Faerie Blood Read Free

nearly made me retch before that maw, too, began to freeze up and change color inside as well as out. Its screeches of pain dwindled down to a few burbling gasps, then cut off with an unmistakable finality. Before I grasped what was happening, the weight pinning me to the earth had transformed from monster to monster statue.
    The troll had turned to stone.

Chapter Two
    People in novels talk about how, in a crisis, a few seconds can stretch into hours, a lifetime, an eternity. You can feel like you age ten years in a heartbeat, or that the world around you has just progressed into the next century when no more than a few chaotic, tumultuous minutes have truly passed.
    I’d never believed in that phenomenon until a petrified troll damned near crushed my chest on the Burke-Gilman trail. From that moment on, though, I was sold. It couldn’t have been more than a minute or two that I stayed there flat on my back, panting, tears of shock and panic blurring the face of the frozen horror just above me, but it felt like decades. My mind fired off incoherent, random thoughts with dizzying speed, and in those impossibly elongated moments, each thought jangled inside me like an insane doorbell.
    What the hell is this thing
?
    What in the name of God just happened
?
    It just turned to stone, things don’t turn to stone, not even monsters
!
    Holy crap, a monster, a real monster, it was going to kill me, it was going to kill that guy
!
    Oh God
.
    The man who’d tried to help me was hurt.
    Time snapped back to its normal rate as I shoved the brand new statue off of me, an effort that left me sweating and trembling, every muscle in my arms seemingly afire. Part of me wanted to giggle at the sight of my Swiss Army knife sticking up out of its back as it toppled over onto the ground, but I recognized the impulse for what it was—hysteria—and wrestled it down. I had to get to my rescuer.
    He was still down but not entirely out, and as I skittered on hands and knees to his side he tried to turn his head in my direction. Mistake, that. His face twisted with pain, and though I’d never had a day of medical training, I didn’t need any to figure out that the swelling, bleeding bump along his hairline where he’d been clocked with his own staff was the cause of his expression.
    “Take it easy, buddy,” I blurted, striving to level out my voice and blink the tears out of my eyes as I leaned over him. I tried to hide my wince at the bump, too. It looked nasty, like it ought to be Exhibit A in a textbook on Knowing Your Concussions, Great and Small. “That thing just about walloped you into next week. You got a real bad knock on the head, okay? I’m going to get you some help, but you’ve got to take it easy.”
    The urgency of the fight had faded beneath a growing glaze over his eyes, and from the way he squinted uncertainly up at me I suspected he saw two or three of me rather than just the one. “Troll,” he muttered, his already accent-slurred voice blurring further as he struggled to sit up. “What happened to the…”
    So that’s what it was
. That same hysterical corner of my brain gibbered at the prospect of reality containing something that could be labeled ‘troll’. Unconvinced that the stone shape lying nearby wouldn’t reanimate and try to rip my head off, I forced myself to keep ignoring it. A guy with a head injury was sprawled before me; I didn’t have the luxury of freaking out. And even one little glance at the troll statue was a panic fit waiting to happen.
    “Stick it on top of a skyscraper, it’ll make a great gargoyle!” I piped, plastering on a smile and praying the stranger was too stunned to notice how it wobbled. “Don’t worry about it. Just lie still and I’ll see if I can get—whoa, hey, what part of ‘lie still’ aren’t you getting?”
    I grabbed the guy, for in spite of my warning he hauled himself up onto his elbows, apparently determined to tackle something way too adventurous for a man