The thin man came sprinting out of the library, clutching his hat in one gloved hand. Ryan blinked. The way the sun caught his bald head made it seem almost white, almost like…

Ryan swallowed. It wasn’t the sun. The thin man wasn’t bald.

The thin man was a skeleton.

Ryan screamed as the skeleton jumped in behind the wheel.

“Shut him up, please,” the skeleton said as the car shot forward.

“Shut up, Ryan,” said Valkyrie.

Foe came charging out of the library but the car, the Bentley, was already slicing through traffic. And still Ryan screamed.

“Ryan,” Valkyrie said, “stop that.”

“He’s a skeleton!” Ryan yelled. “Look at him! They killed your friend!”

“No they didn’t,” said the skeleton. “But they punched me. A lot. And one of them hit me with a desk. Have you ever been hit with a desk, Ryan? It’s sore.”

“I was hit with a desk once,” Valkyrie said.

“Oh, that’s right,” said the skeleton. “It really hurts, doesn’t it?”

“It does.”

Ryan sat in the back seat, petrified. Valkyrie turned to him, sighed, and then gave him the kind of smile usually reserved for idiots, or toddlers, or idiot toddlers.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Valkyrie Cain. My partner here is Skulduggery Pleasant. We just saved your life. The least you can do is not throw up in our car.”

THREE

The skeleton’s jaw moved when he talked, but he had no tongue. He had no lungs, or vocal cords. There was nothing at all to give him a voice, and yet Skulduggery still talked. Good God, did he talk.

“The short version,” he said as they drove, “is that magic exists. Monsters exist. Sorcerers, like myself and Valkyrie, fight to stop other sorcerers, like Foe and his friends, from doing bad things. We’re the heroes, if you really must give us a title. They’re the villains. We try to stay out of the public eye as much as possible. It’s really quite straightforward if you don’t think about it too hard.”

“But I don’t understand,” Ryan whispered.

“That’s the spirit,” Skulduggery said. “We don’t have an awful lot of time, so there are some things you’re just going to have to accept.”

“You’re a skeleton.”

“Like that.”

“But how can you move?”

Valkyrie undid her seatbelt and climbed into the back. “Ryan,” she said when she was settled, “the world is an amazing place. It’s full of wonderful things and fascinating people and deep mysteries just waiting to be uncovered. In order to not annoy me, though, you’ve really got to put all of that to one side and concentrate on what we tell you. He’s a walking skeleton. I wear tight trousers. Do you have any questions so far?”

“Uh, no.”

“Excellent.”