The Dying of the Light

by Derek Landy

  True, calling his name didn’t exactly qualify as ‘without warning’, but he deserved to at least see her face as she killed him.

  He turned his head to her. In that moment, she examined his power, poked and prodded at it, saw how it worked. Then she flicked her fingers and his heart burst inside his chest. He made a small sound and keeled over, and Desmond and Melissa both jumped to their feet.

  “Mum,” Darquesse said. “Dad. It’s time for our tearful farewell.”

  Desmond stood in front of his wife, protecting her. Darquesse had expected no less.

  “You’re not our daughter,” Desmond said. Tears ran down his face. “You killed our daughter.”

  “We’re all just …” Darquesse began, then laughed, and shook her head. “I was going to say we’re all just energy. I was going to say there is no death. This, what I’m doing? In the grand scheme of things, it means nothing. Only … only if I really and truly didn’t get some little bit of pleasure from doing this, then why take the physical approach? Why blast Cassandra’s head off? Why get my hands dirty?”

  “Because you’re sick,” Melissa said, hatred ablaze in her eyes.

  “I think you might be right,” Darquesse responded. “I think I’m sick. I reckon I’m evil. I must be, right? To have fun doing this?”

  She laughed again. The wind carried her laugh who knows where.

  “What a relief,” she said, “to admit that. Not just to you, either, but to myself. To admit that I like doing this. Fighting. Killing. Destroying. It’s just … it’s just so satisfying, you know? I must be evil. That’s the only explanation I can find. But then … but then I came from your daughter. So does that mean your daughter was evil?”

  “She’s a hero,” said Desmond.

  “Was,” Darquesse corrected. “Better get used to referring to her in the past tense. Or, hey, forget it. You don’t have to get used to anything. You’ll be dead soon, too, right? But that’s interesting, isn’t it? All this time I thought I was doing something nice for the universe and actually … actually no, I just wanted to tear it all down.

  “Do you think we’re all like that, maybe? People, I mean. Behind all their ideas about themselves and who they are, do you think they’re all just … bad? Hmm. Not in the mood for a philosophical debate, eh? Yeah, I get that. That’s OK. I think … I think Valkyrie, though, because I knew her so well, much better than either of you ever did, I think Valkyrie would agree with me on this one. She had a dark heart, deep down. Dark and twisted. I just thought you ought to know that about your own daughter before you died.”

  Darquesse brought her hands together and then splayed them out to either side, and Desmond and Melissa Edgley came apart in such an outrageous display of blood and innards that it actually made Darquesse queasy. She laughed at the absurdity of her reaction, and walked over to Valkyrie, careful not to step in the puddles of her parents.

  The body of Valkyrie Cain lay broken and battered at her feet, and the energy inside her was gone. Darquesse could taste it in the air, it lingered faintly, but her essence had dissipated in the moments after her death. That energy was now lost, flowing as it had back into the stream of existence. She hadn’t meant to kill her like that. She hadn’t meant to throw her so hard. She’d thought that after everyone else was dead it would just be her and Valkyrie, exchanging words at the end of the world. Then Valkyrie would finally surrender and Darquesse could become whole again.

  But life, being life, had a funny way of disappointing you.

  Darquesse brushed her hair back, trying to get rid of that awful feeling of Cassandra’s hand on her scalp. She tucked a few strands behind her ear, looking up as she did so. At the end of the street there was a black hat, blowing along in the wind. It tumbled behind a corner, out of sight, and Darquesse allowed herself a sad smile.

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  “Is it working? Tell me it’s working.”

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  She took what she had learned from Fletcher’s magic, and teleported to the corner. She watched the hat blow into the middle of the street and then settle like a slowly spinning coin. Skulduggery emerged from a side alley. He stood over the hat for a moment, then reached down, picked it up and brushed it off. He returned it to his head, angling the brim.

  He’d seen the vision. He knew what was coming.

  Darquesse walked up behind him. He turned to her slowly, dumping spent shells from his revolver. She watched him take bullets from his waistcoat pocket and slip them into the empty chambers. One by one. One to six. Enjoying the ritual of it.

  “My favourite little toy,” said Darquesse.

  “Are you referring to my gun or to me?” Skulduggery was supposed to say. But of course he didn’t. He stood there in silence and she waited for him to speak.

  He finished loading the gun, and he clicked it shut, held it down by his leg.

  “She’s dead,” Darquesse told him, breaking the silence. “I didn’t mean to kill her so soon, but … well.”

