“Perfect, you genius,” said Foaly, congratulating himself. Sometimes his own achievements brought a tear to his eye.
I wish Caballine could have seen that, he thought. And then,
Wow, I must be getting serious about this girl.
Caballine was a centaur he had bumped into at a gallery downtown. She was a researcher with PPTV by day and a sculptor by night. A very smart lady, and she knew all about Foaly. Apparently, Caballine was a big fan of the mood blanket, a multi-sensor massage and homeopathic garment designed by Foaly specifically for centaurs. So they talked about that for a half hour. One thing led to another, and now he found himself jogging with her every evening. Whenever there wasn’t an emergency.
Which there is now!
he reminded himself, turning his attention back to work.
The helmet was sitting next to the human computer keyboard, with its omnisensor pointed directly at the hard drive.
Foaly stared at the hard drive and blinked three times, selecting it on the screen.
“Download all files from this and any networked computers,” instructed the centaur, and the helmet immediately began to suck information from the Apple Mac.
After several seconds, an animated bottle on the V-goggles screen was filled to the brim, and burped. Transfer completed. Now they could find out exactly how much information these humans had, and where they were getting it from. But there was still the matter of back-up files. This group could have burned their information onto CDs, or even sent it by e-mail or stored it on the Internet.
Foaly used the virtual keyboard to open a data-charge folder and send a virus into the human computer. The charge would completely wipe out any computers on the network, but before that, it would run along any Internet pathways explored by these humans and completely burn the sites. Foaly would have liked to have been a bit more delicate about it, and just erase fairy-related files, but he couldn’t afford to take chances with this mysterious group. The mere fact that they had avoided detection for so long was proof that they were not to be trifled with.
This was a major virus to lob into a human system. It would probably crash thousands of sites, including Google and Yahoo, but Foaly didn’t see that he had a choice.
On Foaly’s screen, the data charge appeared as a red flickering flame that chuckled nastily as it dived into the omnisensor’s data stream. In five minutes, the Paradizo’s hard drives would be burned beyond repair. And as an added bonus, the charge would also attach itself to any storage devices within the sensor’s range that bore the network’s signature. So any information stored on CDs or flash drives would disintegrate as soon as someone tried to load them. It was potent stuff, and there wasn’t a firewall or antivirus that could stop it.
Artemis’s voice issued from two gel speakers in jars on the desk, interrupting his concentration.
“There’s a wall safe in the office. It’s where Minerva keeps her notes. You need to burn anything inside it.”
“Wall safe,” replied Foaly. “Let’s see.”
The centaur ran an X-ray scan on the room and found the safe behind a row of shelving. Given the time, he would have liked to have scanned all the contents, but he had a rendezvous to keep. He sent a concentrated laser beam the width of a length of fishing line into the belly of the safe, reducing the contents to ash. Hopefully he was destroying more than the family jewels.
The X-ray scan revealed nothing else promising, so Foaly sent the helmet beads spinning, toppling Holly’s helmet off the desk. In a display of keyboard virtuosity, Foaly used the laser to carve a section from the base of the office door while the helmet was in midair. In two choreographed bounces, the helmet was through the section and into the corridor outside.
Foaly grinned, satisfied.
“Never even touched the wood,” he said.
The centaur called up a blueprint for the Chateau Paradizo and superimposed it over a grid on his screen. There were two dots on the grid. One was the helmet, and the other was Holly. It was time the two were reunited.
As he worked, Foaly unconsciously sang a verse of the Riverbend dirge.
“When my lucky numbers run out of luck,
When I’m stuck in the hole I tumbled into,
When my favorite dawg gets squashed by a truck,
That’s when I think me some thoughts of you.”
On the planet’s surface, Artemis winced as the song twanged through his tiny phone and along his thumb.
“Please, Foaly,” he said in pained tones. “I’m trying to negotiate on the other line.”
Foaly whinnied, surprised. He’d forgotten about Artemis.
“Some people ain’t got no Riverbend in their souls,” he said, switching off his microphone.
