Artemis Fowl_ The Opal Deception - Eoin Colfer [108]
Artemis smiled. It was Gaudí himself. How amazing.
The scene solidified, colors painting themselves brighter. Artemis could smell the dry Spanish air now, and the heavy tangs of sweat and paint.
“Excuse me?” said Artemis in Spanish.
Gaudí looked up from the drawings, and his scowl was replaced with a look of utter disbelief. There was a boy stepping from thin air. Beside him a cowering demon. The brilliant architect absorbed every detail of the tableau, committing it to his memory forever.
“Sí?” he said hesitantly.
Artemis pointed to the top of the building. “You’ve got some mosaics planned for the roof. You might want to rethink those. Very derivative.”
Then boy and demon disappeared.
Butler had not panicked when a creature had stepped out a the hole in time. Then again, he was trained not to panic, no matter how extreme the situation. Unfortunately, nobody else at the Passeig de Gràcia intersection had attended Madam Ko’s Personal Protection Academy, and so they proceeded to panic just as loudly and quickly as they could. All except the curly-haired girl and the two men with her.
When the demon appeared, the public froze. When the creature disappeared, they unfroze explosively. The air was rent with the sounds of shouting and screaming. Drivers abandoned their cars, or simply drove them into store windows to escape. A wave of humans withdrew from the point of materialization as though repelled by an invisible force. Again, the girl and her companions bucked the trend, actually running toward the spot where the demon had shown up. The man with the crutches displayed remarkable agility for one who was supposedly injured.
Butler ignored the pandemonium, concentrating on his right hand. Or rather, where his right hand had been a second earlier. Just before Artemis fizzled into another dimension, Butler had managed to get a grip on his shoulder. Now the disappearing virus had claimed his own hand. He was going wherever Artemis had gone. He could still feel his young charge’s bony shoulder in his grip.
Butler fully expected his arm to disappear, but it didn’t. Just the hand. He could still feel it in an underwater pins-and-needles kind of way. And he could still feel Artemis.
“No, you don’t,” he grunted, tightening his invisible grip. “I’ve put up with too much hardship over the years for you to vanish on me now.”
And so Butler reached down through the decades and yanked his young charge back from the past.
Artemis didn’t come easy. It was like dragging a boulder through a sea of mud, but Butler was not the kind of person who gave up easily, either. He planted his feet and put his back into it. Artemis popped out of the twentieth century and landed sprawling in the twenty-first.
“I’m back,” said the Irish boy, as if he had simply returned from an everyday errand. “How unexpected.”
Butler picked his principal up and gave him a perfunctory examination.
“Everything is in the right place. Nothing broken. Now, Artemis, tell me, what is twenty-seven multiplied by eighteen point five?”
Artemis straightened his suit jacket. “Oh, I see, you’re checking my mental faculties. Very good. I suppose it’s conceivable that time travel could affect the mind.”
“Just answer the question!” insisted Butler.
“Four hundred and ninety-nine point five, if you must know.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
The giant bodyguard cocked his head to one side. “Sirens. We need to get out of this area, Artemis, before I’m forced to cause an international incident.”
He hustled Artemis to the other side of the road, to the only car still idling there. Maria looked a little pale, but at least she had not abandoned her clients.
“Well done,” said Butler, flinging open the rear door. “Airport. Stay off the highway as much as possible.