Ryn re-appeared back in the study—much to her cousin's displeasure. By the time Butler joined them, it'd seemed as if she'd never left—not that he stuck around to find out otherwise.

No sooner had the bodyguard rushed out to check on his sister than the familiar barbeque-heat-haze slipped into through the still-closing door.

Fortunately, they were both ready for her.

"Good evening, Captain Short. At the risk of sounding clichéd, I've been expecting you." Artemis said from behind his desk, his funky sunglasses covering his eyes.

"Booooooo!" Ryn said from her spot on the stainless steel workbench bolted to the far wall.

"You are, of course, still bound by the promises made earlier tonight…" Artemis continued, but it was a moot point. At Ryn's not-unusually-snide comment, Holly promptly dropped her shield and strode over to the workbench, where the girl was examining one of the fairy helmets Butler had taken earlier.

"So, basically, our situation hasn't changed. You are still my hostage."

Holly stopped before Ryn and held her hand out expectantly. She was mostly just listening to the radio signal—which was apparently broadcasting on revolving frequencies—when Holly came over. Ryn took one look at her, murmured a couple more lines of alien gibberish into the tiny microphone, and handed it over. The elf slipped the stealth-coated helmet over her pointed ears, after that her eyes lost focus listening to the radio broadcast.

"Something I should know?" said Artemis.

"Quiet," Holly hissed.

"Okay, first of all it's we, "something we should know"." Ryn said to her cousin as Holly spoke to her helmet's recipient in some language or another. "Second, the answer to that your question is so obvious why do you even bother asking? Really, what sort of genius are you?"

Artemis narrowed his eyes and opened his mouth to reply, but turned his attention to Holly at the last second. "It's not polite, you know. Ignoring your host."

"Speak for yourself."

Holly snarled. "Enough is enough."

She pulled back her fist, fingers curled into a tight bunch. Artemis didn't flinch. Why would he? Butler always inter—

"Butler's not here." Ryn chimed.

Before Artemis's eyes had time to widen, Holly put an extra few pounds of spring in her elbow and whacked her abductor right on the nose.

Click. Ryn chuckled softly as she looked at the picture on her phone. Holly's a little blurry but not bad. This is so going on the internet. She thought.

"D'Arvit," Holly said, or swore based on her tone. Ryn want sure if it was English, but she filed it under the 'forbidden words' section of her brain anyway.

"You hit me," Artemis said in disbelief, propping up onto his elbows.

"You're just now realizing—how are you considered a genius?" Ryn said.

On a good day, Artemis may've been able to deliver a witty remark. But that demanded a certain level social skill and personal understanding of his cousin—neither of which he currently possessed. So when he opened his mouth, waiting for his brain to supply the customary pithy comeback, nothing arrived.

Holly slipped the Neutrino 2000 into its holster and stepped between them.

"Alright, Mud Kids. Playtime's over. Time for the professionals to take over. If you're both good, I'll buy you each a lollipop when I come back."

And when both Holly and Ryn were long gone, one soaring beneath the hallway's ancient oak beams and the other God knows where, Artemis said, "I don't like lollipops."

It was a woefully inadequate response and Artemis was instantly appalled with himself, the howls of witch-like cackling emanating from the other side of the door doing little to ease the shock. Pathetic really: I don't like lollipops. No self-respecting criminal mastermind would be caught dead even using the word lollipops. He really would have to put together a database of witty responses for occasions such as this, especially if Ryn was to be involved in them.

It was quite possible that Artemis would have sat like that for some time, totally detached from the situation at hand, had not the front door imploded, shaking the manor to its foundations. A thing like that is enough to knock the daydreams from anyone's head—but at least the cackling stopped.


Butler took the stairs four at a time. It was possibly the first time he had ever abandoned Master Artemis in a time of crisis—and with his wild card of a cousin no less. But Juliet was family, and there was obviously something seriously wrong with his baby sister. That fairy had said something to her, and now she was just sitting in the cell giggling. Butler feared the worst. If anything were to happen to Juliet, he didn't know how he'd live with himself.

He felt a dribble of sweat slide down the crown of his shaven head. This whole situation was shooting off in bizarre directions. Fairies, magic, and now a hostage loose in the manor—all without the Orion Factor. How could he be expected to control thing? It took a four-man team to guard the lowliest politician, but he was expected to contain this impossible situation on his own.

