Silverfall

by Raven de Hart

  “Are you sure you know? Because it doesn’t look like it to me. You’re reckless.”

  “Like Mom?”

  She balled up her fists and released them, just the same way Leon did. “Don’t tell me about my sister. I knew her better than you ever could.”

  “Do you? Then you’ll remember how reckless she was when she went up front with Dad.” He just shook his head, slow and steady. “I remember what she said to me, and I know for a fact that you remember. You were standing right there, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Yes, I know what she said.” She jabbed a bony finger into the center of Leon’s chest. “Don’t you go bringing them into this. It’s completely different.”

  “Who the hell are you to tell me that? You wouldn’t understand it. You’ve never had anyone.”

  She slapped him across the face again. “How dare you? I deserve more respect than that.”

  “So do I.”

  “Stop.” Cringing, pain cutting across my chest, I forced myself to my feet. Max glanced at me, a frown cutting deep lines around his mouth, but he didn’t make a move to stop me. Good thing. I stepped right up next to Leon and looked his aunt in the eye. “You can say what you want to me. Say what you want about me.”

  Leon rested his hand on my shoulder. “Come on, Tony. Just let me handle her.”

  “She’s not listening to you, so maybe she’ll listen to me.”

  She snorted. “Why would I do that? What do you know about our people?”

  I shook my head. “Not a damn thing. But I can tell you this much: I saw Silver kill someone.” I stopped myself. “I saw Leon kill someone while he was a unicorn. But I still care enough about him to defend him.” At least until he had the chance to explain. After that…I just hoped I liked his explanation.

  Leon wrapped his arm around my waist. “Does that convince you?”

  Suzette snorted. “Infatuation? That’s what you’re going with?” She turned on me, gripping both shoulders. Her fingers dug into the skin, stabbing needles through to the bone. “Your crush on my nephew doesn’t stand anywhere as strong as the love my sister had with Derrick.” I looked up and saw the sparkle of water in her eyes. But no tears fell. “Even if it did, that doesn’t outweigh the risk to everyone else down here.” She loosened her grip a bit. Not enough to relieve the pain, but it lessened. “Sometimes love just isn’t enough to overcome.” She released me, spun on her heel, and headed for the door. “Get him home, and keep him under surveillance.”

  “Aunt Suz!” Leon’s shout echoed through the room. “Damn it. This isn’t fair.”

  She stopped but didn’t turn to face him. “You’ll find someone to love, I promise. One of us. Someone that we can completely and totally trust.”

  “You’re not even giving him a chance.”

  “It’s my job to keep this area safe for us.” Her voice stayed level and calm. It unnerved me a lot more than the screaming and slapping. “We can’t afford chances. Not with Lionshead this active.”

  She took another step. Leon moved after her. “They recognized me.”

  Again, she stopped, and again, she stood with her back to him. “Of course they recognized you. You’re the only gray we have in the guards. Which raises the question of why you were shifted in daylight. Since you want to continue this.”

  “I wasn’t shifted. They recognized me as a human. That’s why I had to run.”

  Suzette ripped back into the room. “What?” A whisper, hardly audible even standing just a couple of feet away. “How? Have you been working like this?”

  “Aunt Suz, you know me. I’m more careful than that. But I ran into one of them in a coffee shop. He knew right away what I was.”

  “That’s impossible.” She walked over and sat on the bed. Her shoulders trembled. “No. There had to be some reason. Who was he?”

  “One of the higher-ups.”

  “My ex.”

  Leon and I spoke at the same time, but Suzette’s eyes fixed on me. Of course they did. I had the better news. “Your ex? You dated a member of Lionshead?”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Did you know about this?” She kept going just like I hadn’t tried to explain. “Don’t tell me you knew about this and still chose to bring him down here. Don’t tell me that.”

  He groaned. “I couldn’t leave him up there. They know he’s with me. You know they wouldn’t be above using him to get to us.”

  She opened her mouth, probably to try and keep arguing. But she stopped and cleared her throat. “You would go after him, then? If they tried to hurt him?”

