Strange Fates (Nyx Fortuna) by Marlene Perez Read Free Book Online

ceiling and a piece of peeling paint in the shape of a duck. I waited for something that never came.
    At about three, I dropped off. I dreamed of drops of blood and the terrible sound of a golden knife cutting a silver thread.
    I woke to the sound of my own scream. I sat straight up and then realized where I was.
    Jasper was gone, but there was something else there. My skin did that itchy, twitchy thing it did when I came across another non-mortal. I fell back onto my pallet and feigned sleep.
    At first, I couldn’t identify the creature that stood in the shadows. I realized what it was from the smell of rotten cabbage and decaying flesh.

Chapter Five
    A troll was in the room, watching me from the doorway. That explained why I hadn’t identified it right away. Trolls were rare. I had seen one once before, in Norway, by a fjord. Judging from the stench, this one had probably come up through the sewers. Or maybe they all smelled like that.
    It also explained the lack of ghosts. Most trolls didn’t care what they ate. Lost souls were as good as a steak to them.
    Mossy and green, his toad-like eyes gleamed through the darkness as he crossed to my pallet. His fat tongue came out as he held up my arm and pinched my bicep. Despite the pain, I stayed limp.
    A troll with a taste for human flesh. Exactly the kind of bullshit I didn’t have time for right now.
    A gob of drool ran down my face, and I decided that it was time to make my move. I didn’t anticipate how hungry the troll was. He chomped down on my arm, but I moved at the last second and his teeth scraped my arm. He didn’t manage to get a good grip, though, and I wiggled away and rolled onto my feet.
    Trolls have jaws like enormous pit bulls. It was all over if he managed to get his teeth into me.
    I ran for the door and the troll followed at a leisurely pace. He was fat and lazy. He’d gotten used to Jasper fetching his supper and he wasn’t expecting a fight, which told me that Jasper had been too cowardly to tell the troll I hadn’t slurped down the cocktail like the rest of his victims.
    My jacket! I’d forgotten to grab it in my haste, but I wasn’t leaving without it. The troll blocked my way.
    I desperately cast my eyes around the room, searching for anything to use as a weapon. I’d never win if it came to a show of strength. He was about a hundred times stronger than I was, but fortunately I was about a hundred times smarter.
    Magic was a last resort. I didn’t want to advertise that I was in town. Instead, I grabbed the gurney and wedged it into his stomach. I grabbed the lawn chair and beat him over the head with it, but trolls have extremely thick skulls, to protect their tiny brains. I broke his nose, but he just grinned at me before he tossed the lawn chair away and advanced.
    He wrapped one fleshy hand around my neck and squeezed until I thought my windpipe would collapse.
    In desperation, I rasped out a little sleep spell— dormite, dormite, dormite —and he dropped immediately. I always got the words for sleep and death mixed up. Had I remembered the right words?
    Apparently, I had remembered. The troll was unconscious, but alive. For a brief second, I thought about leaving him there for Jasper to find, but decided against it. The troll would have him back in thrall and bringing him victims in no time.
    “Is it over?” Jasper’s voice came from the other side of the door. “May I leave now, master?”
    “It’s over,” I said grimly. “Now get in here and help me.”
    There was a long pause and the sound of a choked-back sob. He came into the room with the look of someone who expected a beating. “He’s really gone?”
    “Not yet, but he will be,” I replied. The only sure way to kill a troll was to expose it to sunlight. The sunlight would turn our nasty friend into stone. At least I hoped it would.
    Jasper chewed his fingernails nervously, and for the first time I noticed the small trident inked on his ring finger.
    Trolls belonged