I took the gallbladder with both hands but was seconds too late. Gunmar plucked me from his insides like a tapeworm and flung me to the ground as if I weighed no more than Jim Sturges Jr. 2: The Decoy. I laid there beneath the towering monster, unable to move, almost unable to see Claire struggling across Gunmar’s shoulder, mere feet from the vulnerable softies. I tried to shout encouragement but I was out of sounds. She looked so small up there, but so sure of herself, too, and when she stood on her feet, balanced on the shoulder of the worst of all living things, her front hand holding the sabre, her back hand outstretched for balance, that was the real moment I fell in love.

It was easy to forget how Gunmar’s spine could retract at will. He compacted himself down to half his height and Claire stumbled, dropping Doctor X and sliding through the quills before landing hard on her knees in the end zone. She grabbed them in pain. Gritting her teeth, she looked from between Gunmar’s legs and found me staring back, and though both of us were unable to move, we held each other’s gaze in case each of us was the last thing the other saw.

Dad’s mower stopped in the distance with a defeated cough.

Gunmar the Black had waited forty-five years, but here it was at last: the final demolishing of the trollhunters, no more difficult than a little kid’s squashing worms on the playground. Afterward, he and his kind would infest the surface of the earth, gorging themselves on the meat of man and growing fat and surly in the way of the Old World. He lifted a foot over the nearest trollhunter—me—aiming so that when my runny guts squirted out they would bleed into those of the hundreds of his slaughtered offspring.

The foot never fell.

Leaping from the cratered pit of the end zone, ARRRGH!!! wrapped her arms around Gunmar’s neck. A crooked segment of goal post had been driven into her skull and branched out like strange yellow antlers fighting for space alongside her horns. Instantly Gunmar shot upward to his full height; ARRRGH!!! did not let go. Gunmar shook his torso with all of his might; ARRRGH!!! did not let go. Gunmar beat backward with fists connected to hellishly jointed arms; ARRRGH!!! did not let go. Gunmar extended his quills and I saw a dozen of them sink into black fur and emerge bloody from the other side of ARRRGH!!!’s body. Still, stabbed through a dozen times, she did not let go.