“Don’t worry. I’ll fucking handle it. You just worry about the shit I got from Dorinda’s damn library. I got an assload of pictures from that book.”
“In record time, too,” Vinnie commented with a smile.
Nina shrugged it off. “Vampire speed. Works like a damn boss. I dunno if the pics will help, but we need a win here.”
Vinnie reached over the seat and squeezed Nina’s pale hand. “Did I mention how much I appreciate you guys coming with me tonight? It made seeing Dorinda after such a long time a whole lot less stressful.”
Nina ran her knuckles over the top of Vinnie’s head and winked. “I heard you give the snooty bitch a little subtle what-for while I was in the library doing the deed. Good on you. Somebody needs to take her uppity ass in hand.”
Vinnie felt inordinately pleased with Nina’s approval. “Thanks. Seeing you guys in action helped me have the courage.”
Marty smiled at her from the rearview mirror. “You held your own, Vinnie. Well done.”
A sudden quiet came over the car then, as Vinnie—and she was sure everyone else—pondered this Mikey Stillman and the harm he could bring to their kind.
She sank deeper into Oliver, reveling in the warmth his body provided and how safe she felt with these people—even with a crazy unicorn hunter in the backseat.
Mikey Stillman, forty-one, who, according to a little research and some Googling, lived in a raggedy, rundown trailer on the edge of the woods, lie partially in the back of Marty’s SUV as Oliver stood with everyone in his garage. He didn’t want anyone to know how panicked he was that someone had tried to grab him. He was trying like hell to take this like a man.
But Jesus. Someone had literally hunted him down because he was a unicorn. This was crazy.
But then again, Mikey Stillman looked pretty crazy himself. His scraggly beard, dirty nails, holey T-shirt and paint-spattered jeans didn’t do much but add to his wild appearance. He wore a skull-covered bandanna around his greasy hair and had the worn, round circle of a can of chewing tobacco in his back pocket even as he reeked of cigarettes.
As Nina tugged Mikey the rest of the way into the back of the car, throwing a blanket over his body, Oliver continued to stare at him in disbelief.
This man had tried to kidnap him. What had he planned to do once he had him in his clutches?
Oliver looked to Nina and Wanda, both of whom had questioned Mikey. Nina being the one who’d threatened his life while Wanda asked the questions. “So he was tracing you guys from the hotline?”
Nina climbed back out of the SUV and brushed her hands together before resting an elbow on the side of the car. “I have no clue. Tech isn’t my shit. That’s Darnell’s shiz. The basic gist of it is, Mikey somehow managed to track my phone through the OOPS line…or something like that. He followed us to that bitch Dorinda’s mansion, waited until we got out of the car, and planned to break in while we were inside and surprise us. Instead, he found you, Unicorn Man. Either way, not a very well thought out plan.”
Oliver winced and blew out a pent-up breath. “Did he see my horn?” he asked, catching another glimpse of it in the driver’s side window of the SUV.
It would have been impossible not to see the damn thing. It felt like it was everywhere.
Nina nodded her dark head, the silky curtain of her hair falling over her shoulders. “Uh-yup. But like I said, it doesn’t fucking matter—”
“You wiped his memory,” he finished for her, still unable to process that sentence.
Wanda tapped his arm in sympathy and smiled from where she sat on the folding chair he took with him to games. “She only uses that power for good. I promise. Mikey was mostly an easy mark.”
“Yep. He gave his plan up real nice and easy. It didn’t take much violence at all. Disappointing to say the fucking least,” she groused.
Oliver understood why they had to be careful, but he worried about their tactics—even with the gentle, compassionate Wanda present. He didn’t want anyone hurt because of him, even if the guy had wanted to hurt him first.
“May I ask why he gave up the info so easily?”
Nina pointed to her very white, very shiny teeth. “Because I showed him my fucking sharp teeth. After that, everything was cake. See, here’s the thing about dicks like this, they think they wanna know about the paranormal. They’re all assholes and elbows to hunt us like GD trophies in the jungles of Africa. They have big mouths, they talk all manner of inflated shit until they see us and they see we really do fucking exist. Then they’re all assholes and elbows to hide under the fucking covers like little chickenshits. I just gave him what he wanted to prove we really do exist.”
