Mortal Coil

Mortal Coil
Derek Landy

Meet Skulduggery Pleasant: detective, sorcerer, warrior.Oh yes. And dead.Skulduggery Pleasant is back, and reunited with his original head. But all is not well in the magical world – for one thing, foreign powers are conspiring to take over the Irish Sanctuary, and for another thing, Valkyrie has discovered she might be the sorceress set to destroy the world. The problem is, she doesn’t feel she can tell Skulduggery what she’s learned… and that’s how all the trouble starts.With Valkyrie on a quest of her own, to seal her name and prevent her evil destiny from coming to pass, Skulduggery and the gang are even more vulnerable. Which is a shame, because remember those thousands of remnants, imprisoned in the Midnight Hotel? Well, now they’re out. Not only that but they believe Valkyrie is their messiah. And that means thousands of wicked souls, desperate to get to Valkyrie, willing to kill anyone in their way… Oh, and because they can possess any body, they could be ANYONE.Now Skulduggery, Valkyrie, Ghastly and Tanith can trust no one. Not even each other…

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2010

First published in this edition in the United States of America by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2018

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

The HarperCollins website address is:

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

Skulduggery Pleasant rests his weary bones on the web at:

www.skulduggerypleasant.com (http://www.skulduggerypleasant.com)

Derek Landy blogs under duress at

www.dereklandy.blogspot.com (http://www.dereklandy.blogspot.com)

Text copyright © Derek Landy 2010

Illuminated letters copyright © Tom Percival 2010

Skulduggery Pleasant logo

HarperCollins Publishers

Skulduggery Pleasant ©

Derek Landy

Cover design © blacksheep-uk.com (http://blacksheep-uk.com)

Cover illustration © Neil Swabb

Derek Landy asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780008266363

Ebook Edition © 2017 ISBN: 9780008266370

Version: 2018-07-25

This book is dedicated, with great reluctance, to myeditor, Nick Lake, because he is forcing me to.

Personally, I would have liked to include Gillie Russelland Michael Stearns who, along with Nick, reallywelcomed me into the publishing world with myfirst book.

Unfortunately, because Nick is now my sole editor, he hasthreatened to edit this dedication down to anunrecognisable mess of blacked-out lines, and so as aresult this dedication is to him, and him alone.

Personally I think that this shows a staggering amount of

and

, which proves that Nick is nothing but a

with

for

, but hey, that’s justmy personal opinion.

Here, Nick. You finally get a book dedicated to you.

Hope you’re

happy.

.

(Editor’s Note: Nick Lake is a great guy.)

Contents

Cover (#u55d4160f-525a-586d-ac34-74465082737e)

Title Page (#u94d38a63-0c5c-5e44-b1ce-459c923fb332)

Copyright (#uac94c341-3b7d-54aa-bac5-e0d13b2c060a)

Dedication (#ua62cf191-df65-57a8-a4ba-a4cfa68e47f0)

Chapter 1. Wreath’s Task (#ud608b38d-fae1-556b-ace7-f6fecd40325c)

Chapter 2. The Smiling Detective (#u5def92a2-e7fa-59c9-b4f1-34fcb62aedbb)