A handful of times, I saw movement behind a window, but most houses seemed empty. Two had broken windows. Others had boards nailing the first-floor windows shut. While most lawns were well maintained, several had been disturbed, like claws had torn into the grass to reveal the fresh earth below. Once or twice, I spotted irregular grooves along the sides of a house. More claw marks.
If there were people here, they had to be hiding indoors. Damford houses were so close together—nothing like home, where we’d had only three neighboring families and two of those had been paid off to relocate.
When we turned a corner, I recognized the scene from the photo immediately. The house where we’d seen Hazel Five stood farther down the street. The lawn had been torn up. A rustic wooden name sign—THE ÁVILA FAMILY—lay flat on the grass, broken in half. The garage door was wide open, and so was one of the first-floor windows.
It didn’t look promising, except for one thing: A light was on upstairs.
Rainbow and I took the lead crossing the lawn. The others stayed back. We didn’t want to overwhelm Hazel Five. Odds were, she didn’t know about us—if she was even still there. By now the house could be infested with trolls. Maybe we ought to be more careful, maybe ringing the doorbell would draw unwanted attention . . .
No. I needed to move forward already—to act the way Neven had told me to. Before I could change my mind, I rang the doorbell.
No response. Same on a second try.
I tried the doorknob. Locked. I raised a fist to knock when Rainbow stepped away and crouched. She inspected decorative rocks bordering a patch of lavender. She had to be looking for one of those fake rocks people hid house keys in.
Footsteps thudded behind us. My head snapped up. A girl was running across the road. Probably about our age, short, with brown skin and browner hair and a golf club clutched in one hand. She came straight at Rainbow and me, gesturing frantically.
“Rainbow! Look.”
Rainbow stood, holding an oval rock. The girl reached us in seconds. “Get back!” she whisper-yelled. She did a double take when she saw us up close, but didn’t linger on our identical faces. “Get away from there!” She motioned for us to follow, her expression pleading.
“Trolls?” I asked.
“You know about them? And you still—Yes, trolls.” She shot nervous glances at the house. “We’re by the car over there. Please keep quiet. They’re attracted to noise.”
A gray SUV stood parked beside a shed across the street. A man and a woman stood next to it, anxious eyes on us.
Rainbow dropped the rock and followed the girl. The other Hazels, who’d been clustered around the mailbox, did the same.
I gave the front door a lingering look. If Hazel Five was inside, I didn’t want to leave. It felt like taking a step back. But the others were already running and—shit—
I ran after them.
The people by the SUV looked relieved. The woman reached to open the back door.
An alarm cut through the air.
I almost stumbled from surprise. The sound came from the neighboring front yard. A car stood in the driveway, lights flashing, the alarm wailing sharply.
The girl and Rainbow weren’t even halfway across the street. The other Hazels and I were right behind. A gray blur sprinted across the road. Another two blurs—no, three—I recognized the shapes instantly. The noise must’ve alerted the trolls.
The three of them dove at the girl. She smacked one away with the golf club. “The car!”
By my side, two trolls burst from the thicket. From the garage—another three. One climbed out the open kitchen window.
We’d faced our first—only—troll just that morning. I was nowhere near prepared for this.
I still found myself thinking: Finally.
At least now I knew what I was meant to do. At least now I could make myself useful. Determined, I grabbed my knife from my pocket.
The man by the SUV came running. He was instantly besieged. The girl whirled, smacking at trolls with her club. One leaped up her back. It clambered up her coat almost too fast to see, clutched her hair, reached for her face—
“Yaahh!” Rainbow dove, hacking at its skull with the claw part of her hammer.
A troll ran past me on all fours in a sideways leap-skitter. The slash in its face widened into a grin.
I crouched and swung my knife, cutting the troll from shoulder to hip. A cloud of dirt sprayed into the air. The troll curled up and went skidding across the street.
Red’s baseball bat brought it to a stop.
