“No, old friend,” warned Holly, glimpsing the flickering warrior inside Butler’s sister. “Juliet is possessed.”
Butler understood immediately. They had previously encountered fairy possession when Artemis had been wrapped up in his Atlantis Complex.
The bodyguard’s features sagged, and in that moment his decades of soldiering were written on his face.
“Jules. Are you in there?”
The warrior queen Bellico used Juliet’s memories to answer, but the vocal cords were not under her complete control. Her words were unclear, as though heard through tinny speakers, and the accent was an unusual blend of thick Scandinavian and Deep South American.
“Yesh, braddur. It ish I. Zooooliet.”
Butler saw the truth. The body might be his sister’s, but the mind certainly wasn’t.
Artemis joined them, laying a hand on Holly’s shoulder, a blotch of blood on his shirt where he had coughed. As usual, he found the most pertinent question to ask.
“Why do they not attack?”
Holly physically jerked.
Why not? Of course why not?
Butler reiterated. “Why aren’t they attacking? They’ve got numbers over us, and emotionally we’re a mess. That thing is my sister, for heaven’s sake.”
Holly remembered why they remained unmolested.
We are hosts inside the circle. They need us.
The souls flapped overhead, rearing up to descend.
I can explain what I am about to do, thought Holly. Or I can just do it.
Easier to just do it and hope there was an opportunity to apologize later.
She expertly flicked the settings wheel on the barrel of her Neutrino and shot Butler on his exposed neck and Artemis on the hand in blurred succession.
Now we won’t be possessed, she thought. But, on the downside, these Berserkers will probably simply kill us.
The souls dropped onto their intended hosts like sheets of wet polythene. Holly felt ectoplasm cram itself into her mouth, but the spirit would not be able to possess her because of the rune under her collar.
Hold on, she told herself. Hold on.
Holly tasted clay and bile. She heard echoes of screams from ten thousand years earlier, and experienced the Battle of Taillte as though she herself had stood on that plain where blood ran through the stake pits, and waves of humanity rolled across the meadow, blackening the grass with their passage.
It all happened just the way my father told me, Holly realized.
The soul howled in frustration as it lost purchase and was repelled, flapping into the air.
Two Berserker souls fought for entry into Artemis and Butler but were repulsed. Butler had keeled over like a felled redwood when Holly’s shot hit him, and Artemis clasped his hand, stunned that their friend Holly would burn their bare skin with her Neutrino beams.
Artemis had quickly and mistakenly concluded that Holly had been possessed by one of the Danu, something he now knew all about from the soul who had tried to occupy him.
He sank to his knees and watched through pain-slitted eyes as the Berserker warriors advanced. Was Holly an enemy or friend now? He could not be sure. She seemed herself and had swung her weapon at the horde.
Opal’s voice came from beyond the throng, shielded by its mass.
“They have protected themselves. Kill them now, my soldiers. Bring their heads to me.”
Artemis coughed. Bring their heads to me? Opal used to be a little more subtle. It’s true what they say: Prison does not rehabilitate people. Not pixies, at any rate.
His own baby brothers advanced toward him with murder in their eyes. Two four-year-olds moving with increasing grace and speed.
Are they stronger now? Could Myles and Beckett actually succeed in killing us?
And if they didn’t, perhaps those pirates would, with their rusting cutlasses.
“Butler,” Artemis rasped. “Retreat and evaluate.”
It was their only option.
There is no proactive move open to us.
This realization irritated Artemis, even though he was in mortal danger.
“Retreat and try not to injure anybody except those pirates. The Chinese warrior mummies and I will not be overly upset if a few animals are harmed. After all, it is us or them.”
But Butler was not listening to Artemis’s uncharacteristically nervous diatribe, because Holly’s shot had pulsed his vagus nerve and knocked him out cold. A shot in a million.
It was up to Holly to defend the group. It should be fine. All Captain Short had to do was set her custom Neutrino on a wide burst to buy them some time.
Then a pirate’s blackjack twirled from the fingers of a pirate’s skeletal hand and cracked Holly’s nose, sending her tumbling backward on top of Butler’s frame.
Artemis watched the possessed creatures advance the final steps toward him and was dismayed that at the end it all came down to the physical.
I always thought my intellect would keep me alive, but now I shall be killed by my own baby brother with a rock. The ultimate sibling rivalry.
Then the ground opened beneath his feet and swallowed the group whole.