Last Stand of Dead Men

“You don’t have any of the answers.”

Kenny didn’t have a violent bone in his body, but there was nothing he would have liked to do more at that moment than jump up and smack Slattery right in the face. “I’m making educated guesses. It’s the only thing we can do with the information we have.”

Slattery hesitated, then turned from the wall and looked straight at Kenny. “We need to have a talk.”

“We’re talking now.”

“We need to have a serious talk about what we’re doing here.”

Kenny’s hand fluttered an invitation. “Go right ahead.”

Slattery sat in the tattered old couch that had come with the tattered old armchair. “It might be time to rethink things,” he said. “When you came to me with this, I thought you’d cracked. I honestly thought you’d gone mad. Magic people and possession and super-powers. I thought to myself, Kenny’s gone round the bend. He’s lost it. All those years chasing stories have led him into the nuthouse. I thought you’d want me and my camera down the bottom of some garden, ready to photograph fairies or something.”

Kenny nodded. “Happy to know you had so much faith in me as a journalist.”

“But then when you showed me what you had and, when I saw it for myself, I thought, holy cow, we’re going to change the world. Politics, religion, society – it’s all going to be turned on its head. And we’re the ones who are going to do it.”

“Nothing’s changed since then.”

“Well, that’s it exactly,” said Slattery. “Nothing has changed. We had a few good months of following Valkyrie around, a few good months of collecting information and names and linking stuff up … and then it all slowed down to a crawl.”

“A crawl? Have you been reading the papers? Something’s going on. Unexplained destruction of property, unexplained disappearances, sightings of—”

“Kenny,” Slattery said, “please. Come on. How does this help us? If we had a team, fair enough. But there’s only two of us. By the time we get to the scene, it’s like nothing ever happened.”

“We just have to be patient.”

“You need to go back to work.”

“I am working.”

“You need to work on a story that will get you paid. You’re living on scraps, for God’s sake. I need to get paid, too.”

Kenny frowned. “That’s what this is about? You want money?”

“I don’t want money, I need money. I have bills to pay.”

“When we release what we have, we’ll be rich beyond our—”

“Release what?” Slattery said, barking a laugh. “We have photographs of people and coloured thread on a wall.”

“You seem to be forgetting the recorded footage we have of Valkyrie Cain and Fletcher Renn fighting a monster.”

“Could I be blamed for forgetting that? It’s not like we’ve done anything with it. We haven’t released it or sold it. We’ve hung on to it.”

“You know why. We need more than that. We need something so concrete that no one will even try to tell us it’s faked. We’re dealing with sorcerers who can make you believe whatever they tell you. We can’t afford to go public until we have overwhelming evidence.”

“And how are we going to get it?”

Kenny sat back.

“You need the evidence to write that book you’re always on about,” said Slattery. “You need the evidence to make that documentary that I’m apparently going to film. Where’s that evidence, Kenny? Where do we find it?”

“We stick to Valkyrie.”

“Here we go again.”

“We stick to Valkyrie Cain and she will take us to the evidence eventually.”

“She’s a teenage girl and you want us to follow her around again? We’ve spied on her enough, don’t you think? We tailed her for months, and she led us to people and places that are up on that wall, and that’s it. That’s all we’ve been able to get.”

“Then we have to dig deeper.”

“With what resources?”

“Well, what do you suggest? That we give up on the single most important story in the history of the world? I’m not exaggerating here, and you know I’m not.”

“I never said you were. I’m just saying we can’t do it alone.”

“We have to keep this between ourselves.”

“We can trust—”

“We can’t trust anyone. A careless word here and there and somehow it gets back to Geoffrey Scrutinous or Finbar Wrong or Valkyrie or Skulduggery, and they’ll come for us. They’ll take all this, all our work and research, and they’ll wipe our minds and do a better job of it than they did with me last time.”

“It’s risky. I know it is. But we don’t have a choice. We need support, we need money, we need help.”

Kenny shook his head. “We do this alone.”

“You know your problem? You don’t want to share the glory.”

“This isn’t about who gets the by-line.”

“Isn’t it?”

“What are you going to do?” Kenny asked. “If I say no, if I say we don’t need anyone, what are you going to do?”

“You mean if you refuse to see sense? I don’t know yet. I might just have to take what I know and go somewhere else.”

“I brought you in on this. This is my story.”

“See? It is about the by-line.”

Kenny sighed. “Just give it a little time, OK? All this crazy stuff that’s been happening, it’s been leading to something, I know it has. We just have to wait. Just a little longer.”

Slattery stood up. “You have till October.”

“You can’t expect—”