Disclaimer: The characters, much of the dialogue, and sadly, even the plot are not mine; they all belong to Eoin Colfer.
Pages: –
Chapter 15: The Vanished Future
In the confines of the constrictive blanket and her limbs tightly bound, Holly felt about as endowed with means of escape as an earthworm. However, even worms could still move, and so Holly shifted her attention to carefully wiggling in her restraints from her place atop Butler's shoulder.
Far from the desperate, wild thrashing of before, this time she was careful to control the movement, trying to be discreet enough so as not to alarm the bodyguard. Holly moved cautiously, slowly twisting her head all around and rolling her shoulders, hoping that, if he noticed, he might pass it off as his captive just trying to arrange herself in a slightly more comfortable position. It took at least a minute or two, but finally Holly succeeded in pushing the flopping edge of the blanket free of her head, though she had to keep the bunched up mass partially pinned to her shoulder to keep it from tumbling back down.
Holly's eyes fell on the souk, now some distance away, though the speckled, dirty walls were still visible through the crowds of busy tourists and shop owners.
Holly knew she could have tried screaming for help at this point. Certainly she could at least get a second or two off before Butler put a stop to it by either covering her mouth forcibly or putting yet another hypodermic dart in her.
However, Holly honestly doubted anyone would dare stand up against the towering monster of a man on behalf of a stranger, even if that stranger did appear to be a little girl, and she doubted even more if it would do any good if they tried. By the time the right authorities got here, Butler would be long gone and, considering she was actually a long-thought fantastical species from another time, she would probably be in just as much trouble getting caught by the police as Butler. Besides, she couldn't risk Butler sedating her again even by trying – she needed her voice unimpeded and to be fully conscious if she was going to implement her admittedly simple plan.
Butler stopped walking.
Holly's ears had stopped ringing from the earlier cacophony enough to just make out among the babble of voices and shuffling of feet the sound of tapping buttons somewhere in the vicinity of Butler's hand – Contacting little Artemis to tell him 'got the creature' or something similar, no doubt. Charming.
The pause took barely a second before Butler was off again.
Holly used the opportunity to turn her head around as far as she could manage, keeping the blanket held back with the side of her face. She could just see the outline of Butler's sharp cheekbone, but his eye was just out of sight around his head.
Holly tried to crane her neck a little further, but it was no good. If only Butler would turn his head just a tad more –
He did. Just slightly, probably in the course of scanning his surroundings for hostiles or prying eyes, but enough that Holly could see the white corner of his eye.
Without turning away, Holly twitched her head slightly and, as she had hoped, the movement drew Butler's gaze, instinct to make sure the prisoner was still secure taking over.
It only lasted for a fraction of a second, but that was enough as, the moment his cold blue eyes met her mismatched ones, she seized her chance.
"Butler," she said, voice laced with magic, "Put me down."
Butler's limbs immediately seized up, but amazingly, he kept on walking.
Butler had wrenched his gaze away from hers, but of course by now it was too late. Her words were already worming their way into his consciousness, shutting out everything else.
"Stop, Butler," commanded Holly. "Set me down and cut my bonds."
Butler's gait slowed considerably, yet still he pressed on. Holly winced as she felt his arm tighten around her as he strained against the spell.
Only – Butler – she thought with a grimace. Butler was the only person she had seen able to resist the mesmer like this. The bulky bodyguard was going to either suffocate her or snap her in two if she didn't do something. However, Holly was afraid to press the hypnotic power any further, lest she cause Butler to have a heart attack right on the spot. Even disregarding the whole time paradox, changing-the-future issue, she couldn't bear to do anything that might result in the injury or death of her large friend. She might be able to add a few more layers and safely push a bit harder, but...
While Holly hesitated, a sudden, loud shout cut into her concentration.
"Hey, what you think you are doing?" said a man in heavily accented English, followed by several curses in French, then Arabic.
Butler finally came to a halt, though it seemed his momentum was still carrying him forward and he twisted sideways with a grunt.
Holly's entire body tensed as she felt herself slipping, instinctively wanting to grab hold of something, but made helpless thanks to the bindings on her arms and legs. She tumbled off Butler's massive shoulder and all the air was knocked from her lungs as she landed hard on her back, her arms pinned beneath her. The blanket fell in a cascade of heavy, rough material back over her head.
"Sorry about that," she heard Butler say gruffly, and she could sense her spell had been broken.
Butler picked her up again, this time holding her under his arm like a football. She felt an enormous hand reach under the blanket and clamp down over her mouth.
No way she would break free of Butler like this; she needed to conserve her energy and wait for another opportunity. She'd been close that time. And she had succeeded in mesmerizing Butler once before back right before the Goblin uprising had broken out, so she knew it could be done.
