Trollhunters (36 page)

Weariness, not victory or relief, engulfed me. I placed the tip of Claireblade over the throbbing patch of skin and felt a newfound sympathy for Jack. Defeated, the troll beneath me felt not as
evil as he did obsessed, led by an inescapable hunger that consumed his every atom. I listened to the reedy breaths struggling up his throat and watched the shredded tongue loll from the corner of
his mouth. His single eye stared upward into the night sky, while the Eye of Malevolence nuzzled the empty socket.

I blinked my heavy eyes at the crowd of people. They were quiet aside from the sounds of seventeen tearful reunions. There were no pictures being taken: as I’d learn later, all of the
electronics in a three-block radius were fried the instant Gunmar went down. Most of the faces I didn’t know, but all of them seemed certain of one thing: this monster that had taken their
children must be destroyed. The task felt beyond my capabilities and I looked elsewhere for help. I found Ms. Pinkton, who was shaking her head as if apologizing for even considering giving me less
than 88 percent. I found Sergeant Gulager, too, his rumpled hairpiece and thick mustache splattered with softie effluvium. He gave me the smallest of nods.

Jack and Claire leaned on their swords and waited. I spotted Tub, returning to the sidelines with his arm around his grandma’s shoulders, and the look he gave me was absent of judgment:
this was the burden of being asked to lead. Only Blinky paid my decision no mind. He sat with his tentacles wrapped around ARRRGH!!!, whispering into the fur the kind of complicated, arcane
ceremonial recitations known only to brilliant scholars sending off great warriors into the next realm of unknowable adventure.

I remembered what Jack had asked me once.

It’s a terrible thing, isn’t it? To be dragged under?

It took only a few slices to carve out Gunmar’s heart; the leathery, tubed organ skipped around in an attempt to dodge my blade. After that was done, I broke through the crustaceous skin
of the softies and turned them to gelatin. Then I ducked into the stomach cavity and removed the gallbladder, tossing it to the turf for later burning.

Surviving Gumm-Gumms watched from the bleachers, their spell of slavery broken, watching their once-master’s vivisection as if uncertain about how they’d arrived in this peculiar
place overrun with humans. They rolled horned heads and fluttered bony wings, decidedly uncomfortable as they looked around for the nearest bridge.

I slid off Gunmar’s hip and was caught by Claire and Jack. Dad was there, too, and brought me in to his chest. His shirt smelled like grass, like home, and when I smiled I felt the stiff
edges of that stupid old calculator pocket. No, not stupid. Brilliant. He’d worn that thing for thirty years and it had yet to show a single indication of wear or tear. That pocket was a work
of genius.

I looked up at Dad, thinking I might apologize, but was rendered speechless. The stress lines of his forehead had shallowed and the worry lines of his cheeks were all but gone. His smile seemed
to open parts of him that had long been locked, just as I knew the steel shutters and locked doors would open for good once we returned home. He patted me on the face, the odd gesture of one
unaccustomed to tenderness, and so I patted his cheek in return. The last scabs of the schmoof were gone.

“Nice mowing,” I managed.

He took off his glasses to wipe his face. He noticed the dangling Band-Aid and threw the whole thing onto the turf.

“I’ve had lots of practice.”

With our arms around each other’s shoulders, we hobbled across the field toward Blinky, whose tentacles were smoothing each blood-snarled whorl of black fur. Tub was already there,
sprawled across the hide of his dead friend, his face buried in her masses of hair, one hand dangling over the goal-post antlers.

Blinky’s voice was hoarse with emotion.

“An entire volume of my history shall be devoted to this warrior. No, no—such rudimentary canonization would be insufficient. Her memorial shall be a comprehensive history all of her
own. Yes, a biographical work of dedicatory power so encyclopedic in its recountings of heroism that even the dimmest of illiterates will believe they might reach out and stroke luck from her
boulder. My measly life has but another several hundred years left before it ends. Yet I cannot imagine a better way to run out my golden years.”

Jack put his hand on the nearest tentacle.

“We need to get her underground,” Jack said. “Before the sun—”

“No.”

The refusal was muffled because it came from a mouth lost in folds of fur. Tub raised his head to reveal a face ruddy with tears. He shook his head with such determination that his bouffant
rocked like a bush in high wind. He stood, his ninja-wear smeared with Gumm-Gumm slime, his lime-green fanny pack empty of Papadopoulos’s savage inventions, yet with a confidence that looked
good on a kid who just a week before was giving up daily fivers. He spoke softly into Blinky’s ear—or his best guess of where one might be located.

