Butler gave the pretty girl in question an automatic bodyguard’s once-over.
She was twelve or thirteen, did not appear to be armed and had a mane of tight blonde curls. The girl was studiously working her way through a selection of tapas while a male guardian, perhaps her father, read the paper. There was another man at the table who was struggling to stow a set of crutches under his chair. Butler judged that the girl was not a direct threat to their safety, though indirectly she could cause trouble if Artemis was unable to concentrate on his plan.
Butler patted his young charge on the shoulder. ‘It’s normal to be distracted by girls. Natural. If you hadn’t been so busy saving the world these past few years, it would have happened sooner.’
‘Nevertheless, I have to control it, Butler. I have things to do.’
‘Control puberty?’ snorted the bodyguard. ‘If you manage that, you’ll be the first.’
‘I generally am,’ said Artemis.
And it was true. No other teenager had kidnapped a fairy, rescued their father from the Russian Mafiya and helped put down a goblin revolution by the tender age of fourteen.
A horn honked twice. From across the intersection, a young lady gestured through an open limousine window.
‘It’s Maria,’ said Artemis, then caught himself. ‘I mean, let us go. Maybe we’ll have better luck at the next site.’
Butler took the lead, stopping the traffic with a wave of one massive palm. ‘Maybe we should take Maria with us. A full-time driver would make my job a lot easier.’
It took Artemis a moment to realize that he was being ribbed. ‘Very funny, Butler. You were joking, weren’t you?’
‘Yes, I was.’
‘I thought so, but I don’t have a lot of experience with humour. Apart from Mulch Diggums.’
Mulch was a kleptomaniac dwarf who had stolen from, and for, Artemis on previous occasions. Diggums liked to think of himself as a funny fairy, and his main sources of humour were his own bodily functions.
‘If you can call that humour,’ said Butler, smiling, in spite of himself, at his own memories of the pungent dwarf.
And suddenly Artemis froze. In the middle of a heaving intersection.
Butler glowered at the three lanes of city traffic, a hundred impatient drivers leaning on their horns.
‘I feel something,’ breathed Artemis. ‘Electricity.’
‘Could you feel it on the other side of the road?’ asked Butler.
Artemis stretched out his arms, feeling a tingle on his palms.
‘He’s coming after all, but several metres off target. Somewhere there is a constant that is not constant.’
A shape formed in the air. From nothing came a cluster of sparks and the smell of sulphur. Inside the cluster a grey-green thing appeared, with golden eyes, chunky scales and great horned ears. It stepped out of nowhere and on to the road. It stood erect, five feet high, humanoid, but there was no mistaking this creature for human. It sniffed the air through slitted nostrils, opened a snake’s mouth and spoke.
‘Felicitations to Lady Heatherington Smythe,’ it said in a voice of crushed glass and grating steel. The creature grasped Artemis’s outstretched palm with a four-fingered hand.
‘Curious,’ said the Irish boy.
Butler wasn’t interested in curious. He was interested in getting Artemis away from this creature as quickly as possible.
‘Let’s go,’ he said brusquely, laying a hand on Artemis’s shoulder.
But Artemis was already gone. The creature had disappeared as quickly as it had come, taking the teenager with him. The incident would make the news later that day, but strangely enough, in spite of the hundreds of tourists armed with cameras, there would be no pictures.
The creature was insubstantial, as though it did not have a proper hold on this world. Its grip on Artemis’s hand was soft with a hard core, like bone wrapped in foam rubber. Artemis did not try to pull away; he was fascinated.
‘Lady Heatherington Smythe?’ repeated the creature, and Artemis could hear that it was scared. ‘Dost this be her estate?’
Hardly modern syntax, thought Artemis. But definitely English. Now how does a demon exiled in Limbo learn to speak English?
The air buzzed with power and white electrical bolts crackled around the creature, slicing holes in space.
A temporal rent. A hole in time.
Artemis was not overly awed by this – after all, he had seen the Lower Elements Police actually stop time during the Fowl Manor siege. What did concern him was that he was likely to be whisked away with the creature, in which case the chances of him being returned to his own dimension were small. The chances of him being returned to his own time were minuscule.
He tried to call out to Butler, but it was too late. If the word late can be used in a place where time does not exist. The rent had expanded to envelop both him and the demon. The architecture and population of Barcelona faded slowly like spirits to be replaced first by a purple fog, then a galaxy of stars. Artemis experienced feverish heat, then bitter cold. He felt sure that if he materialized fully he would be scorched to cinders, then his ashes would freeze and scatter across space.
Their surroundings changed in a flash, or maybe a year; it was impossible to tell. The stars were replaced by an ocean, and they were underneath it. Strange deep-sea creatures loomed from the depths, luminous tentacles scything the water all around them. Then there was a field of ice, then a red landscape, the air filled with fine dust. Finally, they were looking at Barcelona again. But different. The city was younger.
The demon howled and gnashed its pointed teeth, abandoning all attempts to speak English. Luckily, Artemis was one of two humans in any dimension who spoke Gnommish, the fairy language.
‘Calm yourself, friend,’ he said. ‘Our fate is sealed. Enjoy these wondrous sights.’
The demon’s howl ceased abruptly, and he dropped Artemis’s hand.
‘Speak you fairy tongue?’
‘Gnommish,’ corrected Artemis. ‘And better than you, I might add.’
The demon fell silent, regarding Artemis as though he was some kind of fantastic creature. Which, of course, he was. Artemis, for his part, spent what could possibly be the last few moments of his life observing the scene before him. They were materializing at a building site. It was the Casa Milá, but not yet completed. Workmen swarmed across scaffolding erected at the front of the building and a swarthy, bearded man stood scowling at a sheet of architectural drawings.
Artemis smiled. It was Gaudí himself. How amazing.
The scene solidified, colours painting themselves brighter. Artemis could smell the dry Spanish air now, and the heavy tangs of sweat and paint.
‘Excuse me?’ said Artemis in Spanish.
Gaudí looked up from the drawings, and his scowl was replaced with a look of utter disbelief. There was a boy stepping from thin air. Beside him a cowering demon.
The brilliant architect absorbed every detail of the tableau, committing it to his memory forever.
‘Si?’ he said hesitantly.
Artemis pointed to the top of the building. ‘You’ve got some mosaics planned for the roof. You might want to rethink those. Very derivative.’
Then boy and demon disappeared.
Butler did not panic when a creature stepped out of the hole in time. Then again, he was trained not to panic, no matter how extreme the situation. Unfortunately, nobody else at the Passeig de Gràcia intersection had attended Madame Ko’s Personal Protection Academy and so they proceeded to panic just as loudly and quickly as they could. All except the curly-haired girl and the two men with her.