After only the briefest interval, Holly felt the blanket being pulled off her. It wasn't until the hot, itchy thing was gone that she realized just how uncomfortable it had been. Relief was immediate, her whole body suddenly about ten degrees cooler.
It also helped that apparently they had moved into the shade now. Even now in the middle of the evening, the heat was merciless. A quick glance told Holly that the bodyguard had moved off into a deserted sort of alleyway behind one of the older buildings for privacy.
Holly's eyes flickered up to her enormous captor, who was now kneeling over her, one hand probably about twice the size of her entire face still over her mouth. His form was so huge it seemed to block out the fading daylight.
Holly stared right back into his familiar dark blue eyes, glaring back with everything she possessed. Butler returned her gaze steadily, his eyes flat and cold. If she had been able to speak, she could have tried to mesmerize him again, but of course, Butler had apparently figured that out.
Holly maintained her defiant expression, despite the fact that inside she found herself quailing. The terror of having this man for an enemy once again was greater than she could have imagined. This was the same bodyguard she had met so many years ago, who had drugged her and brought her to Fowl Manor on the orders of a twelve-year-old Artemis Fowl. A man who had once obtained victory over a troll and could not only certainly break her in two without the least bit of effort, but would do it too without the slightest hesitation if little Artemis gave the order. Even in this heat, Holly felt herself go cold staring into those eyes.
And yet, just for the barest fraction of a second, in those hard eyes she thought she saw a flicker of something. The barest trace of pity.
But she knew she must have imagined it because the next moment Butler had pulled out a roll of duct tape and fixed a strip over her mouth.
"No more funny business out of you," he said in his deep base voice.
Holly tried to glare at him some more, but he didn't look at her again. Instead, he hoisted her up by the scruff of the neck and stuffed her unceremoniously into a duffel bag he had dragged out from behind a nearby rubbish bin, and she felt herself lifted up above the ground as Butler hauled the strap of the bag over his shoulder. She fell against his steel-hard muscles to be carried at his side like an assortment of hardware.
The trapped heat inside the duffel was, if possible, worse than it had been inside the blanket. Butler had left the zipper a little open so she would still be able to breathe, but sweat poured down Holly's face and each breath seemed to take a massive effort, so stifling was the air that had already begun to taste stale.
They had moved far away from the souk by now and the horrid smell of the vats of pigeon droppings, but Holly didn't have time to be glad as the stench of the droppings was simply replaced with the smell of various animals, the donkeys and goats and who-knew what else, as well as her own sweat. By now her shoulders and arms had begun to ache from the awkward position of having them forced behind her back for so long, and the bonds on her ankles chafed as she shifted restlessly against them.
Worst of all though was probably the stupid piece of tape, which burned and itched like mad, made all the worse by the sweat she could feel building up behind it.
Holly's brain began to feel feverish. The heat was so overpowering, and she could feel another bout of claustrophobia creeping just around the edges of her mind. A swirl of nausea and vertigo disoriented her and she felt faint.
But she had to keep a clear head. To fly into another panic would just be wasting energy she was sure to need later, and she must not be sedated.
Artemis isn't here, she reminded herself, so I will have to fend for herself. She would have to start doing her own thinking again for a change.
Yes, all she had to do was think. Now, what would Artemis do if he was here?
Holly's second feeble plan worked no better than the first, not that she expected it to.
Trapped as she was, she couldn't hope to move, but when Butler set the bag down to do a quick check his prisoner was still in the bag, Holly saw an opportunity and decided to try putting up her shield. She thought there might be a chance that, seeing his captive having apparently vanished, the bodyguard would panic and run off to retrieve her, thinking he would catch her before she got too far if he acted quickly enough. Meanwhile, that might give her the opportunity to slip off for real and get a hold of a tool to free her arms and legs.
In Holly's defense, it might have worked on a less with-it guard, but Butler was as cool and collected as they came. When his eyes fell on the empty duffel, he simply reached down into the space to feel if his captured fairy was still there.
Holly had only felt his hand against her shoulder for a second before it was jerked back, the high-speed vibration of her shield making it hard to keep a grip for long. However, that didn't change the fact that she was still bound and unable to move away so long as Butler was right there, and shielding wouldn't protect her from the ever-hovering threat of a knockout dart.
If she'd had more magic, Holly could have stayed shielded until her bonds and outer clothing shook to pieces (modesty was a luxury she couldn't afford at the moment), but she didn't have nearly enough for that without a shimmer suit to reduce the amount of magic needed for shielding. However, it wasn't as though she would have ever even been able to hope to compete with Butler in a game of cat-and-mouse, even if she hadn't been restrained, so maybe it was just as well.
