Chapter Text
Valkyrie ran through the dungeons corridors, the philosopher’s stone tight in her hand. She knew that everything was too damn easy. When she’d crept inside the building, the guards were celebrating something and were completely distracted. The room where the magic stone was located was pathetically protected. But just as she was picturing a nice, calm evening with Xena, maybe even some Days of our Lives, someone had spotted her across the hallway, so now she was running through a maze of dark and umid corridors.
Valkyrie turned around a corner and saw a guard waiting for her at the end of the corridor. Cursing, she stopped on her tracks, and considered her options. If she went back, she would probably face all the other guards that were chasing her, and be even more distant from were she thought it was the exit. And, well, it was as good time as any to try something she’d been practicing. Valkyrie closed her eyes. The man was shouting something and running in her direction, but she ignored him. After a few seconds, she opened them and almost laughed. The world had lost a lot of its color, but she could see magic . Not very well yet, it was like turning a thermal vision filter and not knowing its scales or how to read it. The only thing truly colorful now was the man’s orange aura, but she could also see currents in the air, she could see a hidden sigil glowing on the wall and she could see the magic, like a mist, drifting inside the guard.
The guard stopped, frightened. Valkyrie knew why. Her eyes were crackling with white magic. She focused on the man’s right shoulder, squinted her eyes and pushed . She was momentarily blind, but two beans of energy, smaller than the one she was used to do with her hand, hit the man, exactly where she had aimed. The man collapsed on the floor, and she almost grinned before turning her special vision off starting to run again. She was a freaking X-Man.
The guards seemed to had lost her. Valkyrie slowed a little, trying to think a way out. She passed a smaller corridor on her right, and stopped. Was that a whistle? She backtracked and listened. Yes, someone was whistling “Georgia on my Mind”. She looked back again, to be sure nobody was following her, and entered the corridor. It was full of dungeons cells. The whistling got louder, and Valkyrie found him in the third one, sitting on the floor with his back on the wall, rolling his skinny thumbs.
“Skulduggery?”
He stopped whistling and tilted his head, but remained sitting.
“Ms. Cain?”
It’s been a while since she’d last seen him. Two months, maybe? He was wearing his dark navy suit. One of his favorites, as far as she could tell.
“What are you doing here?”
“You see, many others have asked the same question, but I’m afraid I’m not quite sure. Some say it’s because, when my family was murdered, I got so angry that death wasn’t enough to placate my ire, so I’ve come back. Others say that Nefarian Serpine wasn’t in his top form, and something went wrong with his red hand. Today, I personally think I’m here out of spite.”
Valkyrie blinked and stood silent for a moment.
“I mean, what are you doing in this cell ?”
“Ah. I was looking for the philosopher’s stone, but was surprised by a very silly-looking guard and got caught.” He stood up, brushed the dust off of his suit, and approached the cell door. “You got the stone?”
“This one?” Valkyrie showed him the white crystal.
He nodded.
“Good.” He took a step back and flexed his fingers. “Would you mind taking a step to your left?”
She did, and he spread his fingers. The door went flying and hit the corridor wall. Skulduggery stepped out of the cell.
She frowned at him.
“If you could do that the entire time, why haven’t you escaped before?
“At first there was a guard and I was handcuffed. A second guard appeared and said something about another gatecrasher and both went off running. I’ve managed to pick the lock, but then I got distracted, and then two hours had passed, so I decided to wait to see if the other invader passed by.”
“You got distracted?”
“Happens to the best of us.” He waved his gloved hand, dismissing the situation. “Shall we?” He started to walk through the corridor.
Valkyrie frowned harder. In the two years and a half she knew him, they’d seen each other in a certain amount of dangerous situations, but she’d never seen him freeze or get distracted when there was a threat nearby. Yes, he could talk about unrelated topics and nonsense like no one, but he always had his guard up. To get caught and wait in his cell for two hours? She looked at his back, suspicious, and then she remembered something Ghastly had told her.
“Oh my god.” He turned to look at her, and she pointed at him. “You’re sad about Grace Kelly.”
He froze. He stood silent. He tilted his head.
“What makes you think that Grace Kelly has anything to do with all this?”, he finally said.
“Ghastly mentioned you had a crush on her last week.” She heard Skulduggery muttering something under his breath. “He was worried about the news and how you would react.”
“I’m perfectly fine.”
“Well, obviously you are not, since you were distracted enough to get caught and to forget to escape.”