For a moment, it felt like we were winning. Slashing and hacking and yelling and running.
Then the scattered dirt on the street twitched. It gathered in separate heaps. I knew what came next.
We needed help. “Red!” I yelled. “The whistle!”
The other Hazels and the couple from the SUV were attacking the re-forming trolls and fending off new ones. The girl and I had backed up the street, farther and farther away from the rest of them.
The girl was fearless, the way she dove at the trolls and swung the club. It was getting to her, though. She was panting. Unsteady. Tensely looking from left to right.
I wasn’t much better. All I had going for me was a magical hunting knife and the knowledge that killing these trolls was apparently my freaking destiny.
A destiny that’d be easier to accomplish if they would actually stay dead.
The girl backed onto someone’s lawn. She nearly tripped over the decorative stones bordering a path, but caught herself in time.
I scanned the street. If Red had called Neven, she’d be here soon. But what about the girl? The adults from the SUV? We couldn’t just leave them.
A weight slammed into my back. Claws tore through my coat. Chittering sounded by my ears.
Wildly, I reached behind me to slash at the troll on my back. The knife didn’t connect. Then there were claws on my cheeks and a splinters-and-dirt grin an inch from my eye. Pain flared in my leg—
I crashed into the grass.
There were at least two trolls. Maybe more. Their claws dug deep, shredding my clothes and stabbing the skin underneath. One troll weighed down my arm. I couldn’t reach it with the knife. Something else slammed into me. Pressure on my throat. And movement—something thin and sharp—
It didn’t hurt.
But my tongue tasted of iron, all of a sudden. My skin felt warm. Not warm like panic or adrenaline. Warm like blood gushing from my throat. It dripped down, fast and slick, down my neck and into my clothes.
I saw it, too. The blood sprayed up in bursts at the edge of my vision.
A grinning troll face, moss-covered and bloodstained, loomed over me. Claws piercing my skin. Screams in the distance. The girl. Running at me. Golf club raised.
I felt even warmer, suddenly. Gasping, sputtering, and it hit me that I was about to—
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The girl and I had backed up the street, farther and farther away from the rest.
The girl was fearless, the way she dove at the trolls and swung the club. It was getting to her, though. She was panting. Unsteady. Tensely looking from left to right.
I wasn’t much better. All I had going for me was a magical hunting knife and the knowledge that killing these trolls was apparently my freaking destiny.
A destiny that’d be easier to accomplish if they would actually stay dead.
The girl backed onto someone’s lawn, all immaculate grass and decorative stones. Her toes caught behind one of those stones. She tripped, slamming onto the path. She grunted in pain and folded her leg against her chest, gripping her ankle.
I crouched by her side. “Is it bad?”
A muffled sound. I took it as a yes.
Movement flashed in my peripheral vision. A troll was bursting at us. I pushed myself away from the girl, slashing in the troll’s direction. It lunged, pulled back, shifted sideways, tried to get at us that way. After several attempts, I finally hit it properly. Tw
o uncoordinated slashes at its skull were enough to take it out.
The girl—half sitting up by now—knocked away an approaching troll with her golf club. I cut it down, then swiped the trolls’ dirt all over the grass and path. Maybe that would slow their return.
“Can you get up?” I glanced nervously at the clumps of dirt.
“Let me—nope.” The moment she put weight on her ankle, her face twisted.
Her parents’ SUV was thirty or forty yards down the street. The trolls would get her before she could even stumble halfway there.
The nearby shed stood open, though.
“Come on,” I whispered, offering an arm. The girl leaned on me as we crossed the few feet to the shed. We slipped inside. I left the door open a minuscule crack—I wanted to hear what was happening outside, and wanted to flee the second it seemed necessary.
The light in the shed was still on. No trolls. I didn’t have to look hard, given how tidy the place was: clean floor, mostly empty workbench, a firmly locked storage cabinet.
