I threw myself into the cavity of the bed and drove my heels at the floor, shouting for it to open. The chewed-off edges of the box spring scratched at my upper body as I fell to my knees and dug at individual boards with my fingernails. I might be a trollhunter, but I had no idea how to open that door, and without such knowledge right that second, I was worse than worthless.

My screams for Blinky hammered off the flat surfaces of my room. The troll slithered from the closet with the sound of a birth of snakes, his eight red eyes blinking away curds of sleep. I kept clawing at the floor as I felt tentacles, too many to push aside, wrapping around my torso and lifting me out of the cratered bed.

“Let me go! We have to save her!”

I wriggled in midair before my feet touched down amid drifts of mattress foam. Blinky’s appendages had my body encircled from behind, and the more I fought to be set free, the tighter he squeezed. Slime oozed from between tentacles as he began to speak in a dapper, infuriating tone that I didn’t want to hear, warning me that waiting beneath these boards was an ambush—he had written all about the strategy in volume twelve of his dissertation.

Though I didn’t want to believe it, I heard them and I felt them right through my feet, a seething swarm of Gumm-Gumms just beneath the floor, cackling and slurping in expectation of sinking their teeth into fresh teenager. Claire was gone to their unspeakable hands, taken to unimaginable places, and it was my fault. I moaned and reached for my swords to cut something, anything, just to relish in the breakage.

Blinky’s eight eyes lowered before me like wilting flowers and shone at such wattage that I had to shield myself from the brightness. Then the ancient troll inhaled and I felt against my back the warm beats of multiple hearts and the inflation of at least four giant lungs. A sound rose from somewhere inside his guts. It began low, like the boom of a train crossing distant tracks, but then added the higher octave of whale shrieks and the shrill clanging of bicycle bells rang by boys outrunning the death of summer, the end of childhood, and all other manner of gluttonous beast.

What it was was a call, one loud enough to be heard across the neighborhood, provided that you had the right kind of ears. My medallion began to burn and I could smell the singed skin of my chest. Beyond the pain, though, the translation was forceful and clear, and it made me catch my breath.

“TROLLHUNTERS!!!”

Blinky held me and howled, and I howled, too, sending a prayer out to Claire, to all of the missing: hold tight.

Part IV

33.