Vivian explained very little, ushering us out the door as we grabbed coats. She told us only that she needed my magic to help her with a hurt animal and that it was better if I just saw things for myself.
"I can't heal for shit," I said.
She shook her head, halfway down my stairs already as I zipped on my hoodie and followed.
"It isn't like that, not exactly," she said over her shoulder.
"You said 'we'—who is we?" Alek asked as he followed me out as he settled his gun into a hastily buckled-on holster. He didn't bother with a coat, having told me more than once that our Idaho autumn weather was like a Siberian heat wave to him.
"Yosemite," Vivian said. "He'll meet us at the Henhouse."
"Mountain man?" I asked, but Vivian was already getting into her car, which she'd left running in the middle of the small lot behind my building. Only it wasn't her car, because she drove a truck. I recognized one of Levi's loaners and wondered. More questions for later.
I climbed into Alek's truck and we followed the frantic vet out of the parking lot, heading toward Rosie's bed and breakfast.
"Mountain man?" Alek asked me as we pulled onto the main road.
"Yeah, he's sort of a local legend," I said. "Brie is his sister or something, I think. He comes into town sometimes to get supplies, but mostly he lives out in the River of No Return Wilderness. Huge guy, bushy red beard. That's why everyone calls him Yosemite, after Yosemite Sam."
Alek's eyes flicked to me and then back to the road. He clearly had no clue what I was talking about. I opened my mouth to try to explain and then closed it. I could always show him cartoons later.
Vivian broke all the speed limits and since we were following her, we broke them too. On a night like this, it was unlikely that Sheriff Lee or one of her deputies would be out trolling for speeders. They were likely all at the diner or catching up on paperwork. The whole town was subdued by the apparently accidental deaths of the family who had owned the main supermarket, and the events that had followed among the wolf shifters.
Approaching the Henhouse, we saw all the lights were on out at the barn and saw Vivian's truck and trailer parked there. She pulled up her loaner car beside it and waved us over.
Harper, Max, Levi, and Ezee were all there, crowded around the biggest stall.
"Move," Vivian said, her voice half growl.
Everyone moved. Their faces when they turned toward me were grim and horror-struck. The air fairly crackled with shifter anger. I noticed as I passed that the other stalls were empty, and I wondered where the horses had gone.
Vivian pulled open the stall door, and I looked over the short woman's head as I came up behind her. The barn usually smelled of horse and hay and sawdust, but tonight all I could smell was blood and something rotten, like a compost heap in high summer.
Yosemite, who had a few inches and at least eighty pounds on Alek, knelt inside the stall, a white horse prone beside him with bloody gashes oozing blackish fluid all along its pale sides and flanks. He leaned back as he turned his head to me, revealing the head of the horse, which he cradled in his lap. A long, pearlescent horn stretched out over a foot from the forehead of the animal.
"Unicorn," I said, frozen in the door of the stall.
"He's dying," Yosemite said. "Fix him."
I crept into the stall. The unicorn's eye rolled toward me, his gaze dark and pained. There was intelligence there, more than I'd ever seen in all my years of working with horses. I'd been a working student at a barn once, during my twenty years of living on the run, and helped Max with their horses from time to time out of nostalgia. I'd ridden show jumpers worth six figures and trail ponies saved from auction. All beautiful. None as beautiful as I imagined the unicorn would have been.
His abdomen was torn open, guts glistening where they weren't caked with blood and woodchips. His breathing was labored, rasping. I didn't know how he was still alive. Unicorn magic, I guess. I understood my friend's anger now, why everyone in the barn looked ready to go to war and tear something apart. Whatever had done this to such a magnificent creature was evil, pure fucking evil.
"I don't know how to heal," I said. I tried to fix Alek once, to drive poison from his body, and almost gotten us both killed instead.
