Central Park was beautiful in the afternoon light. Well, it normally was, but something about a couple dozen unicorns reflecting sunlight made the whole thing even more beautiful. Okay, maybe thinking about a herd of scared unicorns as beautiful was a little twisted, but, hey, a lot of things were twisted in New York City. He figured whatever mystical overlord that watched over The City could let this one slide. Oh, wait. That was him.

Either way, Jake could hear the shouts and the whinnies over the screams and chaos of New York traffic almost three blocks away. By the time the actual scene came into sight, he was surprised there wasn't even more press all over the situation. He scoffed judgingly at his own thought. For a 'secret' magical community, this stuff happened all the time. The press probably cared more about the First Lady's toe buckle than another psychotic happening in the Big Apple.

When the scene was directly below him, Jake dove into the branches of a near-by tree. It's not that he was worried about getting spotted as a dragon, the people on the ground were plenty distracted, he'd just been working on his dives lately. This was a great one, too; he slid right between the branches and transformed again just in time to land on one of the lower branches. Below him, the unicorns were charging down the sidewalk, but at least they were all headed in the same direction. He quickly scanned the heard for Haley and Gramps, but neither were anywhere in sight.

Just as he was about to jump into action, the back of the herd came into view. "What the...?" he mumbled to himself while watching what appeared to be one of the City's police horses, mounted by a woman with striking red hair. There was no way she was one of the officers, but the way she rode the horse was skilled and practiced. She had a pretty killer outfit, but she definitely wasn't a New Yorker.

Caught off guard, the herd moved beyond his tree before he could pull himself together. It looked like whoever that was had everything under control. Maybe the whole thing could go down without any more magical interference - maybe that's where Grandpa and Haley had gone off to.

Before Jake could act on his thoughts, there was a loud, terrified, whinny from the front of the herd. Jake wasn't close enough to see detail, but somewhere at the front there were flashes of green light and it was putting all the unicorns back on edge. The police horse reared on its back legs, throwing the girl towards the ground. Before Jake could blink, he had his wings out and was gliding through the air just in time to slide across the pavement and catch the girl in his arms. He wasted no time sliding his wings back out of existence.

He waited for her to flip her hair out of her face before helping her to her feet. "You okay, uh..."

"Kim," she said, pulling herself up and dusting off her pants. She had pretty green eyes and there were little marks on her face where freckles had faded over time. "I'm Kim."

"Jake."

"Listen," she started, "it's not safe here, you should probably - look out!" Kim grabbed Jake by the jacket collar and rolled them both out of the way before a pair of hooves slammed across the ground behind him. "You okay?" she asked.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm cool," Jake said, brushing her hands off his arms. "But what are you doing here?"

"Look, now isn't a very good time." Kim grabbed a hold of the rains of the horse she was riding and threw herself over its back. "Just get somewhere safe!" she shouted before riding towards the retreating herd.

Jake shook his head. "I don't think so."

Swinging up onto a unicorn was easy. Getting her under control quickly was a little harder, but it was doable. In a few moments, he was caught up with Kim, where she was attempting to round up the unicorns on a patch of the grass between sidewalks. Jake wasn't all that surprised to see it not working. Unicorns weren't likely to listen to a human on a regular old horse. Jake didn't know how many stampedes Kim had settled in the past, but the frustration was beginning to show on her face as she chased down another unicorn that was straying from the group.

Seeing the stray headed his way, Jake took the opportunity. It took three years of unicorn-riding training, but he managed to pull his steed to screeching stop in the path of the other unicorn. The unicorn slid to a halt in front of him, whinnying angrily. Before his own ride could buck up underneath him, Jake let out a deep, growling, dragon roar of his own, flashing two rows of pointed teeth. The other unicorn immediately turned tail and galloped back to the still-chaotic herd.

He didn't normally like roaring at anything like that - it felt a little too...animal, for his own tastes, and his grandpa didn't smile at the idea - but he'd caught other dragons doing it before. There was a short time when he thought the whole monster-roar thing was cool, but the novelty wore off pretty quickly when magical creatures started acting more scared of him than respective.