"Listen, little alien or fairy or whatever you are," Butler said very calmly, "you might as well do yourself a favor and stop with the games already."
Holly felt just a bit of a chill, but she was almost used to it by now, and so she let down her shield, knowing full well it was pointless. This wasn't working, and she needed to save her magic.
Holly heaved from the effort of the shield, breathing hard through her nose and blinking rapidly to prevent sweat running down into her eyes.
She turned her head to glare up at Butler, but she knew the effect was probably ruined by the way her eyelids fluttered both from the heat and exhaustion. She was so low on juice that shielding even for that brief time had taken its toll.
Butler stared at her a moment, then reached down and tore off her headscarf in one swift motion, setting it aside. Holly was glad for this as her head felt immediately cooler, but somehow she doubted the bodyguard had done it to be charitable.
As Holly laid on her side inside the duffel bag, side still rising and falling rapidly from her earlier exertion, she wondered what little Artemis had planned for her. Would he really study her like a test subject to learn more about her race, or would he simply use her to provide irrefutable evidence of the existence of fairies to the world at large? Or both? Or perhaps he would try to use her to ransom gold from the People yet again.
Butler held out his phone in front of him. Holly stared back at the glowing red eye, and she was suddenly desperate to get away. However, she was utterly helpless to do anything more than watch as she heard the tiny digital imitation of a shutter click, and a moment later Butler had closed up the bag again, leaving her the small breathing hole as before as they set off.
As fairies and especially LEP operatives, there were few things as ingrained into her people as a fear of Mud Men cameras, recorders – anything that the humans could use to expose their existence. Even if such things were largely dismissed, they were considered an intolerable risk. So perhaps it was that one digital photo more than anything else that finally awakened Holly to the true reality of the situation.
As they went, the full force of what was happening slowly at last began to dawn on Holly; she was trapped and time continued to grow steadily, irreversibly shorter – like the creeping trickle of sand in an hourglass prison that would soon pour over her head and suffocate her.
Holly had been captured. Now, after thousands of years of secrecy, all fairy civilization may very well wind up exposed. All those vague fears that had clouded her will and mind before and even after she had decided to make this trip, that had made her so hesitant to help Artemis in the first place in enacting such a drastic scheme, here the worries were, all being realized to the most ghastly extent she could imagine.
Perhaps the future she knew was already vanishing – vanishing, just the way the world had while she was fighting for her life on Hybras, opting to move on without her. Only this time the new world would not be a better one, with the triumphant return of a long-lost family of fairies, but a world of war and destruction. All because of her.
A wave of sickness was spreading through her, a dark, all-consuming nausea that had nothing to do with the heat and the lining of the bag closing in around her. They were walls of another kind that were encasing her now.
For the first time since she had fired on her own commander to save him, but destroyed him instead, and run to save Artemis, but did not reach him in time, Holly realized that she really had really failed in everything she had set out to do. She had not been able to bring Jayjay back to the present to save Artemis's mother and prevent the Spelltropy outbreak; she had not kept a low profile so as not to mess with the events of history; she had not even succeeded in taking Artemis back to his own time, to deliver him safely back to where his parents and ever faithful bodyguard would still forever be waiting for him...
Holly closed her eyes, and her entire body fell limp with the tremendous weight of this knowledge. Her lungs felt like they were being crushed, her brain growing numb and languid under the pressure.
But a moment later, her eyes slid open slowly, staring at the inside of the rough, dark material of the duffel, its lining digging into her side.
If all that was true, she could not be allowed the luxury of giving in to despair and self-recrimination. If she had the strength to beat herself up, she should use it instead to fix the mess she had made – That was what Julius would say if he was here.
However, as she glared at the tiny of hole of her dark prison, she knew determination alone wasn't bringing her any closer to a solution, a way out.
If only –
She stopped herself. Holly had already decided it was, in all probability, too late at this point. Impossible. There wasn't anything even he could do.
But all the same, Holly let her eyes drift closed again, her thoughts still pushing in that direction, uncooperative as always.
It seemed impossible. But then again, he had done it before. He made the impossible possible.
If only, she thought. If only Artemis would come up with one of his stupidly complicated, ingenious strategies. A reality-defying, unthinkable plan that would solve everything, and put an end to this before it had turned irretrievably into the darkest nightmare of her life.
A/N: Hey, I reached the 60,000-word mark. (: The next one is 100,000 I guess; that's a long way off, though...
So yeah, thank you so much for the reviews last chapter! Hope to hear from you, as always. I think the next chapter is going to need some work, so I need motivation...! (;
Posted 12/6/11