  Hurt me? Carl may have cheated on me, but he wouldn’t actually hurt me. The other guys probably wouldn’t hesitate. My stomach churned at the thought, and the wound on my chest throbbed again. In case I’d forgotten how much bullets hurt.

  “Yes,” said Leon. “I’d fight my way out for him, if you made me.”

  The words hung heavy in the room, smothering all hopes of speech. It took Suz to cut through it. “Let him stay until we can make sense of this. I can’t have any of our guards distracted right now.”

  With that, she left. Leon leaned down and kissed my cheek, but it felt different. Lighter, less passionate. “Everything will work out.”

  It wouldn’t. Nobody says it will if it actually will.

  Max cleared his throat and scooted closer to the door. “Come on, Paolo. Let my patients sleep, now.”

  “Of course.” He followed the doctor out but stopped in the doorway. “I’m sorry, Leon.”

  “Go on, Paolo. Please.”

  Once the door slid closed, Leon lowered himself onto the edge of the bed. “Come on. You should be lying down in your condition.”

  “I really shouldn’t be here if it’s going to cause problems.” I wanted out. This was something I wasn’t ready to handle. For fuck’s sake, who was?

  “Aunt Suz isn’t going to bother us right now. She’s a handful, but she’ll keep her word.”

  Didn’t make me feel any better. “So I get to be with you one more day. Great.”

  “Hey, don’t think like that. We’ll get this all fixed up. If you can get over me killing someone, I don’t think Aunt Suz stands a chance.” He looked at his feet. “So, what did you see?”

  I sighed. I didn’t want to go back to that memory. It wouldn’t help and wouldn’t make it easier to stay with Leon if we had to talk about it. “I just…I saw it. The other night. It was some guy, and you stabbed him with…” The words hesitated on my tongue. “You stabbed him with your horn.”

  “Oh, that.”

  What the fuck? How could he just say “oh, that” like it was nothing at all? “I think it deserves a little more than that.”

  He shook his head. “It wasn’t what it must have looked like to you. He was a unicorn too. Lionshead got him, and they did something to him. He started turning.” A shudder slithered up his spine and spread out across his shoulders. “It wasn’t right. He was in pain. He was begging me to stop him. He was crazy. Not himself. Not in control. It put him at risk, and it put all of us at risk and anyone out there on the street too.”

  “So you killed him.” If I said it enough times, maybe it would lose its bite.

  “What else could I do? He asked me to.” He shook again. “He thought he’d do something stupid. I didn’t want to do it, but there wasn’t any other option. He never could have lived with himself if he’d…”

  “I get it.” Slowly, the memory I had of that night shifted. Not so stark. Not so terrifying. Perhaps just bittersweet. I could still remember the slickness of the blood on my feet and the iron smell in my nose. It hadn’t been self-defense, but it had been something I could handle, apparently. I rubbed Leon’s back and leaned my head on his shoulder. “It’s over. Just calm down.”

  I tried to imagine it, having to stab Terry like that, but I couldn’t even begin to wrap my head around it. It was just a void, a thought that refused to come. Probably a good thing it didn’t too.


  “I’m sorry it happened.” I tilted my head and kissed him under the chin. “Maybe we should get some sleep.” Maybe I could focus on one thought longer than a few minutes if I did that.

  “Yeah. I’ll take the chair out in the living room.”

  He reached back for a pillow, but I grabbed his forearm. “I’m pretty sure we can share a bed.”

  “I know, but if we share a bed, you know what’s going to happen. I don’t want either of us ripping our stitches.”

  I chuckled. “We don’t have to fool around just because we’re in the same bed together. I have a little bit more willpower than that.”

  “I’m sure you do.” He leaned back on the bed and crossed one leg over the over. “I’m not so sure that I do.”

  I lay next to him. He curled around me, keeping his hands away from the stitches. “I think this’ll be a good test for you, then. See if we can’t get you a bit more under control, you wild animal.”

  He released a long breath. It tickled my ear. “That’s going to be hard.”

