Thanks to: shiningpearls, Jolinnn, Readagirl99, 6000j, The Littlest Mouse, Steinbock and Shadow914 for the reviews.

You guys are so awesome. I just see the review notifications coming through one after the other with the same names and it makes me smile every time to know you've all been onboard since the start. Like we're all on the adventure together! It's ace :)

WARNINGS: Swearing, bad driving, good driving, car smashes.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

Inversion

Country Backroads, County Dublin

"This wasn't what we agreed to, Artemis."

The words were said with a firmness the Fowl would normally associate with The Major when he was…discontent with his orders. If it was unusual to hear it coming from his bodyguard, the tone sounded stranger still out of the fifteen-year-old Butler's mouth.

"I am aware. But we can hardly back out now."

Domovoi thought they bloody well could back out now. This was a CAT 2 situation for 'Risk to the Principal' if he'd ever seen one. Short of taking his uncle's charge directly into a firefight, there wasn't much more he could do to put him in danger. Driving in an unsuitable vehicle for the terrain on an amateur-organised track with one other car supposedly not out to run them off the road was one thing. Driving that same vehicle under worsening weather conditions, with the added factor that the other two cars in the race would likely be doing their utmost to ensure that they crashed, was quite another.

The rain seemed to be dampening the spectators spirits. They had to pull over several times into passing places to let them file past down towards the start at a sane and sensible speed, crammed into cars with not enough seats. Only a pair of sodden farmhands remained midway along the track to act as marshals, and even as weather-worn as they were, they huddled by the gate between the wall and their quadbike at the bottom of the slalom against the onslaught of wind and rain.

The thunder rumbled above the noise of the rain lashing the windows and the expression on the young Butler's face looked not far off as tempestuous.

He faintly remembered being perturbed about the noise; a long time ago now. Less scared, like most children, but certainly curiously uncertain, like a puppy exploring a garden for the first time. Pa had scooped him up and taken him to one of the large, bay windows in the manor to watch the storm, sitting down on the windowseat with little Dom on his knee, showing him how he could predict the noise was coming by the flash of lightening that lit up the clouds.

Fowl Manor - The Past

Flash.

"And then we count," he had murmured, is large hand spanning the three-year-old's whole chest, feeling his heart thrumming in his ribcage. "One... two... three... four... five..."

Boom.

"And that means the storm is roughly a mile away," said Pa. "Not five miles, although some people will tell you it's a mile per second, these people are wrong. But don't bother telling them until you're much older. People don't like to be corrected by an adult, let alone a child."

Dom gripped his grandfather's large fingers with his small ones when the rumble came.

"What's making the noise, Pa?" he asked, a little worriedly, squinting through the rain on the glass in search for the source.

"Well, the flash, Kingdom," he explained, calmly. "The lightening makes the sound, but we don't hear it until much later because sound travels much slower."

"Oh..." said Dom. "How much slower?"

"Well," Pa said, searching his cranium for an answer the boy would understand. "That depends on the conditions - air temperature, pressure and the likes. But, roughly, light is around 877,000 times faster than sound."

"Is that a lot?" he frowned.

"It's nearly a million."

"That's a lot," Dom nodded, certainly.

Not if you ask a Fowl, Pa mused, but kept the thought to himself, lest he confuse the boy.

Flash.

"One... two... three..." he muttered quietly.

"Now?" asked the boy.

"Four..." Pa said, shaking his head and holding four fingers up.

Boom.

"See now it's closer. Less than a mile."

"How slow is the sound?" Dom asked, suddenly.

"Still very fast," Pa told him.

"Faster than... running?"

"Yes, much faster."

"Even faster than you and uncle running?" asked the child, who held their track records in highest esteem, along with pretty much everything else they did.

"Oh still much faster," Pa chuckled and Dom tilted his head back to look up at him.

"Faster than... fast punches?" he frowned.

"Yes, faster than any punches."

"Faster than cars?"

"Yes, faster than cars."

"Planes?"

