Faerie Blood (2 page)

Mustering all my remaining energy, I pushed the bike off of me and dove for the cargo bag that still clung to its storage rack. The patch kit and my other repair tools wouldn’t be much good, but what I wanted was my Swiss Army knife. It wasn’t much more of a weapon than a bicycle; it wasn’t intended to be. I had it for tech-chick credibility, taking apart and reassembling bicycles and computers, and an excuse to make MacGyver jokes. But it was the only thing remotely close to a weapon I had, and at that moment in time I was experiencing a need hitherto unparalleled in all of my twenty-eight years to get something sharp and pointy into my hands.

My rescuer hadn’t had to tell me twice. As I tore into the bag and snatched up my knife my only other thought was to run like hell for the nearest source of additional help, and I’d take anything from a passing jogger, to a kid on a skateboard, to a little old lady in a wheelchair. I didn’t care what kind of help I found as long as it involved a portable missile launcher, or at least another phone.

But as I scrambled up off the ground the creature won the tug of war, ripping my rescuer’s weapon out of his hands with enough force to make him stumble. Before he could regain his balance, the troll—who had learned by example—decided that the staff was now its very own personal battering ram. Without grace or control but with plenty of power, it drove the top end of the staff into the man’s chest and sent him flying backwards off his feet. On his way down a second blow caught him across the head, slamming him into the ground. Most of him hit the asphalt that paved the trail, while his head and shoulders landed on the gravel-strewn grass at the trail’s edge.

Something swept over me then, though I didn’t notice it much, not while I was in panic mode. My headache crackled like storm-charged ozone, sending lightning through my blood rather than the air. I couldn’t pay it any more attention than that. I had none to spare. I was too transfixed by the sight of the troll, snarling and gurgling like a drowning mountain lion, whipping the staff back over its head in the universal gesture for ‘Hulk SMASH!’

“Shit,” I squeaked. Then I shrieked in mounting terror at the man sprawled on the trail, “Get up!”

He stirred. His eyes flickered, urgency warring with grogginess in his bearded features as he clued in that he was now up the proverbial creek, unequipped with paddle. But he couldn’t seem to make himself get out of the troll’s way, even when its next strike with the staff missed his skull by scant inches and pounded a hole into the grass instead.

Since he couldn’t move, I did.

Attacking a pissed-off troll with a Swiss Army knife was probably not the wisest thing I could have done. No, scratch that, it was definitely not the wisest thing I could have done. But wisdom wasn’t high on the agenda right then. What I saw before me was a guy getting the crap beaten out of him because he’d answered my scream for help—which made said beating my fault. And that bothered the hell out of me. I couldn’t leave someone to get his head split open like a piñata on my account without at least trying to do something to assist.

So I flicked open the knife and threw myself in a headlong rush at the creature. I’d like to say that a flash of brilliant inspiration gave me the best possible place to hit the troll with my laughably miniscule blade, and how to tackle it to knock it off of my downed rescuer. But I can’t. I can’t even say that I knew what to call the monster, much less how to fight it. My charge had all the finesse of an intoxicated farm boy trying to tip an armed and all too dangerous cow. I almost knocked myself out when I barreled low into my target, catching the staff between it and me before it could take another whack at the stranger.

Blindly I stabbed out with my little knife. I couldn’t tell where I connected; I could barely tell that I’d connected at all, thanks to almost gagging on the troll’s stench and trying not to faint as I got my other arm around it and held on for dear life. But the tip of my blade caught somewhere along its hide—caught and sank in and stayed there.

With another gurgling howl the troll let go of the staff, nearly choking me in the process as the carved wood jammed up against my throat, and started pawing frenetically at the place where I’d struck. It writhed violently, knocking me sideways, away from the tall figure spilled along the trail. And as it writhed, it began to change.