"He could heal, but there's something wrong. I feel magic at work, but it is nothing I've ever seen, something foul and tainted." Yosemite's eyes were multicolored, one green, one blue, like a white cat Sophie had once rescued when I was still in high school.
I knelt down, pushing my sleeves back and summoning my magic. I laid my hand gently on the unicorn's shoulder. His coat was soft and thick; it felt like I was touching rabbit fur instead of horsehair. Closing my eyes, partially for focus and partially because I couldn't stand to see any more exposed guts, I pushed my magic into the unicorn and tried to see the taint.
Yosemite was right. Clinging dark magic twisted and writhed within the unicorn, covering the bright pure light of his own innate power. The taint reminded me of those pictures they show you after oil spills, where the animals are coated in inky black sludge, barely visible as a creature beneath the filth.
The magic was alien to me, however. I didn't know how to fight it, or how to kill it. I pictured my own power as dish soap and attempted to scrub away the filth. The filth reacted by spreading and writhing, not retreating. Nausea ate a hole in my stomach as I swallowed bile and struggled to retain focus, to keep the magical bond with the unicorn. He was trying to fight, but his light was so dim, his own power nearly extinguished by the filth.
Fireball? No problem. Shields? Lightning? Destruction? Finding lost socks? I was good at these things. When it came to this kind of thing, I was lost. Helpless. I hated it.
A long gasp rattled from the unicorn's throat and he stilled beneath my hand.
"No you fucking don't," I muttered. I was not letting the unicorn go gentle into that evil damn night.
Turning my magic into a lance, I speared through the filth, reaching for the dimming sparkle of his power. "Rage, rage," I whispered, barely aware of the sound of my own voice.
The iridescent power touched mine and joy filled me, pure and wild. The joy of a flower blooming through the last frost of winter, sunlight breaking warm and golden through a clouded sky. The burble of a brook, clear water cold and sweet on the tongue. The joy of storm winds whipping down a valley and the quiet of a forest buried in fresh snow.
I clung to that joy, though it hurt, like staring into the sun. I fed it strength, trying to remember every time in my life I'd ever felt like this, giving over everything good and happy that I had for this creature until one memory stood clear.
It's dark and everyone was saying there would be below-freezing temperatures tonight. I had nowhere to go, so when the little Asian guy offered me a warm meal and somewhere to sleep tonight, I figured even if he wanted a fuck or something, I could talk him down to a handjob. He's pretty short and thin. I'm in a weird old house and he's arguing with two women in the other room. I try not to listen. I guess they don't like the idea of this guy bringing home a street kid, but now I'm not so certain why he did. Seems weird to pick up a kid when you already have two women, right? Maybe they are only into each other.
I'm debating what the wooden clock on the wall might be worth if I can get out of here and pawn it when the women come in to the kitchen. One starts making me another sandwich. The other sits down across from me at the little table.
"Ji-hoon says you have nowhere to go?" she asks.
"No," I say. I wonder if they will call the cops. I wonder if I care anymore.
"Why?" she asks.
Screw this , I think, but I decide to answer her. "My family kicked me out, because I'm not like them." I give her my best hard stare. She can have the truth, but no one will ever get my tears. Not ever, not over this.
She glances at the other woman and they seem to telepathically decide something as she nods. "I'm Kayla," she says. "That's Sophie. We're not like anyone else, either."
Then she smiles, and weirdly I know that life has changed, and for the first time in a year, the sun comes out in my heart.
The unicorn's power fed on mine, drinking in my memory, my moments of true relief and joy. Magic—mine, his, I wasn't sure — cascaded through both of us like a tidal wave of glitter. I was barely in control, hanging onto my magic through will alone, unaware of anything outside myself and the unicorn.
The filth burned away as though we'd thrown a match onto gasoline. I felt bones knitting together, wounds closing. Then the wave ebbed and the unicorn let me go. Reality came back to me in stages. First it was touch, my hand still clutching soft fur. Laughter, voices exclaiming, a sense of deep relief replacing the anger and tension. Cautiously I opened my eyes.