"Lots of planes, yes. But some planes are specially made and do something called 'break the sound barrier' - and they're faster."

"Faster than... a gun?" Dom said, bypassing the bit of information that required further questioning for now.

"You mean faster than a bullet?"

"Yeah!"

"Good question. That's where it gets interesting, you see..."

It hadn't taken more than a couple of strikes of lightening before the boy had begun to eagerly anticipate the boom. Most grandfathers would have used the counting merely to bring along the child's basic numeracy skills, but Xandr had taken the opportunity to teach his young protege about the difference between the speed of light and sound and how he could use that to calculate distance. He then went on to explain that bullets generally travelled faster than the speed of sound - sometimes even twice as fast - and that he could use that to his advantage, too.

"The fastest bullets tend to be from sniper rifles, which is important of course Little Kingdom, because if your target heard the shot before the bullet arrived, they could move..."

Flash.

"Again, Pa! One... Dva... Three..."

"Sometimes a bullet can be even four times as fast as sound, if you're using a very high-powered rifle."

Boom.

"And it's two, in English, boy. Remember? One, Two, Three. Or Odin, Dva, Tri... yesli ty schitayesh' po Russki..."

A presence appeared behind them in the hallway.

"Uncle!"

Dom's attention bounced like a puppy's as well, he twisted out of his grandfather's grip and beckoned the arriving Butler to the glass.

"We're watching the storm and counting the miles away it is! You know there's a flash and a boom and the seconds is the miles? But not one second. Five seconds is a mile. So now it's not a mile. It's less. And it's coming this way!"

"I do know that. Pa taught me," Myles smiled, taking a seat at the other end of the bench seat. "I was just coming to look for you actually, kiddo. Is Pa teaching you about the speed of sound?"

"Yeah! Booms is slower than flashes."

"Booms are slower than flashes," he corrected, gently.

"Yeah that," Dom said, absently, his hands pressing against the glass in a way which would probably irritate some cleaner or other at a later date, searching for lightening.

"What have we covered so far?" Myles asked his father. "If we haven't gone for the more age-appropriate 'giants moving furniture upstairs' approach?"

"Age-appropriate bollocks," Pa grunted. "Wasn't it your charge who started looking into stratospheric real estate once his mother spun him that tale?"

"Yes, it was," Myles admitted. "Thought it might be an untapped market."

"Typical Fowl."

Flash.

"One... Two..." the youngest member of their family started excitedly.

"I was just explaining to the boy about supersonic gunfire."

Myles snorted. "Not moved onto sub-sonic yet?"

"One thing at a time, syn," tutted Xandr, ignoring the tad of sarcasm in the query.

BOOM.

"That was quicker!" the youngster said, suddenly excited. "And louder!"

"Yes, because the storm is moving closer. The closer it is, the quicker the sound can get to us."

"But can it... actually get us?" he paused, head cocked to one side.

"The thunder? No. Remember about the bullets? What did I tell you about the sound?"

"They won't hear the shot that kills them," Dom recited obediently.

"Pa..." Myles sighed. "Really? He's three..."

"You were three once," he said, amused.

"Was I right?" Dom asked.

"Perfectly right, good boy," said the giant, fondly. "Now the lightening can hurt you, but if you've already heard the thunder, you're already safe."

"But it's rare - getting struck by lightening," Myles assured him. "And you're safe inside."

"And we'll teach you about how to deal with the risk when you're outside, too," Pa added. "There's nothing to be scared of about thunder."

"Oh, OK," Dom said, satisfied with that. "Does flash and boom at the same time if we're under the lightening?"

Myles caught himself smiling in his reflection in the window. His nephew was smart.

"Pretty much," Xandr nodded.

Flash.

"One... T..."

BOOM.

"Wow that was loud!" he shouted excitedly.

"Ah, you like it now then?" asked Pa.

"I love storms!" Dom yapped happily.

"Not scared at all?" Myles teased him.

"No!" Dom scoffed, scowling. "M'not scared!"

