Fairy magic, he realized. This entire crowd is about to be mesmerized.
“Look into my eyes,” said a voice from every speaker in the room. The voice even managed to invade the cameras and phones of the audience.
“Wow,” said Juliet in a monotone that did not suit the word. “I really need to look into those eyes.”
Juliet might have been reluctant to do what the silky voice commanded if she’d had any memory of her dealings with the Fairy People. Unfortunately, those memories had been wiped from her mind.
“Block the exits,” urged the voice. “Block all the exits. Use your bodies.”
Juliet whipped off her mask, which was impeding her view of the screen. “Brother, we need to block the exits with our bodies.”
Butler wondered how things could get much worse as hundreds of enraptured wrestling fans surged down the aisles to physically block the entrances and exits.
Block the exits with your bodies? This fairy is pretty specific.
Butler had no doubt that another command was forthcoming, and he doubted it would be Now join hands and sing sea shanties. No, he was certain that nothing benign would issue from that screen.
“Now kill the bear and the princess,” said the layered voice, a few of the layers taking a moment to catch up, lending a sibilant sssss to princess. Kill the bear and the princess. Charming.
Butler noticed a glint of dark intent in his sister’s eyes as she realized that he was the bear. What would she do, he wondered, when she tumbled to the fact that she was the princess?
It doesn’t matter, he realized. We could both be dead long before that happens.
“Kill the bear and the princess,” droned Juliet in perfect unison with the mesmerized crowd.
“And take your time about it,” continued the magical voice, now infused with a merry note. “Drag it out a little. As you humans say: no pain no gain.”
A comedian, thought Butler. It’s not Opal Koboi, then.
“Gotta kill you, brother,” said Juliet. “I’m sorry. Truly.”
Not likely, thought Butler. On a good day, if he was drugged and blindfolded, maybe Juliet could have inflicted a little damage, but in his experience the mesmer made people slow and stupid. A large part of their brains were switched off, and the parts left awake were not going to be winning any Nobel prizes.
Juliet tried a spinning kick but ended up twirling off balance and into Butler’s arms. Annoyingly, her jade ring spun around and clattered him on the ear. Even mesmerized, my sister is irritating.
Butler hefted Juliet easily, then tensed his muscles for flight.
“Kill you,” muttered his sister. “Sorry. Gotta.” Then: “Fairies? You kidding me?”
Was she remembering the Fowl Manor siege? Butler wondered. Had the mesmer accidentally triggered recall?
He could investigate later, if there were a later for them. Butler had considerable faith in his own ability, but he doubted that he could take on a theater full of zombies, even if they weren’t fleet of foot.
“Go to work, my human lackeys,” said the voice that went along with the red eyes. “Dig deep into the darkest recesses of your brains, such as they are. Leave no evidence for the authorities.”
Leave no evidence? What are they supposed to do with the evidence?
That question really didn’t bear thinking about.
Bear? Ha-ha-ha, thought Butler, and then: Jokes? I have time for jokes? Is it possible that I am frazzled? Pull it together, man. You’ve been through worse.
Although, looking at the dozens of stiff-limbed instapsychos lumbering down from the upper levels, Butler could not for the life of him remember when.
A pudgy forty-something man sporting an Undertaker T-shirt and a beer hat pointed at Butler from the aisle.
“Beaaaar!” he yowled. “Beaaaaar and princess!”
Butler borrowed a word from the fairy lexicon.
“D’Arvit,” he said.
CHAPTER 3
ORION RISING
Vatnajökull, Iceland; Now
Artemis was jumping between psychoses.
“Not real!” he shouted at the descending ship. “You are nothing but a delusion, my friend.”
And from there he hopped straight over into paranoia. “You planned this,” he shouted at Holly. “Who were your partners? Foaly without doubt. Butler? Did you turn my faithful bodyguard against me? Did you burgle his mind and plant your own truths in there?”