The unicorn breathed again, his dark eye closed, but his nostrils flaring gently with each easy breath. Blood still stained his coat, red now instead of inky black, but the gashes were closed and only deep pink scars remained where the gaping wounds had been.
"You saved him," Yosemite said as he ran a sweaty hand through his dark red curls. "Thank you." His tone made it pretty clear he hadn't thought I could. I remembered that Brie was his sister or something and wondered what she'd said about me.
"I think he mostly saved himself," I said, stroking the unicorn's fur gently. I didn't want to stop touching him, to release myself from the joy, but I made myself let go. My chest hurt and my legs barely wanted to hold me up as I got slowly to my feet. "What did this to him?"
Yosemite gently laid the unicorn's head on the stall bedding and unfolded himself. He was definitely taller than Alek. "We should talk inside," he said, motioning with his head toward the house.
Rosie and Junebug had joined the crowd outside the stall, but everyone took the cue and made their way to the house, except for Max, who said he wanted to stay and keep an eye on the unicorn after he brought the horses back in. It was a sign how subdued everyone was that both Levi and Harper missed an obvious joke about virgins as we left the barn.
"They went crazy when Yosemite showed up with the unicorn like that," Harper explained about the horses as we walked up to the Henhouse.
"Unicorns are guardians of the wild things," Yosemite said in a deep, smooth voice behind me. "The whole forest will be going mad over what has happened. It was good we were able to save one."
I waited until coats and boots were off and we were settled in the living room before I asked him what he meant by "save one."
Vivian passed me her phone as she and the mountain man exchanged dark looks filled with grief. On it were pictures, flashes of horror taken with a cellphone camera in the dark. Unicorns, at least three, ripped to pieces, their bodies black with filth and gore.
"The Bitterroot pack is guarding their bodies," Yosemite said. "I will have to try to lay them to rest, though I do not know if the forest will allow it."
"Aurelio? I mean, Softpaw?" I said, surprised. "I figured he and his would be long gone from here."
"They were, but dark things have been stirring in the wilds, beasts slain for cruel sport instead of food, spore from creatures that we've never seen before. He found me and we were tracking a pack of whatever did this when the forest went mad and I followed the treesong to the unicorns. The stallion was the only one still alive. I tried to use my knowledge to help, but this was far beyond my power." Yosemite's hands clenched into fists in his lap.
I looked closely at him, really looked, now that he wasn't bundled into a thick jacket and I had a moment. His skin was tanned and freckled, his arms covered in red-gold hair, but his tattoos were visible and looked very old, faded and blue. I made out shapes of animals, a fish, something like a cat, a stylized wolf's head, and spirals mixed in. It reminded me of the tattoos on a Celtic woman they'd found in a bog, her body preserved for a couple thousand years. I reached out magically, touching him with the lightest brush of my power, and felt the answering thrum of his own, smelling to my metaphysical senses like pine needles and the air before a snowstorm.
He looked into my eyes with a suddenly ancient gaze and I let my magic go, lifting a shoulder in a half-shrug of apology. "You are a druid," I said. Hey, if there were unicorns, why not druids? I'd always thought that Brie might be one. "Brie is your sister?"
He laughed, a quick bark that died as soon as it was out. "No, she's not my sister. But I am a druid. Taking care of the Frank is my charge." He looked away, staring into a middle distance, seeing none of us. "And I am failing."
I looked at the phone in my hands, glad the screen had gone dark, and could find nothing to say.
"Hey," Ezee said. He'd taken a seat on the couch next to the druid and now scooted over the scant distance between them, putting a hand on Yosemite's arm. "The unicorn will live, right? And now you have not only the Bitterroot pack to help, but all of us."
"It's true," Harper said. "We've vanquished a little evil in our time, for sure."