Butler sprinted down the corridor into what had until recently been Captain Short's cell. Juliet was sprawled on the cot. Enraptured by a concrete wall.

"What are you doing?" he gasped, drawing the Sig Sauer nine-millimeter with practiced ease.

His sister barely spared him a glance. "Quiet, you big ape. Louie the Love Machine is on. He ain't so tough, I could take him."

Butler blinked. She was talking gibberish. Obviously drugged.

"Let's go. Artemis wants us upstairs in the situation room."

Juliet pointed a manicured finger at the wall.

"Artemis can wait. This is for the intercontinental title. And it's a grudge match. Louie ate the Hogman's pet piggy."

The manservant studied the wall. It was definitely blank. He didn't have time for this.

"Right. Let's go," he growled, slinging his sister over a broad shoulder.

"Nooo! You big bully," she protested, hammering his back with tiny fists. "Not now. Hogman! Hogmaaaan!"

Butler ignored the objections, settling into a loping run. Who the hell was this Hogman person? One of her boyfriends no doubt. He was going to keep closer tabs on callers to the lodge in the future.

"Butler? Pick up."

It was Artemis, on the handheld. Butler jiggled his sister up a foot so he could reach his belt.

"Lollipops!" barked his employer.

"Say again. I thought you said—"

"He said lollipops, you heard right."

And that would be Orion.

Artemis sputtered for a second, seeming too angry to form words, before his cousin apparently decided to show mercy and answered. "Juliet left her walkie-talkie in the kitchen. You were saying?"

"Eh…Butler, get out of there. Take cover! Take cover!"

Take cover? The military term didn't sound right coming out of Master Artemis's mouth. Like a diamond ring in a lucky bag.

"Take cover?"

"Yes, Butler. Cover. I thought speaking in primal terms would be the quickest route to your cognitive functions. Obviously I was mistaken."

"Well aren't you a little ray of sunshine?"

That was more like it. Butler scanned the hall for a nook to duck into as Artemis and Orion continued to quarrel over the handheld. Not many options. The only shelter was provided by the suits of medieval armor punctuating the walls. The manservant ducked into the alcove behind a fourteenth-century knight, hissing into the handheld to get the two to quiet down.

Juliet tapped the breastplate.

"You think you're mean? I could take you with one hand."

"Quiet," Butler hissed.

He held his breath and listened. Something was approaching the main door. Something big. Butler leaned out far enough to get one eye on the lobby…

Then you could say that the doorway exploded. But that particular verb doesn't do the action justice. Rather, it shattered into infinitesimal pieces. Butler had seen something like this once before when a force-seven earthquake had rippled through a Colombian drug lord's estate seconds before he had been scheduled to blow it up. This was slightly different. More localized. Very professional. It was classic anti-terrorist tactics. Hit 'em with smoke and sonics, then go in while the targets were disoriented. Whatever was coming, it would be bad. He was certain of it. He was absolutely right.

Ryn was thinking along the same lines as she surveyed the damage from the kitchen doorway. The thick dust clouds instinctively set her on edge. It was an old instinct originating from Zak's childhood asthma. He'd inherited it and his green eyes from their Mom while she and Isaac had both gotten her blond hair and Dad's dark blue eyes, which were apparently a Fowl thing.

Ryn was ecstatic when the large dark shadow moved in the settling dust—those thoughts were too dangerous to dwell on. Whatever was moving looked like a cross between a gorilla and a bear. With red eyes. And tusks. And…dreadlocks?

The D&D monster wannabe sauntered into the living room, squinting despite the dim light (note: likely subterranean) and scraping its long yellow claws along the probably too-expensive marble tiles. It snorted, sniffing for a moment before honing in on a trail (note: acute olfactory senses). In one of her roleplaying games, she'd worry about the whatever-it-is finding her—as that usually led to a quick charge followed by a battle she had very little chance of winning. But it seemed that the scent the mutant Frankenstein hybrid had found was the closer Butler's.

Ryn know it was going to charge once it honed in on a scent—which is why she chose that moment to duck away from the doorway, feeling the too-old-to-be-in-a-house suit of armor vibrate against her spine as it hit the other side of the wall. She heard, vaguely, Juliet say something about Bigfoot before the most-likely-Butler-gunfire went off.

Bigfoot. Random analogy, but accurate. Ryn thought as she rushed back into the kitchen.