“Oh, Oliver, if you could have seen his face.” Wanda laughed with a clap to her thigh. “There’s no other word to describe it but hysterical. Either way, he got what he was looking for, but as Nina said, he wasn’t quite ready for the terror an experience like that brings.”
Nina jabbed a finger in Mikey’s direction. “He’s also the dickweed who’s been calling the hotline these last few months. If nothing else, I’m glad he found us for that reason alone. He’s one less freak we have to watch the fuck out for.”
Oliver rocked back on his heels and let out a breath. “And the tranquilizer he injected me with? What was that? Do I have to worry about repercussions? Like, am I going to grow another head to match my new horn?” he only half-joked.
“Morphine,” Nina provided. “He stole it from his grandmother when she died in hospice care. Which means he’s a damn asshole on top of crazy. There’s nothing I like less than crazy assholes.”
“Was anyone else involved in this endeavor? Or was it just him alone? When I watch some of those YouTube channels, people like Mikey have an awful lot of support.”
That scared him, too. He was no shrinking violet. If need be, he could handle himself. But what if this Mikey had been successful in tranquilizing him? What if he’d dragged him off somewhere and locked his ass up? What if someone who wasn’t human did it? He might be able to hold his own with Mikey, but he was powerless against a vampire.
“Just him. Mikey here’s a lone wolf, but I’m gonna go to his house with Darnell, wipe his damn computer, any electronic devices, and we’re all getting new phones just to be safe. I’ll look around while I’m there to be fucking sure this nutbag’s telling the truth. I can usually smell a lie from a mile off, but this guy’s just plain fuckwit-kooky. Sometimes that throws my ass off.”
Oliver was long past being horrified at her vampiric skills and well into deep admiration—for all of them, in fact. So he didn’t bother to concern himself with whether she was capable of scrubbing this event from Mikey’s memory.
And he said as much when he peered down into her beautiful, eerily pale face. “Is there anything you can’t do, Wonder Woman?”
“Sing. She’s a dreadful singer,” Wanda quipped, rubbing her belly with a protective hand as she pushed her way out of the chair with Nina’s help. “It sounds like a seal mating.”
Nina flipped Wanda her middle finger as she steadied her. “Fuck off. I can too sing, Wanda. I just don’t wanna show you bitches up on karaoke night,” she said, and then she chuckled.
Vinnie slipped out of the entry to the garage off the kitchen with Baloney sitting happily on her shoulder and held up a cup. “Coffee?” she asked him.
Oliver smiled at her in gratitude. He was going on almost no sleep for the past two days. At some point, even coffee wasn’t going to keep him awake. But he didn’t just smile in gratitude. He liked seeing her face in his doorway. He liked it and her…a lot.
She handed him the coffee and smiled, her pretty face beaming up at him. “So is Mikey thoroughly interrogated? Why is there no evidence of waterboarding and a pair of rusty pliers to extract teeth?”
“That was why Wanda was involved. To buffer all communications. Anyway, he’s finished and will be on his way back home like this never happened. Nina and Darnell are taking him.”
�
��The power of the paranormal, huh?” she asked with a dimpled grin.
“Will I ever get used to it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have any powers to speak of, so I can’t say. I can tell you, I’ve seen a lot of it in my day, and if you’re not careful, it can be intimidating.”
“You’re immortal. That’s a power, if you ask me.” Then he paused when he realized what he’d said. “Wait. Am I immortal, too?” Oliver blanched at the idea he’d outlive his parents, his sisters—everyone. It froze him on the spot.
Baloney took that moment to hop to his shoulder with such lithe grace, rather than stumbling because of her lame back leg, it punctuated this new journey he was on, and he had to lean back against the garage wall.
