Roadside Magic Read Online Free Page A

They piled pell-mell into the mortal living room, one of the raven-haired drow leaping atop the couch and hissing, his handsome face distorted as the teeth elongated, rows of serrated pearls. The woodwight swelled, his lean brown frame crackle-heaving between treeshape and biped, living green sprouting from his long, knobbed fingers. Serrated leaves, a dark trunk—an elm, a bad-tempered tree indeed.
    The troll heaved forward again, widening the hole in the side of the trailer. Glass shattered, cheap metal buckled and bent, and Robin flicked her right pinkie fingernail with the pad of her thumb.
    A silver dart crackled into being, splashing against the woodwight and scoring deep. Golden, resinous sapblood sprayed, and the wight’s knothole mouth opened bellow-wide. A furious scream made of creaking, snapping, thick-groaning branches poured out.
    The troll halted, its tiny close-set eyes blinking in confusion. It withdrew slightly, and the second raven-haired drow peeredover its shoulder, poking at it afresh with the silvertip stick. Robin flicked her right middle and ring fingers, one dart catching in the woodwight’s branches and tangling, the other flying true and striking at the troll’s eyes. Index finger, another dart made a high keening noise as it streaked for the first drow, who batted it away with contemptuous ease. The spray of sapblood from the woodwight eased, and the thing hissed a malediction at her, a black-winged curse flapping, ungainly, through the close confines.
    The troll howled, the noise and its stinking breath fluttering Robin’s skirt, cracking the screen on the ancient television, and batting the flying curse aside. It lashed out, horselike, with each limb in turn, the first its left hindleg, catching the second drow with a crack audible even through the uproar. The first drow leapt forward, shaking out something that glittered gold with flashes of ruby, and Robin’s skin chilled all over.
    Is that what I think it is?
    She flicked her thumbnail now, and a high piercing whistle burst between her lips. Ruddy orange flashed, the dart becoming a whip of flame, and it kissed the edge of the woodwight’s trunk.
    Golden sapblood kindled, and a new layer of noise intruded. Robin ignored it, skipping aside with the canister of salt now in her right hand.
A fine time to wish I had cold iron
, she thought pointlessly, and dodged, for the gold-and-ruby glimmer in the first drow’s hands was a net, hair-fine metallic strands with red droplets at their junctures, supple-straining as it sensed its holder’s quarry. It retreated with a cheated hiss, and the drow snarled at her again.
    So
someone
wished her taken alive. Unwinter had sworn to Puck Goodfellow that he would not hunt her, but drow were not of Summer unless they were half something else, whethermortal or another manner of sidhe, and in any case it did not matter.
    The Ragged did not mean to let these suitors, or any other, press their attentions
too
closely upon her. The curse, flapping in the living room, vanished under a sheet of flame. Robin’s whistle ended, and she whooped in a fresh breath, bringing her left hand forward.
    The sinister hand. These darts would be more brittle . . . but far more powerfully malefic.
    The troll, fire-maddened and half-blinded, heaved. The entire trailer lifted, foundation to roof, buckling and breaking. The woodwight, screaming and completely alight by now, blundered into the couch, thrusting itself straight into the troll’s face as well. The poor creature—stonetrolls were not known for their intelligence—was hopelessly entangled with the side of the trailer, insulation and sharp metal ribboning around its hard hide. It heaved again, and the drow with the net slip-stumbled between carpet and linoleum, his dark, liquid eyes widening as footing became treacherous.
    Robin jabbed her left hand forward and the drow dodged aside, crashing into a flimsy closet door—but she hadn’t released the darts,