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Standing in her back garden in the middle of the night like the world’s worst metaphor. Literal though the situation may be, that doesn’t make it appropriate. He knows this. Or at least he is keeping the knowledge seated and well-trained in his peripheral. It’s why he asks what he does, some instinctual, grasping effort to slot their relationship into a safer category.
Or any category at all, really.
He asks, “Do you want me to tell you a bedtime story?”
He hears the smile in her voice. He sees it, too, just like he sees the soft curve of her bare shoulder where it peeks out from beneath the sheet. He wonders if she’s forgotten how well he can see in the dark. He wonders if she hasn't.
Her cheeks are full with that irrepressible smile. “No thank you,” she says.
He’s about to nod and sink into silence and not have any further thoughts about her smile or her cheeks or her shoulders.
“But you can sing me a lullaby if you want.”
Phantom pain. That’s what they started calling it back in the 1870s. Skulduggery has been feeling it since before it had a name.
It’s rare now, so far in time from his body. The damage that can be inflicted on his aura is very specific: A torture of dissolving. A singular, serious ache. But being alive attracts all manner of suffering. Wounds are varied, different in both measure and kind. It’s been so long that it usually takes him a while to identify the phantom in question. But this: This is not a feeling one forgets easily, even after three hundred years.
Skulduggery trusts himself—some would say too much. Some would, in fact, deem this a “huge liability” and a “fatal flaw” in his otherwise perfect and unshakable character. Skulduggery almost never agrees with some, but when he trusts himself enough to open his mouth and sing the first song that springs to mind, he thinks he might understand—just a touch—what they’re on about.
“Me and Mrs. Jones,” he sings softly. “We got a thing…”
His phantom heart lurches. But he doesn’t stop: She’d notice and turn suspect, she’d tease it out of him, or else she’d search up those few words and find the song herself. His voice strains; he catches himself before he falters— “Going on, we both know that it’s wrong…”
There’s an eternity of space in every sustained note. He drops his voice to something just above a whisper, hoping she’ll barely make out the words, hoping she’ll fall asleep before the second verse.
But she’s just staring at him, or at least the space where she knows he’s sitting, and he feels like the monster that crawled out from underneath her bed: Lost in shadow, teeth bared.
But it’s much too strong to let it go now.
And still she’s smiling.
When he sings Six-thirty, and no one knows she’ll be there, he sees her shoulders hitch. He touches the air before he can stop himself, senses that she’s no longer breathing.
When she finally exhales, he feels that too. He doesn’t imagine her breath on his neck, at his jaw. He doesn’t wonder if her pupils are blown from trying to see him in the blackness or for another reason entirely. And he most certainly doesn’t notice the way the blanket is slowly slipping further from her shoulder.
He just sings. He thinks of nothing but the next note, and the next, until she finally closes her eyes.
“We gotta let it go now,” he sings finally, his voice hushed.
And he thinks that’s that, he’s made it through the most treacherous three minutes of his life unscathed, and Valkyrie will wake up having forgotten about the whole thing entirely. Because his plans always work out, regardless of whether or not he has one. He removes his hat and settles in to rest.
But then her voice drifts toward him, small and rough with almost-sleep. Her eyes are still closed.
“Skulduggery?”
“Yes, Valkyrie?”
“Come to bed?”
He doesn’t move. She reaches one bare arm from beneath the covers, her hand grasping toward him.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he says softly.
“It’s part of my prank,” she says, that smile playing at her lips again. She balls her hand into a fist and then opens it again and he thinks of her as an infant, reaching up for his hat.
She’s always been incorrigible.
He rocks forward onto his feet and takes her hand, using the leverage to half-stand, half-tumble (gracefully, of course) into bed beside her. She laughs, immediately rolling onto her side to face him, her body not more than an inch from his.
“Didn’t think you’d really do it,” she says.
“Then why’d you bother asking?”
“To scare you.”
“I don’t get scared.”
She ignores that for his benefit. “Your shoes are still on.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he replies. “My feet are dangling off the bed.”
They look down. The bed does, indeed, cut him off just above the ankle.
“Guess it’s time for a bigger one,” she says.
“No,” he says, “It isn’t.”
She just grins and nestles in against his chest. The entire length of her body is pressed against his now, separated only by one thin blanket, one thin sheet, and the three finely tailored layers of his suit.
“You’ve got to put your arm round me,” she says, matter-of-fact. Her breath touches the space where his throat should be.
He keeps his voice steady, light. “Also part of the prank, I assume.”
“Wrong.” She delights in saying it. “I’m just cold.”
“I’m cold,” he points out.
“You’re not,” she says. Her face is close enough that he can count her eyelashes. “I feel warmer when you stand next to me.”
His plans, it must be said, do not always work out. Particularly when he never had one to begin with.
His voice is steely. “You have a wonderful imagination.”
“Yes,” she says, eyes glinting even in the darkness. “I do.”
“Go to sleep, Valkyrie.”
“You do it all the time,” she whispers, reaching for his hand. Slowly, too slowly, she guides it to her waist, and his grip tightens around her instinctively, the same way it does when they’re flying.
“That’s—practical.”
“That’s—” She mocks him with the pause. “A very good excuse.”
He spreads his fingers just so he can hear her next smug remark wilt in her throat. She gasps, the line of her body tightening stick-straight against him as she clutches his jacket, and he sweeps his hand first to the small of her back and then upwards until he’s holding her, his gloved hand firm between her shoulder blades.
She holds the tension for two seconds, three, four, and then goes limp in his arms. She’s pressed her face to his chest so that he can’t see her expression—shyly, one might say, if the person in question were anyone other than Valkyrie Cain.
“Happy now?” he murmurs. His teeth nearly graze her temple.
He feels her nod more than he sees it.
“Go to sleep, Valkyrie.”
She mumbles something against his shirt. He doesn’t ask her to repeat it. She’s asleep by the time he begins to regret not asking.
Her parents don’t walk in. Dawn breaks without her disappearing to another dimension. When she wakes up, she looks up at him and smiles that soft and crooked smile.
“Thought I dreamt you.”
“You’re dreaming now. There’s no such thing as walking, talking skeletons.”
She laughs and kisses him on the jaw, disentangling herself and sliding out of the bed before he has time to form a response.
And then she’s nothing but a silhouette in the early morning sun, the sheet draped around her strong, still-growing frame, and he feels pain in places he doesn’t remember hurting, places he didn’t even know could feel an ache.