“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 n
ame.
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?”