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I’D ASSUMED TROLLS would be living in one of the realms closer to the ninth and final dimension, but it seemed I’d been wrong. While big and strong, they appeared to be incredibly stupid. I was having trouble keeping my thoughts straight. My mind kept wandering and I was easily distracted.
“Saige!” Aurora snapped when I wandered off the path for the tenth time in an hour.
I flinched at her annoyed tone and shuffled back onto the track. I’d smelled a rotting carcass of an unidentifiable animal and wanted to take a closer look at it.
“Maybe we should put a leash on her,” Ruen said with a wide smirk.
I bared my fangs at him and lifted a huge fist threateningly. He sneered, knowing I wasn’t going to hurt him. One punch from me could do serious damage, even if he deserved it for being so mean to me.
“Can you compel her to follow us?” Aurora asked.
The vamp turned to face me and an intense look of concentration came over his narrow face. “You will obey Aurora and me when we give you an order,” he intoned. “Follow behind us unless we tell you otherwise.”
“Frug ylu,” I said with a sneer.
“I definitely understood her that time,” the demon said with a grin at my blunt insult. “Either she’s getting more coherent, or I’m beginning to understand troll language.”
Ruen made a disgruntled noise and flounced off. I couldn’t be compelled even in this form.
We’d left the cemetery behind and hadn’t run across the necromancer who’d raised the zombies. Using the walking dead as guards was a good idea. They were strong and mindlessly determined to kill anyone who passed through the portal. Sadly for them, they’d been no match for a troll.
The woods continued to flank us and there were a lot of trails to choose from. Animals were abundant, but Ruen spotted footprints that had been made by humanoid forms. It was inevitable that we would come across a settlement soon. We just didn’t know who or what would be inhabiting it.
I heard a dog howl and my head snapped up. “Grarg!” I growled and my instincts kicked in.
“Here we go,” Ruen said with an eyeroll as I rushed past my companions. Aurora caught my sack when I tossed it to her. The vampire took hold of her hand and raced in my wake.
Bursting out of the forest onto the main path a few minutes later, I barreled into ten armed and armored soldiers. The guard dog with them took one look at me and went into a panic. Yipping in distress, it tried to run, but I clubbed the guards out of the way with my weapon and grabbed hold of it.
“Ew!” Aurora said as I bit the beast’s head off and began to chew.
Ruen cackled in delight as he carved his way through the soldiers. I’d killed two of them by accident more than design. He finished off the rest while they were still screaming in terror at the sight of a ravenous troll. I hunkered down to feed as the leech sucked his final foe dry.
The hound looked similar to the others we’d encountered in the previous realms. It stood as tall as my waist and had mangy gray fur. The soldiers looked pretty much how I’d imagined. They were tall, solid and heavy, with long chins and bulges in the backs of their heads.
Aurora kept watch, with her head swiveling from side to side nervously. I’d sensed the soldiers, but hadn’t been able to communicate with my companions to warn them. No one was nearby at the moment, but I didn’t know how to mime that we were safe.
“Are you going to share your kill with Aurora?” Ruen asked. His stomach was slightly rounded and his skinny body had filled out a bit. I growled and hunched over my food.
“I’ll take that as a no,” my bestie said. Feeling bad for being selfish, I ripped off a hind leg and tossed it to her. “Thanks,” she said wryly and bit into the meat.
“At least she won’t be nagging me not to kill everyone we encounter in this realm,” my ex-sidekick gloated when I finished my meal. “Trolls are so dumb they’d attack a tree if it got in their way.”
Standing up to my full height, I lumbered over to him, then leaned down and burped directly into his face. Blood, guts and bits of meat splattered on his skin. He reeled back, wiping his face with his sleeve and swearing at me in several languages.
Aurora snickered and tossed what was left of the dog’s leg into the shrubs. “That’s what you get for poking the bear, or troll in this case.”
“So noted,” Ruen muttered dourly. He’d gotten his murder fix and we were barely two hours into our journey. This would potentially be our bloodiest mission to the underworld if I couldn’t control my instincts.
“There’s no hiding this mess,” Aurora said ruefully as she took in the carnage.
“If Saige is a troll in this dimension, then there must be more of her kind here,” Ruen figured. “She’s left enough tracks to make it clear what sort of creature attacked the soldiers.”
Their tracks were far lighter than mine. I stomped all over their footprints to erase them, then saw them looking at me in astonishment. “Maybe she’s not quite as dumb as we thought,” Aurora whispered, forgetting my hearing was good in this form.
I rolled my eyes, then flapped my hand for them to get going. I spied a weapon one of the soldiers had dropped and tossed the rusty sconce over my shoulder. Picking up the large, heavy hammer, I swung it experimentally, then grunted in satisfaction.
“Aw, the troll’s found herself a new toy to play with,” Ruen said in a sickly sweet, ridiculously high tone.
“Frug ylu,” I growled.
“Frug ylu, too,” he retorted pettily.
“Frug you both if you’re going to be like this during the entire mission,” Aurora snapped. I shuffled my gigantic feet and looked down in shame. The bloodsucker hunched his shoulders slightly and mumbled an apology, aiming it at her rather than at me.
Shaking her head at our childishness, Aurora took the lead. Ruen caught up to her after a few steps and I followed behind them. “How long will it take us to reach the scroll fragment?” Ruen asked.
“It’s hard to say,” she replied, casting a brief look over her shoulder at me. “If we kept up the sort of pace we used in the other realms, it would probably take us four weeks to get there. I’m not sure what we’ll be facing here, or how many distractions there will be along the way.”
“It’s a pity Saige can’t focus for longer than five minutes at a time,” Ruen said in annoyance. “She could probably get us there in two weeks if she didn’t chase after every single thing that catches her eye.”
I’d just been about to lurch off the path to snatch a moth the size of my head out of the air and forced myself to stay on the trail. It was going to be agonizing to be stuck in this form for the duration of our mission. I couldn’t defend myself verbally from his spiteful jabs. All I could do was flip him the bird and make horrible faces at him.
The thought of being stuck as a troll for two whole months was too much to bear. It was far worse than being an ogress. At least I’d been able to think and speak in that form. In this guise, I was little more than a mindless beast.
