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“What truck?”
“Dory! I need the damned keys.” That was Fin.
“What truck?” I persisted, getting a really bad feeling about this.
“That big one,” she told me cheerfully. “Hoo boy, that was fun to drive.”
“Wait. You drove the big truck?” She nodded. “Like, the six-wheeled truck?” More nodding. “And something happened to it?”
“Would you stop that?” Fin was looking pissed. “We got sick people here, and I gotta get something to hold that thing onto the back of your car, ’cause we’re never gonna fit ’em all inside otherwise, and you’re doing what? Oh, yeah. Bitching!”
“I don’t bitch!”
“Gimme the damned keys!”
“Here!” I was impressed I didn’t throw them at him, but placed them in his tiny little asshole palm.
“Finally.” He looked at Granny. “You done?”
“As much as I could. You oughta take a few days off,” she told Blue, who grunted at her. And then she and Fin left in a squeal of tires.
I stared after them.
She didn’t even slow down for the stop sign.
After a minute, I decided I might as well get comfortable, and pulled a six-pack of longnecks out of o
ne of the bags. I handed Blue one, took one for myself, and discovered the heretofore unknown fact that seals like beer. Well, selkies, anyway.
I poured some down the throats of the interested parties, and then Blue and I sat and drank for a while.
The city lights on the water were nice. The place smelled like gasoline, brackish water, and a fish rotting somewhere nearby, but I’d smelled worse. And, slowly, the graffiti was calming down, so I didn’t get dizzy from staring at it anymore.
Blue drank his beer and ate everything in sight. Including two loaves of bread, a package of baloney, two boxes of PowerBars, a quart of orange juice, a bag of Cheetos, eight candy bars, four apples—the only fruit the store had—a dozen doughnuts, six hot dogs, another blue ICEE, and sixteen Slim Jims. Which was fine but made me feel like maybe I should have gotten more.
“You want anything else?”
“No.”
The voice was deep and rumbling, as if a mountain could talk. It fit him. And it kind of surprised me, although I didn’t know why. He’d been looking like he was following well enough; if he could understand English, of course he could probably speak it, too.
“You want something for the pain?”
He shook his head. And then looked skyward; I wasn’t sure why. It was too cloudy to see the moon right now.
I wanted to question him, but this didn’t seem the time. I wanted to help him, but wasn’t sure how, or even what would be acceptable. I knew Olga, Fin, and the twins, but I didn’t think they were necessarily representative of troll culture in general. Olga and Fin had been here for years, and the twins were young and impressionable. They’d become a weird amalgam of human teenage weirdness and Dark Fey habits and anyway, I was used to them.
I wasn’t used to him.
But I wanted to do something. “You want anything at all?” I asked, and waited.
This was a troll, after all.
But the answer came more quickly than I’d expected.
“Four and five.”
I waited some more. “What?”
