Free Skulduggery Pleasant: The End of the World by Derek Landy Page A

doesn’t like me.”
    Her mother shook her head. “Don’t.”
    “It’s true! Ever since I inherited the Estate they’ve been out to cause trouble—”
    “It’s the inheritance, isn’t it?”
    Stephanie looked up. “What?”
    “Your behaviour has been changing ever since you gotthe inheritance. What, do you think you can play by your own rules now?”
    “Mum, no, that isn’t it…”
    “I think it is. Before this, you barely went out. You barely had any friends. You’d be in your room or you’d be down at the beach, and you’d hardly talk to anyone. We were getting worried about you, actually.
    “And now look at you. This Tanith girl, those other people you’re hanging around with, the ones that are keeping you out all day. Who are they? I don’t know who they are. But they’ve definitely had an effect on you.”
    “No they haven’t.”
    “No? You’re still the same old Steph?”
    “Of course I am.”
    “The same old Steph wouldn’t do the things you’re doing. You’ve even changed the way you dress, you’re wearing those black clothes all the time. We wanted to see you come out of your shell, we’ve been wanting to see that for a long time, but we didn’t expect that the person that came out of that shell would be… would be you.”
    Stephanie didn’t answer. She didn’t like this. She didn’t like being under constant attack, without the means to fight back. But she couldn’t fight back, she couldn’t argue, because she didn’t know what she might say in her anger. She had to sit here and take it.
    “You need to think about what you’ve done,” her mother said. “Think about the people you’ve hurt, and the people you
are
hurting, and then decide if you think it’s worth it.”
    Her mother left the room, closing the door behind her. Stephanie sat very still, allowed a few moments to slip past, then lashed out, flinging a lamp across the room. It smashed into the wall and dropped.
    She blinked, watching as it rolled to a stop on the floor. She hadn’t touched it. She’d reached for it and then suddenly it was flying through the air, but she hadn’t actually
touched
it. She smiled to herself. Her powers were growing. Just in time, too.
    WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN, PART 3:
    (The following is a chunk of the original epilogue.)
    Valkyrie Cain. She’d taken that name and she’d embraced it, without the slightest idea of what that would entail. She was a part of it now, part of the world that had claimed the life of her uncle, entering into it with gleeful abandon and hideous ignorance. She’d had the audacity to think that because she was descended from the Last of the Ancients, she was somehow meant for this. Meant for magic and marvels and wonders. And what had she seen instead? She’d seen death and destruction, terrors beyond belief and stuff of which nightmares are made.
    Silly little girl.
    She deserved all the pain she had received. The bruises, the fractures, the cuts, the broken bones? She deserved them, she deserved all of them and more. After all, hadn’t she got off lightly? What about poor old Ghastly Bespoke, now nothing more than a ridiculous statue in the back room of his shop? Or Tanith Low, the feisty and brave Tanith Low, skewered by a man who had vanished without a trace? Had Tanith deserved her untimely death? Stephanie was the one who should have died, and she knew it.
    Her death would be a release, after all. It would release her parents from having to worry about her. After that night in Haggard, after all the tales of roving gangs and fighting in the streets and Stephanie being at the centre of it all, her poor mother and father were at their wits’ end. Her mother hadn’t spoken to her in weeks. Her father couldn’t even look her in the eye anymore. She hobbled around on her crutches and no one in town wanted to have anything to do with her. She was better off dead.
    Even little Jasper was scared of her, little Jasper and his ears that stuck out like car