death of a unicorn, or, with a free good will

[gentle_edgar]

Which completes what was begun here and here (both f-locked) in November 2007, for NaNoWriMo, but stalled out at 3,000 words.

For originalbigbang. Many thanks to kensieg and triskafibble for playing beta readers and being generally encouraging, and to acidamoeba for the lovely cover art and to la_dissonance for the fabulous mix.

*

The tomatoes had been meant for Ben, who would be coming home on leave at the end of the week. Abigail had fallen into the habit of checking them every morning, both to make sure they’d still be good when the time came, and as a sort of reassurance that the time would indeed come. She would rub the leaves between her fingers, inhaling the scent of summer and of home, and carry that with her through the rest of the day. And the tomatoes continued their slow swelling out of greenness into full, true, promising red, each morning showing them a little closer to perfection.

Which is why when Abigail went out on Sunday only to be greeted by an embarrassed huddle of stripped vines-who had plenty of company in their chagrin-she very understandably said something nasty enough to make the few remaining leaves curl. And then she went down on hands and knees to examine the surrounding dirt.

“Unicorns,” she finally declared to the tomato vines, sounding much more certain than she felt. “Guess I’d better get out the shotgun.” She did, though not until putting in a long days work developing black and whites for the wedding she’d photographed the weekend before. Still smelling of chemicals and squinting slightly from the brightness of the kitchen’s overhead lamp, she cleaned the shotgun, dug out a box of buckshot shells, and then went to take a nap. Sleep would likely be in short supply the next few nights.

And it was: between spending her days working on the photographs from the wedding and spending her nights sitting guard, she wound up dozing in twenty minute snatches here and there, usually when her eyes stopped focusing properly. But she did love the sounds of summer nights and slant of moonlight across the clearing in back of the house, the shimmer of fireflies that was echoed by the various wards strung around property as they were found out by the moon. If only she’d had some company and a different reason for being out at night, it would have been downright enjoyable. Even the inevitable mosquitoes mostly left her alone.

However, by Wednesday evening, her body had begun mutinying, and her eyes kept sliding shut no matter how ferociously she told them to stay open. She could feel herself shutting down, the world sliding away like a dream, and even pinching herself or biting the inside of her cheek wasn’t enough-and after unintentionally chomping through her lip she gave up trying and just stood up instead.

Even that had begun to fail, the kitchen door suddenly becoming the most comfortable surface in the world, when she realized that the white blur down on the edge of the forest wasn’t simply her eyes playing tricks. Like some too-solid, garden-devouring ghost, a-the, she would assume for her peace of mind-unicorn was trespassing as audaciously as if it were in fact insubstantial and not entirely susceptible to buckshot. As Abigail disproved once it moseyed into range.

And then she went to bed, delaying only long enough to call the local department of the Wildlife Commission and request removal of the body.

“Good morning, ma’am.” It was a quarter to seven, Abigail was still in her threadbare ‘Sleepy Squirrel’ pajamas-which she must have changed into while unconscious, because she didn’t remember doing it-and the world kept blurring every time she blinked. There didn’t seem to be anything good about it. But mostly she was astonished by who exactly was speaking.

“Doug? I thought you were working out in Oholibah.” If she’d known he would be the one responding to her call, she would have made sure to at least put on a pair of jeans before answering the door. She surreptitiously pulled her sleep shorts down a little and hoped Doug wouldn’t notice; the things had a tendency to ride up in the back, and she didn’t feel like showing him her underwear. Unfortunately, it was too late to do anything about the rest of her: ‘rat’s nest’ would have been putting it kindly.

“I was, but only if you consider managing the campgrounds there something other than a bad way to go crazy.” He flashed her a dimpled, rueful smile, and for a moment it was like being fourteen again, when he’d tried to teach her how to say scathing things while charming the pants off people. “Nothing but logistics and cranky people and making sure bears don’t eat the cranky people, which was not at all what I’d thought I was signing on for.” Abigail attempted her own smile, but it felt warped and slightly gummy, like her current ability to see.

“So here you are, retrieving unicorn carcasses at an hour when anyone sane would still be in bed.” Farmers included, because you had to be slightly bonkers to work in agriculture-she’d grown up on a farm and had seen it firsthand.

“Funny how that goes.” But his own smile slid away into an expression that suggested that was nothing funny about it. “It’s been a while, Abigail James.”

“Worth,” she corrected automatically, and told herself the corners of his mouth hadn’t turned down when she said it. Pity she was such a bad liar. “Um. Why don’t I go put some pants on, and then I’ll take you round to where I left the body.”

