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There’s a loud boom.
Claire’s world is spinning and she’s too dizzy to open her eyes, but she can hear Blinky blathering in the background as he paces around his study—his natural response to any surprise. “Well, I think we can safely say that teleportation spell was, as you human teens call it, a ‘bust.’ You were not transported to Arcadia—in fact, there seems to be no effect at all.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” a girl’s voice says.
Claire raises an eyebrow—had another troll entered the room during the spell?—and forces herself to look. The world stabilizes quickly, but there’s no one in front of her.
“Uh, down here,” says the voice. A very familiar voice.
She looks down, further down than she’s used to looking to meet someone’s eyes. And she sees herself. Same face, same armor, same white streak of hair. “Oh,” she whispers. Except her voice sounds lower than it should be.
“I think the spell screwed up,” says the not-Claire. “I think it switched our bodies.”
Blinky flips through the spellbook. “This is most irregular—I need a moment to discover where we went wrong—” his frantic muttering trails off as he wanders away.
Claire surveys the body she’s inhabiting, which she sees now is most definitely not her own. She stretches out an arm—longer than it should be—and studies the unearthly red pulse of Eclipse running through the magical armor encasing it. She examines four blue fingers that she recognizes all too well. “Oh, no,” she murmurs in Jim’s voice.
“Yeah,” Jim agrees, unhappily, in hers. “Oh, no.”
***
Blinky is confident, upon analyzing the text, that the spell will reverse itself within days. “A week, at most,” he declares. “Unfortunately, the two of you will not be able to visit Arcadia to update everyone on New Trollmarket. Texts will have to continue to suffice.”
“If your mom was the one complaining about long distance rates, you’d disagree,” Claire mutters, attempting to cross her arms. It doesn’t work out well—she forgets the thickness of the armor and the broadness of Jim’s chest—and she ends up awkwardly leaving them by her sides.
Next to her, Jim is the pinnacle of discomfort, standing stiff-backed in a way that she’s sure will make her back hurt once their bodies switch back. “What do we do until we’re back to normal?” he asks.
It’s still strange to hear his words in her voice—she doubts she’ll get used to it by the end of the week.
Blinky seems to notice their distress. He softens, clapping a comforting hand on each of their shoulders. “You will get through this. Think of it this way: you have the chance to learn much more about each other. Your strengths, your weaknesses. Master Jim, you can try shadow magic. Lady Claire, you can learn more about the power of the amulet. In the end, you will become greater warriors for the effort.”
She looks over at Jim. He gives her what she recognizes as his nervous smile, like the one he wore during the Romeo and Juliet rehearsals of the romantic scenes, when he was trying not to seem too terrified. It’s nice to know that even though he’s wearing her face, some of his own mannerisms still shine through. She smiles back, quickly becoming aware of how the fangs make it difficult to do so without cutting her lip.
“Excellent!” Blinky exclaims once he sees they’ve calmed down a bit, using his many hands to promptly shove them out of his study and into the main market area. “Now, go see what you can do!”
She and Jim exchange a bewildered glance.
“Oh,” Blinky sticks his head out the door, “and perhaps keep this information to yourself. I don’t want Merlin lording it over me that I failed this spell. And it wouldn’t do to have all of New Trollmarket worried that the Trollhunter is incapable.” He slams the door shut.
She and Jim linger for a second, still dazed, until another troll abruptly tackles her.
Jim shouts in surprise, coming to aid her, but she waves him off. Bagdwella shakes her—Jim’s—okay, this body switch thing is getting ridiculously confusing—shoulder furiously, but oddly enough, Claire doesn’t feel it beneath the armor and newly-acquired muscle.
(Maybe there are perks to being in a half-troll body.)
“The gnomes have gone mad, Trollhunter!” Bagdwella hisses. The trolls joining the mob around them make angry sounds of agreement. “Ever since we found the new Heartstone, they’ve been acting wilder than ever! You have to do something!”
Claire shares a frantic look with Jim, who shrugs at her under an equally panicked expression. It looks weird on her own face, and she gulps. “Okay,” she says, and Jim’s voice sounds unnaturally high due to her anxiety. She clears her throat and tries again, and her words come out lower and steadier. “I’ll, uh, look into it.”
Bagdwella stares at her suspiciously but eventually nods and relents. The crowd of trolls dissolves as quickly as it formed, leaving Claire and Jim alone.
“Any advice?” she asks weakly, once it’s just them.
Jim smiles at her affectionately, and she finds herself smiling back reflexively, cursing when the motion cuts her lip. “We could go train,” he says, reaching up to wipe the blood off her chin. He pauses, making a funny face. “It’s weird to not be the tall one.”
She reaches down and cups her own face—yep, that’s gonna stay weird—stroking a thumb along the cheekbone. “It’s weird to have to look down to see you,” she replies. “Training’s a good idea. Blinky’s right. We can learn a lot about each other.”
