Skulduggery Pleasant: Raising Cain

Chapter 19 - Lord Vile

Skulduggery – Crow

Anton – Bear

Ghastly – Panda

Dexter – Wolf

Saracen – Weasel

Erskine – Snake

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Chapter 19

They all met in Kenspeckle's hospital with various but not significant wounds to talk.

"The good part is Vengeous has been killed, as our orders instructed," Crow recapped for them, pacing up and down the ward. Valkyrie ate her food Civet had brought her with a mock-flirty wink that had gotten him a few mocking-glares from her friends and a laugh from her. They didn't get food. Kenspeckle didn't like them enough. "The bad part is he already tasked a lot of people to search for what he wants so we need to stop them from gathering in one place and completing the process. It will be a lot easier without Dusk and Vengeous though. And that Sanguine man. I get the impression he'd have been particularly hard to put down if not for Anton."

They all nodded. "Where are we going to look?" Valkyrie asked.

He hesitated. "I'm not sure. Honestly, I thought this was going to take ages and we'd find everything with Vengeous sometime tonight. He tends to make a lot of noise, so it would be easy to..."

Valkyrie was glaring at him.

"We'll find it soon."

She kept glaring.

"I have many ideas on where it could be. We'll split up. Done by the afternoon," he promised.

She looked at him suspiciously but nodded uncommittedly.

"He'll be looking for Vile's armour too," China said from her bed. She looked elegant and put together even with mud on her face. Tanith found it too amusing and had to look away from her immediately.

Crow nodded. "We'll find all of it. The heart, the body and the armour. It'll be over before you know it."

Wolf laughed. "I thought this was going to take ages."

Erskine groaned. "This isn't fair."

Valkyrie smirked and was about to say something naughty back when Kenspeckle came in and she decided not to have her friends killed just yet. Sex, or anything sexual in any form, was not permitted to be known to her as per Kenspeckle's wishes. She liked to pretend she was wholly innocent since he was so nice to her.

Bear caught the look and smiled at her though. She giggled a little and Kenspeckle gave her a fond look no one else could see as he handed her a small box of healing stones. She had almost run out. Turning to the others, he put his hands on his hips.

"You better not let Valkyrie near that monster," he said darkly. "I don't care if it's active or not, you shouldn't take that chance. When is the last time she got to do anything someone her age should? Do you not think of what this does to a young woman psychologically?"

He kept ranting, moving around the room and checking drips and cuts, mostly on China and Wolf, everyone else was in their own beds out of habit, and Valkyrie looked at her phone. She turned it off silence and looked over the texts from Nadia. Most of them were things happening in school, that she was bored, to entertain her, then that her mother had claimed family emergency to get her out. She was currently getting her hair done and being lectured on what was appropriate to wear at a family reunion. She had been mean and sent some texts Valkyrie didn't get often and made her blush a little, asking her about things she wanted to wear that night, mainly some shorts – they were pretty tiny, she'd sent the link she'd bought them at as if to pretend sending a picture of her butt was just something normal – and a pretty flowy top she was going to wear. It would show a lot of cleavage. She'd sent a picture of that too from when she'd worn it a few weeks ago in the shop. Yep, a lot of cleavage. She went redder.