Faerie Blood Read Free Page A

in his condition: getting up. My arms got in his way, and he couldn’t seem to summon the strength to elude them; instead he sagged back against me.
    That much was okay. He was far lighter than the troll, both before and after petrifaction, a reassuringly warm and human-shaped weight. And he smelled a lot better, too. But as he slumped against me that little prickling I’d felt before came back, and this time it was stronger. It thrummed through the man I held, gathering at the place where his head drooped against my shoulder and spreading out from there into me, like electric current following wires out from a socket.
    Shock, I decided. Weird things happened to people in shock. This, however, was weird enough that just for a second or two my mind went entirely blank except for the sense of that current humming between us.
    Then I shook it off. The stranger looked about to take a jaunt into unconsciousness land, and that threatened to call back my panic. I had no idea how to help a man with a head wound, aside from finding the nearest phone and calling 911  —
    No, I corrected myself, not one head wound. Two. Blood oozed out of the bump at his hairline, reddening his dark disheveled hair, but that didn’t explain the dampness where his head now rested against me.
    Nor did it explain, as it soaked through my biking shirt onto my skin, why that place was where the prickling was strongest.
    “Focus, girl!” I hissed at myself, and glanced at the grass. There was a patch of scarlet there, too. Had he smacked his head on the back as well as the front when he’d hit the ground? I could buy that. The troll had hit him hard enough.
    Great. Just great.
    “Hang in there,” I begged then, fighting down the urge to shake him to keep him awake, fighting to stay calm and block my own strange, shocky reactions out of immediate thought. If he fainted, no way I’d move him; he was too big.
    But was it safe to leave an injured man anywhere near the former troll?
    That clinched it. I didn’t want to stay near that thing for another second, and on the off chance it stopped being a gruesome lawn ornament and resumed being a troll, I didn’t want to leave my rescuer in its proximity either. So I started to move, curling his arm around my neck so I could pull him up with me as I stood. “We’re getting out of here, pal,” I said, “so help me out. Stay with me. You’re going to have to hang onto me, and you’re going to have to walk!”
    As I hauled the stranger to his feet I spotted the staff—a weapon. I liked that idea. A lot. So I seized it along with its owner, and lurched upright with both. It took doing, with one arm looped around my companion’s waist and the other hand clutching at the sturdy wood—both for reassurance and for support to get up.
    But I did it. As we rose, he came around enough to peer bemusedly at what remained of the creature that had attacked us. “Turned to stone,” he croaked, his brows knitting together. “Stone… cold iron… how’d you know…?”
    Too busy with getting us mobile, I only half-heard him. “Steel Swiss Army knife,” I chirped, far more blithely than I felt. Especially when my bike was pretty much destroyed, and the contents of my patch kit were still strewn around it. But it couldn’t be helped. I’d have to come back for the bike’s remains later. “Not all that cold. C’mon, big guy, move it! We can’t stay here!”
    “You saw it? The troll… saw it for what it was?”
    “Less talk. More move. Come on!”
    I stand about five foot six. The man had six, maybe eight inches on me, and while he wasn’t Schwarzenegger in the build department, he wasn’t a scarecrow either. As we stumbled along the trail he nearly pitched me to my knees several times with the awkward effort of keeping him moving. But I kept up a half-hobbling, half-trotting pace even when my every nerve screamed for me to run home as fast as I could go, lock all the doors, and not come out for the