Color leeched out of its form, turning greenish-brown skin, black tufts of hair, and tusks the stained yellow of old ivory to an overall rocky gray. Flailing arms and paws began to slow, their motions increasingly sluggish, till the troll fell over onto me with one fist still reaching for the knife and the other jabbing clumsily against the ground beside my head. One great foul blast of breath from its maw nearly made me retch before that maw, too, began to freeze up and change color inside as well as out. Its screeches of pain dwindled down to a few burbling gasps, then cut off with an unmistakable finality. Before I grasped what was happening, the weight pinning me to the earth had transformed from monster to monster statue.

The troll had turned to stone.

People in novels talk about how, in a crisis, a few seconds can stretch into hours, a lifetime, an eternity.
You can feel like you age ten years in a heartbeat, or that the world around you has just progressed into the next century when no more than a few chaotic, tumultuous minutes have truly passed.

I’d never believed in that phenomenon until a petrified troll damned near crushed my chest on the Burke-Gilman trail. From that moment on, though, I was sold. It couldn’t have been more than a minute or two that I stayed there flat on my back, panting, tears of shock and panic blurring the face of the frozen horror just above me, but it felt like decades. My mind fired off incoherent, random thoughts with dizzying speed, and in those impossibly elongated moments, each thought jangled inside me like an insane doorbell.

What the hell is this thing
?

What in the name of God just happened
?

It just turned to stone, things don’t turn to stone, not even monsters
!

Holy crap, a monster, a real monster, it was going to kill me, it was going to kill that guy
!

Oh God
.

The man who’d tried to help me was hurt.

Time snapped back to its normal rate as I shoved the brand new statue off of me, an effort that left me sweating and trembling, every muscle in my arms seemingly afire. Part of me wanted to giggle at the sight of my Swiss Army knife sticking up out of its back as it toppled over onto the ground, but I recognized the impulse for what it was—hysteria—and wrestled it down. I had to get to my rescuer.

He was still down but not entirely out, and as I skittered on hands and knees to his side he tried to turn his head in my direction. Mistake, that. His face twisted with pain, and though I’d never had a day of medical training, I didn’t need any to figure out that the swelling, bleeding bump along his hairline where he’d been clocked with his own staff was the cause of his expression.

“Take it easy, buddy,” I blurted, striving to level out my voice and blink the tears out of my eyes as I leaned over him. I tried to hide my wince at the bump, too. It looked nasty, like it ought to be Exhibit A in a textbook on Knowing Your Concussions, Great and Small. “That thing just about walloped you into next week. You got a real bad knock on the head, okay? I’m going to get you some help, but you’ve got to take it easy.”

The urgency of the fight had faded beneath a growing glaze over his eyes, and from the way he squinted uncertainly up at me I suspected he saw two or three of me rather than just the one. “Troll,” he muttered, his already accent-slurred voice blurring further as he struggled to sit up. “What happened to the…”

So that’s what it was
. That same hysterical corner of my brain gibbered at the prospect of reality containing something that could be labeled ‘troll’. Unconvinced that the stone shape lying nearby wouldn’t reanimate and try to rip my head off, I forced myself to keep ignoring it. A guy with a head injury was sprawled before me; I didn’t have the luxury of freaking out. And even one little glance at the troll statue was a panic fit waiting to happen.

“Stick it on top of a skyscraper, it’ll make a great gargoyle!” I piped, plastering on a smile and praying the stranger was too stunned to notice how it wobbled. “Don’t worry about it. Just lie still and I’ll see if I can get—whoa, hey, what part of ‘lie still’ aren’t you getting?”

I grabbed the guy, for in spite of my warning he hauled himself up onto his elbows, apparently determined to tackle something way too adventurous for a man in his condition: getting up. My arms got in his way, and he couldn’t seem to summon the strength to elude them; instead he sagged back against me.

That much was okay. He was far lighter than the troll, both before and after petrifaction, a reassuringly warm and human-shaped weight. And he smelled a lot better, too. But as he slumped against me that little prickling I’d felt before came back, and this time it was stronger. It thrummed through the man I held, gathering at the place where his head drooped against my shoulder and spreading out from there into me, like electric current following wires out from a socket.

Shock, I decided. Weird things happened to people in shock. This, however, was weird enough that just for a second or two my mind went entirely blank except for the sense of that current humming between us.

