“Who was it? Us or them? Who was it arrested him, Wilkes? Normal people or freaks?”

“Oh,” Wilkes said. “Them, sir. Freaks, sir.”

The anger in Flanery’s chest was a distant memory. Now Flanery was a volcano. Flanery was the goddamn atom bomb. Upon explosion, Flanery would flatten every town and village in the land.

But he couldn’t explode. He had to be calm. Just like his father had taught him.

“What’s the charge?” Flanery asked, keeping his voice low.

“Sir?” Wilkes said, leaning closer.

“The charge. What’s the charge? What has Lilt been charged with?”

“Oh,” said Wilkes. “I don’t know, sir.”

“Find out. Get on that phone and find out. By the time we reach the White House, I want answers. You hear me? You understand me?”

“I understand, sir. But there are other issues we—”

“Forget about everything else. I don’t care. I don’t care about policies or regulations or the House or the Senate or anything. Don’t care. Only thing I care about is what Lilt is charged with and what impact that has on me. You get that? You understand?”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

“Then get it done.”

“Yes, sir, Mr President.”

36

Idiot.

There was no other word for it, really. Only idiot summed up the magnificent stupidity that Omen was capable of displaying at any moment and in any situation. Only he could have hitched a ride from relative safety to absolute jeopardy without actually needing to, at all, in the slightest. He had been fired, for God’s sake. Skulduggery Pleasant himself had told him to leave all this danger stuff to the professionals. He was no longer involved in whatever the hell was going on.

And yet who had teleported, with a man who had already tried to kill him, moving in the span of an eyeblink from beneath a bed in the dormitories of Corrival Academy to the cold floor of what appeared to be a prison? That would be Omen Darkly, yes, sir, it would. No one else could have managed something like that. The Boy Most Likely to Get Himself Killed.

What had he been thinking? What the hell had possessed him to do something so bloody stupid? He hadn’t had anything even remotely resembling a plan. He was impossibly lucky that Nero had just walked off when they’d arrived. If he’d looked around, he would have seen Omen lying there on the ground with his hand outstretched. He might have accidentally trodden on him, which would have been a ridiculous way to be discovered.

And, as Nero had walked away, did Omen spring to his feet, stealthy as a ninja? Or did he roll sideways into an empty cell, and then crawl under another bed to hide?

The word repeated itself in his head, just for good measure. Idiot. Idiot. Idiot.