by Tanya Huff
If this unicorn came out of a fairy tale, then it was the kind of fairy tale that featured severed feet dancing through the forest not singing mice creating haute couture.
She turned as it . . . No, he; definitely he. She turned as he did, keeping the lamppost between them, fighting the stupidly suicidal urge to run. Her heart pounded in time with the hoofbeats, nearly deafening her, nearly drowning out . . .
Madonna?
Someone was singing “Like a Virgin” off in the shadows between two eucalyptus trees.
The unicorn reared, screamed in rage, and charged toward the singer.
Arm draped around the post to keep her standing, Kiren thought that was a bit of an overreaction. It was a decent cover, if a tad clichéd under the circumstances.
His horn split the air between the trees—literally split the air, Kiren caught a glimpse of a sunlit wood before it closed behind him.
The silence that followed had substance, texture, and Kiren sucked tiny gulps of air past her teeth so as not to disturb it. The underbrush rustled and she stopped even that, aware she was fully visible, but convinced it would be the sound of her breathing that would give her position away.
When Charlie Gale stepped out onto the road, blue strip in her hair, jacket and jeans over red cowboy boots, Kiren drew in a deep lungful of air, choked on a bug, and went to her knees. After a moment, the coughing that had been about the bug turned into something verging on hysteria and she couldn’t stop. Then strong hands gripped her shoulders and a quiet, commanding voice told her to breathe.
“Deep breath. Slowly. Okay, now let it out.”
In. Out. Eyes streaming, Kiren straightened. “That was you,” she said to Charlie Gale. “Singing.”
“Yeah, that was me.”
“And before that, that was a unicorn.”
“Yes, it was.”
Kiren accepted a hand up onto her feet, then waved off any other help. “What the hell is going on?”
Charlie Gale glanced toward the spot where the unicorn had disappeared, then back at her. “Dr. Mehta, do you want to go for a coffee?”
Her mouth tasted like she’d been chewing coffee filters. “I think I’ve had enough.”
“Tea?”
Kiren adjusted her glasses, brushed the dirt off her knees, and struggled for detachment as she noted a hoofprint gouged into the road. “I could do tea.”
“. . . AND THEN EINEEN SAID, it’s been thousands of years. Do you know how widespread our bloodline is? And I said, that’s why we keep it in the family.” Charlie let her sleeve fall to cover the bruise. “Which is when she smacked me. She’s stronger than she looks.”
“Eineen the Selkie?”
Nudging a pile of magazines into a configuration less likely to collapse under its own weight, Charlie set her empty mug down on top of the stack. Paper, from books to journals to equations scribbled on the backs of junk mail envelopes, covered every available bit of horizontal space in Dr. Mehta’s condo. Even the studio portrait of an older couple—Parents? Grandparents?—that hung over her fireplace had a Post-it note stuck to it. “You were nearly kabobbed by a unicorn; why are Selkies so hard to believe?”
“They’re just . . .” Kiren waved her hands and splashed herself with tea, having forgotten she still held her mug. After a moment spent frowning down at the glistening wet mark on the top of one bare foot, she shrugged, yawned, and said, “It’s the crossbreeding. It’s biologically impossible.”
“But metaphysically likely.”
“I guess I can’t argue with that.” As Charlie sagged back into the sofa cushions, Kiren finished her tea and stared into the bottom of the mug.
“What do you see?” There were no tea leaves to read, but that didn’t matter much.
“Death. Destruction. Although, technically, I suppose destruction comes before death.” She sighed and set the mug beside Charlie’s. “Should you even be telling me all this? Selkies and aunties and the soundtrack of your life?”
Charlie considered shrugging. Decided she didn’t have the energy. “Sometimes you need to talk about shit.”
“I hear you.”
“And I know you can keep a secret.”
“And you’re going to wipe my memory when you go.”
Okay, that was unexpected. Although Kiren didn’t look terribly upset about the prospect. “How do you figure?”
“Acknowledge the facts, consider the implications, create a hypothesis. Your family, and all the . . .” Her hands sketched unicorns and Selkies in the space between them. “. . . extras, run completely under the radar. A few random data points aren’t a problem, they’ll be turned into stories and we all think we know the difference between fact and fairy tale, but if someone with the ability to connect the points into an actual theorem finds out, then you’re threatened with exposure. As you’ve never been exposed, and—excluding your monologue on the moral implications of not removing the ass head from that Spurs player on the drive from JPL—we’ve been talking for . . .” She blinked at her watch.
“About an hour and a half,” Charlie offered.
“Magic?”
“I can see the clock in your kitchen.”
“Right.” Kiren waved that off. “Okay. Everything points to you and your family having a system in place to prevent exposure. As I can now expose you, you need to take care of that. Me.” She frowned and seemed to think the point needed more clarifying. “My ability to expose you. I assume you’re not carrying around confidentiality agreements although, traditionally, signing a contract is a valid way to apply metaphysics. Applied metaphysics. Fantasy engineering, right? Besides . . .” The yawn caught her in the middle of giggling. “. . . you already told me you did Gary. Gary’s memory. Not Gary.”
