Jack cursed and bolted from the room. ARRRGH!!! spat hot foam and bounded after him, angling her massive shoulders to fit through the door; still, the tips of her horns drew squiggles through the sunny yellow paint. I felt a tugging in my arms and found two of Blinky’s tentacles taking the baby. He did it with such gentle assurance that I did not object. Two other tentacles joined to shift the baby this way and that so that a fifth tentacle could daintily wipe the troll secretions from her body with a towel. The infant giggled and grabbed her feet with her chubby hands.

I retrieved Claireblade and began backing from the nursery, astounded by the sight of a dozen other tentacles at work: pushing the crib back into place, gathering the scattered toys into a semblance of order, righting fallen lamps, reinserting pictures that had popped from their frames, and who knew what else. I’d have thought we’d never been there if not for the terrible feeling that I’d failed.

23.

The backyard stunned me with its normalcy. Studded gardening gloves draped drowsily across a deck chair. A clear sky pinpointed with stars hummed with the faraway progress of red-eye airplanes. Two dogs down the block had a conversation from their respective yards. Even the grass at my feet had reclaimed its territory: the piles of innards had dissolved, leaving ten patches of moisture no more threatening than dew.

The actors populating this easygoing stage looked as though they had wandered into the wrong play. ARRRGH!!! stood at the far edge of the lawn, her giant horned head swinging back and forth as she searched for the escaped Nullhuller. Streetlights glinted from Jack’s twin scabbards as his upper body expanded and contracted with infuriated breaths. Even Tub looked out of place: a regular kid, sure, but with orange hair frizzed into a clown wig and a shirt slopped to his chest with pink paint. He gave me a helpless look.

“It happened so fast,” he said.

“It’s okay,” I said. “It was just one.”

“You know nothing,” Jack snarled.

“Uncle Jack.” I thought the formal title might help. “We killed nine of them.”

“The bag of gallbladders? Did you forget that? We killed zero.”

A sinking feeling overtook me. I looked to Tub, who shrugged.

“It flew down here, gobbled its own guts, and took the bag. What was I supposed to do?”

“This is not your friend’s responsibility,” Jack snapped. “He is not a trollhunter.”

“It was just one,” I pleaded.

“That ‘just one’ will go to Gunmar. It will tell him about us. About you.”

“Look, I’m sorry—”

“I told you to stay out here. Why couldn’t you listen?”

“But I thought you guys needed—”

Jack ripped the mask from his face and whirled around.