Playing With Fire

Chapter Sixteen THE SWITCH

VALKYRIE KNEW IT was a bluff, she just knew it, and Skulduggery confirmed it when he uttered the code words.

"Be brave."

He was gripping her wrist tightly. Her knees were sore from where she had dropped. Her performance was pretty impressive, she had to admit. Hopefully it was also pretty believable.

"Let go of me!" she shouted.

Skulduggery looked over at the Torment. Scapegrace was standing beside him, enjoying every second of what he thought was going on.

"Give us a minute," Skulduggery said.

"A minute," the Torment replied. "Nothing more."

Valkyrie let Skulduggery pull her to her feet and lead her away.

"Keep shaking your head," he said softly.

"What are we going to do?" she asked. "The only way he tells us what we want to know is if you kill me."

"I'm not going to kill you."

"Oh good."

"I'm going to kill your reflection."

"What? How?"

"Where is it right now?"

"Half day in school, so it should be at home."

"Call it, tell it to step back inside the mirror."

To keep up the act, Valkyrie tried, and failed, to pull away. When Skulduggery pulled her back to him, she continued. "But if you do kill it, what will happen? Will it, like, actually die?"

"It doesn't live," Skulduggery reminded her, "so it can't die. It will, however, appear to be dead. I think if we return it to the mirror afterward, though, it should be fine."

"You think?"

"This hasn't been done before. No one has bothered, simply because sorcerers can tell a reflection from a real person with ease. The only way this will work is if the Torment is as out of practice as we're hoping."

They reached the corner of the Roarhaven Sanctuary, and Valkyrie took out her phone.

Skulduggery stepped behind the corner and hunkered down out of sight. He started to dig a hole with his hands.

Valkyrie dialed her home phone, and it was answered after two rings.

"Hello," her own voice said.

"Are you alone?" Valkyrie asked.

"Yes," the reflection answered. "Your parents are still at work. I'm sitting in your room, doing your homework."

"I need you to step into the mirror, okay? We're going to try something."

"All right."

"And leave a note for Mum. Tell her I'm spending the night at a friend's."

"What friend?"

"I don't know," Valkyrie said impatiently. "Pick one."

"But you don't have any friends."

Valkyrie glowered. "Tell her I'm sleeping over at Hannah Foley's."

"Hannah Foley doesn't like you."

"Just do it!" Valkyrie snapped, and hung up.

Skulduggery was scooping out handfuls of earth, making a shallow hole about three feet in diameter.

She hesitated. "It'll be okay, won't it? Once we put it back in the mirror, it'll come back to life, right? I know it's not life life, but..."

"Valkyrie, me shooting the reflection is just the same as me tearing up a photograph of you. There is absolutely no difference."

She nodded. "Okay. Yes, I know. Okay."

He smoothed out the base of the hole, and with his finger he drew a large circle in the dirt, and in that circle he drew an eye with a wavy line through it.

"Are they looking?" he asked.

Valkyrie held a hand to her face like she was crying, and glanced back. "No, they're talking. The Torment is looking annoyed."

Skulduggery stood and held out a hand. The air around him became damp, and droplets of moisture began to form. A rainbow appeared in this mist and cloud, and abruptly vanished when Skulduggery drew it all in tighter and let it fall, as rain, into the hole.

He said, "Surface speak, surface feel, surface think, surface real," and then his fingers curled. The puddle became a mini whirlpool that erased the pattern at its base. Skulduggery calmed the water, and nodded to Valkyrie.

She stood directly over the puddle and looked down, then dipped her toe in the water. The puddle rippled, obscuring her view.

And then a hand broke the surface. They watched the reflection, clad in the same black clothes Valkyrie was wearing, as it slowly climbed up, out of the puddle. No, Valkyrie corrected herself, it wasn't climbing out of the puddle, for she could still see the bottom of the hole. Rather, the reflection was climbing out of the surface of the puddle, and changing from a two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional person before her eyes.

Skulduggery took its hand and helped it out the rest of the way, and it stood there and didn't speak. It wasn't even curious about why it had been summoned.

"We're going to kill you," Valkyrie told it.

It nodded. "All right."

"Can you cry?"

The reflection started weeping. The sudden change was startling.

"Dead man," the Torment called. "Your minute is up."

Skulduggery rested his hands on Valkyrie's shoulders. "Push me away," he said.

He moved in to hug her and Valkyrie turned so that he blocked her from the Torment's view, and she shoved him back and switched places with the reflection. She pressed herself against the wall of the building and didn't move, expecting to hear a shout of alarm. But no shout came. They hadn't noticed the switch.

Skulduggery and the reflection walked back around the corner, and Valkyrie made her way to the cover of the trees. She moved quietly, keeping low, and she didn't once peek. At first, she reasoned that she didn't want to risk being discovered, but she knew it wasn't that.

The truth was, she didn't want to see herself being killed.

She flinched when she heard the gunshot. Her skin was cold, and she had goose bumps.

She rubbed her arms through her coat.

A few minutes later she heard Skulduggery and Scapegrace approaching. She watched them go to the Bentley. Skulduggery placed the reflection's body in the trunk. It looked so limp.

Valkyrie took a deep breath. Tearing up a photograph. That's all it was. That's all.

The Torment had disappeared back into the town, having suddenly lost all interest.

Scapegrace probably expected Skulduggery to rip him apart, but Skulduggery was too busy teasing Valkyrie. She came out from hiding and strolled over, her unease fading. If he was joking, that meant the plan had worked.

"She hardly ever shut up," Skulduggery was saying. "I pretended to be friends with her, but honestly, I just felt sorry for the poor girl. Not the brightest, you know?"

"You're such a goon," Valkyrie said, a grin forming, and Scapegrace turned and squealed.

She ignored him. "Did we get what we need?"

"Bancrook," Skulduggery said. "Vengeous probably has Vile's armor by now, but the Grotesquery should still be in Bancrook. We got what we need."

"You're dead," Scapegrace said in a small voice. "You're . . . you're lying in the trunk."

"Sorry to disappoint you, but my reflection is lying in the trunk."

"No," Scapegrace said. "No, I've seen reflections, you can tell if something's a reflection. ..."

"Not this one," Skulduggery told him. "She uses it practically every day. Over the past year, it's kind of . . . grown, so if I were you, I wouldn't feel bad about being fooled. If I were you, there's a load of other things I'd choose to feel bad about."

"Like how you could have got away," Valkyrie said, "if you'd just kept walking, instead of coming over to gloat."

"I could have got away?"

"Free and clear."

"And . . . and now?"

"Now we're going to Bancrook," Skulduggery said, "and we're dropping you off at a holding cell along the way."

"I'm going back to jail?"

"Yes you are."

Scapegrace sagged miserably. "But I don't like jail."

Skulduggery snapped the shackles into place around Scapegrace's wrists. "Today is not a good day to be a bad guy."