His uncle chucked him under his chin gently with his knuckles.

"That's m'boy."

"Storms are cool!" Dom nodded, turning and pressing his face to the glass once more.

"Well they are very impressive displays of nature," Pa nodded, sagely. "But they can be problematic. For example, if the electricity cables are struck by..."

Flash-BOOM!

The manor was plunged into darkness, several shouts of alarm ringing out.

"Ah, shit," Myles muttered, getting up quickly. "I'll go."

He ruffled Dom's mop of hair and strode away into the dark corridor.

"That was lightening that did that?" said Dom.

"Statement or question?" his grandfather mused, holding out his hand for the boy.

"Sta'ment," Dom said firmly, grabbing it.

"Correct, well done," he said. "Now for part two of your storm training - let's go watch your uncle fighting with the petrol back-up generator to get it started, shall we?"

"Can we?" Dom asked, excitedly.

"Yes, if you promise not to repeat any words he shouts at it to your mother if it puts up a performance," Pa said with a smirk.

"I won't," said Dom, seriously. "He already told me not to say 'shit' in front of her."

"Damn right," Pa said with a deep chuckle.

"Or bollocks or wanker - he said that when he was driving once - but der'mo is probably ok because Mama doesn't really speak Russkiy..."

"I'd be careful - she probably knows that one," Pa told him. The woman had lived with his multilingual son for several years, after all. And been in the company of his other son since.

Domovoi used his grandfather's hand to swing down from the windowseat as he leapt from it.

"Can I slide down the banister, Pa?"

"Hmm..." the bodyguard droned.

"Please?" his grandson grinned up at him.

"Alright," he said, stretching his long arm down so that he could just about reach the boy's hand with his fingertips. "But only if we reach the stairs before the lights come back on..."

Country Backroads, County Dublin - Present Day

They reached the top of the track, turning around to face the the descent, lining up like marbles at the start of a giant Rube Goldberg machine.

"Come on," the Fowl practically wheedled. "You know the track by now – you hardly need me to even be here."

"Great. Maybe you should just get out and go wait at the finish line," Domovoi retorted through gritted teeth. "Then only one of us will die messily in a car-wreck."

The sarcasm was dripping from his words now, all traces of his usual manners lost. But he was bound – he had a genetically-deep disposition – to follow the orders of a Fowl to the death.

Or so Artemis Fowl hoped.

Well, not the 'death' part, obviously.

"That wasn't what I meant. Look, I know as well as you do – we can do this! Surely you at least have some spark of competition in you? They don't train that out of you at that blasted academy, do they?"

"No. They beat pig-headed competitiveness out of us with bamboo canes – along with ego, as something that can get you killed," the youngest Butler muttered, jamming the car into first anyway and crawling up to the start line alongside Romeo's. "If we don't die doing this, my uncle is going to fucking slaughter me when he finds out."

"Well he wo..."

"If you're about to say 'he won't find out', Artemis, I swear to..."

The boy on the megaphone was shouting something Spartican-sounding about winners being made by bravery.

The wind whipped the starting flag out of his hands and it flashed away into the night over the treetops.

Artemis sighed. "Alright, alright. Fine. I'm not forcing you to do this. Clearly you don't want to and..."

"Well it's a bit late for that now, isn't it?"

"You'll have to watch for my signal!" the starter yelled, raising one hand to the sky. "On your marks, gentlemen!"

The other marshals who had braved the trip to the start line piled into the starter's car, ready to follow the race down at a slower pace.

Romeo Devlin began revving his Lancia's engine to a crescendo next to them, his navigator smirking and making a one fingered gesture through the window. The 'wild card' car was one they hadn't raced against yet and Dom gave them a cursory once over. The driver was called McAllister and had lost his first race due to spinning out; the young Butler hoped it was because of bad driving, rather than back luck.

"Junior..." Artemis started, perhaps beginning to bottle it at the last second.

"Get set!"

His companion flicked his eyes to the left and gave a slight shrug. "I'll save it for a 'told you so' later, shall I?"

