The Last Guardian

She switched all power to the jets and sent the Cupid rocketing toward the Sky Window, leaving the security guards pretending to fire useless weapons at her, a couple even going so far as to make bang bang noises, though fairy weapons hadn’t gone bang bang in centuries.

 

The Sky Window is reinforced Plexiglas, thought Holly. Either it breaks, or the Cupid does. Probably a bit of both.

 

Though she would never know it, Holly’s gamble would not have paid off. The Sky Window was built to withstand direct impact from anything short of a low-yield nuclear warhead, a fact that was proudly announced over the terminal’s speakers a hundred times a day, which Holly had somehow managed to avoid hearing.

 

Luckily for Captain Short and her passengers—and indeed the fate of much of the wider world—her potentially fatal ignorance would never come to light, as Foaly had anticipated a situation where a fairy craft would be heading at full speed for the Sky Window and it would refuse to open. The centaur had also guessed that, because of the universal law of maximum doo-doo displacement—which states that when the aforementioned doo-doo hits the fan, the fan will be in your hand and pointed at someone important who can have you fired—the Sky Window would probably refuse to open at a crucial time. And so he had come up with a little proximity organism that ran on its own bio-battery/heart, which he had grown from the stem cells of appropriated sprite wings.

 

The whole process was dubious at best and illegal at worst, and so Foaly hadn’t bothered to log a blueprint and simply had the sensors installed on his say-so. The result was that a cluster of these proximity beetles scuttled along the Sky Window pane edges, and if their little antennae sensed a vehicle drawing too close to a certain pane, they excreted a spray of acid on the window and then quickly ate the pane. The energy required to complete their task in time was massive, and so when the beetles were finished, they curled up and died. It was impressive; but, pretty much like the man with the exploding head, it was a onetime trick.

 

When the beetles sensed the Cupid’s ascent, they rushed into action like a minute company of cavalry and devoured the pane in less than four seconds. When their job was done, they winked out and dropped like ball bearings onto the vehicle’s hood.

 

“That was easy,” Holly said into her microphone, as the Cupid passed through a Cupid-shaped hole. “So much for Foaly’s great Sky Window.”

 

Ignorance, as they say, is usually fatal, but sometimes it can be bliss.

 

Holly powered up the Cupid’s shield—though with every single human satellite out of commission she really needn’t have bothered—and set a course for Fowl Manor.

 

Which gives us about five minutes before Opal has us exactly where she wants us.

 

A less-than-comforting thought, which she did not voice—but all it took was a glance in the rearview mirror at Butler’s expression to see that the bodyguard was thinking more or less the same thing.

 

“I know,” he said, catching her eye. “But what choice do we have?”

 

 

 

 

 

Irish Airspace

 

 

Opal could not have turned her face from the lock now if she had put all her enhanced pixie might to the task. She was the key, and the two were paired. Their collision was as inevitable as the passage of time. Opal felt the skin on her face stretch toward the lock, and her arms were pulled until the sockets creaked.

 

The elfin warlock was indeed powerful, she thought. Even after all this time, his magic holds.

 

Her trajectory took her in a regular arc to the Atlantic’s surface and across the afternoon sky to Ireland. She descended like a fireball in a slingshot toward the Fowl Estate, with no time to wonder or worry about—or, for that matter, revel in—the imminent proof of her theories.

 

I will raise the dead, she had often thought in her cell. Even Foaly cannot make that boast.

 

Opal hit the Fowl Estate like a comet come to Earth, directly on the worn nub of the Martello tower, with its alien creeping vine. Like a dog snuffling after a bone, her corona of magic destroyed the tower and cleared a crater for itself, spiraling twenty feet down, past centuries of deposit, revealing another more ancient tower below. The magic sniffed out the roof lock, settling over it like a shimmering man-o’-war.

 

Opal lay facedown, floating, dreamily watching events unfold. She saw her fingers splay and twitch, spark-streams shooting from the tips. She saw the cloaking spell stripped from what had seemed to be a simple metamorphous boulder, revealing it to be a rough stone tower with complicated intertwined runes etched into its surface. The magical ectoplasm sank into the engraved runes, electrifying them, sending burning rivulets coursing through the grooves.

 

Open yourself to me, thought Opal, though this is an interpretation of her brain patterns. Another interpretation would be Aaaaaaargghhhhhh.

 

The lock’s runes teemed with magic, becoming animated, slithering like snakes on hot sands, nipping at each other, fat ones swallowing the lines of lesser magic until all that remained was a simple couplet in Gnommish:

 

Here be the lock first of two