Charlie’d always known that exhaustion and alcohol created similar symptoms. She’d never seen it proven quite so conclusively. “When was the last time you got any sleep?”
“Lying down? In a bed? My bed?” Kiren dragged both hands back through her hair. “When was the last time I saw you?”
“Come on.” Charlie stood and tugged the smaller woman up onto her feet. “The sandman’s waiting.”
“Is he real?”
“Not as far as I know.” The door after the bathroom led to a guest room/office. Also filled with paper. Shifting her grip as Kiren bounced off the wall, Charlie revised her belief that a scientist would have to be uber organized. Of course, there was always the chance this was organized and she wasn’t smart enough to spot the system.
“Santa?”
“Jury’s still out.”
“Surya?”
The master bedroom was behind the door at the end of the hall. With Kiren hanging off her right arm, Charlie had to twist past her to flick on the light. “I don’t even know what that is.”
“Hindu sun god. One of the lesser Devatas.”
“Given the family baby-daddy, I’m probably not the best person to ask about gods.”
The bed hadn’t been made. Charlie dropped Kiren on the edge of the mattress, then tugged the comforter free of the crap piled on it.
Kiren watched a pile of paper tabbed with multicolored Post-it notes slide to the floor, and snorted. “Paperless office, my ass.” Then she snickered. “Paperless bedroom, my ass. I think you should know,” she added solemnly, “I don’t sleep with girls. Women. Where sleep is a commonly used euphemism for sex.”
“I do sleep with girls. Women. Where sleep is a commonly used euphemism for sex. But I am perfectly willing to take no for an answer.”
“You didn’t ask.”
“You answered anyway.”
“Efficiency. Go team.” She toppled sideways. “Any sufficiently advanced technology can be mistaken for magic. Arthur C. Clarke. More or less.”
“Auntie Ruby was in Sri Lanka in the early sixties.”
�
�Are you saying . . .”
“That Auntie Ruby got around. That’s all. In fifty years, we’ll be throwing around quotes inspired by my sisters.”
“I doubt that.”
“You haven’t met my sisters.”
“Not what I meant.” Sighing, Kiren squirmed until she was lying more-or-less the right way around, her head on the pillow. “If you can’t stop the Armageddon Asteroid and I can’t stop the Armageddon Asteroid, then in sixty years we—where we is the whole human race including your quirkily unique subset—we will be scraping out a subsistence living in isolated pockets where incidental geography or possibly geology . . . I’m a little tired . . . provided protection. From the Armageddon Asteroid. God, I hate that name.”
“None of that means we won’t be talking about my sisters.”
She smiled, a tired, sad smile that took a good shot at breaking Charlie’s heart. “Fair enough. You know, there’s speculation that after the Chicxulub asteroid the entire surface of the earth baked for over a decade.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Baked. We’ll be cookies.”
“Pie.”
“What?”
“My family leans toward pie.”
Kiren nodded. “I like pie. I like you. You give me hope. If there’s people like you and yours in the world, anything can happen. Anything.”
Charlie pulled the comforter up and made a mental note to turn the air conditioning down. “Get some sleep, Kiren.”
“You can sleep on the couch, it’s comfortable. I’ve slept on it lots of times.” Yawning, she rolled over onto her side. “Wipe my memory in the . . . you know, after sleeping.”
The couch was comfortable. Between the asteroid and Jack, Charlie hadn’t been sleeping much either, and it wouldn’t be long until morning.
“I don’t want to be pie,” she sighed as she turned off the light.
Instead of heading north to Calgary, Jack detoured west into the foothills and snatched a big white-tailed buck off the side of the highway. This close to the end of October, he had a full rack of antlers and the severed head dropped like a rock. After all the flying and the flaming, a second deer would’ve hit the spot, but—with even a partially full belly—sleep called.
With Charlie off sorting out the Courts’ crap in the wider world, he had no reason to go home. Sure, there’d be pie, but there was always pie. Sometimes, pie wasn’t enough.
Since caves weren’t exactly easy to spot from the air, and if he had to sleep outside, he might as well have stayed in the freezer, he broke into an isolated barn. Well, he had to squeeze through the big double doorway—with a belly full of deer he couldn’t change either his size or into skin—but, technically, nothing broke. The barn smelled of cattle, probably rounded up and taken off the high pastures with the end of summer if Heartland could be trusted to have slid a few facts in under the angst. He only watched Heartland because Charlie watched it and Charlie only watched it because she knew one of the writers and the two of them agreed that no way Caleb should’ve divorced Ashley. He shoved two big round bales of hay against the walls out of his way, and curled up with his chin on a third. Protected from the wind, his body heat soon got the barn up to an almost comfortable temperature. Wrapped around the place he and Charlie overlapped, he drifted off to sleep.
“Hey, you.”
Jack knew he was dreaming. Not because the Charlie facing him was his age, or, at least, well within his seven-year break, all army boots and attitude and blue/black hair, but because the connection he still felt didn’t lead to her. For all she looked and sounded like Charlie, he couldn’t even count it as wish fulfillment because it wasn’t Charlie. He sat up, still in scales, putting them eye-to-eye as she walked one of the barn’s beams. “Go away. I don’t want you.”
