Down this corridor was a wooden door criss-crossed by metal. Skulduggery picked the lock while Stephanie kept watch. No vampires passed. She sneaked back to Skulduggery when the last tumbler fell, and they passed through. Skulduggery closed the door behind them, as gently as he could, and clicked his fingers. Guided by his light, she followed him down the steps. It was cold down here. Cold and creepy. They passed half a dozen doors, each etched with a unique shield.

“Are you ever going to reclaim your family crest?” she asked, keeping her voice down.

“Now is not the time, Stephanie.”

“I think you should. Reclaim it, I mean. You’ve saved the world, for God’s sake. That has to make up for all the bad stuff you’ve done.”

“That’s the thing about redemption,” said Skulduggery. “If you’re looking for it, the chances are you’ll never find it.”

“Well, I think your family would be proud of you, and I think they’d be even prouder if you took back your crest.”

“This is the one we’re looking for,” Skulduggery said. The crest on this door was a tree and a lightning strike.

“You’re changing the subject.”

“Imagine that,” he said, and held up both hands. Air moved down narrow spaces she couldn’t see, but she heard tiny sounds, like mice skittering behind skirting boards. There was a click, and the door opened.

They hurried in, Skulduggery closing the door behind them, and the light flickered on. It was a narrow room, with two walls, floor to ceiling, of safety-deposit boxes, each one with a sigil over the lock. Skulduggery didn’t say anything for a few moments. When he finally did, it wasn’t very encouraging.

“Dammit.”

Stephanie walked forward. “There are a lot of boxes here. Ten down and, how many is that, fifty across? Five hundred boxes on each side at least. Do we have time to open them all?”

“The time it’d take is suddenly irrelevant,” Skulduggery said. “These locks can’t be picked. Even if they could, each box has an alarm that’d alert the vampires the moment we tried to tamper with it. I have to be honest here. I did not expect this.”

Stephanie said, “They hired more vampire security guards after the last time you broke in. Kind of makes sense that the security inside the Vault would be heightened, too. Every action has a consequence, right? Stuff you did when you first met Valkyrie is coming back at you now, six years later. Kind of makes you wonder what repercussions our actions today will have, six years down the line.”

“If we don’t get the grimoire, I doubt we’ll need to worry about that.” Skulduggery rapped his knuckles against one of the boxes. “OK then. We wanted to do this quietly so that no one would notice. That’s no longer an option. So we go loud.”