A/N: I TOLD YOU I WAS POSTING!
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I do not own Skulduggery Pleasant. Derek Landy does.

I was in one of those dreams where you knew it was a dream. A lucid dream. I was aware. I could hear the sounds of battle raging around me, loud as an avalanche yet strangely distant, as if my ears were disconnected from my body.

I turned around. People were fighting. It seems I had arrived right where I left of the last dream. Adepts, elementals and even children of the spider were battling necromancers. The necromancers were horribly outnumbered and the mix would have beaten them if it wasn't for Darquesse. I could see her at the edges of the battle, just watching. Occasionally flicking her wrist to take care of some of the more tough specimens.

I could see lots of blood and bodies and bone. There wasn't a square inch of ground that wasn't covered in blood. The sky was still clouded by the haze of smoke which seemed to make everyone lethargic. They were slowed down, tears blurring their eyes and lungs screaming for fresh, cool air.

I couldn't see any of the mortals. The magic-users probably smuggled them out.

Or they were dead.

I saw something flying at me. I was too late to duck, so I just closed my eyes and waited for the bone-shattering impact.

Nothing happened.

I opened my eyes again and saw that the thing- I think it was a necromancer- went straight through me. Like I was a ghost. Some sort of apparition.

Coming back from that realisation, I went up to the person who threw the necromancer. It was Ghastly and he was breathing very heavily, his muscles rippling and his heavily scarred face twisted into a mask of complete exhaustion.

"Ghastly!" I called when I was a few feet away from him. It seemed he didn't hear me, which was not impossible. The sounds of the battle were very loud.

I ran up beside him and yelled his name in his ear.

Nothing.

I waved my hand in front of his face but, even though he was staring straight down at it, he seemed to not have seen it.

I guess I'm invisible, too.

Darquesse had risen high in the sky, observing the lesser beings that surrounded her. She gazed at them with no emotion at all, just a calculating expression as her long, ebony hair danced in the storm of power that cracked and sizzled around her.

Suddenly, her gaze whipped across the sea of bodies to land straight on my spectral appearance. Dark, soulless eyes met with mine and I could feel myself being pulled towards them, into their seemingly bottomless depths.

I woke up in my own bed, again sweating and breathing heavily. The sun was just beginning to make its way over the horizon.

I got out of bed and headed to the bathroom, getting in the shower and drowning the memories of the dream in steaming hot water.

Nothing really changed that dream. I could see the carnage and destruction that Darquesse would cause but I had seen that in my other dream. I went through all the details on my head, to see if I could get a clue about what would happen in the battle. I kept on being pulled back to the memory of me staring into the obsidian eyes of Darquesse. Something other than her cold indifference and curiosity sparked there. It was cold, hard fury. But directed at what?

I was pulled out of my reverie by a banging on the door.

"Stephanie?" mum called from the other side. I immediately relaxed from my tensed position.

"Yes, mum?" I called over the sound of the water running from the showerhead.

"We're going out today, so get ready!"

"Okay mum," I called back. It wasn't me that was going out with my parents, it was my reflection.

I turned the shower off and hopped out. I caught a glance in the mirror- the first glance of my real self I had in ages- and gasped.

A long white line ran along the line of my cheekbone. It was the scar from Sanguine's blade. I dimly remembered that the scars from his straight-razor didn't heal.

I was too caught up in all the excitement from being kidnapped to really notice the gash on my cheek, but now that I do, I wondered how my parents would take it and I prayed that the reflection would not take on this particular feature.

I hurried to my room and drew my reflection out of the mirror. I grimaced when she walked out with a fresh scar that wasn't there yesterday.

"You have a new scar," she said with a tone of indifference as we got dressed.

"So do you," I retorted.

"You don't want mum and dad to see, do you?" she asked.

"No, it would cause them to ask questions," I replied.

She walked over to our desk and opened one of the draws. She pulled out some makeup.

"Where'd you get that?" I asked, bewildered.

"Mum took me shopping," she said with a shrug. She started dabbing the makeup on top of the scar. She looked over to me. "Want some?" she asked.

I grimaced. "No thank you," I said.

She shrugged again and continued putting the make up on. I heard a pop as Fletcher appeared in the room.

"You ready?" he asked me, peering quizzically at the Reflection.

"You could have told me I had a very discernable scar in the middle of my face," I said with an eyebrow raised.

Fletcher shrugged and took my arm. "I thought you knew," he said, just before we teleported into Skulduggery's home.

Skulduggery looked at us. "Nice of you to knock," he said.

I sat on one of the sofas. "What's the plan for today?" I asked, ignoring his previous sarcasm.

"Training," Skulduggery said.

Fletcher groaned.