LITMIR.BIZ

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to soar away and she had to grip the folds of flesh on his hips to hold him in place. Then Jerry gave up and stopped flapping, and Valkyrie fell screaming beneath his weight.

      “I’m not a butterfly,” Jerry sobbed, as Valkyrie squirmed and wriggled beneath him.

      The Cleavers arrived on time, as they usually did. They escorted Jerry Houlihan into their nondescript van, treating him surprisingly gently for anonymous drones with scythes strapped to their backs. Valkyrie hailed a cab, told the driver to take her to Phibsborough. They pulled over beside Skulduggery’s gleaming black Bentley.

      Skulduggery was waiting for her in the shadows. His suit was dark grey, his hat dipped low over his brow. Tonight he was wearing the face of a long-nosed man with a goatee. He nodded up to a dark window on the top floor of an apartment building.

      “Ed Stynes,” he said. “Forty years old. Lives alone. Not married, no kids. Recently split from his girlfriend. Works as a sound engineer. Possibly a werewolf.”

      Valkyrie glared at him. “You told me there were no such things as werewolves.”

      “I told you there were no such things as werewolves any more,” he corrected. “They died out in the nineteenth century. Unlike certain other creatures of the night that I could mention but won’t, werewolves were generally good people in human form. So appalled were they by their carnivorous lunar activities that they actively worked against their darker selves. They sought cures, isolation, whatever they needed to make sure that they didn’t spread the curse to anyone else.”

      “Unlike vampires,” Valkyrie growled.

      “You mentioned them, not me.”

      “So if werewolves are extinct, why do you think Ed Stynes is a werewolf?”

      “Last night, people in the area reported sightings of a large dog, or a man dressed as a bear,” Skulduggery said. “He didn’t hurt anyone – werewolves seldom do on their first time out unless they’re cornered. But on their second time, things get a lot more violent.”

      “But if werewolves are extinct...”

      “The infection has been diluted down through the generations, but it’s still there in a tiny fraction of the world’s population. Too weak to ever manifest into any actual transformation – unless the carriers of this infection were suddenly and inexplicably to gain magical abilities.”

      “So Ed is like my butterfly man earlier.”

      “Yes. The latest in a worryingly long line of mortals developing magic. Unfortunately in Ed’s case, it triggered a long dormant aspect of his physiology. You’re going to need this.” He handed her a long-barrelled gun.

      Her eyes widened. “This is mine? You’re giving this to me? This is so cool.”

      “It’s a tranquilliser gun.”

      Her face fell. “Oh.”

      “It’s still cool,” he insisted. “But I’m going to need it back afterwards. It’s part of a set. I have the other one, and I like to keep them together. It’s already loaded with a single tranq dart, so all you have to do is point and pull the trigger. The dart is loaded with enough sedative to bring down a—”

      “Small elephant?”

      He looked at her. “What?”

      “You know. In the movies, if they’re going after something dangerous, they always say their tranquilliser darts have enough sedative to bring down a small elephant.”

      “What do people have against small elephants?”

      “Well, nothing, but—”

      “There’s enough sedative in these darts to bring down a werewolf, which is exactly what we’re hunting. Why would we want to bring down an elephant if we’re not hunting elephants?”

      “It’s just something people say in movies.”

      “In elephant-hunting movies?”

      “No, not particularly.”

      “If we were hunting a were-elephant, I would understand the reference.”

      “There’s no such thing as a were-elephant.”

      “Of course there is. There are were-practically-everythings. Weredogs, werecats, werefish.”

      “There are werefish?”

      “They don’t generally last very long unless they’re near water.”

      “I don’t believe you. I’ve fallen for this too many times in the past.”

      “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He started across the road.

      She followed. “Oh, don’t you? You’ll insist they’re real and I’ll eventually start to doubt myself, and then I’ll ask, Are there really werefish? And you’ll look at me and say, Good God, Valkyrie, of course not, that’d be silly, and I’ll stand there feeling dumb. Just like with that colony of octopus people.”

      “The what?”

      “You told me once that octopus people were real.”

      “And you believed me?”

      “I was twelve!”

      They reached the door of the apartment building. “And yet most twelve-year-olds don’t believe in octopus people.”

      “I was twelve and impressionable, and I believed whatever you told me.”

      “Ah, I remember those days,” Skulduggery said fondly, then took out his revolver. “There is such a thing as a werefish, though.”

      She watched him loading the gun. “Those don’t look like tranquilliser bullets.”

      “That’s because they’re not. They’re silver. Only thing guaranteed to kill a werewolf. Apart from decapitation. But then—”

      “Decapitation kills most things,” Valkyrie finished.

      “Exactly.”

      “Apart from zombies.”

      Skulduggery slid the revolver back into his shoulder holster. “This gun is just for emergency, last-resort back-up. Ed Stynes is a good man – I have no desire to take his life just because he changes into a wolfman a few nights a month.” He took a pair of lock picks from his jacket and started on the door.

      “Why don’t we wait until morning to do this?” she asked. “Wouldn’t that be smarter?”

      “And leave him free to roam and kill tonight?”

      “It’s dark and the moon is full and I don’t hear any howling. Maybe it’s not as bad as you think.”

      “He just hasn’t transformed yet. All day he’ll have felt grouchier than usual. This evening the headaches will have started. Once night fell, the cramps will have kicked in. Judging by the position of the moon, we have about ten minutes before he changes. He’ll spend roughly three hours covered in fur, and when the moon slips further away, he’ll change back.”

      “So we tranq him while he’s still human?”

      “Rarely a good idea,” Skulduggery said, opening the door and putting his lock picks away. “Sometimes it works, but most of the time the transformation occurs anyway, and the adrenaline rush clears the sedative from the system. The wolf wakes up angry and it takes a double dose to put it down again.”

      “So we have to wait until he changes into a monster before we can do anything?”

      “Indeed.”

      “It seems a lot more dangerous.”

      “It is.” He took out a tranq gun identical to Valkyrie’s. “Ready?”

      “Uh...”

      “That’s

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