They hold hands as they walk out of New Trollmarket. It feels strange to have four fingers on one hand, but she thinks of how Jim adjusted to this the first time, and she just squeezes his hand in hers even tighter.
***
The New Jersey woods above New Trollmarket aren’t near any towns, so they train aboveground without interruptions. Just like right after his transformation, she soon discovers just how quick and flexible Jim’s body is by swinging through the trees.
For what feels like hours, she runs and climbs, exhilarated by her speed, until a branch fails to hold her. It snaps with a loud crack, and she drops twenty feet to the ground, landing flat on her back, which knocks the breath out of her but doesn’t hurt.
“Claire!” Jim shouts, approaching her from where he’d been watching her on the ground.
She sits up, seeing how rattled Jim seems by her fall. “I’m good!” she says, giving him a thumbs up. “Wow, this body is so durable! I didn’t realize you were so heavy, though, I thought that branch would hold me.”
Slumping in relief, he laughs awkwardly. “Yeah, it’s, uh… it’s weird. I probably gained fifteen pounds in muscle alone with the transformation. The fun part of being half-rock.”
Claire grins breathlessly. “Well, that’s enough of that,” she says, heaving herself upright. “Wanna try some shadow magic?”
After a beat of hesitation, he nods. “You’re gonna have to explain it more to me, though.”
He follows her to sit on a felled tree. Once they’re seated side by side, Claire places a hand on his knee, marveling at how Jim’s huge hand utterly encompasses her body’s leg. “Shadow magic is unique,” she says. It’s uplifting to feel able to explain it, when she once stumbled into it blindly. “Everyone’s experience is different. I tie my intent to emotion. I used fear at first to do portal magic—that doesn’t always work, though.”
“Do you picture the place you want to open a portal to?”
“Yes, using as much detail as possible. It’s harder without the staff. You need to really ground yourself in the emotion and the visual of where you want to go.” She smiles encouragingly. “Why don’t you give it a try?”
He breathes deeply and nods. She recognizes his look of concentration: that’s Jim the Trollhunter, ready to face the world. He stands, arms outstretched, and closes his eyes.
It takes a moment, but the forest quiets. The squirrels go silent, the branches stop rustling with the breeze. His eyes—her eyes, technically—flare purple, black veins spreading out along the temples, and Claire feels a twinge of unease.
Is that how I look when I do that?
Slowly, a portal starts to open a few feet in front of them, and her fear disappears in favor of excitement. Claire jumps up, laughing with delight. “You’re doing great!” she exclaims.
He gives her a small smile, approaching the black hole in the world. But before their eyes, the portal starts to warp. It trembles violently, defying the laws of physics even further, and rapidly shrinks until it dissipates with a quiet pop. Jim sighs, lowering his hands.
“Jim, that was fantastic,” she tries to reassure him. “I’ve had trouble making portals without the staff since it was broken. And you’ve never even had any experience with shadow magic, you’re just in a body that has.”
He nods, but the gesture feels empty, intended to placate her. “I just…” he sits on the log, and she follows. “I thought I could solve our transportation problem and open a portal to Arcadia. I pictured everything: my house, my mom, even the street, and then it… slipped away.” He lets out a grim laugh. “A good metaphor for our lives, huh?”
“I know it feels like something’s always going wrong,” she says, resting a hand over his. “Not knowing when we’ll get to go home. This body switch. It gets overwhelming.”
“With the shadow magic… it felt like I was trying to walk a tightrope, and I was just about to fall. Does it always feel like that?”
“It gets easier. I know it feels impossible, but it does. Arcadia is so long-distance that I’m impressed the portal even opened a little,” she tells him honestly.
“Maybe I should try for somewhere closer, is what you’re saying?”
“Can’t hurt,” she shrugs. “Like… hear the stream on the other side of those trees? Think you could manage that?”
“I can try,” he says, standing and stretching out his arms again. He closes his eyes, making the black veins seem even starker against his skin, and a portal opens. They both pause, breath held, and when he takes a step forward, it holds. Jim reaches a hand into the black void. When the hand disappears, he grins at her. “Wanna go for it?”
She laughs, grabbing his free hand. “We’ve never been the type to avoid a challenge.”
“That’s true.” He takes a deep breath. “Let’s do it.”
With a yank, he pulls them through the portal, and suddenly they’re a dozen yards away from where they had been. She laughs delightedly. “That was amazing, Jim!”
The portal didn’t turn out perfectly; instead of being beside the stream, they’re ankle-deep in it, but she can’t feel the water through Jim’s armor. Jim, on the other hand, hisses in surprise—those troll instincts still in play—and lifts up a foot, watching Claire’s waterlogged boot drip. He sighs, though underneath it he’s still smiling, and lowers his leg. “Well, at least we know it worked.”
“What emotion did you tie yourself to?” she asks.
“I didn’t really focus on one,” he responds, seeming startled by his own answer. “I just knew I needed to get over here.”
