of you, and I think they’d be even prouder if you took back your crest.”

“This is the one we’re looking for,” Skulduggery said. The crest on this door was a tree and a lightning strike.

“You’re changing the subject.”

“Imagine that,” he said, and held up both hands. Air moved down narrow spaces she couldn’t see, but she heard tiny sounds, like mice skittering behind skirting boards. There was a click, and the door opened.

They hurried in, Skulduggery closing the door behind them, and the light flickered on. It was a narrow room, with two walls, floor to ceiling, of safety-deposit boxes, each one with a sigil over the lock. Skulduggery didn’t say anything for a few moments. When he finally did, it wasn’t very encouraging.

“Dammit.”

Stephanie walked forward. “There are a lot of boxes here. Ten down and, how many is that, fifty across? Five hundred boxes on each side at least. Do we have time to open them all?”

“The time it’d take is suddenly irrelevant,” Skulduggery said. “These locks can’t be picked. Even if they could, each box has an alarm that’d alert the vampires the moment we tried to tamper with it. I have to be honest here. I did not expect this.”

Stephanie said, “They hired more vampire security guards after the last time you broke in. Kind of makes sense that the security
inside
the Vault would be heightened, too. Every action has a consequence, right? Stuff you did when you first met Valkyrie is coming back at you now, six years later. Kind of makes you wonder what repercussions our actions today will have, six years down the line.”

“If we don’t get the grimoire, I doubt we’ll need to worry about that.” Skulduggery rapped his knuckles against one of the boxes. “OK then. We wanted to do this quietly so that no one would notice. That’s no longer an option. So we go loud.”

“What do you suggest?”

“I suggest,” said Skulduggery, “that you point the Sceptre at the boxes and blow them open. As many and as quickly as you can.”

Stephanie grinned, and took the Sceptre from its bag.

“Just don’t aim right at them,” said Skulduggery. “Aim at an angle. A point-blank shot would probably fry everything inside the boxes, not just the surface.”

Stephanie nodded. “I’ll try my best.”

“The alarms will draw in the vampires,” Skulduggery said. “When we have the grimoire, you make a hole in the far wall. If I’m not mistaken, that should take us into the manuscript room. Try not to damage anything in there, it’s all very valuable. The door to our right will take us back to the main exhibits. We’ll want to go up, on to the roof.”

“Last time you were here, Valkyrie had to jump from that roof.”

“But I couldn’t fly back then. I can now, so we’ll be fine.”

“You sure about that?” asked Stephanie. “Vampires are fast.”

“Vampires are overrated.”

“You once called them the most efficient killing machines on the planet.”

“Ah, they’re not so tough. Ready to go?”

She exhaled. “Why the hell not?”

“That’s the spirit.”

Stephanie took the Sceptre from her backpack.

“Now,” said Skulduggery.

Black lightning turned a patch of steel boxes to dust, and an alarm wailed while Skulduggery waved his hand. The dust blew into the corner of the room and Skulduggery checked the contents.

“Keep going!” he shouted.

Stephanie fired again and again, keeping her angle shallow, to avoid destroying the contents of the boxes. Dust swirled in the narrow room, and behind the alarm, Stephanie could hear the frantic scrabbling outside the door.

“Got it!” Skulduggery called, pulling a thick, leatherbound tome from the crumbling dust. Stephanie turned so that he could slip it into the bag on her back, then fired at the wall opposite. Skulduggery went first and she came after, coughing, stumbling into a glass case displaying three curling, aged pages. Skulduggery took her wrist and they ran, up some steps, back into the gallery proper.

A snarl, from somewhere to their right. Stephanie was about to shout a warning when a gust of wind took her off her feet, sent her hurtling up over the balcony. She caught her foot on the edge and went tumbling, snatching a glimpse of Skulduggery turning to face the onrushing vampire. Then she hit the ground, badly, and cursed to herself as she rolled. She got to her feet. If the alarm were raised, if they were separated, the plan was for Stephanie to get to the roof.

Well, OK then. She just had to find the stairs leading up, and she’d be—

The hairs on the back her neck stood up. There was something behind her.

Stephanie broke into a run a moment before the vampire launched itself at her. She twisted as she ran, firing the Sceptre, but the vampire was moving too fast. It streaked through the shadows, knocking tables and chairs out of its way. Stephanie stopped trying to aim at it and instead fired ahead of her, black lightning turning a section of the wall to dust. She ran through, took a short cut through the next wall as well, and the next, and then she was running up stairs, disintegrating the steps behind her. She reached the top before the whole thing collapsed, and it was like the entire building was roaring at her. She glanced back, daring to hope that the falling debris had trapped the vampire, but it sprang from the billowing clouds of dust, caught sight of her again and snarled.

Stephanie ran on, found the door, burst out on to the roof. The vampire followed.

She backed away, missed with every shot she took, and the vampire jumped and she leaped backwards, fired at the section of roof she’d just been standing on. The vampire fell through, vanished from sight, and Stephanie collapsed on to her back, taking a moment to catch her breath and gather her strength.