Then I shook it off. The stranger looked about to take a jaunt into unconsciousness land, and that threatened to call back my panic. I had no idea how to help a man with a head wound, aside from finding the nearest phone and calling
911

—

No, I corrected myself, not one head wound. Two. Blood oozed out of the bump at his hairline, reddening his dark disheveled hair, but that didn’t explain the dampness where his head now rested against me.

Nor did it explain, as it soaked through my biking shirt onto my skin, why that place was where the prickling was strongest.

“Focus, girl!” I hissed at myself, and glanced at the grass. There was a patch of scarlet there, too. Had he smacked his head on the back as well as the front when he’d hit the ground? I could buy that. The troll had hit him hard enough.

Great. Just great.

“Hang in there,” I begged then, fighting down the urge to shake him to keep him awake, fighting to stay calm and block my own strange, shocky reactions out of immediate thought. If he fainted, no way I’d move him; he was too big.

But was it safe to leave an injured man anywhere near the former troll?

That clinched it. I didn’t want to stay near that thing for another second, and on the off chance it stopped being a gruesome lawn ornament and resumed being a troll, I didn’t want to leave my rescuer in its proximity either. So I started to move, curling his arm around my neck so I could pull him up with me as I stood. “We’re getting out of here, pal,” I said, “so help me out. Stay with me. You’re going to have to hang onto me, and you’re going to have to walk!”

As I hauled the stranger to his feet I spotted the staff—a weapon. I liked that idea. A lot. So I seized it along with its owner, and lurched upright with both. It took doing, with one arm looped around my companion’s waist and the other hand clutching at the sturdy wood—both for reassurance and for support to get up.

But I did it. As we rose, he came around enough to peer bemusedly at what remained of the creature that had attacked us. “Turned to stone,” he croaked, his brows knitting together. “Stone… cold iron… how’d you know…?”

Too busy with getting us mobile, I only half-heard him. “Steel Swiss Army knife,” I chirped, far more blithely than I felt. Especially when my bike was pretty much destroyed, and the contents of my patch kit were still strewn around it. But it couldn’t be helped. I’d have to come back for the bike’s remains later. “Not all that cold. C’mon, big guy, move it! We can’t stay here!”

“You saw it? The troll… saw it for what it was?”

“Less talk. More move. Come on!”

I stand about five foot six. The man had six, maybe eight inches on me, and while he wasn’t Schwarzenegger in the build department, he wasn’t a scarecrow either. As we stumbled along the trail he nearly pitched me to my knees several times with the awkward effort of keeping him moving. But I kept up a half-hobbling, half-trotting pace even when my every nerve screamed for me to run home as fast as I could go, lock all the doors, and not come out for the next six years. I overruled my nerves by scolding them that the hurt stranger wouldn’t pull off three steps without me, and it was my fault that he was now a card-carrying member of the concussion club in the first place.

This was what I got for having a conscience.

Stupid conscience.

I avoided thinking about what we were leaving behind, and how a monster which should not exist—and which should not, if it did exist, under any circumstances turn into a rock model of a monster—was lying back there in open view and broad though waning daylight. My aforementioned conscience argued that some other hapless soul might stumble across the troll. Since I had no way of knowing whether its current state was permanent, I was running the risk of someone else getting hurt.

But I ignored both my conscience and my nerves, unable to do anything more to satisfy either shrieking portion of my psyche. I would by God make it home, because I had no other option. I’d help this man who’d tried to help me. One hurt person at a time was all I was able to handle.

That was just going to have to do.

By bike, the spot on the trail where the troll had ambushed me was less than two minutes from my house. On foot and with a wounded man slowing me down it was closer to five, but it seemed to take more on the order of three or four years. There were closer houses than mine, and yeah, I probably should have gone to one of them for the sake of getting the fastest possible help. But with the fight part of the emergency over (I hoped), flight mode had kicked in, and my feet didn’t want to stop till I got somewhere certifiably safe. Since I lived so close to the trail, my head was willing to humor my feet and let them aim for
my
phone rather than
a
phone. Ergo, home.