"GO, GO, GO!" bellowed the young man with the megaphone, throwing his hand down and pointing his finger towards the track in case there was any confusion about which direction they should be heading in.

The three cars leapt away from the start line, their battered, red Mini some second or so behind the vehicles that had been redesigned for rallying slightly more than twenty-four hours earlier.

After the initial wheelspin, the Ford Escort 'wild card' car seemed to linger for a moment and Dom actually had to tap the brake to avoid touching bumpers. Either the driver had slipped the clutch, or - as he strongly suspected - Romeo's friend wasn't racing just for himself.

Artemis barely had time to flick the pages back to the start of the navigation instructions. As he had said, it was highly unlikely they would be desperately needed now they had run the track a couple of times, but the Fowl heir found some strange comfort in the worn edges of the paper, marked with the sweat from his hands.

Sweat from his hands? How uncouth. He had already decided that if they got out of this – if Junior got them out of this, that was – alive, he was never entering into such ridiculous bartering ever again, no matter the potential gain.

"OK, give it to me," Dom said through a locked jaw as they hared after the leaders.

The track would narrow in less than a few hundred metres and there were only three or so points he had noticed along the rest of it to overtake without wrapping the car around a tree.

"OK. L-3 – watch for the ditch on the inside bend – straight for 50, track narrowing into a R-2 – hold your line – well driv – son of a bitch!"

Dom stomped the brake, pulling back in behind Romeo's ally as the other car almost ran them off the road.

"Sorry. I can pass him at the next place – not worth damaging the car at the second corner," he grunted, flicking the already rapid windscreen wipers on faster for a few flicks to clear the watery mud which had been sprayed all over the windscreen from the Escort's rear wheels.

"Understood. Ah… next up… erm…" Artemis's eyes flicked down the page and somehow – something just short of miraculously – he recognised an upcoming corner and picked up the thread. "Yes... we've done the R-2, OK – 40, R-3, steep decline straight into a L-fooouuur – " – he gripped the door-handle, managing to gasp out – " – overtake point coming up!"

"On it," Dom said, fighting with the wheel as the car bounced over the rugged track, sliding in the fresh mud.

He nudged as close as he dared as the wider track section approached. He'd either make it in the first hundred metres or have to abort the attempt. He dropped back.

"What are you – " Artemis began to say, but shut up. This was probably one of those things he shouldn't demand reasoning for during the event. The Major had warned him about those.

McAllister, unsure of which side to protect from an overtake, sat in the middle of the track. Or at least he did, until he reached the large pothole Dom had clocked way back in the first race and was forced to veer…

He chose right and so as the other car's nearside bounced in and out of the dip with a painful thud of suspension coils, the Mini shot up the inside edge and ahead.

Artemis didn't think he'd 'whooped' before now, but he certainly did then.

"Good god I'd have to do something ridiculous like 'fist-bump' you again, if you didn't need both hands on the wheel!" he grinned.

Dom was sporting a similar smirk as he brought them safely around the next corner. "Keep reading, Tim. We've still got to pass Romeo yet, remember?"

The following half a kilometre passed in a blur and suddenly the next widening was upon them.

"McAllister is trying for the overtake," Artemis warned. "My best guess is inside edge… so, undertake rather..."

"Got it," Dom said, hoping that teen driving the Ford Escort wasn't quite stupid enough to cause a crash just to assist Devlin in his mission to make Artemis look a fool.

"If he gets past, there's another overtake spot in three hundred metres after this one," Artemis said, consulting his notes.

"Got it," Dom said again, glancing in the rear-view mirror, noting that the smashed back window was actually a benefit - Henry's rear wiper hadn't ever worked that well and it waved judderingly but valiantly over the empty pane.

Artemis got the feeling he wasn't actually being listened too, but that now was not the time to complain about it.

Sure enough McAllister came up the inside, trying to bully his way through, flicking on his main beam headlights as he sped closer.

"Cover the mirror!" Junior barked.