Vinnie reached up and ran a light finger over Baloney’s back with a smile. “I don’t know, to be honest. Maybe? That’s our whole problem, Oliver. We just don’t know about a unicorn’s origins. What I do know is, what happened tonight is probably just a small taste of what could happen if we don’t find a way to help you with this horn business. That doesn’t even include figuring out how to hide it from people and how it brought you to your knees when you used it to help Arch.”
Baloney leaned into Vinnie’s fingers, and he couldn’t help but comment on it because he didn’t want to talk about his horn. “You know, she’s not usually a fan of women, but she really seems taken with all of you.”
Vinnie cocked her head, her eyes warm as she stroked Baloney. “Really? Why’s that, do you think?”
“Denise,” he said woodenly. He wanted to say her name with ease, and he’d like to think he was past his anger with her, but what she’d done still stung.
Vinnie peered up at him with critical eyes. “Baloney didn’t like Denise?”
“Denise didn’t like her. She called her a rodent, wanted me to get rid of her.”
Vinnie plucked Baloney from his shoulder and rubbed her tiny face against her cheek. “Get rid of this little cutie? I guess some people can’t see the value in them, but then, I had mice when I was little, so I’m not a very good judge. Though, in fairness, maybe Denise was afraid, is all. Marty told me she nearly jumped out of her skin when she saw her, and now she loves her. Sometimes it takes time.”
“How can anyone be afraid of this little bugger?” Oliver shook his head to dismiss the notion that Denise was a bad person because she never liked Baloney. Some people didn’t like animals. They were clearly not his people, and that was okay. “I guess it’s just one of many things I’m only recently realizing were the problems between us. I love animals, she didn’t.”
Vinnie grinned, tucking her hair behind her ears. “I like animals, too. I don’t like unicorn hunters. Which brings me to the book Nina took pictures of at Dorinda’s. I found nothing that makes any sense at all in correlation to turning someone into a unicorn. I did find the spell my mother meant to cast, and holy candied nuts, did she hack that up.”
Oliver winced. “So she copied it down wrong?”
“Probably because she was in a rush and didn’t want to get caught, but ooo-wee, did she ever copy it wrong. I sure wish I knew what she said so we could make sure she never says it again. Who knows what could happen if she gets it right. I could end up with a serial killer. But all joking aside, I have a call into Khristos to see if he knows anyone who can discreetly find out if there’s a spell to turn you back.”
“So we’re back to square one, and my situation forced you to face some demons you didn’t want to face. I’m sorry for that, Vinnie.”
As Nina and Darnell piled into Marty’s SUV and fired it up to drop Mikey back at his house, Vinnie shrugged. “Maybe it was exactly what I needed to see to show me Dorinda wasn’t as intimidating to twenty-eight-year-old me as she once was to ten-year-old me. I think it even actually helped a little.”
Oliver gave her a lopsided grin. “Well, until otherwise notified, I’m part of the club now, too. So you’re not alone in feeling like you don’t fit in. We can be misfits together.”
Her smile of acceptance made his chest feel tight, and with everything going on, he wasn’t sure how to deal with the emotion. “Deal. Now, our next plan of action? Any thoughts?”
“Are fairies who spin cotton candy out of the question? Because that’s pretty damn cool.”
Vinnie let her head fall back on her shoulders, laughter gurgling from her throat. “I thought I told you, all I have is a drunken Barney.”
Oliver mocked a sad face. “So no dancing carousel horses either, then?”
“Um, nope. Not a one. And listen, don’t think I’m not just as disappointed as you because hello, dancing carousel horses come to life? It just doesn’t get any cooler.”
Now he laughed, and then rubbed his belly as it growled. “Then how about some food. I could really use some food. It’s been a hella long day with no answers and despite my weird paranormal anomaly, I’m still a twelve-year-old boy on the inside. Which means I’m starving. Any leftovers from the dinner we missed?”
She hitched her jaw toward the inside of the house. “I hear Arch made spaghetti and meatballs with a sauce that’s to die for, no pun intended. I think there’s some in the fridge. Want me to whip you up some fresh noodles?”