“Grace Kelly had nothing to do with it,” his voice sounded annoyed. He turned and resumed walking. “We better go before someone finds us.”
Valkyrie ran after him.
“Come on, Skulduggery.” He said nothing. “There’s no need to be embarrassed. Everybody has celebrity crushes.”
“I’m not embarrassed. I don’t get embarrassed. I have nothing to be embarrassed about.” He stopped in a bifurcation, and he raised his hand. “Now, would you please shut up, I need to concentrate.”
Valkyrie raised her hands up to the air, showing her exasperation. She watched as he felt the air. After a moment, he lowered his hand and started to walk through the left corridor. Valkyrie followed him and stayed quiet.
“It was not a crush.”
She repressed the urge to grin.
“She was just a very talented actress.”
“And very pretty.”
He nodded, like Valkyrie had just made a good point.
“And amazingly pretty”, he said, his voice getting a tinge of wonder.
“See, that was not so difficult, was it? You should’ve seen me the day James Dean died.”
He tilted his head, but continued to look forward.
“James Dean?”
Valkyrie shrugged.
“Pretty face, bad boy attitude and nice arms. What not to like?”
“The ridiculous hair?”
“It wasn’t that upright.”
Skulduggery said nothing.
“It wasn’t, and you shouldn’t make fun of other people crushes, I was only trying to–” Skulduggery raised his arm to stop her and pushed her against the wall beside him. He peeked around the corner.
“We’ll have to be really careful now,” he whispered to her.
“Why, it’s a guard? We can handle a guard.”
“No, it’s not a guard. It’s the owner of the house.”
“The sorcerer who stole the stone? That’s good, right? We can arrest him too.”
“I don’t think it’ll be that simple.”
“Why not?”
“The rumors said he’s a Kineticist.”
Valkyrie frowned.
“What’s a Kineticist?”
“An Adept sorcerer who has the ability to absorb kinetic energy and transform it in strength. The more you hit him, the stronger he gets.”
“So all we have to do is not hit him, right? We throw magic at him.”
Skulduggery nodded.
“That would be a very good plan, yes. Except...”
“What?”
“He disappeared.”
Valkyrie heard something right behind her. She turned, just in time to see four guards exiting a small corridor which was not there thirty seconds ago. Leading the guards was a tall but scrawny-looking man. More to the young side, actually, Valkyrie realised when he walked in their direction in the badly illuminated hallway. He didn’t seem very strong, but considering his power, Valkyrie thought, he didn’t need to be.
“Ah, Skulduggery Pleasant and Valkyrie Cain”, he said, his voice hoarse and his eyes shining. He stopped a few meters away, and all the guards around him pointed their guns to Valkyrie and Skulduggery. “I’ve been warned that one of you could make an appearance. Such an honor to meet both of the most unique sorceress in the world”, he clapped his hands together, excited. “We should create a club!”
Valkyrie looked side-eyed to Skulduggery, but the skeleton was looking straight ahead. She turned on her aura vision. All the guards had orange ones, but the young man’s was a very light shade of yellow. She turned it off. She put her hands behind her back, preparing to gather magic. The Kineticist extended his arm, palm upward.
“All you have to do is give the crystal to me, and we could be drinking tea and chatting like old friends in no time.”
“I don’t drink tea”, Skulduggery said, taking a step ahead, with his palms up to show that he meant no harm, and tilted his head to the left. Valkyrie understood.
“And I don’t like chatting”, she said, and raised her arms, her hands now crackling white. She shot upwards, to the ceiling above the sorceress. Skulduggery clapped his hands, and a wave of ar pushed them backwards. Since he had to focus on the breadth, it didn’t had enough power to push all of them across the corridor, but it was strong enough to push the Kineticist against the guards, and make some of those stumble backwards. It was their queue. Skulduggery started to run forward, in what it seemed the direction of the sorceress, Valkyrie right behind him. Her hands didn’t stop blasting magic for a moment, and the ceiling was starting to collapse, dust and stone falling. The Kineticist roared, and the guards composed enough started to shoot, but Valkyrie was wearing Ghastly’s clothes, and, apparently, so was Skulduggery. The skeleton stopped in order to throw fireballs in their direction, and Valkyrie used the moment to stop blasting and jump to the left, inside the narrow corridor from were the Kineticist had popped. She ran a few meters, but looked back and stopped. Skulduggery was crouched and had a hand on the wall, apparently worsening the state of the ceiling, making more pieces fall. She aimed above him and blasted randomly, just to keep anyone from getting to close. When the entrance was reasonably blocked and Valkyrie couldn’t blast past it, Skulduggery got up and they started running.
