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"Hello?" she called up the steps. It hurt to move her mouth.
Trip Trap.
The troll appeared on the landing.
Who's trip trapping over my bridge?
"Most people would have come sooner." His rough, gravelly voice filled the stairway. "How your mouth must hurt to bring you here at last."
"It wasn't so bad," she said, trying not to wince.
"Come up, little liar." Ravus turned and walked back to his rooms. She hurried up the dusty stairs.
The large loftlike space flickered with fat candles set on the floor, their glow making her shadow jump on the walls, huge and terrible. Trains rumbled above them and cold air rushed in through covered windows.
"Here." In the palm of one six-fingered hand, he held a small, white stone. "Suck on it."
She snatched the stone and popped it in her mouth, in enough pain not to question him. It felt cool on her tongue and tasted like salt at first and then like nothing at all. The pain abated slowly and with it, the last of the nausea, but she found exhaustion taking its place. "What do you want me to do?" she asked, pushing the rock into her cheek with her tongue so she could talk.
"For now, you can shelve a few books." Turning, he went to his desk and began to strain the liquid from a small copper pot thick with sticks and leaves. "There may be an order to them, but since I have lost the understanding of it, I don't expect you to find one. Put them where they will fit."
Val lifted one of the volumes off a dusty pile.
The book was heavy, the leather on it cracked and worn along the binding. She flipped it open. The pages were hand lettered and there were water-color and ink drawings of plants on most of the pages. "Amaranth," she read silently. "Weave it into a crown to speed the healing of the wearer. If worn as a wreath, confers invisibility instead." She closed the book and pushed it into the plywood and brick shelves.
Val rolled the stone around in her mouth like a candy as she put away the troll's scattered tomes. She took in the mishmash of moth-eaten army blankets, stained carpet, and ripped garbage bags that served as curtains not even the outside streetlights could pierce. A dainty flowered teacup, half full of a brackish liquid, rested beside a ripped leather chair. The idea of the troll holding the delicate cup in his claws made her snort with laughter.
"To know your target's weakness, that is the intuitive genius of great liars," said the troll without looking up. His voice was dry. "Though the Folk differ greatly, one from another and from place to place, we are alike in this: We cannot outright speak what is untrue. I find myself fascinated by lies, however, even to the point of wanting to believe them."
She didn't reply.
"Do you consider yourself skilled in lying?" he asked.>"Oh, nasty! Nasty!" Lolli's mouth contorted with honest, giggling disgust. Val laughed too, because, suddenly, it was funny. Val laughed so hard that her stomach hurt, that she couldn't breathe, that tears leaked out to wet her cheeks. It was exhausting to laugh like that, but she felt like she was waking from a strange dream.
"Are you really going back home to that?" Lolli asked.
Val was still half-drunk with laughter. "I have to, don't I? I mean, even if I stayed here for a while, I can't live the rest of my life in a tunnel." Realizing what she'd said, she glanced up at Lolli, expecting her to be insulted, but she just leaned her head on her hands and looked thoughtful.
"You should call your mom, then," Lolli said finally. She pointed toward the lobby. "There's a pay phone out there."
Val was shocked. It was the last piece of advice she expected to get from Lolli. "I've got my cell."
"So call your mom already."
Val fished out her cell phone with a feeling of dread and turned it on. The screen flashed, calls missed count climbing. It stopped at sixty-seven. She'd only gotten one text. It was from Ruth and read: "where r u? your moms going crazy."
Val hit reply. "Am still in city," she typed, but then she stopped, not sure what to write next. What was she going to do next? Could she really go home?
Bracing, she clicked over to voice mail. The first message was from her mom, her voice soft and strangled sounding: "Valerie, where are you? I just want to know you're safe. It's very late and I called Ruth. She told me what she said. I-I-I don't know how to explain what happened or to say how sorry I am." There was a long pause. "I know you're very mad at me. You have every right to be mad at me. Just please let someone know you're all right."
It was weird to hear her mother's voice after all this time. It made her gut clench with hurt and fury and acute embarrassment. Sharing a boy with her mom stripped her deeper than bare. She deleted it and clicked to the next message. It was from Val's dad: "Valerie? Your mother is very concerned. She said that you two had a fight and you ran off. I know how your mother can be, but staying out all night isn't helping anything. I thought you were smarter than this." In the background, she could hear her half sisters shrieking over the sound of cartoons.
An unfamiliar man's voice spoke next. He sounded bored. "Valerie Russell? This is Officer Montgomery. Your mother reported you as missing after a disagreement the two of you had. Nobody is going to make you do anything you don't want to do, but I really need you to give me a call and let me know that you're not in any trouble." He left a number.
The next message was a silence punctuated by several wet-sounding sobs. After a few moments, her mother's choked voice wailed, "Where are you?"
Val clicked off. It was horrible to listen to how upset her mother was. She should go home. Maybe it would be okay—if she never brought a boyfriend to the house, if her mom would just stay out of her way for a while. It would be less than a year before Val was out of high school. Then she wouldn't ever have to live there again.
She scrolled to "home" and pressed the call button. The phone on the other end rang as Val's fingers turned to ice. Lolli arranged the remaining lo mein noodles into the shape of something that might have been the sun, a flower, or a really poorly rendered lion.
