Stephanie had woken up that morning to find her parents asleep in her bedroom.
She'd reacted the way most teenagers would - or at least, in Des's limited experience of teenagers, the way most would - and tried to kick them out. It took her less than a minute to remember the night before, and once she did, she reacted with a considerately humbling amount of shame. Even so, she was never out of Des's sight for longer than a few seconds that morning, and Melissa insisted on driving her to school. Stephanie wasn't happy about that, but she didn't argue.
Des and Melissa had spent most of the night talking about whether they'd even let her go to school the next few days. But in the end, they both agreed that holding her back would practically be the definition of overreacting. They still kept an eye on her, and Melissa still made her promise that she'd come straight home after school was over, but they'd be hypocrites if they tried to so much as pause her education in the meantime.
Melissa had work. Des didn't. He'd given himself the day off, without telling his wife, to try and sort things out for himself. It was only after he made the phone call and stood alone in the kitchen that he realised he had absolutely no idea what he was going to do with his day off.
He started by going upstairs to Stephanie's room. Her wardrobe door was still open. The full-length mirror she'd shown them last night was on full display. Without thinking, without even a short pause, he walked over and touched it. Nothing happened. He hadn't honestly been expecting anything to. He still visibly relaxed, and found the strength to take out his mobile phone and dial the Sanctuary's phone number off the little card Corrival Deuce had given them.
He went through five different people before someone could finally give him Skulduggery Pleasant's number.
An hour later, Des was parking outside a small cafe on the outskirts of Dublin that he'd been to several times before. He was parking, moreover, right next to the gleaming black Bentley from last night, against which Skulduggery Pleasant himself was leaning. It took Des a moment after killing the engine, but when he got out of the car, he was smiling. "You were serious about the wig?"
"I don't make promises I don't intend to keep," Skulduggery told him. "Well, not anymore."
He looked a sight. Nicely-tailored suit, which looked as impeccable on him as it did the night before, together with a powdered judge's wig obscuring all of his natural hair. Des managed not to laugh, but it was a very close thing, particularly when he noticed innocent passersby stopping to gawk. "How do you normally handle delicate conversations? Cast spells on everyone in the cafe?"
Skulduggery shrugged. "The novelty wears off soon enough, and people usually only hear what they want to hear. I've never had a problem in the past."
"Really?"
"Really."
Des raised a skeptical eyebrow. "No one's ever asked you what science lab you escaped from?"
"That part is a tad more complicated. I've done fairly well, though."
"Your name is a dead giveaway, you know," Des pointed out sagely.
"And yet, I've never had anyone come up to my disguise and accuse me of being a living skeleton."
He had a sense of humour. That was good. Des leaned against the side of his car on his elbows and watched Skulduggery for a minute, observing without interruption the man who had nearly taken his daughter away from him. A lot less evil than Des had been picturing. Charming, though. Charming, and genuinely friendly. There was something magnetic about him, something that garnered trust. Misplaced trust, almost certainly, but trust nonetheless. Des could see how Stephanie fell under his spell, so to speak.
"I heard someone say you can eat like this," he said. "What do you say? My treat?"
Skulduggery's head tilted to the side. "Financially speaking, perhaps, but am I right in assuming I'll be paying for it anyway?"
"How?"
Skulduggery didn't answer, but he didn't really have to. Des's eyes widened, and with a laugh he couldn't quite help, he shook his head. "I'm not going to kick you, no. I just want a few answers."
"Without your wife?"
Des hesitated, wondering what the best way to phrase his feelings was. He didn't want to insult Melissa, even in her absence, but... "She's very protective. We both are, of course, but she didn't grow up with stories of magic. She's... I think it's probably better if she doesn't know everything. I do know everything. I know as much as Gordon did, if not more. I just want to know how much of it Stephanie has done. And unlike my wife, I won't blame you quite so violently."