Rosie made a noise in the back of her throat, threw up her hands in dramatic fashion, and mumbled something about making tea as she left the room. If I had to guess, I'd say that the idea of all of us, her real and adopted family, running out into the woods to fight evil didn't sit well with her. But she wouldn't stop us, either. After seeing Vivian's pictures, after feeling that filth clotting and killing the unicorn's wild purity, I was ready to go lay down some serious pain on whatever had done it.
A whining voice in the back of my mind told me it might be my fault. This couldn't be coincidence. I didn't believe in it, couldn't afford to after everything. Somehow this would be tied to Samir. I felt it in my exhausted bones. I still mentally shut that voice into the closet, however. Nothing I could do but fight whatever came and try to protect the people I loved.
I leaned into Alek's warmth as he wrapped an arm around my shoulders.
"Do you want help burying them?" he asked Yosemite. "I can dig."
"There will be no digging," Yosemite said. "I will ask the earth to take her children inside of her. If they are too tainted, we will have to burn them instead."
Ezee squeezed Yosemite's arm and the druid slid his hand over Ezee's own. I realized that they must know each other, though neither Ezee nor Levi had ever said anything to me about the mountain man. He'd never really come up, since his visits to town were pretty rare from what I knew. There was a familiarity between them, the kind people only get after years of knowing someone. Or the kind you get between lovers. I raised an eyebrow at Ezee and he raised one back, his expression clearly telling me we could talk later.
Rosie brought out tea and we mostly drank it in silence. The mood was grim despite the miracle I'd pulled off with the unicorn and I had trouble keeping my eyes open after few minutes as the aftermath of using power like that hit me. I knew I'd be fine come morning with a little sleep and food in me; my recovery times were getting shorter and shorter as I got stronger. Didn't help the exhaustion now.
Alek and I said our goodbyes with a promise to come check on the unicorn tomorrow. Yosemite promised to keep us advised of the situation in the wilderness and call upon me again for help if he needed. We drove home in near silence and I found myself drifting off in the warmth of the truck cab. Alek touched my knee gently as he parked.
"There's someone sitting at the top of your steps," he said softly.
I could barely make out the shape of a person as I squinted through the windshield at the figure under the porch light. The figure was seated, but stood as Alek shut the truck down. It was a woman, in a thin coat that looked like leather, with a thick ponytail of hair spilling off the back of her head. Her face was in shadow as the porch light backlit her, but she didn't seem familiar.
"Want to go get a motel room?" I asked Alek, only half joking. I didn't want to deal with anything else today.
"Want me to eat her?" he said, smiling.
"She's probably a witch," I muttered, wondering what stupid thing they were going to try now.
"If she's a witch, you can turn her into a toad." He squeezed my knee and climbed out of the truck, letting all the nice warm air out.
Sighing, I climbed out and summoned my magic, wondering if I could turn someone into a toad. The wards around my building weren't going crazy, so she wasn't actively working magic or anything, but they hummed slightly as I checked them.
I stayed at the bottom of the steps and let her come down to me, though the light here was worse. "Who are you?" I asked.
Her eyes were dark and big in her thin, heart-shaped face. She was strikingly beautiful despite her tired look, her face made up as though she'd walked off a magazine photoshoot and found herself on my stairs by accident. She wore a thin leather jacket that hung in a flattering way down to mid-thigh, jeans, and four-inch red heels, which would have identified her as an out-of-towner if nothing else had. Around her neck was a silver chain with a delicate heart-shaped lock hanging from it that seemed to catch the light and glint on its own.
I stopped breathing as I looked at the lock and power poured out around me in visible, purple sparks as I dragged my gaze up to her face.
"Where is he?" I asked.
I'd had a lock and chain like that once. I'd melted it off of myself over twenty-five years ago. Looking at hers, I could feel the blinding pain, the heat on my skin as I forced the magic lock to melt and come loose. As I broke the bond between Samir and myself for good.
"My name is Tess," the woman said. "Please, you have to protect me."