"He looked like a vampire all teeth and bloodshot eyes."

"Well they're hardly going to sparkle in the sun are they? What did he say to you?" Skulduggery asked the young woman in front of him. He was wearing a deep blue suit today with his usual hat on.

"He wanted to know how to open the portal again." The woman named Cassie Appleton answered him. She was short and had a blonde bob hair cut.

"And when you told him that wasn't possible?"

"He said he'd kill me if he didn't get an answer."

"…so why aren't you dead?"

"Because I gave him an answer, obviously."

Skulduggery looked at her and tilted his head. "But you can't have."

"I'm an expert in magical history, it wasn't hard to make something up." She looked at skulduggery like he was an idiot.

Skulduggery got a bad feeling about where this was going. "What. Did. You. Tell. Him."

Miss Appleton looked startled at his tone of voice. "I told him that if he kills the Hourglass and an innocent at the site the portal last opened then it should open again. I gave him a few fake symbols to draw on the floor, he bought it."

"You did what?"

"I don't see what the big deal is, the hourglass has been dead for hundreds of years-"

She was suddenly cut off as Skulduggery's hand closed around her throat.

"The hourglass is very much alive and my daughter."

Cassie's eyes bulged out of her head in fear.

"I'm...sorry...I...I...Didn't...K..K...K...Know."

"You put my daughter in danger." His voice was like steel.

Cassie was struggling to breath and yet Skulduggery didn't move his hand from her throat.

"Skulduggery!" Ghastly entered the room a few moments earlier and had heard the last part of the conversation.

"Let her go, we'll protect her I promise." Ghastly tried to calm his friend.

Skulduggery held on for a moment longer. He pushed his skeleton face close to hers. "If anything happens to Valkyrie, it's you I'm coming after."