“Mom says I need to be back by ten,” she reported.
“Good,” Troy replied, drawing heavy, damp air into his lungs, letting the dose of oxygen lift his spirits. The deadline was later than ever; it was, in fact, Kirsten’s weekend bedtime. “Is your mother feeling generous, or what?”
“I made a bet with her.” Kirsten giggled. “She said you’d be late. I said you’d show up on time. She promised that if you did, I could stay out until ten.”
He chuckled. Kirsten had, as usual, asked him to be on time when they had spoken over the phone on Friday, but he had to admit, most times he managed to be late no matter what.
They went to the lake for swimming and boating, then returned to town to pig out on pizza and Diet Coke.
“Mom always gets vegetables on pizza,” Kirsten said with a scowl. She beamed as he ordered pepperoni, sausage, and Canadian bacon. One of the few good things about being a divorced father was that he didn’t have to bother with the hard stuff like enforcing rules, helping with homework, taking her to the dentist. He got to be the pal.
They finished their evening at the bowling lanes, where Kirsten managed not to gutter a single ball, beating him two times out of three. She danced a little jig as she landed a strike in the final frame.
He hugged her, noting with regret that it was 9:30 pm. “Come on, Shortstuff. Let’s get you home.”
“I had a great time with you, Daddy.”
Yes, Troy thought. It had been a good day. He felt like a real father. A competent, mature person, seeing to his offspring’s needs. He had hope there would be more days like it. Leroy and Doug and the others emerged less and less as the years went on. What was the point of living in his body when they couldn’t truly follow their paths? Troy actually found himself looking forward to the next decade or two, to seeing what sort of adult Kirsten would evolve into.
Chatting with his girl, he drove along the familiar streets toward Lydia’s house, through intersections and around curves that were second nature to him. Three blocks from their destination, he stopped at a signal, waited for the green light, and when it came, pressed on the gas pedal to make a left hand turn.
Headlights blazed in through the righthand windows of the car, appearing as if out of nowhere. An engine whined, the noise changing pitch as the driver of the vehicle attempted to make it through a light that had already changed to red. Kirsten screamed. As fast as humanly possible, Troy shifted his foot from accelerator to brake. He had barely pressed down when metal slammed into metal.
Troy’s car, hit broadside on the passenger side, careened across the asphalt, tires squealing, the other car clinging to it as if welded. Finally the motion stopped. Troy, hands frozen on the steering wheel, body still pressed against his door, looked sharply to his right and wished he hadn’t.
Onlookers had to pull him away from his seat to keep him from uselessly trying to stanch Kirsten’s bleeding. Numb, he finally let them drag him to the sidewalk. Nearby lay the dazed, yet intact, driver of the other car. The reek of alcohol rose from him like fumes from a refinery.
Troy had a bruise on his left shoulder and had sprained a wrist. That was all.
The way Troy saw it a day later, Kirsten had been a natural target. What better life essence to steal than that of the very young? The unicorn had probably had it in for her from the moment she was born.
He should never have called the tattooist a gook. The man had cursed him. For so many years, he had seen the unicorn at least partly as a blessing, when in fact the tattoo must have instigated all those deaths around him.
Causality. Everything happens for a reason.
The warnings had been there yesterday, but he had been blind to them. First there had been his uncharacteristic promptness. Then, Kirsten’s smile in the bowling alley had reminded him all too much of Artie Farina grinning over a joke right at the moment the bullet struck him. Troy should never have kept his baby out late, should have taken her home in the daylight, before the drunk was on the road.
It was his fault. If not for the curse, reality would have taken a different path. The drunk would have come from the opposite direction, would have smashed into the driver’s side of the car. Troy would have died, and his daughter would have lived.
It had been his fault in Vietnam as well. If he had taken the death assigned to him then, maybe all of his buddies would have lived.
He would not accept the devil’s reward this time. He would not continue on, wandering through the decades, living glimpses of Kirsten’s life, the one she would never live directly.
Blood seeped from the edges of the bandage on his chest. He pressed the gauze down, added another strip of tape from his shoulder to his rib cage. Pain radiated in pulses all the way down to his toes, but he paid it no more heed than he had when the stitcher’s needle gun had impregnated him with ink back at G.I. Bob’s.
He had been afraid, when he picked up the knife, that his skin could not be cut, that the invulnerability would apply. But it was done now, and the tears of relief dribbled down the sides of his face. Soon he would pick up the phone—to call Lydia, or contact the hospital directly. The docs could patch him up whatever way they wanted, recommend plastic surgery or let the scars form. All that mattered was that the tattoo was gone.
He had done the right thing, he told himself, wincing. He knew he could have scheduled laser surgery, could have gone to one of those parlors advertising tattoo removal. But it needed to happen before anything came along to change his mind. Now that he had found the courage, even one minute’s delay would have been too much.
And it was working. He leaned toward his bathroom mirror, his reflection sharpening as he came within range of his nearsighted vision. There—little crow’s feet radiated from the corners of his eyes. Gray roots showed like tiny maggots at the base of his hair. His joints ached, and his midriff complained of all the years held unnaturally taut and firm. He was back in the timeline, looking as if he had never left it. Tomorrow’s dawn would mark the first time in twenty-eight years that he would wake up as Troy Chesley and no one else.
His breath caught. Over the bandage, he faintly detected a glow. It coalesced into a horselike shape with a spike protruding from its head. It hung there, letting him get a good look, then it sank into his body. As it did so, his spine straightened, his hair thickened, and an unholy vibrancy coursed through his bloodstream.
His newfound sense of victory drained away. The ordeal had not ended. Some part of him was still willing to do anything to have a suit of impenetrable armor. The marks upon him had long since gone beyond skin deep.