Was he upset with Skulduggery? Yes. But Desmond knew very well how stubborn Stephanie could be, and it wouldn't have surprised him in the least if Stephanie could turn even a four-hundred-something year old living skeleton with that stubborn streak.
Skulduggery observed him quietly for a moment, and then nodded. "This is carte blanche, then? You're giving me permission to tell you absolutely everything in regard to Stephanie?"
"I'll blame you violently if you don't."
Was it just Des's imagination, or did Skulduggery actually flinch at those words? Melissa really did a fantastic job. "You should probably know that she sulks far more than is healthy."
"I knew that part," Des nodded, locking his car and stepping around it. "Shall we go in? How do you feel about a cup of tea?"
"I'll take anything," said Skulduggery, following him inside the cafe. "It's you I'm a little more worried about."
Des gave a good-natured scoff. "Me? I'll be fine. Give me a good strong mug of tea, and I can take anything."
~~
He was wrong.
There were no pits of words to describe how wrong Des was.
True to his word, Skulduggery didn't hold back. He didn't falter, he didn't pause, he didn't mince words, never adopted so much as an apologetic smile. He sounded like he was just reading from a history textbook, ignoring the stares his wig was getting and never so much as breaking eye contact with Des. Only once, only once, did he stop and tilt his head. "Are you alright?"
"Hm?" Des swallowed hard and nodded. "Yes, fine. Keep going."
"You're looking very green."
"You just told me that my daughter was in prison. Of course I'm looking green. Keep going."
"You don't want a break?"
"I didn't need a break after you told me a Sea Hag almost killed her. Or when you told me she killed the Grote Gross thingy."
"Grotesquery."
"Yes. That. Keep going."
"You haven't touched your tea."
Des grabbed the mug and a long sip from it, very pointedly, trying not to mind that the tea had long since grown cold. He put the mug forcefully back down onto the table when he was done. "There. Keep going."
"If you say so."
And he kept going, like he'd never stopped. Des couldn't have ignored any of the words even if he wanted to. They were relentless, pounding, washing over him with the power of ocean surf during a storm. He found himself immeasurably glad Melissa wasn't there. Melissa would never, ever have let Stephanie out of her sight again after this. Des was teetering on that very edge himself, fighting a tangle of feelings in his own gut that was bound up with worry for his daughter and sheer disbelief that he hadn't noticed all of this going on. In his mind, he was matching up Skulduggery's story with his own memory of events. Beryl's story about someone chasing Stephanie through Haggard, and when Stephanie disappeared from the family reunion, and all of those times - those single moments, barely remembered - when something had clearly been bothering her and he hadn't asked because it hadn't been his place to ask -
"Stop," he heard himself saying.
Skulduggery did, immediately and without fanfare. "Do you need a break?"
"No." Des looked down at his hands; they were shaking. "It's been a year since then, hasn't it? When did you come back?"
"A couple of weeks ago."
That first visit. Stephanie came into the house with all three of them, all smiles, and Des remembered thinking she hadn't looked so happy in nearly a year. He dropped his face into his hands and didn't respond for almost a minute; when he did, his voice was muffled through his fingers. "Did she rescue you?"
"No. She tried to. By all accounts, she was close. But she never set foot in that other dimension."
"Who did?"
"Gabe."
"Where did he come from? You haven't mentioned him yet."
For the first time, Skulduggery hesitated. Like an actor in a well-rehearsed play, when the script went slightly off-line and he needed to think about his responses again. "Gabe came from a different dimension altogether," he eventually explained. "His family is the sort that go around helping complete strangers for no reason other than they can, and it's the right thing to do. How we met is an entirely different story that doesn't have anything to do with Stephanie."
"What was Stephanie doing? This whole past year? How was she... trying to rescue you?"
"I'm afraid I don't know the details." Skulduggery paused, and just when Des was going to assume he'd finished, the disguised skeleton spoke again. "She was trying to track down my original skull. It was the only Isthmus Anchor left, you see. She was going to use it to open another portal. I know the search took her all around the world, but I'm afraid I don't know much more than that."
