Holly closed her eyes, breathed deeply through her nose, filling her lungs, then threw her head back, and howled. It was a fantastic noise. Lions, apes, wolves, and eagles. They were all in there. The howl was punctuated by the staccato chatter of monkeys and the hiss of a thousand snakes.
Artemis the elder stepped back, instinctively terrified. Some primal part of his brain interpreted this message as fear and pain. His skin crawled and he had to fight his every instinct not to run and hide.
Artemis the younger reached down to the lemur, dangling the ziplock bag in front of its twitching nose. The lemur laid the pads of its fingers on Artemis’s wrist.
I have him, thought the Irish boy. The money for the expedition is mine.
Then a wall of unholy sound blasted him like a force-ten wind. Young Artemis staggered back, dropping the bag of paste, suddenly irrationally terrified.
Something wants to kill me. But what? Every animal in the world, it sounds like.
The park’s residents were thoroughly spooked too. They screeched and chattered, rattling their cages, hurling themselves against the bars. Monkeys tried repeatedly to leap across the moats surrounding their islands. A thousand-pound Sumatran rhino charged the heavy doors of its cage, rattling the hinges with each attack. A red wolf snarled and snapped, an Iberian lynx hissed, slashing the air, and a snow leopard chased its tail, flicking its head and mewling anxiously.
Butler could not help but shift his focus.
“It’s the female creature,” he stated. “Making some kind of sound. It’s riling these animals up. I’m a bit disturbed myself.”
Artemis did not take his gaze from the lemur. “You know what to do,” he said to his bodyguard.
Butler knew. If there is an obstacle preventing the completion of a mission, remove the obstacle. He strode quickly to the bars, poked the pistol’s muzzle through the mesh, and put a dart into the female’s shoulder.
She stumbled backward, her fantastic orchestra of animal sounds squawking to a halt.
Butler felt a shudder of guilt, which almost caused him to misstep on his way to Artemis’s side. Twice now he had tranq’ed this girl, or whatever she was, without having any idea what the chemicals were doing to her nonhuman system. His only consolation was that he had loaded small dosage darts as soon as he had secured the night watchman. She shouldn’t be out too long. A few minutes tops.
The lemur was spooked now, tiny hands tickling the space before him. The sap cocktail was tempting, but there was danger here of the worst kind, and the urge to live was overriding the desire for a tasty treat.
“No,” said Artemis, seeing fear cloud the creature’s eyes.“It’s not real. There is no danger.”
The little simian was not convinced, as if it could read the boy’s intention in the sharp angles of his face.
The silky sifaka squeaked once as though pinpricked, then scampered along Artemis’s arm, over his shoulder, and out the cage door.
Butler lunged for the tail but missed by a hair. He closed his fingers into a fist.
“Perhaps it’s time to admit defeat on this one. We are dangerously unprepared, and our adversaries have . . . abilities we know nothing about.”
His charge’s reply was to hurry after the lemur.
“Artemis, wait,” sighed Butler. “If we must proceed, then I will take the lead.”
“They want the lemur,” Artemis panted as he ran. “And so it becomes more valuable than it was. When we catch the animal, then we are in a position of power.”
Catching the animal was easier said than done. The lemur was incredibly agile and found purchase on the smoothest of surfaces. It darted without a wobble along a metal railing, leaping fully ten feet to the lower branches of a potted palm, and from there jumped to the compound wall.
“Shoot!” hissed Artemis.
It occurred to Butler briefly that he did not care for Artemis’s expression. Almost cruel, his brow creased where a ten-year-old’s brow should not have creases. But he would worry about that later, for now he had an animal to sedate.
Butler was quick, but the silky sifaka was quicker. In a flash of fur it scaled the wall and dropped outside into the night, leaving a blurred white jet stream in its wake.
“Wow,” said Butler, almost in admiration. “That was fast.”
Artemis was not impressed by his bodyguard’s choice of words. “Wow? I think this merits more than a wow. Our quarry has escaped, and with it the funds for my Arctic expedition.”
At this point Butler was fast losing interest in the lemur. There were other less ignoble ways to raise funds. He shuddered to think of the ribbing he would have to endure if an account of this night somehow made it to Farmer’s Bar in LA, which was owned by one ex-blue-diamond bodyguard and frequented by many more.
But in spite of his distaste for the mission, Butler’s sense of loyalty forced him to share a fact that the park director had mentioned earlier, when Artemis was busy studying the alarm system.
“There is something that I know, which you may not know,” he said archly.