Artemis almost panicked, but as lacking in common sense as he could be, his brain processed the request quicker than he could ask for clarification and he held the notebook out suddenly so that it protected the young driver from the dazzling reflection of the other car's lights in the wing-mirror.

Dom held his ground, which was more than McAllister expected him to do.

"Ah, fuck you then," he seethed under his breath and wrenched the wheel towards the other car.

Sorry Henry, old boy...

"Contact!" he spat in warning, forgetting that he hadn't actually briefed Artemis on the vernacular used for this sort of thing.

Regardless, Artemis got the message, cringing away from the door so far that he almost landed on Dom's lap.

There was a sudden screech of metal and the car slid sideways, but the budding bodyguard had timed his purposeful collision and countered the bump, accelerating through it and sliding the Mini sideways through the corner, missing the barrier by inches but ultimately coming out of it still ahead of the other driver.

"Sorry about the paint job," he said as McAllister's car roared furiously behind them, dangerously close.

Ahead, Romeo's Lancia's brake lights flashed as it careered into a tight bend.

"Not my car, if you remember," Artemis chuckled, nervously.

"Wasn't talking to you," Dom said through gritted teeth. "He'll go for the next overtake. Brace for contact again."

They barely had time to breathe before it was upon them, a straight; lined with trees but just wide enough for two cars to pass eachother... if they then managed to make the corner at the end, that was.

Dom held his line, owning the road as he had been taught.

"Shit he's going to go for it!" Artemis yelped.

"I know. I'm going to bait him," Dom said, calculating furiously.

He let off the accelerator slightly, dropping a gear and allowing McAllister to make for the inside.

"What are you doing? Don't let him pass!" Artemis shouted, aghast.

"Quiet, Artemis!" Dom snapped at him.

The Fowl gaped, but shut up.

He'd timed it for the necessary brake the other driver would have to make before entering the turn. Although the Mini's engine power would not allow him to beat the Escort from a dead start, Dom wasn't planning on slowing down.

The Ford shot by on their passenger side and Dom immediately darted to the left, accelerating in his lower gear up the car's inside edge and slamming the front bumper into its rear wheel.

There was a tremendous bang of crumpling metal and the Ford's rear end slid out of its driver's control.

What Dom hadn't accounted for, was the Mini's bull-bar style chrome bumper hooking into the Escort's wheel arch.

"Ah shite!" he growled, as they were taken along with the momentum.

The world spun around them in a flurry of mud and stones, pelting everything from the underside of the vehicle to the windows. Artemis screamed, Dom swore again, but in the noise and confusion they broke free and when the car finally slid to a stop, engine still rumbling under the bonnet, they were remarkably unscathed.

McAllister, however, had not attended any of Madam Ko's evasive driving classes.

He duly panicked, wrenching his wheel against the turn far too sharply and skidding out of control.

The hedge did little to stop the hatchback, as its wheels bit into the grass verge and it nosedived into the ditch at speed.

Dom saw the approaching lights of the starter marshal's car approaching and glimpsed of the dark belly of the Ford as it tumbled into the field beyond.

Artemis yelped, mimicking his friend's earlier sentiment.

But this time Dom said nothing. Ramming the Mini back into gear, incredibly grateful when the engine responded eagerly, he took off after Devlin once more, flying over the humpback bridge this time without incident.

One down, one to go.

There were plenty of people to help get the car back on its wheels had it landed the wrong way up. That and the fact he had clocked a fitted roll cage on the Ford Escort. Presuming McAllister and his navigator had been wearing their harnesses, they should be fine. Unlike him and Artemis. Should they befall the same fate, they had only standard, one-shouldered seat belts to protect them.

Artemis pulled on his now, twisting in his seat to look back at the crash site.

"Focus!" Dom barked, wrestling them around the next bend. "They'll be fine."

Romeo was just ahead. Whether he had hesitated upon seeing his friend crash out behind him, or he had simply slowed up to tackle the slalom, Dom thought he could guess.

