Hayley moved her hand in a quick motion and they stopped where they were, within sight of the rusted iron gates of the Doherty family crypt. They could hear movement all around them. Tane peered about and caught glimpses of things that had once been people, lurching with each step. He disguised his whimper behind a terrified moan, and realised that Hayley was looking at him, like she was waiting for something.

“What?” he whispered.

“The amulet,” she whispered back impatiently in that broad Aussie accent. “Hurry.”

He frowned at her. “I don’t have the amulet.”

“What? You were meant to bring it!”

“I thought you were meant to bring it.”

“I brought the axe!”

“No one told me I had to bring the amulet.”

“I told you! Before we left!”

He let a moment pass. “I thought you were joking.”

“Right,” she whispered decisively, turning so she was facing him. “I’m going to kill you.”

He flinched away from the axe. “I thought we didn’t need the amulet – didn’t Skulduggery say they’d be able to do this without it?”

Her grip on the axe was turning her knuckles white, and she had that look in her eye, the look that meant she was barely controlling her anger. “He did say that. And then Valkyrie said no, they hoped they’d be able to do this without the amulet, but that if they couldn’t, they’d use the amulet as a last resort.”

“A last resort?”

“To save the world.”

Tane gave a feeble smile. “See? We’ve got nothing to worry about. I mean, when was the last time we used a last-resort-type weapon?”

“Monday.”

He chewed his lip. “I’m sure we won’t need to do it again so soon, though. It’ll be fine.”

She leaned in close, real close, close enough to bite his nose clean off. “You,” she said in a whisper so coarse it was sliding off sandpaper, “are an idiot.”

He shrugged and muttered something and went to retie his bootlace before he remembered gumboots don’t have laces, and eventually Hayley looked back at the mausoleum. When they were sure they wouldn’t be seen, they hurried to the gate. The lock had been snapped, but the hinges still creaked as they slipped through. Tane’s feet crunched on pebbles, but Hayley’s bare feet moved over them with barely a sound, and within moments they were passing through the heavy door into the dank confines of the final resting place (in theory, anyway) of the once great Doherty clan. Two flaming torches, held in wall brackets on either side, illuminated the ancient coffins that lay empty and broken all around them. Moving slowly, they approached the crumbling hole in the ground, a pit so impossibly dark it could have led into the infinitely fathomless depths of Hell itself.

“Looks pretty deep,” Tane said.