“Hey, it’s me again. I’m headed to the bridge now. Arwyn talked with her great-uncle, who’s some kind of supernatural historian. He knows a little about trolls. The invisible thing is more of a chameleon glamour. I think that’s why you were seeing his outline.”
He chuckled. “Arwyn explained it, but she was getting deep in the weeds on perspective and other artistic mathematical theory that I didn’t follow. So, glamour, not invisibility. The great uncle also said bridge trolls are okay with running fresh water but not salt. He thinks that might be why this one has become so aggressive. He’s too dumb to go back into the woods to look for another bridge, so he’s stuck in a place that’s making him angry.
“Our current plan is to either drive him into the ocean, where her dad can send sharks to eat him—by the way, I don’t know who her dad is, but I’m now officially afraid of him—or we drive him into the woods where he can find a better bridge. That’s plan B because we’re told trolls are extremely hard to kill—if you don’t have your own army of sharks, that is. Okay, have a good night and I’ll try to stop by to talk with you tomorrow.”
I checked the time. It was 9:57. They were already there. Without me. This was a very familiar feeling. Everyone else was off doing something together while I was at home. The difference this time was that they’d asked me to go with them.
Something in my chest fluttered. The troll scared me, but I didn’t want to be home safe and sound with my books. I wanted to be doing the stupid dangerous things with my friends. My sort of friends. My possible friends.
Blowing out a breath, I shifted and flew out the window, back to the bridge.
It was full dark, and all hell was breaking loose. Arwyn stood near the edge of the ravine, a huge wolf pacing in front of her, guarding her from the troll. Her hands were moving nonstop at her sides, casting spells that seemed to keep causing the troll to pop into sight momentarily as he lunged for the two large black bears baiting him. When she broke through his glamour, the bears swiped their long, lethal claws at the troll, occasionally trying to bite off hunks of him.
I circled above the fray, assessing what help I could be. Headlights appeared around a curve in the road going north. I thought for sure that brakes were going to lock and humans were going to get out of the car, but the driver and passenger had their eyes on the road ahead; neither even turned their head at the strange battle taking place fifty feet away.
It took me a minute to get the timing of the troll’s glamour dropping. The next time it happened, I was already arrowing through the air at his face. No one had noticed me yet. Their focus was on the ground, where the fight was taking place.
The troll caught one of the bears in the shoulder, almost knocking him off the edge of the ravine, down onto the rocks. The bear caught himself before going over, though there was some scrambling involved. I didn’t veer from my path to make sure he was all right. There’d be time to check later.
The troll looked up at me with a roar of surprise just as my talons snatched at his eyes. He turned his head away, so one of my claws was knocked to the side. The other, though, scratched through his occipital bone, popping and yanking out his eyeball.
He screamed horribly as I dropped the eye into the ravine for a scavenger. When I circled back, Arwyn was bouncing on her toes, cheering for me. I got a little lightheaded. I couldn’t remember ever having been cheered for.
The hurt bear was limping back to the fight. I dive-bombed the troll again, this time aiming for his now blind side. Silent flight meant he couldn’t hear me coming and evade my claws while keeping his remaining eye on the bears who were working in tandem. My claws ripped at his ear and the top of his leathery scalp. A fist rose to punch or squish me, but I wheeled to the side and was out of reach again.
Blood ran down the left side of his face. I was helping. While the troll searched the night sky for me, the uninjured bear rammed into the troll, knocking him over the edge of the ravine.
EIGHT
Just Another Day for the Justice League
The sounds of bones cracking on the rocks had me wincing in sympathy. It had to be done, though. He might have been silent and content for decades, but a raging, man-eating troll was not something that could be excused or overlooked.
Unbelievably, he moved, shaking off the fall. Arwyn was still at it, trying to look over the edge as the wolf kept pushing her back. The troll climbed, blinking in and out of sight, turning this into a horror movie with the monster jumping closer, seemingly out of nowhere.
His long, meaty arms grappled with the rocky wall and he was already halfway up the side of the ravine. With only one eye trained on the bears above, the troll never saw the tidal wave of water barreling down the ravine entrance toward him. The bears did, though.
Nick and Arthur retreated. The wolf tried to force Arwyn out of the way, but she just cheered louder.
“Thanks, Dad!”
The troll shrieked as he was knocked from the cliff face and dragged under. Two huge orcas latched onto the blinking troll and wrenched him in two before swimming back out to sea.
The elation I felt was momentary. He was gone. He couldn’t hurt anyone else. That was good. Almost immediately, though, I was swamped with a strange grief. He was all on his own. No other trolls around. He’d lost his home and was trying to find a new one, but nothing felt right. The contentment he’d once felt was gone forever and yet he had to go on. I knew what it was to be alone, lost in a world that felt all wrong. The difference, I supposed, was that I read while he ate people. I tried my best to shake off the sudden melancholy. It had to be done.
The wolf shifted back into Declan instantaneously. The bears, though, lay down for a longer shift. I’d never met another shifter who could transform as fast as I could. How odd.
Declan held Arwyn, who was waving at the retreating ocean. When I landed beside them, Arwyn looked like she wanted to hug me but couldn’t figure out how.
“Let’s head back to Declan’s rig,” she said. “We can get you both clothes and then talk.”
I flew to the SUV that smelled like Declan and landed on the roof, waiting for them to make their way back to the road and across it. Declan opened the rear hatch and pulled out a plastic bin of clothes, like the bin Nick and most shifters carried. Shifters didn’t have issues with nudity, but we knew that humans did.
Arwyn stared out over the ocean while Declan dressed in his regular clothes, and I put on an oversized black tee and a pair of gray sweatpants that puddled at my ankles. Nick and Arthur jogged past us, toward their own vehicles and clothes.
Yanking hard on the cord at my waist, I grinned, thinking about earlier in the evening when three men were running naked across a highway.
“What’s so funny?” Nick asked, handing me a pair of flip-flops. “They’ll be too big, but they’re better than going barefoot.”
