She stood there, looking down at him, suddenly aware that this was being watched by some past version of Valkyrie and Skulduggery himself, and she turned to look into the space where they would be standing, and she forced herself to give them a smile.

97

“Get ready,” said Skulduggery, as

98

Darquesse lifted off the ground, rose high into the air, where the wind dried her tears. Roarhaven spread out below her like a wounded animal, waiting to be put down. She drifted to its weakly beating heart, touched her feet to the ground and walked right through the front doors of the Sanctuary. Cleavers came at her and she waved them out of existence. The sorcerers who tried to fight exploded into nothingness. Those who tried to run she killed with a little more brutality. She wasn’t as strong as she once was, but the extra effort made it all the more rewarding.

Tanith sprang at her from the shadows. Darquesse allowed the sword to almost reach her neck, but teleported before it scratched her. Tanith’s cry of surprise was amusing. Darquesse punched through her from behind, her fist bursting from Tanith’s chest.

Tanith Low had time to look down at her own heart before she died.

Darquesse went from room to room. Killing. Black flames and blood. No one could stand against her. No one could reason with her. China Sorrows tried. China Sorrows died.

When the Sanctuary was clear of the living, when Synecdoche and Clarabelle were resting in peace and when Erskine Ravel had screamed his last, Darquesse reached her magic into the very foundations of the building and shook them. The walls cracked and the floors crumbled and the world was filled with a thousand roars, and the Sanctuary fell.

Roarhaven fell soon after. She left it in her wake, a flat and smoking ruin. By the time she reached Dublin, her heart was heavy. She carved up the streets and threw cars into buildings and she thought about what she had done. Not even the screams and the sirens could pierce her grey mood.

At first, she wanted to take the cities of the world one at a time. So she took London, and New York, and Moscow and Paris and Berlin and Beijing. She turned missiles to flowers and bullets to rain. She breathed in nerve gas and it cleared her sinuses. She survived the first three nuclear strikes aimed at her by enclosing herself in a little bubble. By the fourth one, she’d figured out how to survive it without the bubble. She may not have been as strong as she once was, but she was still becoming indestructible. And while she may have had the odd headache now and then, she was still a god.