“You’d do that for me?” he asked, feigning coyness.
“It’s the least I can do, seeing as it was my mother who turned you into a unicorn. If she keeps this up, I’m going to have to take up cooking lessons for all her future victims.”
As they laughed and headed back inside to the kitchen, where the warmth of the lights glowed and everyone had gathered around his kitchen table to have coffee and chat while they ate dessert, he smiled. This is what the kitchen was made for. People laughing and talking and having pie.
But there was someone missing. “Where is Alice, anyway?”
Vinnie clucked her tongue with a sigh. “She went back home. She said she had some work to do. The ladies felt like it would be okay to let her go. They don’t think she’s in any kind of danger, but Darnell promised to check in on her throughout the night. Honestly though, it’s a relief. I haven’t gotten past the blame portion of this adventure and I don’t want to lash out at her anymore. She’s taken enough of a beating.”
“She didn’t mean to cause all this trouble,” he reminded. He understood the relationship between them was complicated, and while what she’d done was wrong, he hated seeing Alice so upset.
“I know that. I really do, Oliver. We just have some kinks to work out, but we left each other on good terms. Promise, your new buddy’s safe. No worries. Now, that spaghetti?”
“Yes, please,” he said as he followed her farther into the kitchen, and it was then he realized how much he missed sharing a meal with someone other than Baloney.
He’d isolated himself a bit since he and Denise broke up, unless it was family-related. He was seeing now that was a misstep on his part, and for the first time in a long time, even with a sparkly horn, he felt an invisible heavy weight lift from his shoulders.
Oliver woke with a start, his stomach still full from Arch’s amazing spaghetti. Even reheated, those meatballs had been killer, but he was experiencing a bit of heartburn after eating well past his limit.
After dinner, when Nina and Darnell returned, they’d sat around and talked about what to do next, deciding they’d wait on Khristos because they didn’t know how to approach this without sending out alarms in the paranormal world.
When Oliver had protested uprooting their lives this way and promised not to use his horn so everyone could go home to their families, no one budged. They were in it for the long haul, the way they’d been in every case before his, he’d been told. That meant they stayed the night in order to protect him—which felt weird as a grown man.
But then he reminded himself he was a grown man of average strength, possibly dealing with bad guys with super-human strength.
The choice of dead or alive became the question.
So they’d broken out some UNO ca
rds and played a few rounds before he’d bowed out and gone off to bed, exhausted from the day’s events.
But that burning in his chest because he’d overdone the delicious sauce woke him up, and that’s when he remembered he hadn’t taken out the trash. His world had been a bit upside down and his normal schedule, which he typically didn’t enjoy having interrupted, was totally off.
Slipping from the guest bed and throwing on his jeans and sneakers, he tiptoed out to the long hallway, past the master bedroom where Wanda and Vinnie were sleeping, and away from the rest of the rooms, grateful he could at least provide a place for everyone to sleep.
He was glad they’d talked Vinnie into staying, too. Not just because he liked her, but because she was safe here with them. Wanda had warned that she had vital information about the existence of unicorns. If someone wanted that information, they might try and hurt her to get it.
Sneaking through the kitchen, Oliver popped open the door to the garage and headed to the other door leading out to his backyard, where he kept the trash cans.
He shivered the second he hit the backyard. Damn it was cold tonight. He should have put a shirt on. And maybe a hat because, shit, he’d forgotten about his horn.
Oliver looked around with haste, hoping none of his neighbors were up this late. There was no hiding this damn horn, especially under the shiny moon, so bright it gave him a headache.
Now, what he should have done was run back inside and grab a towel or something to hide the frickin’ thing.
What he did instead? Decided to chance it by opening his back gate, grabbing the trash can and dragging it down to the end of the driveway at a light jog while surreptitiously keeping an eye out for the odd neighbor who’d be up at two in the morning.
Which, by the by, was an enormous mistake. Because the next thing he knew, someone had grabbed him—by his neck no less—and threw him up against the side of his house.
ACCIDENTAL UNICORN, THE Page 13
