Butler sat beside her. “Frankly, I don’t think Artemis has a million dollars. He’s put everything into this latest project. THE PROJECT, as he calls it.”
“What’s he stealing now?”
“Nothing. Artemis has moved on from crime. These days he’s saving the world.”
Juliet’s arm froze halfway through the motion of throwing a pebble. “Artemis Fowl has moved on from crime? Our Artemis Fowl? Isn’t that against Fowl family law?”
Butler didn’t exactly smile, but his scowl definitely grew less pronounced. “This is hardly the time for jokes, sister.” He paused. “But if you must know, the Fowl statutes actually state that a family member caught straying onto the straight and narrow can have his Doctor Evil manual and suction cups confiscated.”
Juliet snickered. “Suction cups.”
Butler’s customary scowl quickly reasserted itself. “Seriously, sister. This is a sinister situation we find ourselves in. Pursued by fairy agents and on the far side of the world from my principal.”
“What are you even doing here? Who sent you on this wild-goose chase?”
Butler had been thinking about this. “Artemis sent me. He must have been coerced, though it didn’t seem so. Perhaps he was tricked.”
“Tricked? Artemis Fowl? He has changed.”
Butler frowned, patting the spot where his shoulder holster would normally hang. “Artemis has changed. You would barely recognize him now, he is so different.”
“Different? How?”
Butler’s frown deepened, a slash between his eyebrows. “He counts everything. Steps, words, everything. I think five is the big number. Also, rows. He groups all the stuff around him into little rows. Usually five per row, or ten.”
“I’ve heard about stuff like that. Obsessive-compulsive disorder. OCD.”
“And he’s paranoid. He doesn’t trust anyone.” Butler’s head dropped to his chest. “Not even me.”
Juliet tossed the pebble far into the lagoon. “It sounds like Artemis needs help.”
Butler nodded. “How about you? You’ve had quite a bit sprung on you in the past hour.”
Juliet raked the shoreline with her fingers, gathering pebbles. “What? You mean little things like being chased by a mesmerized horde? And the fact that fairies do exist? Those tiny things?”
Butler grunted. He had forgotten how much his sister made fun of him and how he, for some reason, put up with it. “Yes, those tiny things,” he said, elbowing her fondly.
“Don’t worry about me, brother. I’m a modern woman. We’re tough and smart, hadn’t you heard?”
“I get it. You’re coping, is that it?”
“No, brother. I feel fine. The Butlers are together, and nothing can stand against us.”
“The new memories aren’t freaking you out?”
Juliet laughed, and the sound did Butler’s heart good. “Freaking me out? Where are we, the 1970s? And, no, the memories aren’t freaking me out. As a matter of fact, they feel . . .” She thought about her next sentence for a while. “They feel right in my head. They belong where they are. How could I have forgotten Holly? Or Mulch?”
Butler pulled a pair of sunglasses from his jacket pocket. They were a little clunkier than the current style, and had tiny solar panels on the arms.
“With fairies on our tail, we may need these.” Juliet plucked them from his fingers, and the stimulus from the contact brought memories flooding back.
Artemis made these from disassembled LEP helmets, so we could see through Fairy shields. The LEP are sneaky, but Artemis is sneakier.
“I remember these glasses. Why did you even bring them?”
“Boy Scout rule number one: Be prepared. There are fairies around us all the time. I don’t want to accidentally shoot one, or miss one, for that matter.”
Juliet hoped her brother was being funny.
“You wouldn’t shoot a fairy,” said Juliet, slipping the glasses onto her face.
Immediately, something appeared in her vision as though it had popped out of a toaster. The something was certainly not human. It hung suspended from a harness and was aiming a bulbously barreled weapon at her head. Whatever it was wore a bodysuit that seemed to be made of a viscous tarlike substance, which clung to its wobbling torso and coated every hair of its shaggy beard.
“Shoot the fairy!” she yelped, shocked. “Shoot it!”
Most people might have assumed that Juliet was joking. After all, what were the chances that a fairy would show up the very moment she donned fairy filters? Not to mention the fact that Juliet was well known for her inappropriate sense of humor and regularly spouted witticisms in moments of mortal danger.
For example, when Christian Varley Penrose, her sous instructor at the Madame Ko Agency, lost his grip on the north face of Everest and went plummeting earthward with only a skinny girl between him and certain death, Juliet braced herself and called to her sensei as he pinwheeled past: “Hey, Penrose. Surely saving you is worth some extra credit.”