She thinks it over. Emotions work for her as an anchor, but shadow magic is different for everyone. Concentration might be the key for Jim. “Hey, as long as it worked.”
“This was actually pretty fun,” he grins in her direction, and she feels herself smiling back helplessly with how proud she is. “I always wondered how shadow magic felt. It was like a weird, tugging sensation? And then when we went through the portal, I felt this massive relief.”
“It can be a lot,” she agrees. She starts to move them toward dry land, but she glances down and catches sight of her reflection in the moonlight. The blue skin throws her off, and she pauses. It’s a shock to see something distinctly inhuman instead of her own face, but she quickly refocuses, shaking it off.
But Jim doesn’t. When she looks in his direction, he’s the one gazing down at their reflections, biting his lip.
“Jim?”
He gives her a rueful smile. “It must be pretty strange for you. To suddenly be half-troll.”
“I mean, not really?” she shrugs. “It’s mostly just weird to be in a different body, to constantly be looking at you and seeing my own face. You don’t feel that?”
“I still don’t really think of it as my face, I guess,” he says, not meeting her eyes. There’s something painful and open in his expression, and it makes her ache as he tries to find the words. “That body just feels so wrong. Do you… I mean, do you get why I hate it now? It’s so rough, and harsh, and ugly.”
She looks down at their reflections again, the way they just fit together, and her heart thuds in her chest. She’s angry—not at herself or Jim, but at the world for putting them in this position—but more than that, she’s sad. That he feels this way. That he thinks she would, too.
Tenderly, she takes his hand in hers, feeling how their fingers intertwine effortlessly. “How can I not love everything about you?” she says earnestly, looking deep into his eyes so he knows that it’s true.
His eyes widen, and he’s left speechless. She takes advantage of that to lead him to shore and sit, and he goes willingly, his grip slack in hers.
“I told you,” she breaks the silence, “that no matter what you are, I love you. I didn’t say that just to make you feel better. I do mean it.”
“I know,” he mumbles, eyes trained on his lap.
“Do you?” she asks, waiting until he looks up at her. “It feels like you don’t understand why. And there’s a lot of reasons. It’s because you are so, so good. You’re the bravest person I know. The funniest. You make me laugh every day, even when all I wanted was to worry about Enrique. The kindest. You help every troll with every problem no matter how—” she breaks off to laugh “—how stupid it is. The sweetest. Even during everything with Angor Rot, you took me up on that hilltop and danced with me. You sacrifice everything to help people, even when I wish you wouldn’t. Jim, you are my miracle. And how you look has no effect on that. How you feel about how you look has no effect on that. But I don’t think this body is ugly. I don’t hate it. I never could. It’s yours.”
He watches her steadily throughout the speech, and it makes her eyes well up. She didn’t know half-trolls could cry, but they can.
“I love you,” she chokes out. “And that is never gonna change. Can you just have a little faith and believe me on that?”
Jim swallows and rubs his thumb along hers, his words coming out thick with emotion. “I can try.”
“Okay,” Claire exhales with relief. She examines their tangled fingers. “Palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss,” she murmurs. “Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?”
“That’s my line,” he says, laughing softly, and the heaviness in the air starts to dissolve with his smile. “You keep stealing them.”
“I’m not sorry,” she teases. She carefully runs the nail of her thumb down his palm. She has more appreciation now for how cautious Jim has been around her in this new body; it’s so strong and sharp and fast. But it’s also capable of the gentlest touches.
He grins back at her, and the words she said seem to take on a deeper meaning when he echoes them. “I’m not sorry, either. For any of it.”
And from a boy who traded away any chance at a normal life to help people, and a girl who gave up her home to follow? That says enough.
***
As time passes, they improve in their switched roles. Claire puts the gnomes back in their place and masters her newfound strength. Jim opens bigger portals, even transporting them clear across New Trollmarket once. They keep to themselves and, somehow, no one seems to notice the switch.
Claire sticks to the shadows, though Jim embraces daylight whenever he can. “This is incredible!” he shouts the first time he gets to soak in the warmth of the sunlight, spinning in circles with his arms outstretched, and she can’t suppress her fond smile from her hiding spot in the trees.
It brings them closer together, for her to understand his body dysphoria and for him to feel the precariousness of shadow magic.
Four days later, they wake up back in their own bodies. Blinky declares it a successful exercise in cooperation, togetherness, blah blah blah, and she and Jim exchange smirks during his long-winded lecture. He has no idea.
She slips her hand, small and pink and warm, into his and cranes her neck to look up at him, grateful to be back to normal. His fingers are cool and blue and firm, and he holds onto her tightly while still remaining gentle. “I love you,” he whispers out of the corner of his mouth, but she picks up on it even over Blinky’s droning.
It strikes her that he’s never said it first before. She beams and squeezes his hand. “I love you, too,” she mouths back, leaning in for a kiss. No matter what you are. No matter what, period.
The way he smiles back at her before their lips touch says he finally believes her.