Mist turned her head and black spiders started crawling from her nostrils and her ears and squeezing out from behind her staring eyes. She opened her mouth, vomited out more of them, the torrent hitting China in the chest. China slipped and fell and covered her face with her hands, but the spiders were already there, trying to get past her tightly-pressed lips, scuttling over her screwed-shut eyes. They were in her hair, in her clothes, crawling all over her, and still they came, the weight pressing down.
She couldn’t see and couldn’t breathe. She tore handfuls of spiders away from her face, but it was like clawing at a landslide. She tried to get up, squashing them beneath her, but slipped on the mess and fell again, grunting on impact, her lips parting slightly.
And then the spiders were in her mouth.
She kept her teeth locked together, but they were there, filling her cheeks, surging down her throat, and she was choking now, and going to die.
The least she could do was take Mist with her.
Her hand went to her chest, her middle finger pressing through her clothes to the point of her sternum. She traced it down, following the tattoo that she could feel glowing to life, as all of her other tattoos started glowing also. The tattoo swerved left and her finger followed, then swirled, and cut across, and she felt the heat rise from within her. And, as she finished tracing the symbol she had cut into her own skin so long ago, the heat burst from her.
It incinerated her clothes, her shoes, the scant make-up on her face and the light polish on her nails. And it incinerated the spiders, too – burned them all, outside and in, turned them to ash and turned the ash to vapour. She opened her eyes and her mouth and sucked in air that turned superheated and scorched her throat and lungs. She stood, the ground melting beneath her bare feet. She looked at her arms, looked down at herself. She glowed. Her body was a furnace. She could feel her eyes starting to boil.
Madame Mist was struggling to stand. Dismayed at the loss of so many of her spiders. Clutching her ruined arm. So pale and so frightened. China reached out with both hands, clamping her fingers round Mist’s shoulders. Mist tried to scream, but she was dead before she could make a sound. China let her go and she crumbled, a smoking, charred, blackened thing, not even recognisable as a corpse.
China allowed herself a single moment of satisfaction, of something approaching smugness, and turned and saw Skulduggery looking at her.
“What have you done?” he asked.
She could barely hear him over the roar in her ears. Ravel was on his knees, his hands shackled behind his back.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry for what I did to you. I’m sorry for what I did to your family.”
He shook his head. “Turn it off. Whatever you’re doing, deactivate it.”
She gave him a smile. She wondered how it looked through the heat haze. “There is no off switch, I’m afraid. And don’t come any closer. Nothing can withstand its power. I added this tattoo once I learned that you had returned from the dead. It was Mevolent’s idea, actually. A last resort. He helped me craft it. If ever you had found out what I had done, and you’d got your hands on me, I was to use this to kill both of us.”
“That’s insane.”
“Not really. Burning myself alive from the inside was a far less scary thought than what you’d do to me.”
“China—”
“Shut up, Skulduggery. You talk too much, has anyone ever told you that? Shut up and listen. I’m sorry for the part I played in the murder of your child and the woman you loved. I neither deserve nor expect your forgiveness. I don’t even want it.” Her mouth was dry. It was getting harder to speak. “I deserve this. I deserve the pain that’s going to arrive, any second now.”
“I’ll get you to a doctor.”
“It won’t do any good.”
“Then we’ll bind you.”
“With what? I’ll melt any shackles that get close.”
“For God’s sake, there has to be something I can do. I can’t just watch you die in front of me.”
“Turn away and you won’t have to.”
“No!” he roared, then stepped back, standing straight. “No,” he said again, calmer this time. “You did terrible things hundreds of years ago. So did I. I’m no hypocrite. I can’t hate you any more than I can hate myself.”
She laughed despite the pain that was building. “Skulduggery, darling, you do hate yourself.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “I love myself. I think I’m hilarious. And you’re not going to die.”
“Do you know why I like you, you dear, sweet man? Because, while you may not have ever loved me, you have never bored me, either. That’s a rare quality, and one which I have always found most … attractive.”
“I need you, China.”
“How I have longed to hear those words …”
“I need you to help me get Valkyrie back.”
“… followed by those. I wish I had more time to think of something suitably pithy to leave you with but, unfortunately, the pain is becoming quite distracting. Goodbye, Skulduggery.”
[...]
Two words. China wanted to say two words. She only wanted to say I’m sorry, as she reached out through the darkness, found Darquesse’s arm and closed her hand round it.
“Oh, dear,” she heard Darquesse say. “Did you really think that would work?”
China tightened her grip, but she had no more strength and her knees were about to buckle and she stepped back and then there was something cool pressing against her chest.
“It’s going to be OK,” she heard Darquesse whisper.
The darkness shifted to gloom and then brightness and she had eyes again, and she could see Darquesse standing there, her left hand sucking the heat from China’s body. It filled Darquesse now, making her glow, incinerating her clothes, burning through the gold bands in her hair, turning the arm bracelet to ash. The Necromancer ring burst open as it disintegrated, the shadows curling and twisting madly.
China stepped back, repelled by the heat, but in an instant it was gone, absorbed, and Darquesse stopped glowing. The twisting shadows latched on to her, flowed across her strong arms and broad shoulders like oil, down her chest and her belly and her long legs, covering her body like a second skin.