Trollhunters by Guillermo del Toro, Daniel Kraus Read Free Book Online

specific?”
    I clutched at the bumper and raised myself to unsteady feet. I patted the truck bed, taking solace in the cake of dust. It was real; I was not caught in a nightmare. I smeared the dust with my
fingers and smelled it.
    “If you lick that, we’re no longer friends,” Tub said.
    With utmost caution I edged over to the empty parking space where I had been trapped. I didn’t want to get too close and so skirted out into the path of exiting cars. I was met with
honking and various colorful curses, but I ignored them. The cracks on the pavement that had been made by those vicious claws moments earlier looked like the unassuming marks that came with wear
and tear and age. The innocent manhole cover was right where it was supposed to be.
    “That.” I pointed. “Look at that.”
    Tub leaned over the disc of iron.
    “This right here?”
    Tub kneeled down and brought his eye as close to the cover as his gut would allow. I tensed my stomach muscles and braced for the worst.
    “I see it,” he said.
    The blood drained from my face.
    “You do?”
    “I sure do. You want me to get it?”
    “What? No! Just get away!”
    He pointed at a small pink spot on the manhole cover.
    “Looks like Bubblicious to me. Let me tell you a secret: I’ve got gum in my pocket that’s
never even been chewed
, which is a big part of what I look for in a gum. But
far be it from me to stand between a man and his cravings.”

I didn’t say a word to Tub about what I’d seen. The fact that I had no proof to show him bothered me less than that I had no proof to show myself. There were no
claw marks anywhere on my skin, no tufts of fur caught in my jacket zipper. For a long time I’d worried about the mental stability of my father. It was why Mom had left us, why we lived alone
in a homemade prison. What if, printed in my genetic code, was a similar insanity? Tub might abandon me, too.
    I looked past the football field, where the jumbotron workers were packing it up for the day. To the east, the crags of Mount Sloughnisse were bathed in peach light. To the west, a different
kind of mountain had slipped into shadow: the towers of totaled vehicles at Keavy’s Junk Emporium, a legendary spot for late-night teen trespassing. I scanned the darkening sky to estimate
the time. To Dad, getting home after dark was the worst possible offense.
    “Hey, Pocahontas.” Tub chomped at a stick of the gum he’d offered me a few minutes earlier. “If you’re a few minutes late the old man will live.”
    “You still don’t get it.”
    “I get that he needs to put a couple more links in your leash.”
    “He just worries. About a lot of things.”
    “Congratulations, you are today’s winner of the Understatement Award! Honestly, I don’t know how a guy that wound up sleeps at night.”
    The truth was that he didn’t sleep at night. Tub knew it, too, and grimaced at his own comment. I was going to tell him not to worry about it when he perked up his head and slapped my
shoulder.
    “Shortcut time?” His braces flashed in a mischievous grin.
    The building closest to Saint B. High was the San Bernardino Historical Society Museum, a columned edifice mostly ignored by the local population but, if rumors were to be believed, celebrated
by rare-artifact aficionados all across California, whose deep pockets made it possible for the society to announce new acquisitions annually. Much more popular was the expansive garden that
surrounded the museum. Rare was the weekend that you didn’t see a woman in a white dress being photographed while the rest of her wedding party milled about and yawned. The garden was
cordoned off by a mile-high fence, though, confounding any high schooler who wanted to save time going north.
    Tub and I, though, knew a different route.
    “I don’t know, Tub. We’re going to run out of luck one of these days.”
    But he was already walking backward toward the museum, wagging his eyebrows and blinding me with those