One corner wasn’t so tidy. Two brooms, a rake, and an old spade lay tangled together on the floor. Must’ve fallen from the empty hooks on the wall above them.
Nearby, I spotted dried blood.
“Don’t worry,” the girl said weakly. She leaned against the workbench and lowered herself to the floor. She groaned, hopefully more from relief than pain. “This is the Hendersons’ shed. They were attacked. Fought the trolls off with a shovel. They’re holed up in the library now. Lots of people are.”
Distant, panicked yells came from outside. I had to help. This was my fight, after all. “I’ll go outside,” I told the girl. “I’ll tell your parents your location.”
“No.” She kept her voice soft and glanced at the door at the same time I did. “If the trolls see you and realize I’m still here, I’m dead. I’ll text my dad. He’ll pick us up.” She pulled a phone from her coat pocket. It dropped from her hands and bounced onto the floor. She was shaking. Her ankle had to hurt more than she was letting on.
“I’ll text them, yeah? If you can unlock the phone.” I let my knife dangle from the string around my wrist and crouched to grab the fallen phone.
“No need. I borrowed it from a neighbor who deactivated the lock screen for me. My own phone was charging in my room when the trolls chased us out of the house.” She grimaced. “My dad’s is the most recent number I dialed. Send the text to the next most recent number, too—that’s that woman out there. She’s a government researcher. Tell them: ‘Hendersons’ shed, ankle injured.’”
I leaned against the workbench and typed the text, keeping one eye on the door. And, to be honest, on the girl. She was leaning over, rubbing her leg. Curly locks fell over her forehead. Her skin showed splotches from exertion.
She would’ve been safe inside the SUV. Yet she’d risked crossing the street to get us to safety.
And then some random freaking car alarm had riled up the trolls. None of us had even been close enough to set it off. If that’d happened while we’d still been near the house, the trolls could’ve cornered us. We’d known to watch for single trolls; we hadn’t known to watch for an entire army of them.
We owed this girl.
I fired off the text and kept the phone in my hand in case they responded. “You said that woman is a government researcher?”
“Yeah. She arrived with several agents to investigate the trolls, but most of them left last night.” They must’ve rushed to Philadelphia the moment the rift tore loose from my backyard. “That researcher stuck around. Most trolls stay on the move or in the woods, so when she heard how many trolls were in our neighborhood—in our house—she wanted to see for herself.”
The researchers and agents had to be MGA. How many government agencies could there be researching weird shit like interdimensional rifts and troll invasions? Maybe the woman even knew about me.
“Then you all showed up.” The girl craned her neck to look up at me. She was nearly a head shorter than I was; with her on the ground, I felt even more self-conscious about my height. “I’ve never seen you around town. I’d notice quadruplets.” She frowned. “How did the one with the hair know about the spare key?”
“Just guessing?”
“She went straight for the right stone.”
“I don’t know. Sorry. Look, if that was your house—”
“You didn’t even know whose house it was, and you were ringing the doorbell and going for the spare key?” Her eyes searched my face like she expected to find an answer there. They were this rich, brown color. I tried not to stare. I didn’t want to be creepy. “You clearly didn’t know much about the trolls, either. Your sister was using a baseball bat.”
“What do you mean?”
“Steel is more effective than wood. The trolls go down faster and stay down longer.” She nudged the club. “The higher the iron content, the better. The agents told us that. Steel tops the list. It has more iron than even cast iron. But real steel is apparently hard to find. A nearby town is supposed to be sending more. You didn’t know any of that? What are you doing here?”
I shifted uncomfortably. She was so direct that I couldn’t tell whether her incredulity was from irritation or confusion. “It’s . . . complicated?” The girl said she’d never seen us, but I had to be sure. “Do we look familiar at all? We saw a photo of our sister in your house. We’re trying to find her.”
“One: How many sisters do you even have? Two: Someone in my house? When?”
