Skulduggery Pleasant: Raising Cain

Chapter 103 - The Old Mill, err, it's a dud

Skulduggery – Crow

Anton – Bear

Ghastly – Panda

Dexter – Wolf

Saracen – Weasel

Erskine – Snake

Solomon – Raven

Corrival – Pa

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Chapter 103

Valkyrie stayed till four in the morning at Nadia's house, quietly laughing, eating and joking with her girlfriend until Nadia looked as if she were about to fall asleep. Nadia had helped her out the window and blew her a kiss as Valkyrie ran away. It was sad leaving her because for those nine hours she had stayed in Nadia's house – she'd stayed a long while – everything else had disappeared. No killers. Raven wasn't missing. Snake wasn't having panic attacks. Crow cared. And best of all, she was a normal girl with a normal life eating snacks and not scared of anything.

At least she fell straight to sleep when she got home.

That sleep was a strange one. She had some weird dream where she couldn't escape a maze and ended up getting to the middle and realising she could have used magic all along to fly and frustrated herself so much in the dream she woke herself up, just to remember she couldn't use that magic at all and got even more frustrated that she had woken herself from her dream with lies.

Rubbing her face, she checked her phone and realised she had to get up anyway. She took her time at first, getting a shower and cutting her toenails, before nodding to herself and deciding it was time to get moving and find Raven even if she wasn't happy with Crow. Raven had done nothing wrong and needed help, so she would do just that.

"Hey Val," Wolf said as soon as she came in.

"Hi," she smiled. The others, that being Tanith, Panda, Snake and Weasel, were eating their breakfast. Wolf looked as tired as her and just as serious. At least they were on the same page. Tanith seemed to be engaged in an eating competition with Snake though if she knew about it was a mystery. Snake was definitely trying to keep up. "Have you heard from Crow?"

"Nothing," Wolf said, tapping the table and leaning back in his chair. "As soon as you're ready I thought me, you and Saracen could go visit The Old Mill and go from there."

"So we're following Crow's footprints now?" Valkyrie asked moodily.

"Yeah, this might not be the time, but I get the feeling Crow's been captured," Weasel said. "I know we're being anti-Skul and all that, but we probably shouldn't let him be pulled apart either."

Valkyrie sagged. "He got captured."

"I don't know!" Weasel said quickly. "Me being confident something happened and my magic saying something happened are similar feelings, so if this is just my past experience of him getting captured getting in the way, I'm sorry, but that's what it looked like from my point of view."

"Let's be honest, he probably got captured," Wolf said and the others nodded.

"I think he enjoys it," Valkyrie muttered. "I also think I told him something like this would happen if he went off alone and oh no, here we are with nothing while he's gone by himself and got captured god knows were. Whatever will he do stuck in a cage being tortured while knowing this is his fault? Hopefully regret it."