From the rooftop, the directional mike in Holly’s helmet picked up no more than every second word, but it was enough to tell her that Artemis was not the clinical logistician he used to be.
If the old Artemis could see the new Artemis, the old Artemis would die of embarrassment.
Like Butler, Holly was having a hard time controlling her rebellious sense of humor in this dire hour.
“Get down!” she called. “The ship is real!”
“That’s what you want me to think. That ship is nothing more than a cog in your conspiracy. . . .” Artemis paused. If the ship was a cog in the conspiracy, and the conspiracy was real, then the ship must be real. “Five!” he blurted suddenly, having forgotten all about it for a minute. “Five ten fifteen.”
He pointed all of his fingers at the ship, wiggling them furiously.
A ten-finger salute. Surely that will vaporize this vision.
And it seemed as though the fingers were having an effect. The four discus-shaped engines, which had been trailing behind the main body like helpless puppies tethered to their spooked master, suddenly flipped and began emitting anti-grav pulses that lolloped toward the ground in fat bubbles, slowing the ship’s descent faster than seemed possible for a craft of such inelegant dimensions.
“Hah!” crowed Artemis. “I control my own reality. Did you see that?”
Holly knew that, far from controlling anything, Artemis was actually witnessing a fairy probe’s landing sequence. She had never actually piloted a deep-space probe herself, but nevertheless knew that standing underneath such a behemoth while it was dropping anti-grav bubbles was more than enough to get a person killed, and wiggling fingers like a sideshow magician was not going to change that.
I have to get up, she thought.
But the injury in her legs held her down like a lead blanket.
I think my pelvis is broken, she realized. Maybe an ankle too.
Holly’s magic had an unusual potency, thanks to a couple of boosts from her friend the demon No1 (who was turning out to be the most magical warlock the university had ever enrolled). The magic was setting to work on her injuries, but not fast enough. Artemis had a couple of seconds before one of those anti-grav blobs tore him apart or the ship itself actually landed on his head. And you didn’t have to be a genius to figure out what would happen then, which was just as well, as Artemis didn’t seem to be a genius a
nymore.
“Assistance,” she called weakly into her com set. “Someone. Anyone?”
There was no one. Anyone who had been inside the shuttle was beyond magic, and Foaly was still upended in the snowdrift.
Even if there were somebody, it’s too late.
Large crack patterns bloomed in the ice like hammer blows as the anti-grav pulses impacted on the surface. The cracks spread across the glacier with a noise like snapping branches, dropping large sinkholes through to the subterranean caverns below.
The ship was as big as a grain silo and seemed to be fighting against the pull of its tethered engines, throwing off waves of steam and jets of fluid. Rocket fuel drenched Artemis, making it difficult to ignore the fact that the rocket was real. But if there was one thing Artemis had not lost it was his stubbornness, and so he stood his ground, refusing to yield to his final squeak of good sense.
“Who cares?” he muttered.
Holly somehow heard the last two words and thought,
I care. Desperate situations call for desperate solutions.
Nothing to lose, thought Holly, flapping at the holster on her thigh.
She swept her pistol from its home in a slightly more erratic arc than usual. The gun was synced with her visor, but even so, Holly did not have time to check the settings. She simply held down the command sensor with her thumb, then spoke clearly into the microphone at the side of her mouth.
“Gun.” [Pause for beep.] “Non lethal. Wide-bore concussive.”
“Sorry, Artemis,” she muttered, then fired a good three-second blast at her human friend.
Artemis was ankle deep in slush and in full-rant mode when Holly pulled the trigger.
The beam hit him like a slap from a giant electric eel.
His body was lifted and tossed through the air a moment before the probe clattered to a bone-crushing landing, obliterating the spot where he had been standing.
Artemis dropped into a crater like a sack of kindling and disappeared from Holly’s sightline. That’s not good, thought Holly, then saw her own magical sparks hover before her eyes like inquisitive amber-tailed fireflies.