“An idea most unusual,” Blinky whispered, “but a requiem unforgettable. Plump midget, you have humbled me with your elegiacal instincts. When they think back upon this day,
which they will, and often, it will be your contribution that will be remembered first, and fittingly so. It is poetry, and you, my corpulent comrade, are a poet.”

Tub understood none of this, of course, but shrugged anyway, and Blinky whispered the plan to Jack, who squinted across the field as if measuring the difficulty of the task before nodding his
agreement. Without explaining the goal, he arranged us on all sides of ARRRGH!!!: Claire and Tub at one leg, Dad and I at the other, Jack at the right arm, and Blinky at the left. At Jack’s
call we attempted to drag the great troll from her position midfield. Panting and groaning and sweating, our attempts earned us less than a first down.

Then I felt another pair of hands at my side and looked up to find Sergeant Gulager. He took hold of a horn so that ARRRGH!!!’s head wouldn’t drag across the turf. More people
followed: Principal Cole, Coach Lawrence, and Ms. Pinkton, all goggling in disbelief at the arm they lifted from the ground; Carol the museum cashier, the man with the dyed black goatee, and his
little girl whom I’d first seen on a flyer lifted up a foot; Mrs. Leach and her thespians took up an entire left leg; and then, in a single wave as if responding to a referee’s whistle,
the entire varsity squads of the Saint B. Battle Beasts and the Connersville Colts assembled to lift the torso.

None of the players knew what they’d witnessed that night or if they’d wake up Saturday morning to find this had been a wild fantasy brought on by concussion, but at that moment they
were moved by a sense of
right
, and so they lowered their shoulder pads, flexed muscles trained in weight rooms, and lifted.

The body traveled the entire length of the field as if by miracle, with the noble, snouted face pointed at the stars. When we reached a spot just past the end zone close to the street, Jack gave
a signal and we set the body in an upright arrangement. As Jack gathered yard markers and first-down poles to prop up the arms, I began to understand Tub’s plan. Tears sprung to my eyes and I
backed way, afraid to be so close to something so beautiful.

ARRRGH!!! was posed in a stance so lifelike I expected her to wink at me one more time. Her crouch made it look as if she were about to spring forward, while her open jaw suggested the
earsplitting roar that would never again be heard. Right now it was the macabre posing of a corpse, but in a few hours, when the sun crested over Mount Sloughnisse, she would turn, quite
painlessly, into a stone statue. Hers would not be one of those sad things lost in the Cemetery of Souls; hers would memorialize the site of the Battle of the Fallen Leaves and serve as a reminder
that the worlds of human and troll could operate in friendship rather than in the age-old cycles of animosity and carnage.

Harry G. Bleeker Memorial Field had always been missing a mascot, and what better icon to represent the Battle Beasts than this one?

We made our way back to the midfield, the football players dispersing into the crowd of people who were only now beginning to rub their eyes and pat their pockets for car keys, objects they
barely remembered how to use. Tub wandered over to check on Grandma, though she seemed quite pleased. Everything, after all, had been at a suitable volume for the hearing impaired. Only Sergeant
Gulager stood in place, hands on his hips, surveying the normal-looking people of his town who’d performed so far beyond expectations.

“We shouldn’t let those people go.”

It was Jack, cleaning Victor Power against the bike chains surrounding his shins.

“Why not?” I asked.

He gestured at the motionless mountain of Gunmar the Black.

“We’ll need all the help we can get to haul that body underground before morning.”

“They’ll help,” I said.

“Who?”

“The Gumm-Gumms.” I pointed them out. “I think they’ll do whatever we ask.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Something tells me they’ll be open to the non-human-eating message, too.”

“I suppose you’re right.” Jack sighed. “You know the closest bridge?”

“I do.”

“Well, all right. Let’s get this thing started.”

“Okay, but—give me just one minute?”

Jack followed my gaze and smirked. He sheathed his sword.

“Take two.”

Claire was crossing the field, splashing her hiking boots through the gunk blown out by Dad’s mower but not looking disgusted in the least. Her fatigues were crusted with unspeakable
fluids and her face was a smudgy mix of mud and blood. And yet she was radiant, her tangled hair bouncing behind her, beaming with the same abandon that I’d been enamored with long before
we’d shared a single word a week ago in math class.

