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“Yeah.” He looked around resentfully. “They trashed my place, so they just came back here. I don’t know how they think they’re going to get away with it. The Circle does checks on places like this—”
“They recently acquired an in with the Circle.”
Rufus and I exchanged glances.
“Well, that’s just great,” Ray said. “All these people mean we can’t use magic to pinpoint the weapons, and now you tell me we gotta search”—he broke off to count—“twenty portals!”
“Forty. Twenty on this side, too,” Curly pointed out.
Ray cursed. “How the hell are we supposed to search forty portals?”
“I don’t know. You said, get you in. I got you in. Now I got to go to the john.”
“You just went to the john!”
“I have a tiny bladder! It’s a condition!”
He said something else, too, but I didn’t hear. Because the front doors went crashing into the main room, followed by fifty thousand pounds of pissed-off war machine. And I didn’t just mean the truck.
Looked like the party had come to us.
Chapter Fifty-eight
I guess the truck hadn’t died, after all, just got hung up on the steps. Because it came barreling into the room, shattering the pretty glass lobby and slinging around. And started off-loading trolls—tons of them.
It looked like a clown car at the circus; they just kept coming. But instead of big red noses and floppy shoes, they were wearing full-on armor: huge helmets, massive breastplates, even shin guards. And it wasn’t just Olga’s usual crew; I didn’t know most of these guys, although I was pretty sure I’d seen a few at the burnt-out-building fight.
And it looked like they were ready for a new one.
“What are they doing?” Ray yelled to be heard over the trolls, who were also yelling. And banging on massive shields and slamming equally massive spears into the floor, hard enough to crack the tile.
Olga got out and clambered on top of the cab, and if I’d thought she looked like Boudicca before, it was nothing compared to this. She was armored, too, including a shining bronze helmet, a breastplate that truly deserved the term, and a sword in her fist that had to be six feet long. She roared, a word that in no way does that sound justice, and which was completely unlike the triumphal noise I’d heard her make at the theatre. This one was full of anguish and fury, a primal, heart-stopping, gut-wrenching cry that had all my hairs standing on end and my knees weak.
The beating and stamping and assorted other sounds abruptly stopped.
And so did everything else.
A couple slot games chimed quietly to themselves and somebody dropped a glass. But nobody moved; nobody spoke. For a space that a minute ago had been loud and boisterous, it was pretty impressive.
And then Olga started talking, and it was more so.
“Trym! Geirröd!” The shout was loud enough to shake the rafters. “Come out and face me. Come out and die!”
Nobody came out.
I didn’t really blame them.
“You go into our hills,” Olga spat. “You lead slavers to hidden villages. You rip children from mothers’ arms, sell like animals. Those you not sell, you kill! You kill my sister’s son, my BLOOD. Now I take yours! Come out and face me! Come out and die!”
Shit. It looked like I hadn’t been the only one doing some investigating, and Olga’s had not ended in good news. For her or the bastards responsible.
“Worse, you sell bones,” Olga said, her voice low and savage, but it went through the room like a shout. “You sell souls. You make weapons from our people to use on our people! You blaspheme and defile! No more!”
There was a sound from the crowd then, a murmur that swept, not through the staring humans, motionless in their gowns and jewels, but through the trolls. Only that isn’t the right word. A murmur implies something soft, and there was none of that here. A low, furious vibration was more like it, one that shook the floor under my feet despite the fact that I was standing on a balcony. If rage had a sound, that would be it.
“What’s going on?” Ray whispered.
I thought about what Blue had told me. “I think . . . six and seven are about to have a very bad day.”