  He stayed quiet.

  “Anything you want to know before you die?” she asked. “Any last questions? Ask me anything about Valkyrie and I’ll answer, as honestly as I’m able. Anything you’ve always wondered?”

  Not a sound.

  She smiled. “You’re an impressive man, Skulduggery. There will never be another like you. And if you don’t want to talk, I understand that. You want to get to it, I suppose. I’m … I’m going to miss you. Please know that.” She took a breath, and gave him a sad smile. “I know you made a promise,” she said. “Until the—”

  He was so fast she never even saw him raise the gun. The first bullet hit her throat, the second burrowed through her cheek, and the third blew the back of her head open. They didn’t worry her, of course. The entry wounds were already healing before the exit wounds had even formed. The fourth and fifth bullets caused her a little concern, however, smashing through her brain the way they did, and the sixth tore through her breastbone and punctured her heart. That one was probably symbolic.

  Six bullets, though. He’d got off six bullets. In the vision, he’d only fired three.

  She reached out to him with her magic, started plucking at the energy holding him together. His fingers went first, and the gun and the glove fell, the finger bones rattling on the street. She kept pushing, skewering his magic, and she watched his arm fall, his sleeve flapping in the wind.

  His other arm now. And then she went low, to stop him from getting any closer. She sliced at the magic around his feet and then his ankles fell apart and he dropped to his knees and his hips went and he toppled backwards and now he was just a skeleton in a suit that was quickly deflating around him.

  He tried to sit up, tried to raise his head, but she finished him off and his bones clattered. The only magic remained in his skull, and she plucked it from his spine and held it up, made sure he could see her, and then she kissed him, with all the love she could muster. She kissed him goodbye, and when she let the skull fall the last of who he was disappeared into the ether, and the skull broke and the jawbone spun away.

  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.

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  “Get ready,” said Skulduggery, as

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  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 almo
st 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.

  But Beijing annoyed her. The mortals were still fighting her and the sorcerers were helping them. All over the world, they refused to accept the fact that their silly little meaningless lives were over. It was insulting, if she were to be honest. They thought they still had a

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  chance with this, and one only.” Skulduggery grabbed Fletcher, pulled him to his feet, and pointed at Valkyrie and her parents. “Get Alice and get them the hell out of

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  here she was, destruction incarnate, and these mortals dared to hope that somehow, maybe, with the help of all these sorcerers, they could find a way to beat her.

  It was aggravating.

  She went away for a week, thought about her next move, and decided to just kill them all, absorb as much of their energy as she could, and move on. She had itchy feet. She wanted to explore the universe. To seek out new life and new civilisations. Then to kill them, too.

  So she killed the world, burned it to a husk, and flew off into space.

  She set foot on the moon. She teleported to Mars. The gases of Neptune made her eyes water. By the time she breached the galaxy, she didn’t need her body to travel any more. Her body became her mind, and she travelled at the speed of thought, and upon discovering life her physical form would take shape once again.

  She appeared as a vast alien god to these otherworldly species. And she was not a nice god.

  There were challenges that she had to overcome. Weapons she was unfamiliar with. Life cycles she was ignorant of. A constant pressure on her head, like a hand pressing down on her. But her biggest challenge was boredom. When she had had her fill of this universe, she returned to what remained of Earth. She began to long for something new. Something different.

  Using everything she had learned from all those thousands of Remnants she had absorbed, she solved the mechanics of reality, and lifted off the ground and

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  rose high into the air. Fletcher watched, sure that she would snap out of it, fix her gaze on them, but she didn’t, she kept rising, a peculiar look on her face. She reached out with her hands and pulled

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  the empty space apart. Darquesse felt her fingers buzz. This was a new way of doing it, a new way of creating a portal, a doorway to a world with a

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  red sky, there was a red sky, and Fletcher’s heart thundered in his chest when he heard that noise, that awful, sickening

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  mourning call of the Faceless Ones, beautiful in its way, and Darquesse smiled at last. She hadn’t smiled since she’d killed Skulduggery Pleasant, all those years ago.

  She stepped through the portal, leaving the lifeless universe of her home, and the portal closed behind her.

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  Fletcher blinked. “It worked?”

  Cassandra sagged and Skulduggery caught her. Finbar collapsed and Fletcher only noticed when he heard the thump beside him.

  “Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”

  Finbar mumbled something, and waved his hand weakly.

  Fletcher looked up again, at where the portal had just been. At where Darquesse had vanished. “We beat her?”