"Now that's how you...huh?" Jake turned to gloat, but the police horse was galloping, riderless, towards the streets. "Oh, now she's gone," he grumbled to himself. Off to his left, there was another collective of whinnying as the unicorns began fleeing across the lawn again. "Hey!" he shouted, kicking his steed to follow. "Wait up!"

Just as he was catching up to the back of the herd again, there was a thump behind him and his unicorn yelled in protest as her back legs almost gave out from under her. Jake turned behind him in alarm and got a sight full of pre-teen sister. Most of her hair was pulled back into a neat pony-tail and her pink top looked hardly worse for wear than when she walked out of her room that morning.

"Haley!" he scolded. "Where have you been?"

"Do you know how hard it is to make a decent distraction now-a-days?" Haley shouted, flipping her bangs out of her face. "Press these days, I swear."

"Fill me in on that later, Hales," Jake told her, turning back around to the herd. "Where's Gramps?"

"He flew down to the DMC to get someone to take the unicorns somewhere before city police can. He should be here soon. Hopefully with someone that can pass for human, this time. What about you, weren't you supposed to wait at the shop? I can handle myself sometimes, you know."

"Later, Haley," he said again. "Now would be a good time to start some of that 'handling' you keep telling me about.

Haley scoffed behind him. "Whatever, just get me closer to the front."

It took a minute or two and some serious speed boosts on the part of Haley's wings - which, to be fair, had gotten larger over the years - but they eventually made it up to the lead unicorns. While the ones in the back had seemed to be acting more off of the collective terror of the others, Jake could see the legitimate fear in the eyes of those in the front. Something must had seriously spooked them to get them this agitated, and Jake wanted to know exactly what it was.

After his sister wasn't standing on the rear end of a moving animal.

"Be careful, Haley!" he told her.

"I got it, I got it!"

Jake wondered if he was that full of it at her age.

There was a moment where Jake's heart skipped a beat and time almost seemed to pause because his little sister had just jumped off a moving unicorn with the intent of landing on a stampeding one, but, just like that, she had landed. Roughly and on her butt, but she had made it. Jake let out a breath he didn't know he was holding.

He wasn't sure how she did it, but Haley had a way with some - okay, most - magical creatures that Jake just couldn't figure out. He could understand the big ones, and freaky ones, and the ones that went bump in the night; but for some reason the most basic ones, like unicorns, weren't quite as far into his playing field like they were into Haley's. With a few strokes of the mane and kind words that Jake couldn't make out over the pounding of hooves, the front unicorn was slowing down. Through one way or another, probably a magical empathetic creature kind of thing, the rest of the herd was slowing down too, until they were all trotting to a nervous stop.

"See?" Haley bragged, bringing her unicorn around to Jake's and gave him that blinding smile she could never get rid of. "Not so hard."

Jake just shook his head. He was about to suggest they leave before whatever distraction Haley laid out for curious press stopped working when he remembered why he came to help in the first place. Looking around the Park, he couldn't see any more of those green flashes or the mysterious green woman he'd seen on T.V. back at the shop. That Kim girl had disappeared too. It hadn't occurred to him when he first saw her, but he couldn't get her face out of his head. It wasn't even the normal "she's totally hot" not forgetting her face, it was more of a "she is incredibly familiar where have I seen her before?" kind of remembering.

He did, however, spot someone else walking towards them. "Gramps!" he called, hopping off the unicorn. "There you are!"

Before his grandfather could scold him, a dozen or so women, probably witches, approached him. They were all dressed rather casually, but a few of them had forgotten to ditch their pointed hats. One with a large, purple, hat and pretty blue eyes shook his hand. "Thank you so much, American Dragon, sir," she said. "We can take it from here."

"Oh, it's no problem, gorgeous." He added a nonchalant hand-wave for good measure. "All part of the job."

