“He might,” said Scapegrace.

“Shut,” the Master said, “up.”

Scapegrace stayed where he was until the Master and the White Cleaver were gone, and then he got up. Thrasher stood beside him, brushing the dirt from his clothes. “You’re pathetic,” Scapegrace sneered.

“I know,” Thrasher said meekly. “But whenever the Master is around, nothing else matters but him. It’s like he said, zombies are made to serve Necromancers. That… that doesn’t mean I still don’t value your leadership, sir.”

“Yeah, well,” Scapegrace said, curling what was left of his lip, “just don’t you forget it.”

Chapter 45 - The Nicest Town in Ireland

Chapter 45
The Nicest Town in Ireland

eoffrey had been the key.

It was a good trick, all right, getting people to believe whatever he told them. He hadn’t reckoned on Kenny’s journalism training being able to renew his interest in the story, but that wasn’t Geoffrey’s fault. It was a fluke, nothing more. Kenny had no trouble believing that Geoffrey’s power would work on anyone. And that had got him thinking.

He had spent the last few days digging out all the reports he’d found that had later been retracted. He read over them again with fresh eyes, with a new perspective. What if these reports hadn’t been hoaxes or mistakes? What if they were genuine, and had only been retracted after someone like Geoffrey had convinced the poor, frightened people that they hadn’t seen what they’d thought they’d seen?

Kenny had laid all these reports out on his floor, and he’d spent hours going through them. One of them caught his eye. Only a few lines long. A few years ago, a man in north County Dublin had called the cops after witnessing a dark-haired girl fleeing from a pack of white-skinned “animals” who ran on two legs. The girl – he hadn’t seen her face – led them towards the pier.

His statement was taken by the local cops. The next day he denied ever seeing such a thing. The day after that, the cops who had taken his statement denied ever doing so. It would have been completely forgotten about if Kenny hadn’t been such a keen collector of oddness.

It was a long shot, Kenny knew. There were plenty of darkhaired girls in Ireland. There was absolutely no reason to think that it was the same girl who Geoffrey had called Valkyrie Cain. But the name of the town in which this had happened was Haggard, which was only a kilometre or two from the town in which there had been all that Insanity Virus trouble at that nightclub. And so Kenny got the bus to Haggard. He stayed in a B&B and talked to the couple who owned it about any odd occurrences they might have heard about. Odd? they said. Sure nothing odd ever happens in Haggard.