All around the world. All around the bloody world. Des took his face out of his hands and gulped down the rest of the tea. Skulduggery left him to it; when the mug was lowered, he finally - finally - looked apologetic. "You'll have to ask her about that span of time."
Des pushed his mug away across the table. "How much have you left out?"
"What makes you think I've left anything out?"
"Because if she's been with you almost every day since this whole thing began, you can't be telling me everything. We'd be here all month."
Skulduggery considered that. "True. I've told you the most important things."
"Every time her life was in danger?"
"Well, no," Skulduggery admitted, and this time he even sounded apologetic. "We'd be here all month."
Something in Des's gut grew tight, and cold. What did sorcerers consider important? "Tell me that you at least mentioned every time the world was in danger."
The slight silence before he spoke was all the answer Des needed, but Skulduggery answered anyway. "The world is, to be perfectly honest, almost always in danger. For every madman you know of, there's at least one who can use fantastically dangerous forms of magic, and at least half of those want to see the world ended. Or changed. Or overrun, for whatever reason. Fortunately, for every one of those, we have at least twenty sorcerers working hard to stop them. And we have me."
"You and Stephanie."
"She's a very good detective, in her own right. Our line of work isn't easy, and there aren't many who can handle the burden. She can, and she does." Skulduggery hesitated. "I haven't been training her because I need a partner. I don't need a partner, for one thing, and even if I did, I wouldn't go for one I had to train. I've been training Stephanie because she wants to be trained, she's very good at the training, and because we make a very good partnership. If one was predisposed to sentimentality, one could say I've grown quite fond of her."
Des closed his eyes. He'd known all of that. Or at least guessed all of that. "And how many people," he asked, remembering Gordon's books, "want the two of you dead?"
"A fair number. Very few of them are actually threats at the moment."
Des was going to be sick. He could feel it. Mentally, he mapped where the bathroom was in the small cafe, and managed it without having to open his eyes. "Why isn't... and I'm not trying to say Steph isn't good, or can't take care of herself. But she's fifteen. Why isn't she..."
He couldn't even bring himself to say it.
For a long moment, there was silence. Des opened his eyes and looked up when it had stretched on for long enough, ready to demand an answer if he had to, and was vaguely surprised to see that Skulduggery was staring off into space. For the first time during their conversation, his attention seemed to be on something else.
"Part of it," he finally answered, "is because I have a certain reputation among sorcerers. In our world, only idiots don't pay attention to reputation. If someone were to kill Stephanie, or have anything to do with her death in any way, they would find themselves on my bad side. People who find themselves on my bad side don't usually live as long as they were expecting."
Something in Des's gut lightened. He wasn't completely sure of what that was, except... well, except that dangerous as this was, as all of this was, Skulduggery's implied promise actually made him feel better. It sickened him all over again, but with the tangled knot of feelings somewhere around the level of his heart, Des was going to take all the comfort he could get. And knowing that Skulduggery would kill anyone who might try to harm his daughter, and that the simple knowledge of that fact was what stopped anyone from trying, made Desmond feel much better than anything else had so far. Skulduggery was powerful enough to strike fear into the hearts of other sorcerers. Stephanie was very firmly under his protection.
Sorcerers may be arrogant as all get out, but Des had to admit that maybe some of them had a reason to be.
"You've turned a shade of olive green," Skulduggery informed him levelly, head tilted to the side. "Are you sure you're going to be alright?"