Several of the younger witches giggled before the one with the eyes had them all roping up a few unicorns each. Haley stalked over from where she handed over the unicorn she'd been riding. "Hey, I did all of the work," she complained. "You weren't even supposed to be here."

"You didn't do all the work," Jake countered. "I did some pretty sweet riding myself."

"But she is right, Jake," Gramps said as he approached. "I left instructions with Fu Dog that you were to stay at the shop and read up on your politics - in preparation for today's lesson."

"Okay, so I didn't listen," at a stern look from his grandfather, he added, "again. But it's not like the two pages I would have gotten through before you got back would be that much help anyway, right?"

Grandpa sighed, but Haley said, "He's right, Grandpa. You could leave him alone all night and he wouldn't get past the table of contents."

"So I'm a hands-on learner, big deal!" Jake rubbed and hand through the gel in his hair. "We've always known that. Let's just..." he sighed, shoulders dropping. "Let's just get back to the shop and I'll read up on that book."

Gramps gave him a long look while Jake scuffed his shoes in the dirt. There was a myriad of hoof prints marking out the grass and foot prints where the witches had walked through the mud left behind. Half an idea had started to form in his head during the silence, when Gramps said, "Perhaps, a different lesson would better suit today," he said. Jake's head shot up. "I want both of you back at the shop in ten minutes. No excuses."

Gramps turned to walk towards the witch with the blue eyes and Jake called, "Thank you so much, Grandpa!"

When he was out of earshot, Haley scoffed. "How is that fair?" she asked. "I even did the reading."

"Not all of us can be dragons and skip grades, Haley," Jake told her, messing up her hair - something that was a lot easier when she was shorter than his chest. "Now let's go."

Jake, and Haley following, jogged back down the line of dirt and tossed grass that the unicorns had run through in their stampede. He was sure Haley was looking for a good place to transform and take off quickly, but he had other ideas. When they reached around the start of the stampede, Haley found a good spot and started towards it, but Jake paused. He stopped where he was and started looking around on the ground.

"Jake!" Haley called from the bushes. "What are you waiting for?"

"He gave us ten minutes," he called back. "I can make it in two, go on ahead."

"Oh, no," she said, shaking her head so her hair swung and the little beads in her pony-tail holder clicked while she came to stand beside him. "You are not doing stuff without me." She planted her feet together and tried to following his line of sight to the ground. "What are we looking for?"

"Foot prints." At the questioning look Jake got, he elaborated. "I wasn't going to come down here, but one of the news channels back the shop was showing someone's cell phone video from when the stampede started. From the outside, it looked like a bunch of crazy unicorns, but there was something in the middle."

"Something," Haley asked, "or someone?"

"Exactly. It looked like a woman, but she had this green skin." Jake nagged at his memory of the video. "It might have just been the crummy lighting, or-"

"Some other magical creature was freaking out the unicorns," Haley finished for him. He really hated it when she did that. "It's rare enough for unicorns to be out in public daylight like that, but there were so many of them."

"I didn't even know that many lived in Central Park," Jake added.

"They don't. There are normally quite a few, sure, but pixies and unicorns get along pretty well and the number of unicorns around here usually goes up just before and after the pixie convention." Haley took Jake's blank look with practiced ease. "What? If you'd read up on that book, you'd know that, too."

"So whatever we're looking for has green skin, doesn't like unicorns, and probably knows about the pixie convention this weekend. If there's more unicorns around, they can make even more chaos." Jake gave his sister a pat on the back. "And that's what I have you around for."

Haley rolled her eyes. "Whatever. Anyway, we should probably head back. There's no way we're finding any foot prints in this mess without something special from Fu Dog. I'm sure we can come back later."

"Yeah, yeah, okay," he agreed and walked with her back the bushes. "Hey, if you've read it already, do you think you could give me the SparkNotes version?"

"In your dreams, doofus," she said, but they were both smiling as they took off above the tree tops.


(Edited 3/2/2015)

-Kinetic