Читать книгу Skulduggery Pleasant: Books 1 - 12 - Derek Landy - Страница 199

little over thirty-two hours later, Valkyrie climbed through her bedroom window. The reflection stepped into the mirror and she absorbed its memories. She got dressed in the clothes it had been wearing and went downstairs. She made her mother a cup of tea and sat at the kitchen table and watched her father demonstrate the new baby seat he’d bought for the car. She did her best to smile at his antics.

The Sanctuary was gone. Destroyed. Twenty-nine sorcerers and twenty-one Cleavers had been killed. Davina Marr was missing and every surviving agent was hunting for her.

They’d questioned Scarab in his prison cell and he denied all knowledge. He claimed he had never been in contact with Marr. She was not part of his plan. He enjoyed the fact that such destruction was brought down by one of the Sanctuary’s own agents.

Skulduggery didn’t know why Marr had done what she did, but he knew how. The Desolation Engine that had been recovered at the castle had never been handed over to be deactivated. Marr had kept it and then given it to Myron Stray. She had made sure his name was on the list so that he could enter the Sanctuary without incident, and she had done her best to make sure that Skulduggery and Valkyrie were there also. Using Stray’s true name, she had commanded him to burst his own eardrums so that he couldn’t hear orders that would conflict with hers. Skulduggery theorised that she would have instructed him to keep his mouth shut and warn nobody of what he was about to do. She ordered him to do everything but be unafraid, and so Myron Stray had walked into the Sanctuary fully aware of what he was about to do, but completely unable to prevent it.

As far as the rest of the country knew, the old Waxworks Museum had collapsed all by itself, and it was a miracle that nobody was hurt. The truth had no place in the newspapers. The dead were mourned privately and quietly, the rubble was cleared and the giant hole was filled in. In a few more days, Skulduggery had told her, there would be no sign that the Sanctuary had ever existed there.

Valkyrie went upstairs, pulled on shorts and a vest and went to bed early with the rain gently tapping the window. Within five minutes she was asleep.