“Razzia. She’s completely off the rails. I never know what she’s going to do from one moment to the next. She’s got a creature living in her arm, a parasite of some sort. I’ve asked several times to examine it, but she hasn’t let me get close.”

“Tell us about Smoke,” Skulduggery said.

“All I know about him is what he can do. I’ve seen him touch people – not even skin-on-skin contact, but through their coat sleeves – and they’re corrupted. Ordinary, decent people turned into psychopathic versions of themselves. I’ve seen it go on for weeks – every two days, Smoke just taps them and it starts all over again. I’ve seen people under his influence kill their entire families and laugh while they do it.”

“We’ll stop him,” said Skulduggery. “We’ll stop all of them. Anyone else we should know about?”

“There are others, though they come and go. But that’s the main group.”

Skulduggery leaned back in his chair. “I’ve read a bit about you, Doctor. Your power manifested in medical school, didn’t it? Up until that moment you had no idea magic existed.”

“That is correct,” Melior said, nodding. “I did some haphazard research after it happened, managed to talk to a proper sorcerer and had my eyes opened. After that, I met Savant and fell in love, and … well, never looked back.”

“And then Parthenios Lilt talked to you.”

Melior’s face soured. “Yes. He’d heard about me and came to interview me, to run some tests … The term Neoteric was actually my suggestion. We became friends, or so I thought. This was back in the 1960s. Savant and I were living in San Francisco, because where else would you be living in the sixties? Parthenios introduced us to his friends – mostly other Neoterics. For a while, it was fun – we even had our own bowling team, as lame as that sounds now and, in fact, back then. But then we met more of his friends. People like Bubba Moon. Have you heard of him?”

“We have,” said Skulduggery.

“That’s when the alarm bells really started to ring. This was an insane man sitting at the table with us, talking about the tyranny of mortals, about how we should rise up against them and join with the being who lives beyond our reality.”

“We met him,” Valkyrie said. “The being beyond our reality, I mean. His name was Balerosh.”

Melior blinked. “Moon was telling the truth? He exists?”

Valkyrie shrugged. “Not any more.”