“Too bad.” Arms out, she pivoted at the end of the beam and headed back, dust motes dancing around her like Pixies. “You can have me. You can’t have her.”
“You can’t tell me what I can’t have.”
“Yeah, dude, I can.”
“No, you can’t.”
“If you want to be a Gale, you have to follow this one rule. You can’t have her.”
Tail out for balance, he reared. “Yeah, well, maybe I don’t want to be a Gale!”
“If you’re not a Gale, you can’t have her.”
“Stop saying that.” His wings slammed into the walls. The walls shook. “She’s not something to have.”
“Okay, fine.” A dismissive flip of blue/black hair. “She can’t have you. Works out the same either way. Big fucking hole in both your hearts that’ll never be filled.”
“Stop it!”
“You can’t be together.”
“Shut up!”
“No way, no how.”
“Shut up!”
She burned, fat crackling, skin peeling in blackened strips. Smiling, not screaming.
She smelled like pork.
His mouth watered.
And he woke up, clutching at his connection to Charlie.
It hadn’t changed.
The relief, completely illogical relief because he knew he’d been dreaming, left him feeling light-headed and he dropped his head, chin resting on the floor in the meter or so of fresh air remaining under the thick smoke that filled the barn.
The thick smoke?
Wings tight to his back in embarrassment, he put out the fire seconds before one of the beams ignited. He hadn’t spontaneously flamed in his sleep in years. The third bale had been reduced to ash, but at least no one had seen; the aunties would never let him live down that kind of property destruction. And Cameron would have never let him live down the whole nocturnal emissions thing.
Pale, predawn light spilled through the grimy windows. It’d still be a few more hours before he’d be able to change into skin, but he’d digested enough he could adjust his size to fit through the door without needing to fix the frame afterward. A dump out off the main trail where weather would take care of the evidence brought him a little closer to thumbs. Not that he needed thumbs. He needed to see Charlie. He needed to hear her complain and see her smile and smell her and touch her and argue with her about how little thirteen years meant to an immortal. Eyes, ears, and nose needed to know she hadn’t burned.
He’d used the blood tie to track his father from the UnderRealm, so cross-country, or countries, to find Charlie would be a piece of cake. Or, more probably, pie. Trouble was, he couldn’t count on Charlie to stay put and she traveled too quickly for him to keep up. He should go home. She always came home.
The dirt rolled up behind his claws like wood shavings as he gouged four lines into the partially frozen ground. Someday, she wouldn’t come home. Someday, the restrictions of family would outweigh the benefits and, like Auntie Catherine, she’d go Wild. Someday soon. He could feel her pulling away from the center of the family. Reluctantly, and not even entirely aware she was doing it, but he could feel it. He wasn’t the only one. He’d watched Allie watch Charlie and knew that half the time she called her home just to prove she still could. The rest of the time, her reasons were more obvious.
Except . . . Jack frowned up at the sky. . . . the asteroid would keep Charlie home. She couldn’t go Wild unless going Wild would save the world. But after the asteroid, even if only the family survived, she wouldn’t stay. He didn’t know what he’d do when Charlie left. She’d said they’d always have what they had, but how long would she be willing to come around and talk to him through the fence separating her from the rest of the family? He’d finally go Wild himself, driven by frustration, and spend all his time chasing her but never catching her.
“If you want to be a Gale . . .”
What did want have to do with it? Being a Gale was a matter of blood. He might not have known he was a Gale for the first thirteen years of his life, but that didn’t change
the fa . . .
A dragon’s shadow blocked the sun.
Pines cracked as Jack snapped out to full size and were flung aside by his downdraft as he took to the air.
The other dragon flew east, the rising sun masking his color. Didn’t matter. For as long as it lasted, the MidRealm was his world. Not even Uncle Adam got a free pass.
Closer. Closer. The invader was fast, but Jack burned his frustration as fuel, shredding the thirteen years that kept Charlie from him with every beat of his wings. Closer. He opened his mouth to roar and choked, coughing clouds of smoke out his nose as bands of power clamped his muzzle shut.
The other dragon dropped a wingtip and pivoted around it. Excluding Jack’s mother, this was the largest dragon Jack had ever seen. As he passed, scales gleaming in the sun, he said, “I have a proposition for you, Jack. We should land and talk.”
“Fucking California,” Charlie muttered, dragging the blanket over her head and cutting off the beam of sunlight that had slapped her awake with sudden light and heat. It was obviously morning. She was just as obviously not getting up. Not given the time she’d gotten to sleep. Kiren had been right, the sofa was comfortable. Both long enough and wide enough and with the big, floral sofa cushions tossed to the floor, Charlie rated it in the top ten of sofas she’d spent the night on in spite of its proximity to the curtainless east window. Would’ve made the top five had she not been alone.
For certain values of being alone that ignored the empty place Jack should . . .
Jack!
Throwing the blanket aside, she surged up onto her feet and ran across the room to where her jacket hung on the back of one of the dining room chairs.
She couldn’t feel Jack.
The connection hadn’t been broken, it just wasn’t.
He wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t there.
Where the hell was her phone?
Shit! She’d left it in Jack’s room.