Ryn was disappointed when she poked her head back into the landing. In the short time she'd been gone, Holly had been buried under a carpet-like tapestry, with Butler crumpled just a couple feet from her. Either this thing was tougher than it seemed or Butler and Holly weren't as good as they thought they were.

Ryn decided to give the big guy the benefit of the doubt and say it was a bit of both.

But she supposed that wasn't important right now. With the major players down Bigfoot (as she dubbed him) was turning back to Juliet. The second the troll aligned one of its sickly yellow talons with an artery in her neck was the second Ryn decided she like the older girl way too much for her own good. At that second Bigfoot was distracted from the vein by the sharp clink made by the small object Ryn hurled into the room as it bounced off the floor. The object she'd thrown, or rather made, was basically a stink bomb mounted on top of a battery-operated toy car with a mini siren on top of it. Bright light, loud noise, and stink, the perfect things to distract a cave-dweller with a sensitive nose.

After the second bounce the little device settled on the floor, and at that instant the high-pitched whining and multi-colored lights switched into 'high' mode and the yellow-green gas poured out of the sides in thick puffs. Above the siren, however, was the alien-pitched shriek no one would expect to come from a creature that size.

Ryn smirked broadly. In her month-long gaming binge since she'd come to Fowl Manor, she'd forgotten the joy of a simple prank.

But she wasn't done yet. Immediately after the lights and gas the wheels came on, twirling around in circles at Bigfoot's feet. He was so disoriented that his clumsy swipes at the device were clear by half a foot.

Almost as an afterthought, Ryn grabbed a heavy glass bottle with a gold label from the table next to her. Even though she knew next to nothing about wine or champagne or whatever it was, she guessed from the 1920s date that it was pretty expensive.

She peaked back out the doorway, waited until Bigfoot's back was to her, and then moved.

She ran full speed into the room, expertly hopped onto a coffee table in her path on the balls of her feet, and then used her remaining momentum and the spring from her curled legs to hurl herself up and forward, landing squarely on Bigfoot's back.

Ryn realized, later, that what she'd just done could be considered a gymnastics move—making it her first in almost eight years. But at that moment she was too busy getting a grip on Bigfoot's dreadlocked hair-fur.

The troll instantly felt her impact and rounded on its feet to try to throw her off before bucking once. Ryn, however, was grateful for the buck, it gave her the leverage she needed to haul herself into a sitting position and throw her legs over Bigfoot's shoulders.

Any other girl would've locked their ankles over the troll's neck, it secured their position and gave them the opportunity to choke the creature out. But Ryn was 12 years old, not even five feet tall, and only weighed about a hundred pounds. She wasn't going to rely on her own physical strength, not in this situation, not against this creature. That is why she instead drove her heels into Bigfoot's armpits at an angle that forced her knees into the sides of the big guy's neck.

This time the troll reached over his shoulder to grab her as it had Holly and toss her off, which is when Ryn leaned over the opposite shoulder and smashed the swiped wine bottle right in his face. For this purpose Ryn would've preferred something more like rubbing alcohol, but when the bottle shattered the semi-alcoholic beverage still did the job of rendering Bigfoot temporarily blind. And agitated no less.

The troll roared again, twisting and bucking fiercely in a desperate attempt to throw the tiny human latched on its back off.

Guess I should've considered a career as a bull rider more thoroughly, Ryn thought. For the most part she held on pretty well and managed to get her torso moving in a wave-like fashion that prevented her from getting whiplash. A method not so much skill-based improvisation as it was learned habit from years of riding a mechanical bull at her favorite pizza place back home. All the while pulling Bigfoot's long, greasy dreads to a certain spot in the room.

Then, right on time, she saw the too-big-to-be-anyone-else figure in the corner of her eye. In a second, she removed her feet from Bigfoot's shoulder joints, placed them side by side on the nape of his neck, and sprung up to the ceiling, where she promptly entangled herself in the overhead chandelier.

The troll swung at her heels in an attempt to grab her, paying no attention to the large human human behind it.

Butler closed his visor, twirling the mace in his hand as though it were a cheerleader's baton before ramming it home between the troll's shoulder blades. A blow like that, while not fatal, certainly distracted the troll from its target.

Butler planted his foot just above the creature's haunches and tugged the weapon free. It relinquished its grip with a sickly sucking sound. He skipped backward, settling into a defensive stance.