A tattoo was forever.
“No,” he whispered. His hand flailed across the counter top until his fingers closed on the knife. “I won’t let this go on.” If cutting off the unicorn was not enough to destroy its power, there was another way, and he would take it. He raised the knife to his throat . . .
The weapon clattered to the floor. Troy stared at his image in the mirror. It had changed again. Though it was his same—youthful—face, his aspect now radiated an impression of intimidating, heroic size, as if he were looking at himself from the perspective of someone smaller and dependent.
“My God,” he moaned.
The glow over his wound had done more than restore his immortality; it had brought an entity to the forefront. Troy reached toward the floor, willing his knees to bend, but they would not. The person possessing him would not allow a knife to point at the flesh of the man she had adored her whole brief life.
Leroy and Doug and Arturo and the others might have permitted him to consign them to oblivion. But this new one did not understand. She was frightened of death. Whatever shred of existence remained to her, she wanted to keep.
How could he deny her?
Troy stumbled into the second bedroom, lay down, and tucked up his knees. Overhead hung posters of cartoon characters. The coverlet was pink and trimmed with ruffles. He pulled Brown Bear off the pillow and hugged him close, beginning to cry a
s only an eleven-year-old, afraid of darkness and abandonment, could do.
Unicorn Series
Nancy Springer
[I]
I am not unlike the unicorn,
Shy wanderer of a mystic solitude,
Serene as ignorance, yet keenly drawn
To seek the lap of truth. You’ll think me puffed
With pride to set myself beside the faery
Form of sorrow. Yet I too have known
The traitor virgin, the mocking hunters, the sharp
Teeth of the hounds. I too have felt the hard
Encircling boards. Only I lack a white
And supple body and a soaring horn,
Their passion lost in unity of loves,
To dream completion for the half-made world.
[II]
Solitude
is a vast sea
a vast sand upland
the high wild mountains
the high wild wind in the sky
the high wild wind
among the strange trees
where hidden one with white mane
lank and stirring on his withers
and a wide seeking eye
scans sea and mountain and sky
Solitary
is the unicorn
from the day it is born
[III]
Snow shuts down
the highway, street lights
lets the stardark in.
The wild things cry in the wind.
White in the nightout
Nearer than the stars
The unicorn is standing
In the snow.
[IV]
Moonglow unicorn
Son of the moon
Of pearl is your horn
Stars fall from your mane
And your flank is as white
As the white winter light
Of the moon.
[V]
Tell me, fair unicorn,
How, like a young woman
World knew its own wonder
Those days of creation
With the one mystic eye.
Great god-eye of sky,
Clear eye of awareness
By which as in mirror
Of bright mountain water
A fair cloud-white unicorn
Or a young woman
Might if they saw truly
Yet see self divine.
[VI]
The unicorn leaps on the mountains.
The unicorn couples amid the mountains
Under a crescent moon.
The horn is as hard as the mountains,
Singular as the horns of the moon.
Where the sunrise is,
There is the silver unicorn.
Where the sunset is,
There is the golden unicorn.
Where the moonlight is,
There is the unicorn of shining horn.
The unicorn leaps on the mountains.
The unicorn flies in the far dark sky
Unseen, between as the stars spin by
On their rounds of mystic omen.
[VII]
The waves arch their white crests,
The waves leap in moonlight.
The unicorn lives in the waves.
The moon is a bright curve
Whose two horns are one.
The unicorn lives in the moon.
The moon is crescent,
Full, decrescent, dark
The waves leap in darkness.
The unicorn lives.
[VIII]
The mist is rising.
The unicorn is walking in the meadow.
See the soft grass,
The silver tufts of grasses by the river?
The unicorn is silent.
Softly it walks through the wish light,
Through the pearl gray light of dusk
The flowers are folded.
Who has seen the unicorn?
About the Editors
Peter Soyer Beagle is the internationally bestselling and much-beloved author of numerous classic fantasy novels and collections, including The Last Unicorn, Tamsin, The Line Between, Sleight of Hand, Summerlong, and In Calabria. He is the editor of The Secret History of Fantasy and the co-editor of The Urban Fantasy Anthology.
Born in Manhattan and raised in the Bronx, Beagle began to receive attention for his artistic ability even before he received a scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh. Exceeding his early promise, he published his first novel, A Fine & Private Place, at nineteen, while still completing his degree in creative writing. Beagle’s follow-up, The Last Unicorn, is widely considered one of the great works of fantasy. It has been made into a feature-length animated film, a stage play, and a graphic novel.
Beagle went on to publish an extensive body of acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction. He has written widely for both stage and screen, including the screenplay adaptations for The Last Unicorn and the animated film of The Lord of the Rings and the well-known “Sarek” episode of Star Trek.
As one of the fantasy genre’s most-lauded authors, Beagle is the recipient of the Hugo, Nebula, Mythopoeic, and Locus awards, as well as the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire. He has also been honored with the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award and the Inkpot Award from the Comic-Con convention, given for major contributions to fantasy and science fiction.
Beagle lives in Richmond, California, where he is working on too many projects to even begin to name.
Jacob Weisman is the publisher at Tachyon Publications, which he founded in 1995. He is a three-time World Fantasy Award nominee and is the series editor of Tachyon’s critically acclaimed, award-winning novella line, including the Hugo Award-winner, The Emperor’s Soul by Brandon Sanderson, and the Nebula and Shirley Jackson award-winner, We Are All Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory. Weisman has edited the anthologies Invaders: 22 Tales from the Outer Limits of Literature, The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (with David G. Hartwell), and The Treasury of the Fantastic (with David M. Sandner).
Weisman lives in San Francisco, where he runs Tachyon Publications just a few blocks from the house he grew up in.
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