Valkyrie dodged right, into a bakery, and slid over the countertop. She passed the startled baker, dashed through the back room that smelled of fresh bread and flour, and then she was out through a narrow door and had the road under her feet again. She ran through traffic, ignoring the shouts and the blaring horns. A cyclist hit her and she fell, spinning, to the pavement, and watched Skulduggery floating gently over the bakery roof. He took out his gun and Valkyrie scrambled up, shoving her way through the people who’d stopped to help her.

She reached the corner, turned on to Horizon Street and ducked under the shutter of a restaurant. Inside, the staff was setting up tables.

“We’re not open yet,” one of them said to her, frowning and coming forward.

“Call the Cleavers,” she said, batting aside his grasping hands. “Tell them it’s an emergency.”

“You can’t go back there, that’s for staff—”

“Call the Cleavers!” she snapped, and bolted through to the kitchen. There were some delivery guys here, bringing in crates of fresh food, and she slipped past them, emerged into an alley barely wide enough to fit the van. She squeezed by, stumbling on her last few steps, and checked the empty sky before she broke into a run. She just needed to stay out of sight while she put distance between them. That’s all. That’s all she needed to do.

She got to the mouth of the alley, sticking to the wall, and then bolted for the adjoining street, into a clothes shop where a woman was arguing with her children. There was a door in here with a bead curtain, and beyond that the interior of another shop. Valkyrie ran through one bead curtain and then the next, shimmying and juking her way around display stands and customers, leaving swaying waterfalls of rattling beads in her wake as she traversed the entire street without having to set foot outside. She got to the final store and left through the back.

But the air snagged her feet, lifted her by the ankles and she flipped, head over heels, into the alley wall. She cracked an elbow when she hit the ground and howled, clutching her arm even as she scrambled up. Then she froze.

Skulduggery dropped slowly out of the sky. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said, emptying the bullets from his gun and pocketing all but one of them. He touched down. “You’re thinking, Oh, God, oh, God, I’m going to die. You’re thinking, How can I stop him? Can he even be stopped? Is this the end of the infamous Valkyrie Cain?”

She forgot about the pain in her elbow. She just stood there, her back to the wall, watching him slide that single bullet back into the chamber, then spin the cylinder and click it closed.