2 HOME INVASION

2
HOME INVASION

She missed him.

She missed his voice, and his humour, and his warm arrogance, and those moments in his company when she realised that this was when she came alive—finally living, by the side of a dead man.

For eleven months he had been gone and for almost a year Valkyrie had been searching for his original skull, to use as a tool to reopen the portal and get him back. She slept when she had to and ate when she needed to. She let the search consume her. Time spent with her parents grew less and less. She’d been to Germany, and France, and Russia. She had kicked down rotten doors and run through darkened streets. She had followed the clues, just like he’d taught her, and now, finally, she was close.

Skulduggery had once told her that the head he now wore was not his actual head—he had won it in a poker game. He said his real head had been stolen, while he slept, by little goblin things that had run off with it in the night. At the time he hadn’t gone into any further detail, but he had filled in the blanks later on.

Twenty years ago, a small church in the middle of the Irish countryside was being plagued by what appeared to be a poltergeist. The angry spirit was causing havoc, terrifying the locals and driving away the police when they came to investigate. Skulduggery was called in by an old friend and he arrived, wrapped in his scarf with his hat pulled low.

The first thing he learned was that the culprit wasn’t a poltergeist. The second thing he discovered was that it was most likely a type of goblin, and there were probably more than one. The third thing he unearthed was that the church, as small and as spartan as it was, had a solid gold cross set up behind the altar, and if there was one thing goblins loved, it was gold.

“Actually, if there’s one thing that goblins love,” Skulduggery had said, “it’s eating babies, but gold comes in a close second.”

The goblins were trying to frighten everyone away long enough so that they could pry the cross loose and make off with it. Skulduggery set up camp and waited. To pass the time, he sank into a meditative state, to be roused whenever anyone got too close to the church.