Shane pulled out the Magnum. The girl rolled her eyes. Somewhere Clint Eastwood shed a tear.
She shrugged off her jacket and gave him an unrestricted eyeful of what she’d been hiding under the trench. Sure, he could finally see her cleavage—very nice, by the way—and her tiny waist was visible, but his eyes were all for her other goodies. Two black bands crisscrossed her chest and were covered in tiny silver-looking knives. Shane knew enough about the fae to be aware silver was useless against them, so the blades were likely made of an iron alloy.
“Who
are
you?” Shane asked, clicking off the gun’s safety.
“Shiv-awn,” she replied.
“Shiv-awn? Were your parents really into prison movies?”
Shane had never seen someone glare at him with disdain quite as beguilingly as she did. “Siobhan. S-I-O-B-H-A-N. It’s Irish.” She then rolled her eyes as if unable to believe she’d been forced into a spelling lesson.
“Okay,
Siobhan
. So you’re planning to take down a troll with all those itty-bitty knives?”
Siobhan’s eyes lit up, and she didn’t seem annoyed or frazzled anymore. She reached to her back and drew out a two-foot-long black baton with a slight curve to it. Shane was about to make a snide comment about having a more impressive nightstick he could offer, when she squeezed the baton.
It extended outward from both ends, following the curve of the shaft until Siobhan held a lightweight black bow in her hand. She unstrung a small loop of wire from her belt and stepped on the lower curve of the bow, stringing the wire onto a ridge before she pulled down on the top of the bow and connected the wire to an identical ridge there.
“Damn, girl.” He gave an appreciative whistle. “You some kind of modern Robin Hood or something?”
She removed one of the small blades from her belt and squeezed it as she had the baton. The blade transformed into a full-sized arrow, complete with silver feathers on the end. Shane had been willing to write off the bow as an impressive mechanical weapon, but there was no way an entire arrow could have fit into that tiny blade.
“Magic?”
“Yup.”
“Expensive?”
“Yup.”
“You don’t say much, do you?”
“Not a lot of conversation to be made with trolls.”
There was nothing about that point Shane could argue with, primarily because he didn’t have any experience with trolls, and also because Siobhan didn’t seem as though she was the kind of woman who liked to be argued with.
“Any pro tips on how to kill one of these things?”
“The brain is almost nonexistent, so don’t focus there.” She was lining up the arrow and readying her bow as best she could in the narrow pass. “If you’re a good enough shot to take out the eye, then do that. Otherwise, it’s like any other living thing, magic or not. Shoot it in the heart and you’ll kill it eventually.”
“Eventually?”
Siobhan pushed past him. “Buddy, it’s a ten-foot-tall, seven-hundred-and-fifty-pound monster that’s been around for two centuries. Do you think you’re going to take it down in one shot?”
As she bounded out of the alley and into the street, he stared dumbfounded for a moment before running out after her shouting, “My name is Shane.”
Chapter Three
What kind of idiot introduced himself while running into the heat of battle?
Siobhan could hear Shane’s name shouted across the still evening air as she bolted towards the troll with both hands clamped on her weapon. She needed backup. She needed high ground. The last thing she needed was a man’s name.
Her low-heeled boots clamored against the pavement as she ran, and the troll growled at the sound. They might have had tiny ears, but trolls
hated
noise. It always made her laugh when she heard fairy tales about trolls living under bridges. There was simply no way. The thrum of traffic and the echoes of the noises above would prove too much for any normal troll in about five minutes. They also avoided water like the plague.
Way to miss the mark completely, Grimm Brothers.
She skidded to a stop a good twenty feet from the troll and anchored her foot on the tire of a nearby car, hoisting herself up onto the vehicle’s roof. It wasn’t much of an advantage, still putting her head below the troll’s shoulder level, but it was preferable to being on the ground.
“
Glerfendgle
,” Siobhan shouted, and she didn’t need to turn back to know Shane was staring at her like she was a nutcase. She got that look a lot.
The troll grunted in response to its name and stopped advancing.
“You are outside your territory,” she added.
The troll shrugged one knobby shoulder and trundled a few steps closer. Shane, who was standing near the car she was on, whispered loudly, “I don’t think he cares.”
“No, they never do.”
She raised her bow. The weight of the weapon felt comfortable in her hands, like she was lifting her fingers to wave instead of leveling an arrow to kill something. “Your trespass will not be tolerated in the realm of the Claughdid,
Glerfendgle
.”
This time the troll’s words sounded remarkably close to
fuck you
, or as close as the troll language would allow.
“Does that ever…you know…work?” Shane asked, and Siobhan heard him chamber a bullet.
“I like to give them the opportunity to be the first troll with half a brain.” Since this troll would not prove to break new ground for his kind, Siobhan strung an arrow onto the taut wire and plucked the string back near her ear. “
Last chance
,” she hollered to the advancing troll.
Glerfendgle had lost interest in her and Shane and was now trying to lift a small red Chevette off the street to peer underneath it. Siobhan grumbled an old Gaelic curse and rotated her neck, hearing the bones of her spine creak and groan. One of these days she’d make it through a week without having to protect a supernatural gateway from mythological monsters.
This wasn’t going to be that week.
“
Now
,” she screamed to Shane. There was no pause between her command and her attack, she simply assumed if Shane was smart enough to hunt the undead and not die, he was also smart enough to follow directions.
Her bow sighed as she released the wire, sending an arrow through the air in a slight upward arc until it met its target with a satisfying and meaty thunk. The troll bellowed its protest, but Siobhan was already stringing another arrow, and this time it sailed directly into the troll’s tiny, blinking eye.
A car alarm went off, and from an apartment window a would-be witness shouted obscenities, demanding they “Shut the hell up before I call the cops.”
