“You don’t say.”
The girl sighed. “Okay, I know this must be hard for you to digest. Weird stuff exists. The monsters you thought were only in fiction are—”
“Look, lady, you don’t need to give me the whole ‘The monsters under your bed are real’ speech. I hunt vampires for a living.”
For the first time since she’d grabbed him she appeared mildly impressed.
“But trolls are a bit out of my league,” Shane confessed.
“They’re just really, really, really stupid fae.”
“I feel better already.” He peeked over her again to take another look at the troll. It was breathing heavily, nostrils flaring with each inhale and a rattling grunting noise coming out with each exhale. It was sniffing for something. Or someone.
“Is it hunting you?”
“Sort of.” She dipped under his braced arm and peered at the monster.
“How good is its sense of smell?”
The troll grunted and turned in their direction. It barked loudly. “Not as good as its sense of hearing,” she said with a sigh. “Are you armed?”
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?”