Kingdom of the Wicked

“Jerry Houlihan,” she said. “He thinks he’s a butterfly. Apparently they don’t wear trousers.”

“And is he a butterfly?”

“He isn’t.”

“You’re quite sure?”

“Quite.”

“He could be a butterfly dreaming he’s a man.”

“Well, he’s not. He’s a big fat man dreaming he’s a big fat butterfly. What the hell am I supposed to do?”

There was another hesitation. “I’m not sure. You don’t happen to have a large net handy, do you?”

“I want to hit him. I want to hit you, but I also want to hit him.”

“You can’t hit him. He’s an ordinary mortal under some kind of magical influence. It’s not his fault he’s acting this way. I assume you have him out of public view at the very least? Valkyrie? Valkyrie, are you there?”

“I’m here,” she said dully. “He’s started leaping with every third step. It’s kind of mesmerising.”

“I can only imagine. The Cleavers should be with you in half an hour or so. Can you contain him until then?”

She gripped the phone tighter. “You’re not serious. You can’t be serious. We’ve saved the world. I, personally, have saved the world. This here, right now, this is not something I do. This is something other people do and then you and me laugh about it later.”

“We do what needs to be done, Valkyrie. Once you’ve handed him over to the Cleavers, meet me in Phibsborough.”

She sighed. “Another busy night?”

“It certainly looks that way. I really must go. Sally Yorke has just set fire to her knees.”

The line went dead. Valkyrie gritted her teeth and stuffed the phone back in the pocket of her black trousers. This was not how a seventeen-year-old girl was supposed to spend her evenings. She blamed the Council of Elders for making this a priority. Yes, she accepted that it was a major problem that previously unremarkable mortals were suddenly developing magical abilities – aside from the threat they posed to themselves and others, they also risked exposing the existence of magic to the general public, and that was not something that could be allowed to happen. But why, out of all the cases that were popping up all over Ireland, did Valkyrie have to deal with the weird ones who thought they were butterflies? There were a few dozen sedated mortals back in the Sanctuary and not one of those was as weird and unsettling as Jerry Houlihan in his underpants.

Valkyrie frowned, and wondered why she couldn’t hear Jerry’s footsteps any more. Then she looked up and saw him flying through the night sky, flapping his arms and squealing with glee.

“Jerry!” she shouted. “Jerry Houlihan, get down here!”

But Jerry just giggled and jiggled, unsteady in the air but flying – definitely flying. He reversed course, flapping back towards her. Stupidly, she looked up as he passed directly overhead. The image seared itself into her mind and she felt a little piece of herself die.

Jerry veered off course, drifting from the safety of the park towards the bright streetlights of Dublin City. Valkyrie reached up, felt the air, felt how the spaces connected, and then she pulled a gust of wind right into him, knocking him back towards her. She needed a rope or even a piece of string, just something to anchor him in place like a fat, man-shaped kite.

“Jerry,” she called, “can you hear me?”

“I’m a butterfly!” he panted happily.

“I can see that, and a very pretty butterfly you are, too. But aren’t you getting tired? Even butterflies get tired, Jerry. They have to land, don’t they? They have to land because their wings get tired.”

“My wings are getting tired,” he said, puffing heavily now.

“I know. I know they are. You should rest them. You should land.”

He dipped lower and she jumped, tried to grab his foot, but he beat his arms faster and bobbed up high again. “No!” he said. “Butterflies fly! Fly high in the sky!”

He was gasping for air now, losing his rhythm, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t keep himself from dipping lower once more. Valkyrie jumped, grabbed him, closed her eyes and tried to send her mind to a peaceful place. Jerry was sweating from all that exertion, and his skin was warm and sticky and hairy. Valkyrie remembered the good times in her life as she pulled him out of the sky, handhold after handhold. He made a last-ditch effort to soar away and she had to grip the folds of flesh on his hips to hold him in place. Then Jerry gave up and stopped flapping, and Valkyrie fell screaming beneath his weight.

“I’m not a butterfly,” Jerry sobbed, as Valkyrie squirmed and wriggled beneath him.

The Cleavers arrived on time, as they usually did. They escorted Jerry Houlihan into their nondescript van, treating him surprisingly gently for anonymous drones with scythes strapped to their backs. Valkyrie hailed a cab, told the driver to take her to Phibsborough. They pulled over beside Skulduggery’s gleaming black Bentley.

Skulduggery was waiting for her in the shadows. His suit was dark grey, his hat dipped low over his brow. Tonight he was wearing the face of a long-nosed man with a goatee. He nodded up to a dark window on the top floor of an apartment building.

“Ed Stynes,” he said. “Forty years old. Lives alone. Not married, no kids. Recently split from his girlfriend. Works as a sound engineer. Possibly a werewolf.”

Valkyrie glared at him. “You told me there were no such things as werewolves.”

“I told you there were no such things as werewolves any more,” he corrected. “They died out in the nineteenth century. Unlike certain other creatures of the night that I could mention but won’t, werewolves were generally good people in human form. So appalled were they by their carnivorous lunar activities that they actively worked against their darker selves. They sought cures, isolation, whatever they needed to make sure that they didn’t spread the curse to anyone else.”

“Unlike vampires,” Valkyrie growled.

“You mentioned them, not me.”

“So if werewolves are extinct, why do you think Ed Stynes is a werewolf?”

“Last night, people in the area reported sightings of a large dog, or a man dressed as a bear,” Skulduggery said. “He didn’t hurt anyone – werewolves seldom do on their first time out unless they’re cornered. But on their second time, things get a lot more violent.”

“But if werewolves are extinct …”

“The infection has been diluted down through the generations, but it’s still there in a tiny fraction of the world’s population. Too weak to ever manifest into any actual transformation – unless the carriers of this infection were suddenly and inexplicably to gain magical abilities.”

“So Ed is like my butterfly man earlier.”

“Yes. The latest in a worryingly long line of mortals developing magic. Unfortunately in Ed’s case, it triggered a long dormant aspect of his physiology. You’re going to need this.” He handed her a long-barrelled gun.

Her eyes widened. “This is mine? You’re giving this to me? This is so cool.”

“It’s a tranquilliser gun.”

Her face fell. “Oh.”

“It’s still cool,” he insisted. “But I’m going to need it back afterwards. It’s part of a set. I have the other one, and I like to keep them together. It’s already loaded with a single tranq dart, so all you have to do is point and pull the trigger. The dart is loaded with enough sedative to bring down a—”

“Small elephant?”

He looked at her. “What?”

“You know. In the movies, if they’re going after something dangerous, they always say their tranquilliser darts have enough sedative to bring down a small elephant.”

“What do people have against small elephants?”