  I scooted my butt back, pressing harder against his crotch.

  “I see that.”

  His shaft grew, sliding along my ass crack. I flipped around to face him, smell his breath. The wound on my chest smarted, but I ignored it. It faded as I stared into Leon’s eyes, looked at my reflection in the dark circles. I could see the pores on his nose, the cracks in his lips, and the slight growth of stubble along his jaw.

  This was Leon. My Leon.

  He pressed his mouth against mine and nibbled my bottom lip. His tongue slid along the edge of my top teeth and then a gentle brush across the tip of my tongue. I shuddered a breath out, breaking contact just for a few seconds. Tiny filaments of quivering heat wound through my body from the tips of my toes to the tips of my fingers. They flared, power coursing along each one every time he touched me, kissed me, and licked me. My mouth blazed with it.

  He nuzzled against my neck. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

  “Like I would be anywhere else.” I closed my eyes and smelled him. The memory was just as good, but it couldn’t hold up to the real, in-person smell of him.

  We lay there a while with no space between us, but suddenly everything was so far apart. My gut fell out as though I were staring into a deep ravine. But the panic didn’t rush in to fill the void. Because of Leon. I knew I could make it over to him there on the other side of the canyon. Now, nothing would ever stop me from being next to him. Not if I wanted it enough. I’d felt this way before and knew it didn’t always last. But in that moment, there was no room for logic. I could be with Leon, whatever else happened.

  That thought felt like warm water, washing everything away and overtaking the threads of passion. This was stronger. This pierced to the bone. I could feel the idea changing me.

  “So, are you okay?” he asked.

  My smart-ass remark came out before I could stop it. “Didn’t you see the stitches?”

  “No, not that. With everything. This hasn’t been the easiest day so far.”

  “I noticed.” Eyes closed, I shuffled through the blur of memories, holding to as much as I could remember. All I got was a burgeoning headache. “It might help if you give me a breakdown on some of this stuff. I’m kind of floundering here.”

  “Right.” His cheeks puffed out when he exhaled. He pushed himself up to sitting, lifted me, and draped his arm over my shoulders. “I guess you want to know about us?”

  “That’s a good place to start.” No shit I wanted to know. It wasn’t every day I met a unicorn. Well, for all I knew, it was.

  He nodded. “It’s something to do with emotions. Stress. Anger. Fear. Anything like that. If the feelings get too intense, we lose control and shift. There’s some of us working to figure out exactly why. But we know enough that we can mostly control it.”

  “But how did it start?”

  He shrugged. “Evolution, just like anything else, I guess. We mostly stick together and the genes just carry down, but a good number of us come from outside too. They get born to regular human parents, but they can shift too. When that happens, word gets to the rest of the unicorns and someone gets the kid.”

  “You just…take them away from their parents like that?”

  He snorted. “I’ve seen what happens a few times. They can be totally in love with a kid, but as soon as they shift, suddenly you don’t have such a loving pair of parents. Most of the time, you find the foal running around alone.”

  “The foal?”

  Leon nodded. “After it happens, the kid gets thrown out, gets scared, and they can’t help but shift again. Once you get them calmed down enough to shift back, it’s the same story. Assuming they’re even old enough to talk.”

  “Old enough…” How? I wasn’t a parent, I knew that, but I couldn’t imagine anything that would make me give up my son or my daughter. Even just my nieces and nephews back home… How? “What…what about that—that lion-thing?”

  Leon squeezed me tighter to his side. His heart drummed through his ribs and into my skin. “Lionshead. They’re really not a more comforting subject. We can talk about it after you get some sleep.”

  “Lionshead. Tell me about them.” The thought of those kids, alone on the streets, scared…I didn’t need them in my dreams.

  “They’re old. They go back for centuries. Started hunting unicorns back in the Middle Ages. I don’t know exactly when.” He drew his arm back and laid it across his chest. “Back then, it was all about royalty and medicine men and stuff. If a king had a unicorn pelt, he could claim to have hunted and killed it himself. They figured the horn could neutralize poisons and heal just about anything you had wrong with you. Which is complete crap, but it didn’t stop thousands of us from getting killed over the years.”