“Just now. Past day.” The thought that Hazel Five might be down the street and we were hiding in this shed itched at me. I almost heard Neven’s voice: And the Chosen One decided to chat with a pretty girl in a garden shed, while everyone else was fighting for their lives.
“We got chased out two days ago,” the girl said. “You’re saying someone broke into my house after we left? No way. It’s been completely invaded by trolls.”
I suddenly wanted to take another look at that photo Rainbow had found. Maybe we’d seen it wrong, maybe we’d come here for nothing, maybe I’d been so pathetically eager that I’d seen clues where none existed . . .
My head snapped toward the door. “I hear a car.”
The girl groped for the workbench to pull herself up, either ignoring or missing my outstretched hand. Pain shot across her face when she put weight on her ankle.
I went for the door, dropping the phone in my pocket. The SUV came to a halt several yards away. Trolls were speeding after it. I pushed the door open, gripping my knife.
The girl’s dad burst from the SUV and ran past me.
One troll had clambered onto the SUV’s roof. It zigzagged across as if trying to find a weak spot. It ended up sliding off the windshield, glaring at the researcher in the passenger seat. Its mouth parted to reveal uneven shards of teeth, a motley collection of blunt and sharp. The researcher stared back with mixed fear and fascination. (Had she recognized us? Was she MGA? She looked familiar.)
Another troll went for the open driver’s-side door. I rushed in to cut it down from behind.
The girl and her dad ran for the SUV. I whirled to check out the area. Two piles of dirt on the road were re-forming. Several other trolls were racing at us, but the SUV would be gone before they reached us. Much farther away, I saw long blond hair whip around and sun glint off brightly dyed locks as the Hazels fought. I’d been gone for . . . what, five minutes? God, I hoped they were all OK—
“What about them?” the girl said as her dad helped her into the SUV.
“You first. We’ll go back.” He turned toward me. “You, get in.”
We hadn’t found Hazel Five yet. If I fled, I wouldn’t be able to face Neven. She’d finally arrived, flying straight at the other Hazels. With her help, we could take the trolls for sure.
“I can’t leave yet,” I said. “My sisters can’t either. Go! Before the trolls reach!”
“But—” the girl started.
“Go!”
“I’m not riski
ng my daughter to convince you,” her dad said. “Last chance.”
I shook my head.
For a moment, he looked torn. Then he dropped into the driver’s seat. “Good luck. Come find us.”
“Library!” the girl called. “We’ll be in—”
They tore off. The trolls on the road had been inches from reaching the SUV. They gave chase for a couple of feet, then stopped. As one, they whirled on me.
I stepped back automatically. Gravel shifted under my feet. I chanced a look over my shoulder to make sure there weren’t any more coming—Shit. At my four and eight o’clock, two small groups approached. It was like they’d organized this.
I slashed at the nearest troll. Something smacked into my back, dragging down my coat. Fighting three or four trolls was a whole different story than one at a time.
Neven’s shadow soared over the road. She was carrying the others. I bolted toward her, the troll still on my coat. I already felt its claws on my back. No, off, off—
Effortlessly, Neven’s tail whacked the troll away. Her tail wrapped around me, plucking me off the ground and placing me on her back.
“Time to go,” her voice rumbled.
Neven had put me at the back of the group instead of by her neck. I was getting a grip on her scales when her words registered.
She wasn’t helping us fight. She was evacuating us.
“No!” I called. Neven was flying fast. The town blurred below. I swore I glimpsed blond hair in the window of the house we’d come here to find. “No,” I said, the wind thinning my voice. “I wanted to . . .”
There was no point in finishing my sentence.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Neven paced back and forth.
“That,” she growled low in her throat, “was unwise. Picking fights with trolls without any preparation? What were you thinking?”
She’d set us down behind a low hill that separated us from the main road, maybe two hundred yards from the roadblock we’d encountered.
“I’m sorry,” Four said, “we hadn’t realized—”
The Art of Saving the World Page 12