AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Siobhan strung another arrow onto the wire and cast Shane a sidelong glance before firing the next arrow into the troll’s other eye. The troll wailed and stumbled forward, collapsing onto the street with a monumental thud. “Because blind trolls are easier to kill.”
Slinging the bow across her chest, Siobhan pulled a long-bladed knife from her boot and hopped off the car. The troll was moaning, and the worst part about that was it made her feel a little bad for it. Sure, it was breaching inter-dimensional laws, and it had no right to be here, and it was really hard to reason with, but she still felt shitty for killing it. When your biggest motivation in life was to gorge yourself on small children, the human realms were a veritable buffet of willing victims. The trolls didn’t seem to grasp that humans didn’t want their unprotected children to be kidnapped and eaten.
“Does blood make you woozy?” she inquired without looking at Shane.
“Does…what?” When she didn’t repeat herself he said, “No.”
“Good.” Siobhan knelt next to the troll who flailed out weakly in an attempt to swat her, but she’d crouched next to his midsection and his efforts were so halfhearted he wouldn’t have knocked her over even if he did manage to hit her. The traditional chant slipped off her tongue in Gaelic more easily than any English turn of phrase would. These were the words she’d been born knowing how to speak, the very meaning of her life.
As she spoke, the blade in her hand began to glow faint blue, shimmering in the night and illuminating the whole street with its surreal brightness. The troll groaned but stopped flailing.
“What the fuck?” Shane asked.
“If you can’t say it in Gaelic,” Siobhan growled, “I would appreciate you not saying it at all.” With that, she slammed the knife into the troll’s spine all the way down to the hilt. The monster gave one final cry before falling limp, either from exhaustion or death. Trolls weren’t exactly easy to kill, so she wasn’t counting on him being dead from one stab wound.
It was what she’d do next that guaranteed death.
Once more cast into darkness with the glowing blade buried inside the troll, Siobhan began to work the weapon back and forth in a sawing motion until she’d cut a hole in its back wide enough for her to stick her hand into. She gave Shane a challenging look and smiled.
“What are you—?”
“You were warned,” she said before he could finish, and jammed her arm into the hole until she was elbow-deep inside the monster’s guts.
When she didn’t hear any retching noises from behind her, she decided Shane might be more than a pretty face after all. She jerked her arm free and slid the knife out as she did, casting the street in a more purplish hue thanks to the blood coating the weapon’s blade. In her formerly free hand she was now clutching the troll’s heart.
“Oh,” Shane said, his eyes growing wider. “Wow. Okay.”
Siobhan used the blade to cut open the heart, then moved around the body in a circle until a path of blood outlined the corpse. She stopped where she’d started, dropped to her knees and whispered the rest of the incantation, touching her forehead once with the troll’s blood. Once the whole chant had been spoken, she took the knife to her own skin, cutting the tip of her finger open and letting one drop fall into the circle she’d drawn.
All of the sound vanished from the street, and she and Shane were suddenly in a vacuum. There was no noise, no air to breathe, nothing. Siobhan gritted her teeth and slammed the knife into the asphalt, combining the troll’s blood, her blood and the weapon that had cut them both before shouting the sealing word, which had no English translation but as close as she could explain it meant I banish.
Light exploded outward from the circle, sending her tumbling back onto her ass and blinking into the chaos she’d created. Unlike the knife earlier, this new light was pure white and impossible to look at without being drawn into it. And this was not a light you wanted to follow to the end of the tunnel.
“Don’t look at it,” she told Shane, realizing she should have warned him sooner.
Too late. The idiot was stumbling towards her magic with an awestruck expression on his face. Siobhan got to her feet and dove at him just before he touched the edge of her circle. Not only would it suck him into an alternate-reality hell void, but it would fuck up her whole ritual.
And no one fucked up her rituals.
She landed on top of him and clapped her hands over his eyes while he struggled to get free. He was a strong bastard too.
“I’m really sorry about this,” she whispered.
She smacked his skull against the pavement.
Chapter Four
There are headaches, and then there are headaches.
Shane awoke with what he was sure was the mother of all migraines and was absolutely certain at any moment one of the chest-bursting spawn from Alien would chew its way out of his skull. He opened one eyelid a crack and immediately regretted it. Dim light from a lamp assaulted his eyes and felt about as awesome as the time he’d gotten shot.
“Fuck my life,” he groaned.
Words. Oh Jesus, words hurt worse than the light had.
“You nearly did fuck your life,” a woman’s voice cut in.
It felt like it was literally burying itself into his brain like a knife.