Des burst out laughing. Oh, it was a hysterical laugh, and he knew it, but he didn't make a single effort to stop himself as everyone in the cafe looked over. Time almost seemed to slow down; someone behind the counter was walking over to find out if everything was okay, and Des took the opportunity to stand up and head quickly over into the bathroom. Where he was, promptly and unsurprisingly, sick all over one of the sinks.
no subject
She'd reacted the way most teenagers would - or at least, in Des's limited experience of teenagers, the way most would - and tried to kick them out. It took her less than a minute to remember the night before, and once she did, she reacted with a considerately humbling amount of shame. Even so, she was never out of Des's sight for longer than a few seconds that morning, and Melissa insisted on driving her to school. Stephanie wasn't happy about that, but she didn't argue.
Des and Melissa had spent most of the night talking about whether they'd even let her go to school the next few days. But in the end, they both agreed that holding her back would practically be the definition of overreacting. They still kept an eye on her, and Melissa still made her promise that she'd come straight home after school was over, but they'd be hypocrites if they tried to so much as pause her education in the meantime.
Melissa had work. Des didn't. He'd given himself the day off, without telling his wife, to try and sort things out for himself. It was only after he made the phone call and stood alone in the kitchen that he realised he had absolutely no idea what he was going to do with his day off.
He started by going upstairs to Stephanie's room. Her wardrobe door was still open. The full-length mirror she'd shown them last night was on full display. Without thinking, without even a short pause, he walked over and touched it. Nothing happened. He hadn't honestly been expecting anything to. He still visibly relaxed, and found the strength to take out his mobile phone and dial the Sanctuary's phone number off the little card Corrival Deuce had given them.
He went through five different people before someone could finally give him Skulduggery Pleasant's number.
An hour later, Des was parking outside a small cafe on the outskirts of Dublin that he'd been to several times before. He was parking, moreover, right next to the gleaming black Bentley from last night, against which Skulduggery Pleasant himself was leaning. It took Des a moment after killing the engine, but when he got out of the car, he was smiling. "You were serious about the wig?"
"I don't make promises I don't intend to keep," Skulduggery told him. "Well, not anymore."
He looked a sight. Nicely-tailored suit, which looked as impeccable on him as it did the night before, together with a powdered judge's wig obscuring all of his natural hair. Des managed not to laugh, but it was a very close thing, particularly when he noticed innocent passersby stopping to gawk. "How do you normally handle delicate conversations? Cast spells on everyone in the cafe?"
Skulduggery shrugged. "The novelty wears off soon enough, and people usually only hear what they want to hear. I've never had a problem in the past."
"Really?"
"Really."
Des raised a skeptical eyebrow. "No one's ever asked you what science lab you escaped from?"
"That part is a tad more complicated. I've done fairly well, though."
"Your name is a dead giveaway, you know," Des pointed out sagely.
"And yet, I've never had anyone come up to my disguise and accuse me of being a living skeleton."
He had a sense of humour. That was good. Des leaned against the side of his car on his elbows and watched Skulduggery for a minute, observing without interruption the man who had nearly taken his daughter away from him. A lot less evil than Des had been picturing. Charming, though. Charming, and genuinely friendly. There was something magnetic about him, something that garnered trust. Misplaced trust, almost certainly, but trust nonetheless. Des could see how Stephanie fell under his spell, so to speak.
"I heard someone say you can eat like this," he said. "What do you say? My treat?"
Skulduggery's head tilted to the side. "Financially speaking, perhaps, but am I right in assuming I'll be paying for it anyway?"
"How?"
Skulduggery didn't answer, but he didn't really have to. Des's eyes widened, and with a laugh he couldn't quite help, he shook his head. "I'm not going to kick you, no. I just want a few answers."
"Without your wife?"
Des hesitated, wondering what the best way to phrase his feelings was. He didn't want to insult Melissa, even in her absence, but... "She's very protective. We both are, of course, but she didn't grow up with stories of magic. She's... I think it's probably better if she doesn't know everything. I do know everything. I know as much as Gordon did, if not more. I just want to know how much of it Stephanie has done. And unlike my wife, I won't blame you quite so violently."
