Chapter 2

Anna heard them before I did. She ran off the path.

"Dammit, Anna!" Sven took off after her. I followed, slower, taking my time to slide under a branch and walk around a fallen tree. The leaves overhead blotted out the stars. They were playing music, bass thumping—she was going to get to them without me. "Anna, that's not your sister!"

"But they might have seen her!"

Good news: the sound was easy to follow. Anna kept stumbling and swearing to herself, Sven kept barking, and the music—they had wrestled a stereo from somewhere. The song had a pounding drum and a lilting melody, plucked out by some kind of synth. It keened out above and below itself, wailing from another world, another time, minor and fervent and feverish. I grew up with that shit. Still made me shiver to hear it again. One time it had gone on for hours, and I had buried my face in Sven's scruffy neck and begged them to stop singing. The hound had howled over my crying, and I was grateful since that almost drowned out the sound. They had laughed, and ruffled my hair, and told me to go away for a few days, to go climbing.

I could make out a campfire's glow through the trees ahead. I caught a whiff of smoke, and the scent of pork roasting on the wind. Sven barked again. He sounded absolutely delighted.

"A visitor!" Bulda yelled. The music cut off. I couldn't hear Anna's response over the general cheering.

I broke through the bushes and stepped into their clearing. The light seared into my eyes. I brought up my arm and squinted while they adjusted.

"Krissie's home!"

They all cheered. One of them grabbed me and spun me around. I landed on my ass for the second time that day.

"Take off your clothes, I'll wash them—"

"My clothes stay on!" I scrambled to my feet and blinked the last few spots out of my eyes.

They looked human: pale skin, green eyes, and greasy, dirty blonde hair. They were dressed in shades of olive green, with stained jeans. They blinked in unison. I didn't see Pabbie. A trailer squatted in the middle of the clearing, a few feet back from the bonfire. Its door hung loose on its hinges. The illusion held out, even to me, even when they hadn't been expecting extra eyes. Pabbie had told me that they wanted it, to appear human, at all times. There were more of us, once, he had said.

Gravella turned the spit over the fire, and grease splattered off the pig's corpse into the flames and hissed. Sven dashed up to the very edge of the flames, jumped back, and ran up to the edge again, his muzzle extended over the flames and pointed towards the corpse.

Sven reached out his grey neck as far as he could stretch it and bared his teeth, and tried to tear into the flank of the hog—and he fell. Sparks flew.

I broke into a run. He howled, and he peddled back out of the flames. He collapsed onto his side in the dirt. The stench of burning hair cut through the smell of pork. Anna and I reached him at the same time. We both knelt next to him. "His nose," she said.

The side of his muzzle, and a part of his nose, shone bright red, and the scruff of his neck was missing hair. Sven whined. I said his name and pressed my hand against his shoulder. Burns, you treat burns with ice. I looked up at Bulda.

The air flickered around her when she met my eyes, and for a second she was short, and fat, and grey. But then it was gone. "Yes, dear?"

"I need ice, and Grand Pabbie."

Anna curled her fingers under the uninjured side of the dog's face and shifted his head into her lap. She scratched the soft, short fur behind his ear. "Hang in there. Everything's going to be alright." He looked up at her and thumped his tail against the ground, once.

Bulda nudged my shoulder. I jumped. I hadn't noticed her move. She held a blue freezer pack out to me. It shimmered in the firelight, and for a second it looked triangular instead of square, and it glowed bright blue, and it was translucent. "You know I can't use the crystals."

She smacked her forehead with her palm."You and your limitations, dear, so many I lose track." I stepped back to give her space. Anna was staring at me, eyebrows furrowed, until Sven turned his head and licked her hand. She bent back down over him and murmured something sweet and meaningless, and he slapped the ground with his tail. Bulda touched the crystal to his muzzle. He whined, again, and I gritted my teeth at the noise.

I pushed past Gravella and banged my fist against the screen door of the trailer. "Grand Pabbie! Sven's hurt!"

Nothing.

"I'm here." His voice came from behind me. I turned in time to see him step out from the edge of the trees. He looked the same as the rest, human, old, with grey hair tied back at the nape of his neck. "What's the problem?"

"He was greedy, tried to eat before I offered it to him," Gravella said. She laughed, and some of the others did too. "Right into the fire, plop!"

Bulda stepped back and let him kneel over Sven. He looked up at Anna. "Krissie's brought a girl home?"

She blinked. "Oh, I'm not—I'm nobody, I'm just—I'm just me, Anna."

Pabbie stared at her for a minute, and Anna faked a smile. It crumbled under his silence.

"Sven," I said. My voice sounded weird, and high, and breathless. I cleared my throat.

He grunted and lowered his head. "You should get something to eat, Anna. I need room."

Anna bit her lip and shifted out from under Sven's head. She took a few steps back and stared at the rest of us. Two of the trolls shifted, lifted the pig off the fire and dropped it onto the folding table leaning against the trailer.

"I'll get your plate!" Bulda clapped her hands together and practically floated over to the table. "Stana, turn the music back on!"

"No!" I ran in front of her. Anna's glance shifted from me to the rest of them. "She's with me. She's just looking for her sister."

Bulda sawed off a hunk of the pork with a saw-toothed knife. She plopped it onto a paper plate and carried it over, staring at Anna as she walked. The air shimmered and her crooked, white grin morphed into something—else. Her teeth went grey, pitted, rounded, turned into teeth shaped like tombstones, grave markers set into her gums, and her smile split her narrow human face in half. It reached all the way back to her ears. Anna gasped and grabbed my arm. "Oh, dear, just a bite won't hurt!" Bulda held up the paper plate and I shifted, again, so I was between the two of them. Anna dug her fingers into my bicep, her nails sharp, even through the flannel.

"She is with me," I said again. Slow. "We're just trying to find her sister."

"Suit yourself." Bulda shrugged and bit into the chunk of meat herself. It was a piece the size of my hand. She slurped, and all of it vanished inside her mouth. She sucked the juice off of her fat fingers and chewed. "With you, huh?"

Pabbie got to his feet, and Sven bounded up to Anna and me, tail wagging. He held up a hand and Bulda swallowed whatever she had to say next. Thank God. "What does your sister look like?"

Anna looked from me to the trolls. I'll explain later, I thought, and I tried to make it obvious in my face. I was never good at that, the talking, but she must have seen something in my expression because she nodded at me and took a breath. "She's a little taller than me, kind of a similar face, but she has her hair cut short and dyed black. Spiked up."

Oh, hell.

I had met her. Not by name. It was after I had gotten an apartment and moved out. But I had come back and seen her, once, dancing with Bulda in a ring. She had taken a long, hard look at me with my low-slung jeans, my flannel, my feet, spread shoulder width apart, and she had laughed. I hadn't stayed long enough to ask her her name. I'd practically turned around and walked into the woods again before she had caught her breath. I got enough of that shit on the outside.

They all traded glances with each other. "Elsa," Pabbie said. "We know her. A thief. She fancies herself to be a witch."