  “Thousands?”

  He nodded at his knees. “Again, I don’t know for sure. But that’s what I’ve been told. Over the years, the reasons changed. Unicorns for sideshows or churches or whatever other scheme Lionshead could play. They didn’t care. People are always willing to pay too much for us.”

  “Even now?”

  “Sort of.” He scrubbed his hands over his face, his fingers leaving white streaks on his cheeks and forehead. “We’re not easy to kill once we shift. I think that’s why Lionshead never gave up. They knew what to do, and they’d put too much into being able to kill us.”

  “You’re rambling.”

  “I know,” he snapped. After a second, he looked straight at me and grabbed my hands. His grip, so tight, knotted and folded my fingers in ways I wasn’t sure they were supposed to, but I let it go and just listened to his shaking voice. “We’re hard to kill because everything is durable. Our horns and bones are the hardest substance anyone’s found yet, and our skin is almost as tough. Teeth too. And hooves. Mane and tail are almost unbreakable. That’s how Lionshead makes their money now.”

  “I’m not getting something here.”

  He released my hand. My fingers tingled as blood returned. I almost didn’t hear Leon continue, his voice was so weak.

  “Those bullets we were shot with? Unicorn bone. It’s the only thing that can pierce our hide.”

  Unicorn bone. The words leeched into me like poison into the dirt. “But, they can’t. You’re people.” And they knew it. Had watched Leon and Paolo shift. The bastards still shot.

  “At some point, they figured it out. They just don’t care. Too much money. Unicorn bullets, unicorn hide armor, plus all the snake oil they make out of organs and stuff. They’re probably making more money in a month now than they did in the past two or three centuries. Why stop?”

  “Because they’re hurting people. They’re killing people, for fuck’s sake.” Carl was killing people. Was that going on when we were dating too? “I just don’t get it. Money’s not worth it.”

  “It is to some people, and their clients bring an awful lot of it.”

  “Carl’s not like that, though. Are you sure it’s not just someone who looks like h
im?” Stretching, I knew. Carl had recognized Leon too. He’d been there in the restaurant. But I just couldn’t… Carl couldn’t be part of this shit. I knew him too well. “It’s possible, right?”

  Leon just shook his head. “Carl Richmond. He’s been with them for about a year and a half now, and he’s already up in the ranks. I don’t know what it is he brings to them, but they like it. They normally don’t let you up high like that until you actually kill one of us.”

  “He hasn’t killed a unicorn?” Thank God. Leon, please be right about this. “H-how can you tell?”

  “No trophy. Lionshead members always display a… They make it very clear to us that they’re willing to kill.”

  Year and a half. After we broke up. That wasn’t much comfort. “I can’t believe it.”

  “I’m sorry.” He leaned over and kissed my cheek. I barely felt it. “I wish I could tell you something else.”

  “It’s fine. It’s just the truth.” The truth sucked, which meant it wasn’t a much better distraction. I needed something else to focus on. “I do have one more question.” I wasn’t sure I really wanted his answer, but I figured it was better than thinking about Carl killing unicorns. No matter if Leon thought he had…I was focusing on Carl too much again. “Were you following me?”

  “What?”

  “Were you following me around as Sil—as a unicorn?”

  After a second, he nodded. “I followed you after that night. Lionshead has connections all over the place.” He looked away. “I wasn’t sure if you were one of them.”

  “Me?” Really?

  “I didn’t know better, and given the situation… Can you really blame me for being cautious?”

  I sat for a moment, just processing. People hunting unicorns, kids in danger. “I guess I can’t be mad about it.” I had more important things to worry about. We both did. “I mean, if they’re really that bad, I’m glad you’re keeping an eye on them.”

  Leon reached out and took my hand. “I was a little shocked when I saw you in Pointe, but you were cute. Are cute. I figured that was my best chance to scope you out, if I could.” He smiled at me. “It worked out for the best, right?”