LITMIR.BIZ

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energy. If it could kill insane gods whose very appearance drove people mad, then artificial beings with skin of leathery paper and not one brain cell between them didn’t stand much of a chance. They exploded into dust that drifted to the floor and was trodden on by their unthinking brethren. They didn’t stop. Of course they didn’t. They didn’t know fear. They had no sense of self. They were poor imitations of life, much like Stephanie herself had been. Once upon a time.

      But now Valkyrie Cain was gone, and Stephanie Edgley was all that was left.

      From elsewhere in the supermarket, she heard a crash as Skulduggery fought Rhadaman. She wasn’t worried. He could take care of himself.

      The shadows moved beside her and a fist came down on her arm. Her fingers sprang open and the Sceptre went spinning beneath an overturned shelf. Stephanie ducked back, cursing. Her only other weapon was the carved shock stick across her back, which had a limited charge and was useless against anything without a nervous system. She ran by a shelf of microwaves and blenders, past pots and pans. She grabbed a stainless-steel ladle that felt unsurprisingly unsatisfying in her hand, and immediately dropped it when she saw the one remaining box of kitchen knives. She dragged it from the shelf, threw it straight into the face of the nearest Hollow Man. The box fell, knives scattering across the floor.

      Stephanie snatched up the two biggest ones and swung, the blades slicing through the Hollow Man’s neck. Green gas billowed like air from a punctured tyre. Even as she ran on, she could taste the sting of the gas in the back of her throat.

      Two Hollow Men ahead of her, one in a shirt and tie and no trousers and the other in a silk dressing gown.

      She dropped to her knees, sliding between them, cutting into their legs as she passed, and even as they were starting to deflate she was already on her feet again, stabbing the filleting knife into the chest of a Hollow Man wearing pyjamas. She spun away from the blast of gas, coughing, her eyes filling with tears. Something blurred in front of her and she hacked at it, shoved it away, her vision worsening, her lungs burning. Her stomach roiled. She tasted bile. She slipped on something. Fell. Lost one of the knives.

      A hand grabbed her hair, pulled her back and she cried out. She tried slashing at it with the second knife, but the blade got tangled in her jacket and then it too was lost. She reached up, dug her nails into rough skin, tried to tear through. Her hair was released. Something crunched into her face. The world flashed and spun. She was hit again. She covered up, her arm doing its best to soak up the heavy punches, her head rattling with each impact. If she’d had magic, she’d have set the Hollow Man on fire by now or sent her shadows in to tear it apart. But she didn’t have magic. She didn’t have such a luxury to fall back on, to get her out of trouble. She wasn’t Valkyrie Cain. She didn’t need magic.

      Stephanie brought her knees in and spun on her back. The Hollow Man loomed over her, little more than a black shape. Its fist came down on to her belly like a wrecking ball, would have emptied her lungs were it not for her armoured clothes. She braced her feet against its legs and pushed herself back out of range, rolling backwards into a crouch, the Hollow Man stumbling slightly. She plunged her hand into the display stand next to her, scrabbling for a weapon, fingers curling round a mop. The Hollow Man came at her and Stephanie rose, swinging the mop like a baseball bat.

      She missed wooden mops. Wooden mops had a little weight to them – whereas the plastic one in her hands merely bounced lightly off the Hollow Man’s head.

      She flipped it, drove the other end into its mouth, pushed until she’d sent it staggering and then she let go, turned and ran back the way she’d come. Her eyes were clearing. She no longer wanted to puke. A Hollow Man turned to her and she dodged round it, tripped and fell and saw the Sceptre. She threw herself forward, plunged her hand under the fallen shelf, her fingers closing round its reassuring weight. The Hollow Man reached for her. She turned it to dust.

      She got up, disintegrated the next one, and the one after that. Three more trundled into view and she dispatched them with equal ease. Then the only sounds in the place were coming from Skulduggery.

      She hurried back to the open area, in time to see Rhadaman pull Skulduggery’s arm from its socket.

      Skulduggery screamed as his bones clattered to the floor. A blast of energy took him off his feet, and Rhadaman closed in, ready to deliver the killing blow.

      “Freeze!” Stephanie yelled, the Sceptre aimed right at his chest.

      He looked at her and laughed. “That doesn’t work, remember?”

      She shifted her aim, turned the door behind him to dust. “It only works for its owner, moron. Now, unless you want your remains to be swept into a dustpan, you’ll shackle yourself.” She kicked the shackles across the floor at him. They hit his feet, but he didn’t move.

      “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “You’re thinking, ‘Can I kill this girl before she fires?’ Well, seeing as how this is the Sceptre of the Ancients, the most powerful God-Killer in the world, and it can turn you to dust with a single thought, you’ve got to ask yourself—”

      Skulduggery swung the butt of his gun into Rhadaman’s jaw and Rhadaman spun in a semicircle and collapsed.

      Stephanie stared. “Seriously?”

      Skulduggery nudged Rhadaman with his foot, making sure he was unconscious.

      “I was in the middle of something,” Stephanie said. “I had him, and I was in the middle of something. I was doing a bit. You don’t interrupt someone when they’re doing a bit.”

      “Cuff him,” Skulduggery said. He holstered the gun and picked up his arm, started to thread it through his sleeve.

      “I’d almost got to the best line and you … fine.” Stephanie shoved the Sceptre into the bag on her back, walked over and cuffed Rhadaman’s hands tight. She stood as Skulduggery’s arm clicked back into its socket.

      “Ouch,” he muttered, then looked at her. “Sorry? You were saying something?”

      “I was being cool,” she said.

      “I doubt that.”

      “I was being really cool and I was quoting from a really cool movie and you totally ruined it for me.”

      “Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”

      “No you’re not. You just can’t stand it when other people get to say cool stuff while you’re too busy screaming, can you?”

      “He did pull my arm off.”

      “Your arms get pulled off all the time. I rarely get to say anything cool, and usually there’s no one else around to hear it anyway.”

      “I apologise,” Skulduggery said. “Please, continue.”

      “Well, I’m not going to say it now.”

      “Why not? It obviously means a lot to you.”

      “No. There’s no point. He’s already in shackles. Also, he’s unconscious.”

      “It might make you feel better.”

      “I’d feel stupid,” said Stephanie. “I can’t say cool things to an unconscious person.”

      “This isn’t about him. It’s about you.”

      “No. Forget it. You’d just laugh at me.”

      “I promise I won’t.”

      “Forget it, I said.”

      He shrugged. “OK. If you don’t want to finish it, you don’t have to. But it might make you feel better.”

      “No.”

      “OK then.”

      He stood there, looking at her. She glared back, opened her mouth to continue the conversation, but he suddenly turned, walked away, like he’d just remembered that she may look and sound and talk like Valkyrie Cain, but she wasn’t Valkyrie Cain.

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