Skulduggery looked around. “Here. Darquesse is not here, therefore this room can be eliminated from the list of places she could be. Unless she enters this room after we’ve gone, in which case, we’d be foolish to rule it out completely.”

China sighed. “So what you’re saying is that it’s impossible to track her down.”

“No, not at all. In fact, we have two ways of finding out where she is. The first is quite simple – we bring her to us.”

“And how do we do that?”

“She’s punishing Erskine Ravel for the murders of Anton and Ghastly. For twenty-three hours of every day, he’s subjected to unimaginable agony. If the doctors try to alleviate his suffering, the pain increases. If he grows somewhat tolerant, the pain increases. This link between them is something we can exploit. If we shunt Ravel into another reality, the link could break.”

“And how does this help us?”

“Once the link is severed, Darquesse will come looking for answers. When we bring Ravel back, he’ll be her first target. Naturally, we’ll have to be ready, because we’re only going to get one shot at luring her in.”

China pursed her lips. “Risky.”

“Oh, yes,” said Skulduggery. “Hugely risky. Possibly suicidal. But we should probably get started on finding a reality to shunt him into.”

China sighed. “Very well. And the second way?”

“That’s a little trickier, but it’s also more straightforward. We don’t have to track her – we just have to track the people with her.”

“You mean Tanith Low.”

Skulduggery nodded. “Yes I do. Tanith Low and Billy-Ray Sanguine.”

5

TO WATCH THE WORLD BURN

e watched her standing in the air, her eyes closed, hovering just above the wooden floor. She was wrapped in darkness, from each individual toe right up to her jawline, a darkness so tight he could see the muscles in her legs, the tightness of her belly. She’d been like that for days. Hadn’t opened her eyes, or said one word. Just hovered there.

Sanguine took off his coat, dumped it on a straight-backed chair, the only piece of furniture in the room. It was cold outside, but hot in here, all that heat generated from the eighteen-year-old girl slowing rotating in mid-air. What was going on inside her mind, he had no idea. Were they human thoughts she was thinking, or something else? Something beyond human?

Someone that powerful, he reckoned, would only take a short while to start thinking thoughts that had no place in a human head.