“Fine with me,” Doug said, affable once again, and started whistling ‘My sweetheart wore her nightgown’, despite knowing full well how much she hated that song.

Abigail closed the door in his face and went in search of a clean pair of pants, despite knowing there weren’t any. Her washer had started eating anything she put into it, and she hadn’t yet gotten around to calling up Augustus May to get it fixed. But after some digging, she managed to find a pair that was only slightly muddy, and whose pockets were mostly empty instead of bulging with film canisters. When she returned outside, fully clad and marginally more functional, Doug had switched tunes and was well into ‘Love, you left a soldier and returned less than a man’. A few years ago she might have thought it an improvement, but now it made her feel like throwing something at him.

“It’s around the back,” she said instead, and reminded herself that he could have chosen worse, though not by much. Anyway, he was technically an officer of the law, and the best way to get him to leave would be to keep her mouth shut and cooperate, no matter how intentionally aggravating he tried to be.

“Went after your garden, did it?”

And she was going to be polite and not mention that it had succeeded because his brother’s wards were rubbish. “Yes.” The yard seemed strangely quiet for early morning, but it might have just been Doug’s presence; she didn’t get many visitors. “It was down by the forest when I first spotted it, but-” She stopped, because where had been a yellow-white and smelly body the night before was now only a patch of smashed grass.

“I’m going to guess this isn’t the way you left it last night.” Doug still sounded more amused than the situation warranted-shades of most of their shared childhood-but she couldn’t really bring herself to care at the moment.

“Definitely no,” she said, and hoped her voice didn’t sound as shaky as she thought it did.

“I don’t suppose there’s any chance you didn’t actually kill it?” But he asked the question like he already knew what the answer would be, and it wasn’t one he liked. Perhaps he had grown up a bit after all.

“Oh, it was dead all right. I blew apart its head to make sure.” And had done it without a second’s squeamishness, detachedly, through a fog of exhaustion. Now, though, her knees were wobbly enough that she had to sit down on the stairs again, same place as she’d sat the previous three nights while fighting to stay awake. There was an awful lot of blood and stuff on the grass, even if it had all dried by now.

“That’s what I thought.” Doug squatted down to examine things more closely-and she really must be half-mad from lack of sleep, because suddenly all she could see was frame after frame of potential perfect shots, the brown of his uniform against the grass, the way the morning sunlight picked out all the bits of dried blood and brain and bone in a ghastly counter to the moonlit magic the night before.

Absolutely mad.

She scrubbed her face with her hands and made herself pay attention to what Doug was saying. “Looks like it got dragged off back towards the forest.” He glanced over at her, taking his hat off so he could run a hand through his hair absent-mindedly. “How big was it, anyway?”

“At least a twelve-incher, I’d say. So maybe six hundred pounds? Seven hundred? It looked pretty bulky.” She’d thought for a moment, just as she pulled the trigger, that the shotgun wasn’t going to be enough-in which case she would have been faced with a rather large, very unhappy animal with a sharp spike on its head. But the shotgun had done its job, and fierce justice had been meted out.

“So whoever-or whatever-took this away had to have some pulling power.” He squinted over at her, sun-kissed and golden, eyelashes iridescent. “No tire-tracks, though.” How had she managed never to notice his freckles before? Lack of sleep, she told herself firmly, mentally boxed up that detail, and put it somewhere she wouldn’t see it again. Missing dead unicorn: that was what mattered.

“No,” she agreed, and shivered; in the shade of the house, it was almost cold. “I think I would have woken up if someone drove through my backyard in the middle of the night.” Well, she would have usually. She’d been nearly dead to the world last night even before she’d finally fallen into bed, but she didn’t feel like admitting that or having to explain why. Doug had always been merciless of others’ foibles.

“Yeah, that would be kind of hard to miss, wouldn’t it?” He sighed and stood up again, scrubbing his hand through his hair once more before shoving his hat back on. “You have any coffee? It’s too early in the morning for me to think straight about this kind of thing.”

After the hasty relocation of the various projects covering the kitchen table, Abigail managed to find the coffee, and orange juice and milk and cereal, which she ate while Doug caffeinated himself. Hunched over a coffee mug, he seemed a less irritating than he had outside, which was helped by the fact that he had yet to call her ‘James’ again. Or anything else, for that matter. Surprisingly politic of him.

“So, how long have you been back?” she asked after five minutes silence. Keeping quiet when other people were around had never been one of her strong suites.

Doug had had both eyes closed as he all but inhaled the coffee, but now he opened one to look at her. “Back?”

“Here, I mean. From Oholibah.” Her cornflakes had gone all soggy, so she dumped in some more and stirred it all around so the textures would be distributed more evenly. Few things were more unappetizing than pure mush.