The troll rounded on him, all ten talons sliding out to their full extent. Drops of venom glistened from the tip of each tusk. Playtime was over. But there would be no lightning strike this time. The beast was wary, it had been hurt and was still reeling from its last attack. This latest attacker would be afforded the same respect as another male of the species. As far as the troll was concerned, his territory was being encroached on. And there was only one way of solving a dispute of this nature. The same way that trolls solved every dispute…

Ryn, for the most part, simply enjoyed the perfect birds-eye-view provided by the chandelier. With her phone running of course.

"I must warn you," said Butler, straight-faced. "I am armed and prepared to use deadly force if necessary."

Ryn genuinely couldn't tell if Butler was playing good cop and giving Bigfoot a legitimate warning, or if he was just creating a diversion. Once again she decided to give the big guy the benefit of the doubt.

"Step away from the females. Easy, now."

The troll inflated its cheeks and roared. Scare tactics. Classic monster move. Butler didn't flinch and Ryn hardly blinked.

"Yeah, yeah. Real scary. Now just back out of the door and I won't have to cut you into little pieces."

Even someone lacking Ryn's dark sense of humor could see how backward the statement sounded.

"One step at a time. Nice and slow. Easy there, big fellow."

Ryn looked over at Bigfoot, there it was. It was subtle but it was there, that small flicker of uncertainty.

Then Butler snapped forward. He danced under the tusks, hammering home a devastating uppercut with his medieval weapon. The troll staggered backward, talons flailing wildly. But it was too late—Butler had stepped out of reach, scooting across to the other side of the corridor.

Bigfoot lumbered after the man, spitting shards of fanged teeth from crushed gums. Butler slid on his knees on the overly-polished floor before rising and turning back to the troll.

"Guess what I found?" he said, raising the Sig Sauer.

Ryn wasn't 100% sure what she was expecting when Butler fired nearly a dozen shots into, or at she supposed, Bigfoot's head. But she knew she didn't expect the mammoth creature to drop dead, somehow all those years of playing countless fantasy games had cemented the idea that such creatures couldn't feld by simple guns. At the same time, she also wasn't expecting to be right.

That is why she was surprised when Bigfoot responded to the shots by stumbling around dizzily and beating his own forehead. The sight, surprisingly, brought back a memory of when Zak came back obscenely late the night of his first high school party drunker than snot. A fly had been buzzing around his head, making him, in his state, repeatedly slap himself trying to hit it.

The sudden wave of sympathy was not something she expected when she stormed out of the basement some seven hours earlier, especially not with something like Bigfoot. She couldn't help it though. Against her better judgment this thing now had an association with her lazy, passive rebellious, bat-crap crazy older brother. The one who knew all the answers to every test but refused to do homework of any kind. Who was dexterous enough to paint a landscape with his feet but couldn't run straight unless it was a life-or-death situation. Who…looked a lot like Artemis now that she thought about it.

Ryn was so wrapped up in her mental episode that she completely missed Butler's nerve point-takedown routine—something she'd rat on herself about that later until she remembered the recording on her phone.

There was a sharp click as Butler loaded a fresh clip into his handgun.

"Let's see how much bone you have under your chin."

"No," an out-of-breath voice said. Twisting her head, Ryn saw it was Holly. "Don't."

When Butler didn't respond, probably because he was busy getting the gun in place under Bigfoot's chin, she tried again.

"Don't do it…You owe me."

Ryn didn't hear a shot. She twisted back to look back at Butler. He was fingering the trigger but it didn't look like he would pull it. Ryn hoped not, aside from the weird Zak connection, she was right on top of them and would prefer not to deal with the mess.

"You owe me, human."

Butler sighed, but lowered the gun.

"Very well, Captain. The beast lives to fight another day. Lucky for him, I'm in a good mood."

Holly made a noise. It was somewhere between a whimper and a chuckle.

"Now let's get rid of our hairy friend."

Butler rolled the unconscious troll onto an armored trolley, dragging it to the devastated doorway. With a huge heave, he jettisoned the lot into the suspended night.

"And don't come back," he shouted.

With that line, Ryn's I-do-what-I-want-to-Hell-with-the-consequences nature returned. She let out an airy version of her witch cackle. Recycling her old prank routines, real-life bull riding, and emotions for crying out loud. She had more going on for her in this one night than the last three weeks!

"Man, if I knew you guys did this kind of stuff on your little missions I would've stuck my nose into your business a long time ago."

Butler came back over to Ryn's position, stone-faced as ever.

"I don't doubt that. Now, why don't we get you down from there?"