Billy Kong decided that he’d have a little word with the new prisoner. The female. If indeed she was female. How was he supposed to know for sure what class of a creature it was? It looked like a girl, but maybe demon girls weren’t the same as human ones. So Billy Kong thought he might ask
it
what exactly
it
was, among other things. If the creature decided not to answer, Kong didn’t mind. There were ways to persuade people to talk. Asking them nicely was one way. Giving them candy was another. But Billy Kong preferred torture.
Back in the early eighties, when Billy Kong was still plain old Jonah Lee, he had lived in the California beach town of Malibu with his mother, Annie, and big brother, Eric.
Annie worked two jobs to keep her boys in sneakers, so Jonah got left with Eric in the evenings. That should have worked out fine. Eric was sixteen and old enough to look after his kid brother. But like most sixteen-year-olds, he had more on his mind than little brothers. In fact, babysitting Jonah was seriously interfering with his social life.
The problem was, as Eric saw it, that Jonah was an outdoorsy kind of boy. As soon as Eric took off to hang out with his friends, Jonah would ignore his big brother’s orders and head out into the California evening. And outdoors in the city was no place for an eight-year-old. So what Eric needed to do was devise a scheme that kept Jonah indoors, and allowed Eric to roam free.
He came upon the perfect strategy quite by accident one night, returning home after a late-night argument with his girlfriend’s other boyfriend and his brothers.
For once, Jonah had not ventured out, and was plonked in front of the TV, watching a horror show on hacked cable. Eric, who had always been impulsive and reckless, had taken to sneaking around with the girlfriend of a local gangster. Now word had leaked out, and the gang was after him. They had roughed him up a bit already, but he had gotten away. He was bloody and tired, but still kind of enjoying himself.
“Lock the doors,” he’d called to his little brother, startling him out of his TV stupor.
Jonah jumped to his feet, eyes widening as he noticed Eric’s bloodied nose and lip.
“What happened to you?”
Eric grinned. He was that kind of person—exhausted, battered, but buzzing with adrenaline.
“I got . . . There was this bunch of . . .”
And then he stopped, because the spark of an idea was ricocheting around in his head. He must look pretty beat up. Maybe he could use this to keep little Jonah indoors while Mom was working.
“I can’t tell you,” he said, dragging a smear of blood across his face with one sleeve. “I’ve sworn an oath. Just bolt the doors and close the shutters.”
Usually Jonah didn’t have time for his brother’s theatrics, but tonight there was blood and horror on the TV, and he could hear footsteps pounding up the driveway.
“Dammit, they’ve found me,” swore Eric, peeking through a shutter.
Little Jonah grabbed his brother’s sleeve. “Who’s found you, Eric? You gotta tell me.”
Eric appeared to consider it.
“Okay,” he said finally. “I belong to a . . . uh . . . secret society. We fight a secret enemy.”
“What, like a gang?”
“No,” said Eric. “We fight demons.”
“Demons?” said little Jonah, half skeptical, half scared out of his wits.
“Yeah. They’re all over California. By day, they’re normal guys. Accountants and basketball players, stuff like that. But at night they peel off their skin and go hunting kids. Under-tens.”
“Under-tens? Like me.”
“Like you. Exactly like you. I found these demons chewing on a couple of twin girls. Maybe eight years old. I killed most of ’em, but a few must’ve followed me home. We gotta stay real quiet and they’ll go away.”
Jonah rushed for the phone. “We should call Mom.”
“No!” said Eric, snatching the phone. “You want to get Mom killed? Is that what you want?”
The idea of his mother dying started Jonah crying. “No. Mom can’t die.”
“Exactly,” Eric said gently. “You gotta leave the demon-slaying to me and my boys. When you’re fifteen, then you get to be sworn in, but until then, this is our secret. You stay in the house and let me do my duty. Promise?”
Jonah nodded, blubbering too much to say the word.
And so the brothers sat huddled on the sofa while Eric’s girlfriend’s boyfriend’s brothers battered on the windows and called him out.
This is a cruel trick, Eric thought. Maybe I’ll just let it run for a couple of months. It’ll keep the kid out of trouble until everything dies down.
