“So, it’s a trap. It looks like Juliet was keeping closer tabs on you than we thought.” He pulled the Sig Sauer from his waistband. “Okay, Artemis, you stay in here. It’s time for the soldiers to take over.”
Butler’s features then stretched in an expression of surprise and pain as a bolt of magic sizzled into the barn from outside, engulfing the bodyguard’s head and torso, permanently melting every hair follicle on his head, and tossing him into the rear of the plane, where he lay motionless.
“It’s a trap, all right,” said Holly, grimly. “And we walked straight into it.”
[...]
They hunched in the back of Artemis’s solar plane, basically waiting for the Berserkers to launch their attack. Butler lay unconscious across the rear seats with smoke literally coming out of his ears, a symptom that had never been professionally diagnosed as a good thing.
Holly cradled Butler’s head, pressing her thumbs gently into his eye sockets, and forced her last watery squib of magic into the bodyguard’s cranium.
“He’s okay,” she panted. “But that bolt stopped his heart for a while. If it hadn’t been for the Kevlar in his chest…”
Holly didn’t finish her sentence, but Artemis knew that his bodyguard had escaped death by a whisker for the umpteenth time, and umpteen was the absolute limit of the number of extra lives handed out by the universe to any one person.
“His heart will never be the same, Artemis. No more shenanigans. He’s going to be out for hours,” said Holly, checking the fuselage’s porthole.
The Last Guardian, Chapter 15-16