Fury's Kiss Read Online Free PDF Page B

earthquake is doing its best to shake your room apart, you don’t have much of a choice. I blinked open my lashes to find sunlight poking cheerful fingers into my eyes, a wannabe Pavarotti in bird form outside my window, and at least a 5.0 on the Richter scale.
    The jam jar of daisies on my dresser was dancing. Little puffs of plaster were sifting down from my ceiling. And my bed was slowly migrating across the worn wooden boards of my floor. I stared around in utter confusion because I was still half asleep, and because the pounding on the door almost exactly matched the pounding in my head. For a minute, I wasn’t sure if it was the room shaking or me.
    The room, I decided, when the jam jar danced to the edge of the dresser and leapt to its doom.
    “Crap,” I said, and fell out of bed.
    The earthquake stopped.
    A few seconds later, a gnarled, scarred hand, big as a bucket, squeezed around the doorframe. It was careful, because little things like solid oak doors are notoriously flimsy. But then it stopped without actually coming in.
    The pain in my head was fairly astonishing, but it didn’t stop me from recognizing the hand. It belonged to one of my roommates, because my living situation isn’t any more normal than the rest of my life. Ymsi, the donator of daisies, had the slight disadvantage of being a troll. Not thatit was a disadvantage to him, by all appearances, but it did cause the rest of us problems from time to time.
    Like when he decided to wake us up by gently knocking on a door.
    “Come in,” I croaked, only to have nothing happen.
    I hung my head. Of course not.
    Ymsi had the usual troll love of beauty, and for some reason, he had decided that I fit the bill. And although he and his twin brother, Sven, had been on earth for a while now, they were still getting their feet wet when it came to the odder facets of human culture. Like the whole privacy thing.
    This had resulted in my looking up in the middle of a bath one day to find Ymsi standing hunched in the doorway, staring at me with the same rapt look on his face that he used when encountering a new kind of flower. Or playing with the baby squirrel he had rescued from the backyard after a storm and kept as a pet. Or being introduced to the wonders of chocolate for the first time.
    Apparently, in troll terms, that sort of thing was considered endearing.
    Unfortunately for Ymsi, I am not a troll.
    And I guess my reaction had been memorable. Or maybe Olga, a friend who was also of the troll persuasion, had had a talk with him. Because he had suddenly acquired a Victorian-era level of prudery where women were concerned. These days, he wouldn’t dare to enter a lady’s bedroom, my heavens no. Meaning that if I wanted to know what the deal was, I was going to have to get to the door.
    Somehow.
    I ended up crawling through daisy runoff, because it just seemed easier. I thought about trying to pull myself up by the knob, to answer the door like a normal person, but who the hell was I kidding? I settled for kicking it open with a foot instead, only to be confronted by a solid mountain of…well, mountain.
    The acre or so of troll flesh not concealed by a tattered pair of shorts and a homespun shirt was greeny brown, with the consistency of caked earth if it had somehowpetrified over time. I poked it—in the knee, which was as high as I could reach. The skin didn’t do anything as normal as dimple, but the mountain did shuffle back a few feet, allowing a huge head to peer in the doorway.
    It had floppy blond hair that fell over a prominent forehead, a nose the size and shape of a head of cauliflower, and small blue-pebble eyes. They squinted at me myopically.
    “Yes?”
    Ymsi didn’t say anything.
    I sighed and leaned my head against the wall.
    Conversations with the twins could stretch over hours if not days, to the point that I often forgot what we’d been talking about. I sometimes wondered if the old legends were true, the ones that said that ancient