“Do you know where we are going?”, Valkyrie asked, looking back to the skeleton.
Skulduggery had his hand raised, feeling the air. “Left. And then right. And left again.”
“It’s that the way to the exit?”
But apparently Skulduggery didn’t hear her. The corridors were narrow, not enough room to two people run side by side, so Valkyrie concentrated in keeping up the pace in order to not slow them down. They turned to the last left, only to find themselves in the room where the crystal was when Valkyrie first arrived at the place. She halted at the door, and turned to look at the skeleton.
“Skulduggery, that’s not the exit.”
He nodded at her, but it looked like he was trying to find a way to step inside the room without pushing her out of the way.
“Wonderful observation skills.”
She crossed her arms on her chest.
“I thought the plan was to get out of here.”
He shrugged.
“We never really discussed a plan, to be honest.”
She glared at him. He sighed, and put his hands on her shoulders, carefully pushing her out of the way and into the room. His gloved hands were neither hot or cold. He released her quickly to press a button on the side of the door, closing it. It blended perfectly with the wall. He started to walk towards the middle of the room. Valkyrie glared some more at his back.
He seemed to sense it, because he turned to her, hands in his pockets, looking almost apologetic. She didn’t buy it.
“I forgot something in here.”
“You forgot–”
“Not technically forgot, you see, but when I was here I dropped something, deliberately , in order to the guards not to find it. I knew they were going to ransack me, that’s why I keep my gun between the fourth and fifth ribs, so–”
“You keep your gun inside you?”, Valkyrie raised her eyebrows. She probably was being rude right now, but didn’t care much.
Skulduggery waved his hand dismissively. He started to pace around the room, his head down, clearly looking for something on the floor.
“I have the space, it’s practical, and nobody ever finds it when they pat me.”
“Isn’t it dangerous? I mean, what if it fires accidentally? You could pass a bump on the road, or somebody could shove you really hard, and then next thing you know there’s a bullet in your heart.”
“I don’t have a heart, Ms. Cain.”
“Your figurative heart, then.”
“I keep the gun locked.”
Valkyrie opened her mouth to point out how preposterous was the whole thing, but decided that this was not an argument that she wanted to have right now. She approached him, looking at the floor too, and asked:
“So what are we looking for?”
“My car keys.”
She looked up, waiting to see if he was joking. He didn’t seem to notice, and crouched to look under the table.
“Your car…” She rubbed her temple. “If you put your gun inside you, why don’t you do the same with your car keys?”
Skulduggery was almost under a table, so his answer was muffled.
“Sorry, I didn’t quite get that”, she drawled.
He straightened himself and turned to her, a car key now in his left hand.
“I said: ‘Don’t be absurd, it wouldn’t stop jingling and everyone would hear me coming’.” He jingled the keys for the effect.
Valkyrie narrowed her eyes. She was almost sure he was pulling her leg somehow, but wasn’t sure how exactly. She opened her mouth to accuse him of doing so anyway, but she heard a blast behind her and turned to see the door where they’ve came through crumbling, the Kineticist and two guards right behind it. They’ve stepped into the room, the first one rubbing his hands together and the guards with their guns raised.
“Not a great idea, you see, to collapse a building on top of a Kineticist”, the man said. “Now I have all this... energy to spare.”
The guards fired, and Valkyrie had to cross her arms in front of her head to avoid getting hit. She tried to create an energy barrier, but couldn’t concentrate properly. Suddenly, the bullets stopped coming. Valkyrie looked to the side and saw Skulduggery with both arms raised, palms extended. She looked at the guards and saw that Skulduggery was manipulating the air somehow, creating a shield and making the bullets stop and fall a few meters in front of them.
The Kineticist roared, and started to run towards Skulduggery. The skeleton couldn’t lower his hands yet, but grunted to Valkyrie:
“Guards.”
She nodded and started to run towards them. She raised her hands and aimed to their feet, forcing them to lower their guns and retreat a few steps. When she was close enough, she aimed and blasted magic again, now aiming to one of the guns. It went flying, but she didn’t slow down, running towards the one with the gun still in their hands. She tried to pry the gun away from the guard, but their grip was tight. Both of them stood on this tug-of-war for a moment, until Valkyrie was able to push the barrel down, forcing the stock up and right into the guard’s chin. Their hold weakened, and she pried the gun away from them. She used it to land a few blows: stomach, ribs, temple. The guard crumbled.