So it would be quite reasonable to assume that when Juliet yelled Shoot the fairy she was actually joshing her big brother, but Butler did not assume this for a second. He was trained to recognize stress registers, but even if Artemis hadn’t forced him to listen to that MP3 lecture in the car, he knew the difference between genuinely shocked Juliet and having a laugh Juliet. So when Juliet cried Shoot the fairy, Butler decided on a course of aggressive action in the time it would take a hummingbird to flap its wings.
No gun, so no shooting, he thought. But there are options.
The option Butler chose was to grasp his sister’s shoulder firmly and push her sideways so that she actually skidded along the pebbled beach, her shoulder plowing a furrow in the stones.
Scratched shoulder. I’ll be hearing about that for weeks.
Butler swung both arms forward and used the momentum to pull himself up and into a full-tilt launch at whatever had spooked Juliet. At this point he could only hope that the whatever was close enough to grapple, otherwise there was a fairy somewhere laughing into his face mask and calmly aiming a weapon.
His luck held. Butler made contact with something squat and lumpy. Something that struggled and bucked like a pig in a blanket, and exuded a particular odor that a person might experience if that person were unfortunate enough to somehow end up facedown in a medieval swill patch.
I know that smell, Butler realized, holding on grimly. Dwarf.
Whatever was holding the dwarf up whined and dipped, dunking Butler and his wriggling captive into the lagoon’s waist-high water. For Butler, the dunking was harmless enough—he was virtually clamped around the invisible dwarf, and in fact the cool water felt quite refreshing—but for the shimmer-suited fairy, the sudden dip was catastrophic. Abrasive contact with the sharp scree on the lagoon bed punctured his camouflage suit, breaking the skin, releasing the charge.
The dwarf, Cruik, was suddenly visible.
“Aha,” said Butler, hauling Cruik from the surf. “Dwarf head. Good.”
Cruik had forfeited his gift of tongues along with the rest of his magic, but he had been living among the humans for long enough to pick up a smattering of several languages, and Butler’s simple statement was terrifyingly easy to misinterpret.
Dwarf head? This Mud Man is going to eat my head.
Butler was actually glad to see the dwarf’s head because dwarf heads are disproportionately large, and this particular dwarf’s head was even more bulbous than most. It was almost Butler-sized and there was a helmet perched on top of it.
With a fairy helmet, I can see what this little
guy sees.
It was the helmet Butler was after, not the meaty noggin inside.
“C’mere, slippy,” grunted the bodyguard, intuitively snapping the helmet’s seals and popping it off. “Did you just try to shoot my sister?”
Recognizing the word shoot, Cruik glanced down at his own hands and was dismayed to find them empty. He had dropped his gun.
Cruik was a career criminal and had lived through many close calls without losing his nerve. He had once faced down a gang of drunken goblins armed with only a jar of burn lotion and three bottle tops, but this bloodthirsty giant with a face of fury and a thirst for brains finally sent him over the edge.
“Nooooo,” he screamed shrilly. “No brain biting.”
Butler ignored the tantrum and the musty helmet pong and gripped the protective hat one-handed, as a basketball player might grip a basketball.
Cruik’s skull was now totally exposed, and the dwarf swore he could feel his brain trembling.
When a dwarf finds himself unnerved to this extent, one of two things is likely to happen: one, the dwarf will unhook his jaw and attempt to eat its way out of trouble. This option was not available to Cruik because of his suit’s hood. And two: the terrified dwarf will trim the weight. Trimming the weight is an aviators’ trick, which involves jettisoning as much unnecessary cargo as possible to keep the ship in the air. Dwarfs are capable of shedding up to a third of their body weight in less than five seconds. This is obviously a last resort and can only be performed once a decade or so. It involves a rapid expulsion of loose-layered runny fat, ingested mining dirt, and gases through what dwarf mommies politely refer to as the nether tunnel.
Trimming the weight is mostly an automatic response and will be engaged when the heart rate nudges past two hundred beats per minute, which happened to Cruik the moment Butler enquired whether Cruik had tried to shoot his sister. At that moment, Cruik more or less lost control of his bodily functions and had just time to scream “No brain biting!” before his body decided to trim the weight and use the resulting propulsion to get the heck out of there.