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

His fingers flexed within mismatched winter gloves coated with sharp tacks. His forearms were studded with soda caps, each one of
them dimpled from bottle openers. His biceps were protected with the wire from a hundred spiral-bound school notebooks. His chest was plated with relics from a little girl’s baking set,
miniature pans in the shapes of hearts and stars and horses. All down his stomach were die-cast cars and trucks, their little chrome parts shining in the firelight. Both of his legs were wrapped
over and over in bike chains. Some were red with rust, but a few still glimmered with oil.
    When he moved, it sounded like a bowlful of nails being stirred.
    I rolled away from both him and the troll—Blinky, if that was to be believed—and leapt to my feet. The man stopped advancing. The handles of his swords jutted up behind his head like
horns. I had not forgotten that they dripped with blood.
    The metal man held up a hand. The tacks glinted in the firelight.
    “You need to listen to me.”
    “Why?” I asked. “Who are you? Where am I?”
    “We don’t have much time.”
    “Why not? What are you going to do to me?”
    “You overslept. It’s almost dawn.”
    “What happens at dawn?”
    “You go home.”
    “I don’t believe you.”
    “There’s no time to explain.”
    “Talk fast, then.”
    He sliced a hand through the air. Metal chimed against metal.
    “We do
not
have
time
!”
    From a distant chamber came a growl of something large awakening.
    “Now you’ve done it,” he said. “You’ve woken ARRRGH!!!.”
    The battle cry slammed around the cavern. When it was gone, the only sounds were the man’s quick breaths and the toy cars attached to his chest, spinning their tiny wheels.
    Then even those sounds were overtaken. Massive footsteps began crashing from inside a tunnel next to the stone mural. Everything in the cave reacted to the vibration: roller skates escaped,
plastic guns tumbled and made electronic shooting noises, bikes spun their flat tires.
    I backed away.
    “Arrrgh?”
    “You’re not listening. I told you to listen.” The metal man took a deep breath. “ARRRGH!!!.”
    I backed away some more.
    “Three
R
s, three exclamation points. Take my advice and don’t mispronounce it.”
    “I won’t mispronounce it, I swear.”
    The goliath emerged from the tunnel as comfortably as a dog from a doghouse, coarse black fur pouring into the chamber before I could make out any actual arms or legs. It rose to its full height
after passing beneath the archway and stretched its arms as if working out the kinks of a nap. Even beneath the fur I could see huge loops of muscles flexing. The same clawed paws I recognized from
the manhole, as well as from under my bed, tightened into fists.
    ARRRGH!!! was built like a gorilla but three times larger: two arms, two legs, and, thankfully, just two eyes. Horns, curled like those of a ram, nicked across low-hanging pipes. One of the
pipes sprung a leak and gray water spilled across greasy fur. The thing’s orange eyes cast about with animal perceptiveness, and it raised its snout and sniffed. Its mouth fell open to reveal
a purple, slavering mouth armed with haphazard daggers of teeth.
    It had smelled me.
    I retreated until I was backed against a pile of bedsprings. ARRRGH!!! crossed the room in four colossal lopes that shook rust from overhead pipes like falling snow. The beast loomed over me,
then bent at the waist so that its wet nose was inches from my face. It sniffed once, then exhaled. The blast blew the hair back from my face. Viscous drops of saliva fell from a chipped tooth and
pooled warmly on my stomach. Its avid eyes, each the size of a softball, catalogued my details.
    It snarled and the bedsprings sang.
    The metal man slipped a gloved hand between two cake pans of his chest plate, scrounged for a moment, and then withdrew a bronze medallion swinging upon a dirty chain. The symbols were clear
even from a distance: a long-sword, an