He shook his head. “I did. I did. You don’t know.”

Her hand slipped into her purse. “The last eleven months have been hard on you, haven’t they? You’ve had nowhere to go to for help. No friends. No colleagues. Just you and your scrambled little mind. All you needed was to have one lucid moment…but you didn’t get it, did you?”

Crux licked his lips. “Everyone knows what you did. I told them. They’re all talking about you. They’re all whispering. China Sorrows, China Sorrows, she’s the one, they’re saying. She’s the one. Nefarian Serpine killed Skulduggery Pleasant, but China Sorrows led his family into the trap.”

She stepped towards him. Crux clicked his fingers and fire flared in his hands. China pulled the trigger. The bullet ruined a perfectly good purse and then made a mess of Remus Crux’s chest. He fell backwards, fire extinguished, and was already dead when China stepped over his body and walked away.

38 THE CASTLE

38
THE CASTLE

The last time Valkyrie had seen this castle she had been running from it. They had just rescued Skulduggery and Serpine’s Hollow Men had been closing in from all sides.

“I rescue you a lot,” she muttered.

“Sorry?” Skulduggery said, looking back.

“Nothing.”

Every ground floor entrance had been bricked up, so they got in through a window on the first floor and worked their way down. It was quiet and cold. Skulduggery went first down the stone stairs, then Fletcher and Anton Shudder. Valkyrie and Ghastly brought up the rear.

The stairs to the basement level were cemented over.

“Spread out,” said Skulduggery. “We’re looking for any sign of recent activity.”

They split up. Valkyrie went to the back of the castle. Here and there were items of old furniture, dust-covered, standing alone in otherwise empty rooms. She stepped into a drawing room with an ornate fireplace, turned to go, then stopped. She looked at the way the light caught the grooves that had been scraped into the floor in front of the fireplace. She knelt by them, running her fingers along the worn edges. Valkyrie was no expert, but she reckoned that these shallow grooves that curved in a uniform pattern had been here for about as long as the castle had been standing. Something heavy had been repeatedly moved across this area over the years – but had it happened recently?