She sat up, pushed herself to her feet and shook the dust from her hair. She looked at the hole in the roof and went cold. The vampire’s claws were clinging to the edge.

It shot up, out of the hole, and Stephanie spun and ran for the edge of the building. She leaped and fell towards a tree, steeling herself for the impact, but something slammed into her, hands clutching her, and she was lifted – twirling – into the sky and over the city, the streets becoming blurred streams of light beneath her. The arms that held her were warm and strong – flesh and blood arms, not bone. Not Skulduggery. She looked up into a bright smile.

“Hello, you,” said Darquesse, and threw her.

fter Gant and Jeremiah leave the store, Danny counts to sixty, then steps out into the cold air and looks up and down the street. He can’t see them. He returns to the warmth of the store, and stands behind the counter. He gives himself a half-hour of standing there, then fills two grocery bags. He hopes Stephanie won’t mind getting her delivery on a Wednesday instead of a Thursday. He decides she won’t, not when he tells her his real reason for being there.

He closes up early, puts the bags on the passenger seat of his car and pulls out into traffic. If anyone tries following him, they’ll find themselves lost in the school run. Hopefully. It starts to snow, and he realises how cold it is. He puts the heater on full blast and leaves town, heading north, part of a loose convoy of cars and pickups. One by one they turn off the narrowing roads, until there’s just Danny with one other car in his rear-view. It’s dark by this stage, and Danny swings smoothly round a bend and picks up speed on the straight, but when there are no headlights behind him he slows a little and drives on, the wipers sweeping the snowflakes into little triangles on his windshield.

He doesn’t know what he’d expected when he imagined someone actually asking about her. He’d expected journalists, maybe photographers, or cops. Maybe the FBI or the Marshals Service or someone. He hadn’t expected an old man and a fat man. He hadn’t expected the menace they brought with them. Not for the first time, he wonders about Stephanie, about who she is and what she’s done. Maybe today’s the day she’ll tell him. He hopes she won’t have to kill him afterwards.

Approaching the turn-off for her farm, Danny happens to glance in his wing mirror and catches a glint of something behind him in the snow, something polished and dark. He curses, once and loudly, and tugs at the wheel, fishtailing slightly before getting the car back under control. He passes the turn to Stephanie’s place, his palms sweaty, his throat dry. They had turned their headlights off. That’s all they’d done. They’d turned their headlights off and he’d almost led them straight to her. Almost.

Danny keeps driving, his mind a frozen blank. What happens now? Is he going to drive until he runs out of gas? Out of road? What will happen once they realise he’s been driving aimlessly? Will they pull him over? What will they do to him? What are they capable of? Will they hurt him?

He doesn’t know, he can’t know, but he feels it. He feels sure they’ll hurt him. An old man and a fat man. He’s young, in better condition than either of them, but he’s never been in a fight in his life. Not even at school. He isn’t built for physical confrontation. He has no idea what to do. He digs in his pocket, yanks out his phone. No signal. He curses again, but this one is quiet, like he doesn’t want them to hear.

Will they have weapons? The fat one, Jeremiah, he’d been asking about hunting knives and guns.
I like guns
. Danny doesn’t have a gun. There’s probably a tyre iron in the trunk, but as far as weapons go, that’s it. There’s nothing but maps in the glove box and an empty coffee container in the cup holder. In the grocery bags there are a few steaks, chicken breasts and some celery and soft drinks and a dozen other useless items. He could possibly throw the grocery bags at them when they run at him, but he doesn’t think it’ll do much good.

Then an idea occurs to him.

He drives on for another few minutes, slowing as he reaches a turn. He takes a smaller road left, trying to drive casual, the car jolting every time it hits a pothole. After a minute or two, he pulls up outside an old cabin, gets out and grabs the grocery bags from the passenger seat. He takes his time, waits until he sees, out of the corner of his eye, the black car crawling up through the swirling snow and patches of darkness. Once he feels sure they can see him, Danny walks up to the cabin door and knocks.

He knocks again.

Oh, God, please be home please be home please be—

The door opens. Eddie Sullivan peers up at him suspiciously. It takes a few moments for the old man to recognise Danny outside of the store.

“Hello, Mr Sullivan,” Danny says, smiling brightly. “I thought you might be having a little trouble getting into town with the snow and all, so I figured I’d come up here and deliver a few essentials.”

Eddie peers at the bags. “I didn’t order nothing.”

“I know,” says Danny. “Just being neighbourly.”

Eddie chews his lip. “I didn’t order it, so I ain’t paying for it.”

Danny nods. “Sounds reasonable. May I come in?”

Eddie grunts, but shuffles sideways and allows Danny to step in out of the snow. Danny puts the bags on the table and immediately goes to the window, makes sure not to disturb the curtains as he peers out. The black car crawls by, headlights still off. It’s an old model, a Cadillac by the look of it. He sees a flash of Jeremiah’s pale, fleshy face pressed up against the passenger window, staring at the cabin, before the Cadillac does a U-turn and goes back the way it came.