The gun shook. He deserved it. For everything he’d done, he deserved it. He wasn’t my friend. He was a killer. He was a killer and he was going to kill my son.

I pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

Moon laughed. “You really think she’d give you a loaded gun?”

A scream pierced the air, and Moon grinned. “That would be your friends, I imagine,” he said. “What, you thought they were going to come save you? They’ve never gone up against anything like this before. You have no one to…”

He faltered. The scream twisted and undulated and screeched. No human being could ever make anything close to that kind of sound.

Then there was silence.

Darkness swarmed my vision and dissipated like smoke…

… and then we were back in the warehouse with Moon’s People sprawled unconscious around us. Sammy stood beside me, his hands still tied and his mouth still gagged. Next to the cloth-covered table, Moon stood with Chrissy, shaking his head, trying to clear it. Skulduggery Pleasant and Valkyrie Cain stood behind them both.

Valkyrie pushed Chrissy aside and Moon spun, too startled to do anything more than curse, just before Pleasant stepped into him and flipped him over his hip. Moon crashed to the ground and Valkyrie moved in. The handcuffs that had been used to bind her snapped over his wrists.

Moon got to his knees, shaking his head. “You can’t stand up to it, you’ll never defeat it—”

“We already have,” said Valkyrie.

Moon screamed in abject rage as I dropped the gun and turned, untied Sammy. His hands free, he pulled the gag from his mouth, too startled, too shocked to speak.

I looked at Chrissy as she ran from the warehouse, then at Moon, tears streaming down his face, and finally I turned to Pleasant. “Are you going to kill him?”

“I thought we’d have to,” he said. “We didn’t think we’d be able to capture him. But now that we have…”

Valkyrie held Moon as well as she could while Pleasant picked the knife up off the table and cut a new symbol into Moon’s forehead. When it was done, Pleasant stood over him, his gloved hand splayed against his bloody wound. He looked at me.

“Before I begin,” he said, “I need you to understand that the words I am about to recite in no way indicate the presence, or indeed the existence, of a Divine Being of any sort. Words are words, and they have power, and arranged in a particular way they can have a particular effect. Is that understood?”

I nodded.

Pleasant looked down at his prisoner. “I command you, unclean spirit, in the name of whichever god you believe in, I command you to depart. Depart, then, transgressor. Depart, seducer, full of lies and cunning, foe of virtue, persecutor of the innocent.”

“Get away from me,” said Moon. “Get away!”