Armageddon Outta Here - The World of Skulduggery Pleasant

And then Peg was gone.

Valkyrie stood beside Skulduggery. “Anything you want to tell me?”

“No,” he said. “Not really. Are all the babies safe?”

“Safe and unharmed. Their folks will be glad to have them back. Are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me? To share?”

“Relatively positive, yes.”

“She seems nice. Peg, I mean.”

He looked at her. “It’s going to take you a while to stop teasing me about this, isn’t it?”

She grinned. “Oh, yes.”

He sighed. “Then you may as well get started.”

lack Annis didn’t like living in a ditch, but times were changing, and the England she had known as a child was long gone. She narrowed her eyes – left eye blue, right eye green – and tried to remember what she had been like as a child. It had been so long ago she had quite forgotten.

Had she laughed and played, like other girls? Had she giggled and joked, and run through the meadows and the fields of Leicester, letting the sunshine warm her skin? Highly unlikely. The more she thought about it, the more she remembered. She couldn’t recall any friends, nor could she recall any giggling or joking. She seemed to remember a lot of screaming, though. Oh, yes, a whole lot of screaming.

Annis walked to the cave mouth, her feet crunching on bones and human remains. It was almost morning. She hated mornings. She hated the morning, the noon, the early afternoon, the late afternoon, and bright evenings. She hated a lot of things.

What had she been thinking about? Oh, yes, her childhood. Now that was a time of her life that had outstayed its welcome. Her parents had been terrified of her. Her father had thought she was the spawn of the devil, but she’d always taken that as a compliment. Whenever she got angry her fingernails would grow long and pointed, and her teeth became jagged and her skin turned blue. She’d never really understood why her skin turned blue, or what purpose it served, but her parents used it as an early-warning system. Annis’s temper was not a pretty sight.

All in all, it had probably surprised no one when she started eating people. Her parents’ friends had probably nodded when they’d heard, maybe shrugged, saying something like, “Aye, doesn’t surprise me one bit, her eatin’ people. Always had that look about her, didn’t she?” Black Annis didn’t mind. By the time she was twenty she’d eaten everyone in her village, parents and all.

That had been … how long ago? Two hundred years, maybe. Now she had streaks of grey in her black matted hair, and her face was lined and she wore her age like an ugly shawl. This was her life – living in a cave that opened into a ditch, kept awake during the day by the tractors that ploughed the field above.

A rat scampered in from the ditch outside and she snatched it up. It was thin and mangy and squirmed in her grip, but she hadn’t eaten in a week, so she bit down and the rat squealed and its warm blood ran down her throat.

She munched through it, not bothering with the tail, which was always too chewy, and dropped the remains at her feet. She coughed up a hairball and spat it out, then wandered back to the fire at the centre of the cave.

She heard Scrannel returning, heard the clanging of his armour, and she allowed a spark of hope to permeate her usual dour humour. He was hurrying. Maybe that meant he’d been successful. Maybe he was struggling with someone. She heard him lose his footing and splash and crash into the ditch. She didn’t care who he’d brought with him – child, adult, old person, she genuinely didn’t care. She was regretting eating the rat now – she should have held off a little longer. She heard Scrannel hiss in pain – either the meal had struck him, or he’d become tangled in the thorns again. Black Annis licked her lips, picturing a plump child, maybe ten years old. She was starving.

But when Scrannel appeared at the cave mouth, he was alone. Disappointment became a weight in the pit of Annis’s stomach.

“Hullo,” Scrannel said, his armour dripping with ditch water. “I’m back.” It wasn’t real armour, of course. He had made it from an assortment of tin products and segments of corrugated iron. It was held together by nuts and bolts and pieces of frayed string. It clanked when he walked. It clanked when he didn’t walk. It just clanked.

“Where’s my dinner?” Black Annis asked, even though the answer didn’t interest her. The only thing that mattered was that she wasn’t going to eat. Again.

“No one’s about,” Scrannel said, giving an apologetic shrug that kicked up quite a racket. “Everyone’s asleep.”

“Of course everyone’s asleep,” Annis snapped. “It’s night. You were supposed to sneak into a house and grab someone.”

“I tried,” Scrannel claimed, eyes wide with earnestness. “But every time I got close to a door or window, the lights would come on and I’d have to run away. I don’t know how they knew I was there. It happened six or seven times.”

Annis crossed her arms. Her dress was shapeless and made of sackcloth. “Do you think,” she said, her voice quiet and filled with barely restrained rage, “that maybe they hear that stupid armour you insist on wearing?”

Scrannel frowned. “They hear this? I don’t think that’s very likely, Annis. They’re probably all psychics. That’s what I think.”

She resisted the urge to tear him limb from bloody limb. Scrannel was, for lack of a better word, a pet. His mother was a troll, to whom his father was nothing more than a drunken blur one dark and stormy night, and so Scrannel himself was a crossbreed, a mongrel, an oddity. He had milky-white eyes that were set too far apart, he had no nose to speak of and a mouth wide enough to swallow a decent-sized rock. He had tiny teeth and high cheekbones and only the barest hint of a chin, upon which he was trying to grow a beard. He had been trying to grow this beard for the past three years. His chin looked vaguely fluffy, but that was as far as it had got.

Scrannel was an idiot of a creature, who actually enjoyed living in a ditch, and the only reason Annis had not eaten him was because he tasted dreadful. The first time they had met she’d torn off a chunk of his leg, chewed it for a few moments before spitting it out. She’d spent the rest of the night being sick in a stream, and Scrannel had stuck around, eventually offering to hold her hair back while she vomited.

That had been twelve years ago, and he still hadn’t left.

“I have a bit of news,” he said, trying to sound casual. “I think I was followed.”

She stared at him. “What?”

“I can’t be sure now,” he said hurriedly. “But there was a woman, and she had blonde hair and a long coat, and I’ve never seen her before, and she looked, you know, out of place.”

“And why do you think she was following you?”

“Because when I ran away, she ran after me.”

Annis could feel her skin starting to turn blue.

Scrannel spoke quickly. “I might be mistaken, of course. Could just be coincidence. She might be a jogger, or something.”

“A jogger?” Annis growled. “In a long coat? At night?”

“Carrying a sword.”

“What?”

“I’m fairly certain she was carrying a sword.”

Annis felt her fingernails grow long. “That doesn’t sound like a jogger, now, does it?”

Scrannel pondered, then shook his head. “To be honest, no, it doesn’t. And now that I think about it, I don’t think she was even wearing jogging shoes. What kind of jogger doesn’t wear jogging shoes?”

“You’re an idiot,” Annis snarled.

His armour clanked when he nodded.

There was movement at the cave mouth. Scrannel scuttled away, and a young woman with tousled blonde hair, wearing a long coat over brown leather trousers and a brown leather tunic, stepped into the cave holding a sword in her right hand.

“That’s her,” Scrannel said unhelpfully.

The woman was holding a coil of thick rope in her other hand, which she let drop into the human remains at her feet.

“Nice place,” she muttered, almost to herself. She had a London accent. Annis liked Londoners. They tasted great.

Scrannel let out a battle cry, then he ran forward. The young woman didn’t use her sword, as Annis expected. Instead, she swayed to one side and slapped Scrannel on the back as he hurtled by. He ran into the cave wall.

Annis could feel her teeth start to lengthen in her mouth. “Who are you?”