"Slalom! Slalom coming up!" Artemis yelled, several seconds too late and entirely unnecessarily.

Dom pushed the Mini to the limit to follow it. He had to slow to avoid careering straight into the rocky outcrop that almost took them out in the first round and despite his best efforts, Romeo was gaining lead every second. The speed at which they took the first bend of the slalom was nearly too much for the small car to handle.

"Jesus Junior!" Artemis yelped as the back end almost spun out in the mud around the first of the five bends, taking out the stakes holding the fluttering tape barrier.

"Sorry. We've got to beat him to the gate," Dom said through gritted teeth. "Or it doesn't matter if we catch him, we aren't going to get past him once we hit the road."

The next section after this - and indeed down to the finish line - was the part of public road Devlin's minions had blocked off. Better going for their woefully inadequate tyres, but the Lancia would trounce them, even if it wasn't walled with high hedges, the corners narrow, the passing places too short to overtake at speed; or at least not safely...

"Cheating bastard getting McAllister to sabotage us like that!" Artemis said, thumping the dashboard in temper. "We can't beat him now, can we?"

"I never said that," Dom grimaced back, with more than a hint of his predecessors about him.

He would have said he was acting like his uncle on the rare occasions the man let his facade of ultimate professionalism slip. Xandr and Myles Butler would have taken one look at him, then at eachother and the same word would have come simultaneously from their lips; Beckett.

"What do you mean?" asked the Fowl.

"How much do you want to win this race?"

The second bend of the slalom was approaching fast, the Lancia disappearing in front of them was already tackling the second sharp left some way below them in the sloped field.

"Well of course I want to win! What do you think the whole point of this stupid exercise was?" Artemis snapped.

"Taking part?" Dom said, only half-sarcastically. Artemis had only bet he would take part, hadn't he?

"Well yes, but... Winning would be better!"

Dom had the sudden feeling his future employer was hiding something from him, but that now was very much not the time to be pressing the matter.

"Hold tight then," he said, gritting his teeth. "This is going to be a bit bumpy."

They were going too fast to make the second turn. Even Artemis with his limited grasp of vehicular physics could tell that.

"Junior what are you...!"

"Hold onto your hollyhocks!" he said grimly.

"What are holly - Jesus Christ!"

Dom didn't slow. He had done his calculations. There were five bends to the slalom, the first and last were to the right. If he didn't take the left turn here, he could skip the other three bends and head straight to the gate. Cheating, of course. But given Romeo didn't seem to have much regard for the rules when they were in place and had then specifically said 'anything goes'...

"Juniiiooorrr!" Artemis howled as they hurtled headfirst down the 45 degree decline, sliding on the slurry-slick grass.

The car tore through the flimsy barrier and bounced over a ledge of rock, gaining several feet in height before, inevitably, crashing back down to earth with a force Dom was very certain didn't do the suspension any good. Something gave – Track rod end, maybe? his trained side questioned – and he battled with the steering column to keep them in a straight line. Stakes and tape fluttered in their wake, dragged behind them like cans behind a wedding car.

But despite the insanity of it, his plan was working. They shot past Romeo's car, spattering it with muck and making roughly for the gate in the dry-stone wall. There was only space enough for one car - and barely that, too - but as it happened they were already too far ahead for Romeo to do anything about it.

"Left turn, left turn, left turn! 90 degrees!" Artemis garbled, griping the door handle with both hands.

You mean square left, Dom thought. And I know what I'm doing. Brake in, accelerate out.

Dom stomped the middle pedal and put the car into a somewhat-controlled slide. They didn't seem to slow down much and it took quite some effort to wrench the wheel and sling the car through the gate, narrowly avoiding the pillar.

"Yes! Take that!" Artemis spat, predicting that Romeo wouldn't be able to mimic the manoeuvre.

Unfortunately for him, as cocky as the eldest Devlin son was, he had also had a lot of driving lessons from some of the best rally drivers his father's money could employ.

"Not over yet," Dom warned as he refocused his attention on the road ahead.

