You can’t stay in that blasted house forever, my boys, he thought. And the moment you poke your noses from cover, Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye shall be prepared.
He could wait.
He was prepared to put in the hours. As the duke often said to himself: One must spend time to make time.
Teddy lay sandwiched between a yoga mat and a veil of camouflage that had served as a hide of sorts for almost a month now, and ran a sweep of the island through his night-vision monocular. The whole place was lit up like a fairground with roaming spotlights and massive halogen lamps. There was not a square inch of space for an intruder to hide.
Clever chappies, these Fowls, thought the duke. The father must have a lot of enemies.
Teddy sat up, fished a boar-bristle brush from his duffel bag, and began his evening ritual of one hundred brushes of his beard. The beard rippled and glistened as he brushed, like the pelt of an otter, and Teddy could not help but congratulate himself. A beard required a lot of maintenance, but, by heaven, it was worth it.
He had only reached stroke seven when the duke’s peripheral vision registered that something had changed. It was suddenly darker. He looked up, expecting to find that the lights had been shut off on Dalkey Island, but the truth was more drastic.
The island itself had disappeared.
Lord Teddy checked all the way to the horizon with his trusty monocular. In the blink of an eye the entirety of Dalkey Island had vanished with only an abandoned stretch of wooden jetty to hint that the Fowl residence might ever have existed at the end of it.
Lord Bleedham-Drye was surprised to the point of stupefaction, but his manners and breeding would not allow him to show it.
“I say,” he said mildly. “That’s hardly cricket, is it? What has the world come to when a chap can’t bag himself a troll without entire land masses disappearing?”
Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye’s bottom lip drooped. Quite the sulky expression for a hundred-and-fifty-year-old. But the duke did not allow himself to wallow for long. Instead, he set his mind to the puzzle of the disappearing island.
“One can’t help but wonder, Teddy old boy,” mused the duke to the mirror on the flat side of his brush, “if all this troll malarkey is indeed true, then is the rest also true? What Brother Colman said vis-à-vis elves, pixies, and gnomes all hanging around for centuries? Is there, in fact, magic in the world?”
He would, Lord Teddy decided, proceed under the assumption that magic did exist, and therefore, by logical extension, magical creatures.
“And so it is only reasonable to assume,” Teddy said, “that these fairy chaps will wish to protect their own, and perhaps send their version of the cavalry to rescue the little troll. Perhaps the cavalry has already arrived, and this disappearing-island trick is actually some class of a magical spell cast by a wizard.”
The duke was right about the cavalry. The fairy cavalry had already arrived.
One fairy, at least.
But he was dead wrong about a wizard casting a spell. The fairy responsible for the disappearing-island trick was a far cry indeed from being a wizard, and could no more cast a spell than a frog could turn itself into a prince. She had made a split-second decision to use the only piece of equipment available to her, and was now pretty certain that her decision was absolutely the wrong one.
THE gnome professor Dr. Jerbal Argon once presented a theory, dubbed the Law of Diminishing Probabilities, to the fairy Psych Brotherhood. Argon’s law states that the more unusual the subjects involved in a conflict, the more improbable the resolution to that conflict will be. It is possibly the vaguest behavioral theory ever to make it into a journal, and it is really more of a notion than a law. But in the case of the Fowl Twins’ first magical adventure, it would certainly prove to be accurate, as we will see from the hugely improbable finale to this tale.
The law’s requirements were certainly fulfilled, as this day was, without doubt, one for unusual individuals:
An immortalist duke…
A miniature troll…
And a set of fraternal human twins: the first a certified genius with a criminal leaning lurking in his prefrontal cortex, and the second possessed of a singular talent that has been hinted at but not fully explored as yet.
There are two additional unusual individuals still to join the tale. The nunterrogator, to whom we have already alluded, will presently make one of her trademark theatrical entrances. But the next unusual individual to join our cast of protagonists is more than simply unusual—she is biologically unique. And she made her appearance from above, hovering thirty feet over Dalkey Island.
This unusual individual was Lower Elements Police Specialist Lazuli Heitz, who, Five Minutes Earlier, entered the island’s airspace to complete a training maneuver in the Fowl safe zone. Usually such safe zones were in remote areas, but in rare cases where there was a special arrangement with the human occupants, a zone could be closer to civilization and provide more of a challenge for the specialists. A case in point being Dalkey Island, where Artemis Fowl the Second, friend to the LEP, had guaranteed safe passage for fairies.
From a human perspective, Lazuli was unusual simply by virtue of being an invisible flying fairy, but from a fairy perspective, LEP Specialist Heitz was unusual because she was a hybrid, that is to say a crossbreed. Hybrids are common enough among the fairy folk, especially since the families were forced into close quarters underground, but even so, they are each and every one idiosyncratic, for all hybrids are as unique as snowflakes and the manifestation of their magical abilities is unpredictable.
In Lazuli Heitz’s case, her magic had resolutely refused to manifest itself in any shape or form. Lazuli’s particular category of hybrid was known as a pixel, that being a pixie-elf cross. There were other species in the ancestral DNA mix, too, but pixie and elf accounted for over ninety-five percent of her total number of nucleotides. And even though both pixies and elves are magical creatures, not a single spark of power seemed to have survived the crossbreeding. In height, Specialist Heitz followed the pixie type at barely thirty-two inches tall, but her head adhered to the elfin model and was smaller than one might expect to see on a pixie’s shoulders, with the customary elfin sharp planes of cheekbone, jaw, and pointed ear. This was enough to give her away as a hybrid to any fairy who cared to look. And just in case there was any lingering doubt, Lazuli’s skin and eyes were the aquamarine blue of Atlantean pixies, but her hair was the fine flaxen blond associated with Amazonian elves. Scattered across her neck and shoulders was a mottling of yellow arrowhead markings, which, according to paleofatumologists, had once made Amazonian elves look like sunflowers to airborne predators.
Unless that elf is a hybrid with blue skin, Lazuli often thought, which ruins the effect.
All this paleofatumological knowledge only meant one thing to Lazuli, and that was that her parents had probably met on vacation, which was about the sum total of her knowledge on that subject, aside from the fact that one or both of them had deserted her on the north corner of a public square, after which the orphanage administrator had named her Lazuli Heights.
“I changed the spelling, and there you have it,” the administrator had told her. “It’s my little game, which worked out well for you, not so much for Walter Kooler or Vishtar Restrume.”
The sprite administrator had a human streak and often made barbed remarks along the lines of The lapis lazuli is a semiprecious stone. Semiprecious, hybrid. I think your parents must have been thinking along those lines, or you wouldn’t have ended up here.