Was he upset with Skulduggery? Yes. But Desmond knew very well how stubborn Stephanie could be, and it wouldn't have surprised him in the least if Stephanie could turn even a four-hundred-something year old living skeleton with that stubborn streak.
Skulduggery observed him quietly for a moment, and then nodded. "This is carte blanche, then? You're giving me permission to tell you absolutely everything in regard to Stephanie?"
"I'll blame you violently if you don't."
Was it just Des's imagination, or did Skulduggery actually flinch at those words? Melissa really did a fantastic job. "You should probably know that she sulks far more than is healthy."
"I knew that part," Des nodded, locking his car and stepping around it. "Shall we go in? How do you feel about a cup of tea?"
"I'll take anything," said Skulduggery, following him inside the cafe. "It's you I'm a little more worried about."
Des gave a good-natured scoff. "Me? I'll be fine. Give me a good strong mug of tea, and I can take anything."
~~
He was wrong.
There were no pits of words to describe how wrong Des was.
True to his word, Skulduggery didn't hold back. He didn't falter, he didn't pause, he didn't mince words, never adopted so much as an apologetic smile. He sounded like he was just reading from a history textbook, ignoring the stares his wig was getting and never so much as breaking eye contact with Des. Only once, only once, did he stop and tilt his head. "Are you alright?"
"Hm?" Des swallowed hard and nodded. "Yes, fine. Keep going."
"You're looking very green."
"You just told me that my daughter was in prison. Of course I'm looking green. Keep going."
"You don't want a break?"
"I didn't need a break after you told me a Sea Hag almost killed her. Or when you told me she killed the Grote Gross thingy."
"Grotesquery."
"Yes. That. Keep going."
"You haven't touched your tea."
Des grabbed the mug and a long sip from it, very pointedly, trying not to mind that the tea had long since grown cold. He put the mug forcefully back down onto the table when he was done. "There. Keep going."
"If you say so."
And he kept going, like he'd never stopped. Des couldn't have ignored any of the words even if he wanted to. They were relentless, pounding, washing over him with the power of ocean surf during a storm. He found himself immeasurably glad Melissa wasn't there. Melissa would never, ever have let Stephanie out of her sight again after this. Des was teetering on that very edge himself, fighting a tangle of feelings in his own gut that was bound up with worry for his daughter and sheer disbelief that he hadn't noticed all of this going on. In his mind, he was matching up Skulduggery's story with his own memory of events. Beryl's story about someone chasing Stephanie through Haggard, and when Stephanie disappeared from the family reunion, and all of those times - those single moments, barely remembered - when something had clearly been bothering her and he hadn't asked because it hadn't been his place to ask -
"Stop," he heard himself saying.
Skulduggery did, immediately and without fanfare. "Do you need a break?"
"No." Des looked down at his hands; they were shaking. "It's been a year since then, hasn't it? When did you come back?"
"A couple of weeks ago."
That first visit. Stephanie came into the house with all three of them, all smiles, and Des remembered thinking she hadn't looked so happy in nearly a year. He dropped his face into his hands and didn't respond for almost a minute; when he did, his voice was muffled through his fingers. "Did she rescue you?"
"No. She tried to. By all accounts, she was close. But she never set foot in that other dimension."
"Who did?"
"Gabe."
"Where did he come from? You haven't mentioned him yet."
For the first time, Skulduggery hesitated. Like an actor in a well-rehearsed play, when the script went slightly off-line and he needed to think about his responses again. "Gabe came from a different dimension altogether," he eventually explained. "His family is the sort that go around helping complete strangers for no reason other than they can, and it's the right thing to do. How we met is an entirely different story that doesn't have anything to do with Stephanie."
"What was Stephanie doing? This whole past year? How was she... trying to rescue you?"
"I'm afraid I don't know the details." Skulduggery paused, and just when Des was going to assume he'd finished, the disguised skeleton spoke again. "She was trying to track down my original skull. It was the only Isthmus Anchor left, you see. She was going to use it to open another portal. I know the search took her all around the world, but I'm afraid I don't know much more than that."