Before she could turn, however, the other guard crashed into her, kicking her back. She fell forward, on her knees, and had to drop the gun, but before they could do anything else, she turned still kneeling, one leg swiping back. The guard jumped, but she raised herself swinging an upper. Their chin fell right on top of her fist. They stumbled back, dazed, and she sent a flying kick to knock them out.
While she rushed to lock the two guards away with her handcuffs, she looked up to the other fight.
Skulduggery was avoiding getting to close of the Kineticist, dodging and dancing around him, like a bullfighter. He sometimes threw a fireball towards the other sorcerer, but his clothes seemed reinforced too. Valkyrie finished putting the guards away and started to run towards them, but before could get close, she saw when the Kineticist found an half of an opening and threw a punch on Skulduggery’s ribs.
She screamed. It wasn’t a perfect punch, Skulduggery had stepped away from part of it, but what if the Kineticist could break bones with just one blow? What if a broken bone was all it took to make the skeleton crumble at their feet? She raised her hand, magic on her fingertips, but stopped running when she saw that Skulduggery hasn’t turned to a pile of bones on the floor, or wasn’t holding his ribs painfully or any other thing that indicated a major injury. In fact, he had stopped moving, and was now considering the Kineticist with his head tilted.
“Tell me again how you got to be a Kineticist.”
The man sneered at him.
“I’ve trained since I was a boy.”
“But did you have a tutor? You searched through books extensively?”
Valkyrie felt the need to point out that maybe that wasn’t the best time for this.
“Skulduggery–”
“I was a natural! Ever since I was a little boy people realized my potential for it”, the Kineticist screamed, and went for another punch, this time aiming Skulduggery’s head.
He blocked the punch easily, grabbed the man’s arm and twisted behind his back. The man whimpered, and Valkyrie raised her brows.
“That’s it? That’s his strength?”
“Oh, don’t get me wrong, he’s strong for a scrawny guy, but it seems that’s all of it.”
“Talk about anticlimactic.”
Skulduggery shrugged.
“It was highly unlikely for him to be so skilled without any special training. And since the last real Kineticist died a couple hundred years ago…”
“I am a real Kineticist! He said so! Let me go and I’ll show you!”
“Okay.”
Skulduggery released him suddenly, and the man lost his balance and fell. He scrambled to his feet quickly.
“What?”
Skulduggery opened his arms.
“Hit me.”
The man frowned at him, but assumed a boxer stance. Skulduggery didn’t move. The (pseudo?) Kineticist prepared to throw a punch.
“Wait!”, Valkyrie raised her voice, running the last meters towards them. They looked at her. She sat on top of a table near the wall, legs crossed. “I want to see it properly.”
She closed her eyes, and a minute later opened them again, eyes crackling. She gave a thumbs up at the two.
Skulduggery’s aura was as red as always, bright and abrasive. But not only that, his whole figure was glowing. The magic was around and inside him, not like a mist, but almost like blood currents keeping him standing. It was amazing, and she had to force herself to look away.
The Kineticist’s aura was the same pale yellow that she saw before, but now she wondered if that paleness indicate something else. His magic was still for a moment, but then it started to flow towards his right arm. She saw it building, turning brighter, and she was about to scream to Skulduggery to duck when she saw it leaking to the air, dispelling itself. The Kineticist threw the punch, and Skullduggery grabbed his fist with no trouble.
Valkyrie stood up and approached them.
“Wow, you suck.”
The Kineticist was trying to pull himself out of Skulduggery’s grip, but wasn’t being successful. After a few seconds, Skulduggery got tired of it and landed a blow right in his temple, knocking him out. The skeleton handcuffed him, and turned to look at Valkyrie.
He tilted his head to her.
“Ms. Cain, I have to say, your eyes are sparkling this evening.”
Valkyrie laughed.
“And yours are as deep as a bottomless well, Mr. Pleasant.”
He laughed, and she closed her eyes, turning it off. She winced when she felt a killer headache approaching, but when she opened her eyes again, Skulduggery was still looking at her.
“Do you need a ride, Valkyrie?”
She actually did. Alice had borrowed the Corvette, after dropping Valkyrie nearby, telling Valkyrie to call her when she was finished, but she supposed that asking Skulduggery to drop her off was much more practical.
She shrugged, and started to walk out of the room.
“After the trouble to get the damn car key, that’s the least you could do.”
She didn’t need to look back and see the tilt in his head to know that he was smiling.