That would have pissed Romeo off mightily. The other teen was a good driver, but Dom was banking on his temper getting the better of him. He could guarantee their opponent's level of driving would drop due to emotion long before his would. He was a Butler, after all.

"Straight for one hundred then an L-4. Mind the outside edge – soft verge onto a drop," Artemis warned, dropping the suggestions for countering an overtake attempt at the upcoming corner. Clearly the younger boy was adept enough at that on his own.

Behind Romeo jerked to the left, trying to goad them into a block. Dom took it at the last second, too late for the other driver to drop back and overtake on the outside of the bend.

Or so he thought.

He was, technically, entirely right with that deduction.

The Fowl's Mini took the inside line, back end sliding out just enough to be in the way of the Lancia as it went for the overtake. But that didn't seem to matter to the other driver. Dom felt the car wrench out of his control as the rear was hit, sending them into a spin. Basically his own manoeuvre against McAllister used against him.

But of course, just as with his self-defence techniques - if he knew how to inflict it, he knew how to get out of it.

"Brace, brace, brace!" he barked, frighting to turn the wheel into the spin.

But the Lanica ploughed on, T-boning them across the road before it slid past in a crunch of obliterated wing-mirrors and for perhaps half a second, Devlin and Fowl were side by side, the latter never seeing the determined snarl on the face of the former, by virtue of having his eyes screwed tightly shut. He would have been unlikely to see the driver anyway past Romeo's screaming navigator. The driver did not intend to lose, not under any circumstances - and especially not to Fowl and his baby bodyguard.

They careered past – too fast to maintain control. The Mini's nearside wheels bit into the grass verge and though Dom futilely threw his weight the opposite direction as he felt it going, they rolled.

The world inverted with a clatter of leftover belongings; falling to the ceiling not quite in slow motion as so many people reported. Dom just about had time to remember to duck his chin to his chest and use the wheel to hold himself in the seat lest he hit his head on the ceiling. The rear windows imploded with loud, crumpling pops, the engine roared at the lack of traction on the wheels, then stalled. And then with a heavy, finality-laden boom, they hit something that halted them to a dead stop coated with relative silence.

Dom was very grateful for the crash barrier.

Had it not been there, they would have been sent into a tumble quite likely of death all the way down the hill beyond and, unless they were stopped by a tree, into the river at the bottom of the valley.

When his vision settled, he turned immediately to Artemis. He could tell by the hyperventilating that the Fowl heir was alive, but he still had to verbally check for injuries in the dim light of the upturned car.

"Tim," he said, quite quietly. "You OK?"

"I think so," Artemis panted. It was mightily uncomfortable hanging upside-down like this. He was beginning to see Junior's point about the rally harnesses. He unbuckled his helmet, which was hanging painfully from his chin, dropping it the short distance to the ceiling with a heavy thud. Thankfully, being shorter than the Butler boy, he had not needed to take evasive action to save his skull from hitting it when it crumpled inwards.

"Good. If we can flip the car, I think I can get it started again if the engine isn't upside-down for too long," Dom said tersely, contorting his knees out from behind the steering wheel and flipping his boots towards the ceiling so that he could land on his feet when he managed to get the seatbelt buckle to release. It was not his first rodeo, after all. Ko actually encouraged them to flip cars on occasion, to get some good practice getting themselves and others out of the vehicle. "I'll have to kick the windscreen out so we can see, but we could still finish the race at least."

"Forget the race," Artemis sighed, his dark locks hanging down away from his head comically. He looked like a vampire who had run out of hair-gel, Dom thought, briefly. "It doesn't matter. It's not worth getting ourselves killed over."

Dom was about to say he wished Artemis had realised that earlier, but he wisely held his tongue.

There was no way they could get out of the driver's side, being as it was so crushed up against the metal barrier, so Artemis, after some struggling with his seatbelt, led the way out of the smashed passenger window, since the doorhandle which hadn't, in all honesty, been reliable at the best of times, had jammed irrevocably.