She stopped a few inches away and scraped dried blood from Doctor X as another girl might toy with a ring.

“Look,” I said, “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? About what?”

“About everything. About letting you get caught. About not realizing you were like us.”

“It all ended well enough,” she said. “A bit sticky, perhaps.”

“And the play. I’m sorry about the play.”

She laughed, that loud bray that made me feel like butter.

“The play? Are you serious, ya silly gowk?”

“That accent, I’m telling you.” I shrugged. “You would’ve been great.”

“It
was
a lot of lines to memorize for nothing.”

“Tell me about it.”

Claire gave me a sly sidelong glance.

“Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, / Which mannerly devotion shows in this, / For saints have hands that pilgrim’s hands do touch, / And palm to palm is holy
palmers’ kiss.”

She held out a small white hand stained with blood.

My stomach fluttering with nerves, I took it.

“Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?” I asked.

“Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.”

“O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do, / They pray—grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.”

Claire moved closer. The frayed ends of her coat brushed against my chest.

“Saints do not move,” she whispered, “though grant for prayers’ sake.”

“Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take. / Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged.”

Beneath shattered lights, atop a ruined field, surrounded by an audience of battered survivors and the mangled dead, we kissed, and kissed again. While I closed my eyes and sank into a dark
enjoyment, two random thoughts pricked at me like a pesky mosquito. Did someone deal with Gunmar’s gallbladder after I’d tossed it to the field? And where, come to think of it, had
Professor Lempke gone?

Those worries were lost as Claire ran her hands over my back. Warmth sealed her body to mine and in the dizzy nirvana of the moment I felt her teeth scrape across my lips as she continued to
murmur Juliet’s most lovelorn of lines.

“Then have my lips the sin that they have took.”

I kissed her cheek, her eyelids, raised on my toes to kiss her forehead.

“Sin from thy lips?” I said into her hair. “O trespass sweetly urged! / Give me my sin again.”

Her arms tightened around me in a hug that was every bit as crushing as a Claire Fontaine hug ought to be. I wheezed happily within her grip, feeling her trollhunter heart beat opposite mine,
the taste of her warrior’s lips still salty upon my own. I looked through blowing wisps of her hair to find Tub at the sideline next to Grandma, making fake gagging faces through a wide grin
that gleamed with the latest in dental technology.

To my surprise, Steve Jorgensen-Warner stood there, too, unaware of Tub’s presence, staring at the field of battle with a face drained of emotion. His uniform was grass-stained from play
but free of gore, leading me to believe that he’d managed to hide away during the skirmish and was only now crawling out to absorb the aftermath. Tub looked at his former tormentor, who no
longer looked as intimidating as he once did. I had a feeling that my friend was done paying a toll, and might, in fact, reclaim the Trophy Cave as his own.

Tub regarded Steve for a long time. Then he examined the random pieces of football equipment scattered at his feet. Then, once more, he looked back up at Steve, as if an idea was forming that
was every bit as brilliant as tuning the jumbotron to static. Tub gently guided Grandma aside before kneeling down and picking up one of the helmets of the Connersville Colts. Only when he stood up
again did I realize what had been staring me in the face all night.

The emblem printed on the Colts’ helmets was a horseshoe.

And what had Blinky once said about horseshoes?

Iron works best, but in a pinch, anything of horseshoe design will suffice.

Acting upon instinct that would make any trollhunter proud, Tub pressed the helmet against the forehead of Steve Jorgensen-Warner. To say that he reacted would be the kind of understatement
worthy of a punch to the face. Steve howled as if the mere touch of the emblem had torn him in half, which, a second later, it did. His blond hair self-scalped as a reptilian ridge asserted itself
through his skull, and then his face, the lure that had hooked many a lovelorn high school girl, ripped down the center, splitting his forehead to reveal a bone-studded faceplate that spat out both
eyeballs in favor of silver orbs that glimmered with coal-hot fury. Steve’s cheeks slopped away like two uncooked hamburger patties and his jaws exploded in a shower of teeth to make way for
a massive gray mandible. The football uniform parted like a robe and thin ribbons of human meat began melting to the turf in favor of the hard, gray musculature of a changeling troll.