The deception worked well. Jonah didn’t set foot outside the house after dusk for weeks. He sat on the couch with his knees drawn to his chin, waiting for Eric to return with elaborate demon-slaying stories. Every night he feared that his brother would not return, that the demons would kill him.
One night his fears came to pass. The cops said that Eric had been killed by a notorious gang of brothers who had been gunning for him. Something about a girl. But Jonah knew different. He knew the demons had done it. They had peeled off their faces and killed his brother.
* * *
So Jonah Lee, now known as Billy Kong, was going in to see Holly, carrying the weight of his childhood memories. For the sake of his sanity, he had managed to convince himself over the decades that there were no demons, and that his beloved brother had lied to him. This betrayal had messed him up for years, preventing him from forming lasting relationships, and making it a lot easier for him to hurt people. And now this crazy Minerva girl was paying him to help her to hunt down actual demons, and it turns out they
were
real. He had seen them with his own eyes.
At this stage, Billy Kong couldn’t tell fact from fiction. A part of him believed that he had had a bad accident, and that all of this was coma hallucinations. All Billy knew for sure was that if there was the slightest chance that these demons were the same ones who’d killed Eric, then they were going to pay. It was revenge he was after.
Holly was not too happy playing the victim. She’d had enough of that in the Academy. Every time the curriculum had thrown up a role-playing game, Holly, as the only girl in that class, had been picked to be the hostage, or the elf walking home alone, or the teller facing a bank robber. She’d tried to object that this was stereotyping, but the instructor had replied that stereotypes were stereotypes for a reason, and get that blond wig on. So when Artemis proposed that she allow herself to get caught, Holly had taken a bit of persuading. Now she was tied to a wooden chair in a dark damp basement room, waiting for some human to come and torture her. The next time Artemis had a plan involving someone being taken hostage, he could play the part himself. It was ridiculous. She was a captain in her eighties and Artemis was a fourteen-year-old civilian, and yet he was dishing out the orders and she was taking them.
That’s because Artemis is a tactical genius
, said her sensible side.
Oh, shut up
, her irritated side responded eloquently.
And then Billy Kong came into the room and proceeded to irritate Holly even further. He glided across the floor like a pale, hair-gelled ghost, circling Holly silently several times before speaking.
“Tell me something, demon. Can you peel off your face?”
Holly met his eyes. “With what? My teeth? Hands tied, moron.”
Billy Kong sighed. Lately, everyone under five feet seemed to think it was their prerogative to give him verbal abuse.
“You probably know I’m not supposed to kill you,” said Billy, teasing his hair into spikes. “But I often do things that I’m not supposed to.”
Holly decided to crack this human’s confidence a little.
“I know that, Billy, or should I say, Jonah. You’ve done a lot of bad things over the years.”
Kong took a step back. “You know me?”
“We know all about you, Billy. We’ve been watching you for years.”
This wasn’t strictly true, of course. Holly knew no more about Kong than what Foaly had told her. Perhaps she wouldn’t have baited him if she’d known about his
demon
history.
To Billy Kong, this simple statement was confirmation of everything Eric had told him. Suddenly the building blocks of his beliefs and understandings toppled and smashed beyond repair.
It was all true. Eric had not lied. Demons walked the earth, and his brother had tried to protect him and paid with his life
.
“You remember my brother?” he asked, his voice shaking.
Holly presumed that this was a test. Foaly
had
mentioned a brother.
“Yes. I remember. Derek, wasn’t it?”
Kong pulled a stiletto knife from his breast pocket, gripping it so tightly his knuckles whitened.
“Eric!” he shouted, spittle spraying from his mouth. “It was Eric! Do you remember what happened to him?”
Holly suddenly felt nervous. This Mud Man was unstable. It would only take her a second to escape from these bonds, but maybe a second was too long. Artemis had requested that she remain bound for as long as possible, but from the look on Billy Kong’s face, it seemed that staying bound could be a fatal mistake.
“Do you remember what happened to my brother?” asked Kong again, waving the knife like a conductor’s baton.
“I remember,” said Holly. “He died. Violently.”
Kong was thunderstruck. Reeling internally. For several moments he circled the room muttering to himself, which didn’t comfort Holly any.