The Dying of the Light Read Online Free PDF Page B

China. “And where have you eliminated so far?”
    Skulduggery looked around. “Here. Darquesse is not here, therefore this room can be eliminated from the list of places she could be. Unless she enters this room after we’ve gone, in which case, we’d be foolish to rule it out completely.”
    China sighed. “So what you’re saying is that it’s impossible to track her down.”
    “No, not at all. In fact, we have two ways of finding out where she is. The first is quite simple – we bring her to us.”
    “And how do we do that?”
    “She’s punishing Erskine Ravel for the murders of Anton and Ghastly. For twenty-three hours of every day, he’s subjected to unimaginable agony. If the doctors try to alleviate his suffering, the pain increases. If he grows somewhat tolerant, the pain increases. This link between them is something we can exploit. If we shunt Ravel into another reality, the link could break.”
    “And how does this help us?”
    “Once the link is severed, Darquesse will come looking for answers. When we bring Ravel back, he’ll be her first target. Naturally, we’ll have to be ready, because we’re only going to get one shot at luring her in.”
    China pursed her lips. “Risky.”
    “Oh, yes,” said Skulduggery. “Hugely risky. Possibly suicidal. But we should probably get started on finding a reality to shunt him into.”
    China sighed. “Very well. And the second way?”
    “That’s a little trickier, but it’s also more straightforward. We don’t have to track her – we just have to track the people with her.”
    “You mean Tanith Low.”
    Skulduggery nodded. “Yes I do. Tanith Low and Billy-Ray Sanguine.”

5
TO WATCH THE WORLD BURN
    e watched her standing in the air, her eyes closed, hovering just above the wooden floor. She was wrapped in darkness, from each individual toe right up to her jawline, a darkness so tight he could see the muscles in her legs, the tightness of her belly. She’d been like that for days. Hadn’t opened her eyes, or said one word. Just hovered there.
    Sanguine took off his coat, dumped it on a straight-backed chair, the only piece of furniture in the room. It was cold outside, but hot in here, all that heat generated from the eighteen-year-old girl slowing rotating in mid-air. What was going on inside her mind, he had no idea. Were they human thoughts she was thinking, or something else? Something beyond human?
    Someone that powerful, he reckoned, would only take a short while to start thinking thoughts that had no place in a human head.
    A whisper of leather behind him, but he didn’t turn. Tanith Low was quiet when she did her patrol of this little house in this little ghost estate. Were he to glance out of that window, he’d see a dozen identical houses to this one, but all hollow and empty. Years back, they were set to be sold to the affluent Irish and the lucky immigrants who came here for a better life. Then the money went away and immigrants sought better lives elsewhere, took a good chunk of the Irish with them.
    Sanguine was tired of Ireland. It was coming to the tail end of winter, but the winds were still bitter and the rain was still mean. He wanted to go home, back to the heat of East Texas. He was sick of living the life of an outlaw. He wanted to sit on the porch in the evenings and not have to worry about the world ending, or how to play his part in it.
    He watched Tanith slip out of the window and walk up the outside wall towards the roof. She had binoculars up there she could use to sweep the full 360. She hadn’t said much since they’d arrived here, and she barely slept. The Remnant inside her kept her going, kept her strong and alert. Sometimes he’d catch her looking at him and wonder if today was the day she’d kill him.
    Because she had to kill him. He knew that much.
    Darquesse, that god-in-a-girl’s-body that had once been known as Valkyrie Cain, was the Remnant’s messiah, destined to decimate the earth and reduce