Siobhan was used to this, to bystanders ignoring things like a giant fucking troll in the middle of Harlem, because it was easier to pretend it wasn’t there than it was to accept that trolls existed in the first place.
Shane fired off two bullets in quick succession before clambering up next to her on the car roof.
“I thought you said the brain was a pointless target.” His own shots had taken out the troll’s rather substantial knees, and now the beast was teetering like a drunk on a carnival ride.
“It is.”
“Then why the hell should we shoot him in the eye?”
Siobhan strung another arrow onto the wire and cast Shane a sidelong glance before firing the next arrow into the troll’s other eye. The troll wailed and stumbled forward, collapsing onto the street with a monumental
thud
. “Because blind trolls are easier to kill.”
Slinging the bow across her chest, Siobhan pulled a long-bladed knife from her boot and hopped off the car. The troll was moaning, and the worst part about that was it made her feel a little bad for it. Sure, it was breaching inter-dimensional laws, and it had no right to be here, and it was
really
hard to reason with, but she still felt shitty for killing it. When your biggest motivation in life was to gorge yourself on small children, the human realms were a veritable buffet of willing victims. The trolls didn’t seem to grasp that humans didn’t
want
their unprotected children to be kidnapped and eaten.
“Does blood make you woozy?” she inquired without looking at Shane.
“Does…what?” When she didn’t repeat herself he said, “No.”
“Good.” Siobhan knelt next to the troll who flailed out weakly in an attempt to swat her, but she’d crouched next to his midsection and his efforts were so halfhearted he wouldn’t have knocked her over even if he did manage to hit her. The traditional chant slipped off her tongue in Gaelic more easily than any English turn of phrase would. These were the words she’d been born knowing how to speak, the very meaning of her life.
As she spoke, the blade in her hand began to glow faint blue, shimmering in the night and illuminating the whole street with its surreal brightness. The troll groaned but stopped flailing.
“What the fuck?” Shane asked.
“If you can’t say it in Gaelic,” Siobhan growled, “I would appreciate you not saying it at all.” With that, she slammed the knife into the troll’s spine all the way down to the hilt. The monster gave one final cry before falling limp, either from exhaustion or death. Trolls weren’t exactly easy to kill, so she wasn’t counting on him being dead from one stab wound.
It was what she’d do next that guaranteed death.
Once more cast into darkness with the glowing blade buried inside the troll, Siobhan began to work the weapon back and forth in a sawing motion until she’d cut a hole in its back wide enough for her to stick her hand into. She gave Shane a challenging look and smiled.
“What are you—?”
“You were warned,” she said before he could finish, and jammed her arm into the hole until she was elbow-deep inside the monster’s guts.
When she didn’t hear any retching noises from behind her, she decided Shane might be more than a pretty face after all. She jerked her arm free and slid the knife out as she did, casting the street in a more purplish hue thanks to the blood coating the weapon’s blade. In her formerly free hand she was now clutching the troll’s heart.
“Oh,” Shane said, his eyes growing wider. “Wow. Okay.”
Siobhan used the blade to cut open the heart, then moved around the body in a circle until a path of blood outlined the corpse. She stopped where she’d started, dropped to her knees and whispered the rest of the incantation, touching her forehead once with the troll’s blood. Once the whole chant had been spoken, she took the knife to her own skin, cutting the tip of her finger open and letting one drop fall into the circle she’d drawn.
All of the sound vanished from the street, and she and Shane were suddenly in a vacuum. There was no noise, no air to breathe, nothing. Siobhan gritted her teeth and slammed the knife into the asphalt, combining the troll’s blood, her blood and the weapon that had cut them both before shouting the sealing word, which had no English translation but as close as she could explain it meant
I banish
.
Light exploded outward from the circle, sending her tumbling back onto her ass and blinking into the chaos she’d created. Unlike the knife earlier, this new light was pure white and impossible to look at without being drawn into it. And this was not a light you wanted to follow to the end of the tunnel.
“Don’t look at it,” she told Shane, realizing she should have warned him sooner.
Too late. The idiot was stumbling towards her magic with an awestruck expression on his face. Siobhan got to her feet and dove at him just before he touched the edge of her circle. Not only would it suck him into an alternate-reality hell void, but it would fuck up her whole ritual.
And no one fucked up her rituals.
She landed on top of him and clapped her hands over his eyes while he struggled to get free. He was a strong bastard too.
“I’m
really
sorry about this,” she whispered.
She smacked his skull against the pavement.
Chapter Four
There are headaches, and then there are
headaches
.
Shane awoke with what he was sure was the mother of all migraines and was absolutely certain at any moment one of the chest-bursting spawn from
Alien
would chew its way out of his skull. He opened one eyelid a crack and immediately regretted it. Dim light from a lamp assaulted his eyes and felt about as awesome as the time he’d gotten shot.
“Fuck my life,” he groaned.
Words. Oh Jesus, words hurt worse than the light had.
“You nearly
did
fuck your life,” a woman’s voice cut in.
It felt like it was literally burying itself into his brain like a knife.
A knife.
His eyes flew open in spite of the extraordinary pain as the memory of what had happened came rushing back to him. The street, the troll, the explosion of light, and the girl. The same girl who was sitting at the end of the bed he was in and giving him a look he suspected was usually shared between doctors and terminally ill patients. Sort of half pity and half
just die already so I can get rid of you
.
Through a haze of sharp, pointy agony that speared him in the eyeballs, he was able to recognize he wasn’t in a familiar place. The room was small and sparsely decorated, the only real personal touch peeling rose-print wallpaper gone yellow with age. The bed he was lying on was a lumpy twin with an old gray comforter, and the only other furniture in the room was the nightstand where the god-awful lamp was perched.