“What are you doing tomorrow?”
“Jack and Min have trolls in their gardens.”
“Trolls?”
That saw Niko perking up a little. Trolls—nasty little things with hairy faces and flat noses that lived underground and usually came above ground in the warmer weather to eat out of people’s gardens—were some of Niko’s favorite creatures to chase around. Even more than mice. For all his intrigue and excitement at the possibility of getting to chase around a troll or two, he actually wasn’t very good at catching them. In fact, in the seven years Travis had known him, he’d never actually seen Niko catch one. He just liked to chase and pounce at them.
“No,” Travis said before Niko even asked anything about chasing the trolls out of the Chu’s gardens.
“No what?”
“No, we can’t just have you trying to ch
