“It’s more convincing if you’re in the photo with us.” The more of our story we could prove to Five, the better. Seeing a combination of a dragon and four identical copies had to pique her interest.
“Very well. This is not typically one of my duties, you know.”
I cracked a smile. “What, do your heroes normally use tripods for their group selfies? OK, um, I’m hitting the button. Fifteen-second timer. Go.”
We all huddled around Neven’s neck as she awkwardly lifted her front paw.
“Tilt it more to the left?” Red said.
“Not that far!” Rainbow said. Neven wiggled to get the phone into position.
Flash. First photo.
I blinked away stars.
“Aim it downward? You’ve got the sky now—” Flash. Second photo. It caught Rainbow with her mouth open and her hand out.
The third one caught Four and Red laughing.
I couldn’t help it.
By the fifth, I was laughing, too.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Within minutes of sending Hazel Five the photo, the phone rang.
“You wanna take it?” Rainbow held out the phone.
Not really.
I breathed deep and accepted the call. “This is Hazel,” I said automatically.
“What the hell?”
There was no mistaking my own voice, even if I never heard it this angry. “We can explain,” I said, then reconsidered. “Sort of. We’re from other dimensions. It’s complicated.”
Five must’ve guessed as much. There were few uncomplicated explanations for landing in a different dimension, being chased by trolls and mysterious government agencies, and receiving a photo of four alternate selves and a dragon.
The other Hazels had hunched in to listen to the call while Neven sat farther away. Occasionally, she pushed herself off the ground to look over the field, her front legs dangling by her sides while her hind legs and propped-up tail helped her keep her balance. If there were trolls around, they kept their distance.
After a few moments of tight, tense silence, Five finally said, “You’re me.”
“Yeah.”
“Hazel Stanczak?”
“Yeah.”
“All four of you.”
“Yeah.” Maybe I should’ve launched into the promised explanation, but the phone didn’t seem like the best medium.
“What the hell,” she repeated.
“Are you OK?” I asked. “Are you trapped?”
A snort. “No.”
The Hazels around me looked relieved.
“What about the trolls? We could go someplace safer.”
“It’s complicated,” she said, echoing my words. “You’re really not with the government? Did you tell them I’m here?”
“No. I hoped the photo proved we’re on your side.”
“One of you has rainbow hair. If we can be that different, who knows what you might be hiding.”
Good point. “We’re running from the government, too.”
“What’s up with the dragon?”
“It’s—”
“—complicated, right.” She seemed to consider the situation. “OK. Come back to the house. I think you could enter safely.”
“No way. That neighborhood is infested.”
“Really? I had no idea. Look: Were there other people at the house when you were here earlier?”
I cringed at her sarcasm. Was that really me? “Yeah.”
“Did the trolls attack them before they attacked you?”
I tried to recall. Tara had been their first target, hadn’t she? “I think so.”
“Did the trolls attack any of you before you attacked them?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It went kind of fast.” Kind of like this conversation. I’d expected a Hazel who was scared, frantic, trapped. If it weren’t for her voice, I’d be wondering whether we even had the right person.
“Come back,” she said. “Not the dragon. Not anyone else. Just you four. As long as you’re not aggressive toward the trolls, they shouldn’t hurt you.”
“Why—?”
She’d already hung up.
Returning to the street where we’d just gotten our asses kicked so thoroughly that we had to be evacuated by a dragon didn’t seem like the smartest plan.
But it was the only one we had.
I gripped my hunting knife in my pocket. The others held on to their weapons, too, hiding them under their coats or in their sleeves. We could do “not aggressive,” but we wouldn’t slide into “please gruesomely murder us” territory.
Two vehicles drove past as we headed down the Damford streets. Both were battered pickup trucks with a bunch of men and one or two women crouched in the back. Although the passengers craned their necks to watch us as they passed, the trucks didn’t slow.
“They had shotguns,” Four whispered.
“Probably more ‘sheriff-appointed, concerned citizens,’” Rainbow said.
Damford’s citizens were taking on trolls with pickup trucks full of heavily armed adults, and here we were, a couple of sixteen-year-olds waltzing into troll territory armed with only claw hammers, weirdly shaped knives, and fabricated destinies.
“Back at Lina’s apartment,” Four said thoughtfully, “we attacked first, too. The troll initially went after Casper.”
We headed down Tara’s street. Before, we’d spotted signs of trolls, but we hadn’t seen the trolls themselves until that car alarm went off. Now scattered trolls crept through the twilight. Two crouched under a rosebush, watching us with eager amber eyes. One sat perched on a rooftop. A handful of trolls were even following from a distance. They slinked past houses, through front yards, and across driveways, keeping their eyes on us all the way.
Hazel Five was right: None of the trolls attacked us.
“How?” I whispered, watching a troll chase a raccoon into a backyard. They’d attacked Casper and Tara unprovoked. Based on reports, they’d attacked other targets out of the blue, too.
But not us.
“I guess we’re about to find out,” Red said. “Wait. Did you hear that?”
“Screaming.” Four’s eyes went wide. “Someone’s screaming.”
We broke into a run. The trolls sprinted along with us. The voice—voices?—grew louder the closer we got to Tara’s garage. A gray SUV stood crookedly in its center. The same car Tara’s dad had driven earlier.
A girl who had to be Hazel Five—we only saw her from the back, but the hair fit—stood by the open driver’s-side door with feet spread and fists balled.
A woman was half sitting in the driver’s seat. One foot was outside, perfectly still, like she’d frozen partway through exiting the car. A rip in her coat stretched from elbow to wrist, and the skin beside her ear bled from a trio of scratches. The blood contrasted sharply with her pink-white