The night was eerily quiet but for the gurgling and hissing of the unfortunate, upturned engine.

"Hey - it's stopped raining at le..."

"Fuck! Fuck, shit, bollocks, goddamn, fuck!"

Dom actually jumped so hard at the stream of expletives that he banged his head on the doorframe he was extricating himself from. He wouldn't have expected them coming from the aristocrat's mouth at a lower volume, let alone screeched as they were into the damp, evening air. But he supposed now was as good a time as any for him to let loose verbally. The Fowl continued physically as well, stomping across the road swinging his foot at the nearest solid object; which just so happened to be a tree stump.

"Ow Jesus! Hellfire, that didn't make me feel any better!" he said, gritting his teeth and limping back. "Why the hell do they do that sort of thing in all those silly action films?"

"Because, Tim," Dom said heavily, as he pulled himself free from the wreckage and dusted the gems of glass from his combats. "Life is not like it is 'on the tele'. Besides, when have you watched an action film? Doesn't seem really your genre..."

"Oh, so we're not going to discuss how many times I've walked in on both you and your uncle pretending to be doing something armoury related with Some Like It Hot playing in the background?"

"Shush!" Dom said suddenly, raising one hand.

"You can't silence me just because you don't like what I'm saying, Junior – you know it's true..."

"No, seriously – do you hear that?"

"Yes, it's the sound of me jovially taking the piss," the Fowl sighed, his temper fading already as the miserable reality of failure began to hit. "Now come on, I suppose we're going to have to walk out of here... Maybe those young lads with the quadbike will help us tip it over, but heaven knows how long it's going to take us to get home if you can't get it started again..."

"Artemis!" Dom snapped. "Will you just shut up a minute! I can't hear anything with you wittering on - I'm trying to listen!"

"Oh really. That's about the third time you've told me to shut up this evening, you know?" Artemis scoffed. "And what exactly are you listening for? I thought they would train this sort of melodrama out of you at that Academy..."

"Just tell me if you can hear anything!" Dom said, opening and closing his jaw and popping his ears, in case the crash had rattled his hearing.

"Fine," Artemis huffed. "No. I can't hear anything."

"Exactly. An engine the size of that Lancia – we'd still be able to hear it at the finish line, let alone two thirds in."

"So?"

"So..." Dom began, then froze.

"What?"

"Run back to the gate and get someone to shout up two more crashes on the radio!" he shouted, setting off at a sprint down the road.

"Two?" Artemis opened his mouth again to question, then closed it again.

He didn't need to ask for explanation.

He could suddenly hear what had pricked the young bodyguard's ears long before it had reached his own.

In the cool, rain-rinsed air of the Irish summer night, somebody was screaming.

Apologies for the cliff-hanger! But you did also get to see baby!Dom in a thunderstorm so yanno, you win some, you lose some. Kudos to Mother Nature for providing some nice storms this week for me to watch and be inspired by.

There may also be a short delay in posting the next chapter because my life is returning somewhat to pre-lockdown routine which I have mixed feelings about because on one hand, I like routine. But on the other hand, my routine means I have 2 - 4 days off a month, instead of like, working 2 days a week and doing whatever the hell I want for the rest of the time. Which has been great. A real silver lining to the whole pandemic thing for me. I know a lot of people have been really struggling, but I've just escaped into my writing at every opportunity and done my best to enjoy the 'enforced pause' on a hectically busy life.

OK, next chapter is the final chapter... but of course then there's an epilogue. So the penultimate update.

And I couldn't leave you without a post-credit scene that jumped into my head yesterday and had me messaging Steinbock for some German translation help, so there's a tag-on couple of thousand words at the end.

Thank-you for all your help and suggestions with the posting a chapter across to Lil Rems. I really should have done it at the start but I forgot about it and also was just well excited to post this as a fic. I might even just go straight for the first chapter, so if you see an update for Lil Rems don't get too excited, sorry haha

Wolfy
ooo
O

17/06/20