All around the world. All around the bloody world. Des took his face out of his hands and gulped down the rest of the tea. Skulduggery left him to it; when the mug was lowered, he finally - finally - looked apologetic. "You'll have to ask her about that span of time."
Des pushed his mug away across the table. "How much have you left out?"
"What makes you think I've left anything out?"
"Because if she's been with you almost every day since this whole thing began, you can't be telling me everything. We'd be here all month."
Skulduggery considered that. "True. I've told you the most important things."
"Every time her life was in danger?"
"Well, no," Skulduggery admitted, and this time he even sounded apologetic. "We'd be here all month."
Something in Des's gut grew tight, and cold. What did sorcerers consider important? "Tell me that you at least mentioned every time the world was in danger."
The slight silence before he spoke was all the answer Des needed, but Skulduggery answered anyway. "The world is, to be perfectly honest, almost always in danger. For every madman you know of, there's at least one who can use fantastically dangerous forms of magic, and at least half of those want to see the world ended. Or changed. Or overrun, for whatever reason. Fortunately, for every one of those, we have at least twenty sorcerers working hard to stop them. And we have me."
"You and Stephanie."
"She's a very good detective, in her own right. Our line of work isn't easy, and there aren't many who can handle the burden. She can, and she does." Skulduggery hesitated. "I haven't been training her because I need a partner. I don't need a partner, for one thing, and even if I did, I wouldn't go for one I had to train. I've been training Stephanie because she wants to be trained, she's very good at the training, and because we make a very good partnership. If one was predisposed to sentimentality, one could say I've grown quite fond of her."
Des closed his eyes. He'd known all of that. Or at least guessed all of that. "And how many people," he asked, remembering Gordon's books, "want the two of you dead?"
"A fair number. Very few of them are actually threats at the moment."
Des was going to be sick. He could feel it. Mentally, he mapped where the bathroom was in the small cafe, and managed it without having to open his eyes. "Why isn't... and I'm not trying to say Steph isn't good, or can't take care of herself. But she's fifteen. Why isn't she..."
He couldn't even bring himself to say it.
For a long moment, there was silence. Des opened his eyes and looked up when it had stretched on for long enough, ready to demand an answer if he had to, and was vaguely surprised to see that Skulduggery was staring off into space. For the first time during their conversation, his attention seemed to be on something else.
"Part of it," he finally answered, "is because I have a certain reputation among sorcerers. In our world, only idiots don't pay attention to reputation. If someone were to kill Stephanie, or have anything to do with her death in any way, they would find themselves on my bad side. People who find themselves on my bad side don't usually live as long as they were expecting."
Something in Des's gut lightened. He wasn't completely sure of what that was, except... well, except that dangerous as this was, as all of this was, Skulduggery's implied promise actually made him feel better. It sickened him all over again, but with the tangled knot of feelings somewhere around the level of his heart, Des was going to take all the comfort he could get. And knowing that Skulduggery would kill anyone who might try to harm his daughter, and that the simple knowledge of that fact was what stopped anyone from trying, made Desmond feel much better than anything else had so far. Skulduggery was powerful enough to strike fear into the hearts of other sorcerers. Stephanie was very firmly under his protection.
Sorcerers may be arrogant as all get out, but Des had to admit that maybe some of them had a reason to be.
"You've turned a shade of olive green," Skulduggery informed him levelly, head tilted to the side. "Are you sure you're going to be alright?"
Des burst out laughing. Oh, it was a hysterical laugh, and he knew it, but he didn't make a single effort to stop himself as everyone in the cafe looked over. Time almost seemed to slow down; someone behind the counter was walking over to find out if everything was okay, and Des took the opportunity to stand up and head quickly over into the bathroom. Where he was, promptly and unsurprisingly, sick all over one of the sinks.