  “We didn’t beat her,” Skulduggery said. “We fooled her. There’s a difference. Everyone link up.”

  Geoffrey and Philomena held out their hands. They were pale. Weak. What they had just done had taken a lot out of them. Fletcher made sure everyone was touching, then teleported back to the Medical Wing.

  Valkyrie was the first to see them – of course she was – and she sat up in bed and tried to move her parents and Synecdoche out of the way, but the doctor was having none of it.

  “You do not move,” she said sternly.

  Fletcher and Skulduggery walked over. Valkyrie’s neck was in a brace and her face was swollen and cut. Her left hand sported new bandages which matched the bandages on her elbows.

  “She’s gone,” Skulduggery said.

  Valkyrie tried to nod, and winced. “I know,” she said. “I felt her somehow. She seemed happy.”

  “She’s got a whole new universe to conquer. I’m sure she’s thrilled.”

  Fletcher spotted Tanith across the room, sitting on the edge of a bed with her head down. “Is Tanith OK?”

  Valkyrie hesitated. “She’s fine. But Billy-Ray Sanguine is dead. I … I told her about, you know … the two of them. When she had the Remnant. I couldn’t not tell her. Not after he gave his life to save her. I figured she ought to know the whole story.”

  “How did she take it?”

  Valkyrie shook her head. “I’m still not sure.”

  Synecdoche sat her up, lifted her shirt, and applied clear gel to her badly-bruised torso.

  “We’ve got an assortment of broken ribs here that we’ll have to mend later today,” the doctor said, “along with the broken arm, the concussion, the fractured skull and the internal injuries. For now, though, we’ll strap you up and move you on. We need the space and, astonishingly, you’re not critical.”

  Synecdoche motioned to an assistant to finish the job, and hurried to a moaning patient elsewhere.

  “Is that it?” Desmond asked. “Darquesse is gone? It’s over?”

  Skulduggery nodded. “Cassandra and Finbar and the others gave her the reality she wanted and then allowed her to leave it. As far as she knows, we’re all dead. Our universe is dead. There’s nothing for her to come back to.”

  “No more danger?” Melissa asked.

  “Not from Darquesse.”

  Melissa sobbed, turned to Valkyrie and grabbed her good hand. “Sweetheart …”

  “Mum …”

  “Sweetheart, I am so proud of you. I am so … proud. No parent has ever been as proud of their daughter.”

  Valkyrie managed a strained smile that looked odd to Fletcher somehow. The assistant finished up and Skulduggery helped Valkyrie stand.

  “You’re coming home with us?” her mum asked.

  “I will,” Valkyrie said. “When I’m cleared here.”

  “Steph, please—”

  “Mum. Fletcher will take you three home now and I’ll be there as soon as Doctor Synecdoche says I can. I still have things to do here, and I want to check on a few people. I won’t be getting hurt any more today, though, I promise.”

  Melissa hesitated, then nodded, and looked up at Skulduggery. “I owe you an apology.”

  “No,” he said, “you don’t.”

  “I sai
d some pretty horrible things.”

  “Entirely justified.”

  “Oh, I know they were,” Melissa said, “but I’m beginning to think that your good points outweigh your bad. Steph says it’s because of you that she’s alive today.”

  “That may be so. But I’m only here today because of her.”

  Melissa looked back at Valkyrie. “Can I hug you? Would it hurt too much?”

  “You can hug me a little,” Valkyrie said, an actual smile poking through. Both her parents gave her the lightest of hugs, but they both spent ages doing it. When her father was done, he stepped back.

  “Gordon would be so proud of you,” he said. “I know I am. You helped save the world today, sweetie. The kid I raised helped save the world. In a way … in a way, I suppose that means I saved the world.”

  “If anyone’s still listening,” Melissa said, “I would like to apologise for my husband.”

  “I’m going to get a T-shirt printed up. Maybe a mug.”

  Melissa turned to Fletcher. “When you take us home, are we going to throw up again?”

  He couldn’t lie. “Probably,” he said.

  She sighed.

  Desmond poked his finger at Alice. “And don’t think I’m forgetting about you, young lady. Your big sister saved the world today. What the hell have you done?”

  Alice giggled, and Fletcher took them home.

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  Valkyrie and Skulduggery left the Medical Wing. The Sanctuary was in chaos. People ran, shouted at each other. Emergency crews took over. Valkyrie and Skulduggery ignored it all. Valkyrie and Skulduggery had had enough.