“Oh, five days, give or take a dozen hours.” He tossed back the last of his coffee and then stared at the empty mug as if it might magically produce more. But he’d already had two, and she’d seen what happened when he had a third; she had no desire to repaint her kitchen.

“Five days?” she repeated, taking away his empty mug and setting it in the sink. “And they sent you out here on your own?”

“It was supposed to be a simple retrieval,” Doug pointed out. “And anyway, Butch is down with food poisoning and Ginny really ought to be on maternity leave.” Ginny Lindstrom was (to use a cliché) as tough as nails and built to shrug off very nearly any amount of damage. In fifty years, she would be one of those old ladies described in old British detective novels as ‘battle axes’. At the moment, however, she was eight months very pregnant and still stubbornly on duty.

“You have a point there-I saw her in the store the other day, looking like she was fed up with the whole business and about ready to start slicing herself open if it would speed things along at all.” Of course, Abigail had come across her again, ten minutes later, by the shelves of diapers, an expression of baffled awe transforming her normally plain face into something wondrous-and Abigail had itched to take a picture of it, but she hadn’t brought her camera with her. She’d tried sketching it later, but simply didn’t have the technique to render the moment properly. “But now what? I’m not exactly comfortable with the thought of something-or someone-simply waltzing through my backyard, taking whatever they please with them.” That was how this whole thing had started, after all.

“No, I imagine not.” Doug straightened his hat and stood up. The sun shining in the window and through the prisms shed rainbows in his hair, smudging color down his cheek like a child with a new box of crayons. “I’ll go take a closer look at the ground-maybe there are footprints or scat or something else that might indicate who or what removed the body.” He sighed. “I was hoping for something a little simpler to start my day.”

Abigail made a vaguely sympathetic sound around her mouthful of cereal, though it was lost in the sound of the door shutting behind him.

The room seemed to settle into itself in his absence, the empty spaces and silences familiar again. While she waited for him to return, she busied herself with putting the breakfast things away, washing the dishes, singing old love songs and sea shanties taught to her by her grandfather, filling the space with memories of people she’d loved. The opening of the kitchen door seemed to shudder everything sideways and awkward again, and she broke off mid-verse, finishing her final pass over the counter with a dishrag. “What’s the verdict?”

“Not any of the usual suspects.” Doug looked and sounded baffled, face screwed up into the very image of frustrated confusion. “I think. The ground’s too hard to hold prints, so all I have to work with is a few patches of scraped-up dirt and grass, and a single broken branch that may or may not have been damaged during removal of the body.”

“Was it the big maple?”

He thought a moment. “Yes.”

“That happened last week in the big thunderstorm, so yes, almost certainly unrelated.”

Doug removed his hat so he could scrub a hand through his hair again, and collapsed at the table like his supports had been removed. “Two scuffs and a huge, unmistakable drag-trail. I don’t like where this is headed.” He sighed. “Well, at least I know how the unicorn got in.”

“Me too,” she said without thinking, bit her tongue, and then decided she might as well keep going. “Does it include your brother still being absolute rubbish at wards? I never could understand how he wound up doing them for a living.”

Doug’s eyes crinkled up at the corners, meaning he wanted to laugh but wasn’t letting himself. “He was sixteen-you can’t still hold that against him. And no, it involves someone with a knife or very sharp nails.” Half-consciously, Abigail glanced down at her own: short clipped, filed, cuticles cracking slightly from overexposure to water and developing solution.

“Nails?”

“Well, claws, more likely. We’ve been getting reports of dogs going missing, so Butch thinks there’s a bigcat nearby.” His tone was that of someone repeating what they’ve been told even though they think it’s gibberish.

“‘Butch thinks’? What do you think?”

He leaned forward, spreading his hands out over the table like it was a map. “There are warding markers laid out two miles from the road on both sides, and I’ve spent the last three days checking all of them from Heavner to Michael’s Heights: they’re sound as a daisy, every last one. Whatever we’re dealing with here, if it is a bigcat, it’s one that’s learned how to counteract wards. And that’s about as likely has me being able to fly just by flapping my arms.”

“And what does this have to do with the broken wards in my garden?” ‘With Ben’s tomatoes’, she doesn’t say.

“Don’t know yet, but it wasn’t James’s fault. Someone or something cut through one of the wards’ base layers.” From one of his pockets he produced a segment of string coated with powdery dirt and a splotch of what was likely dried blood. “And it was a clean cut, so it had to have been a knife or scissors or something equally effective, which leads to the question of what they or it were doing in your garden in the first place. You haven’t been leaving meat out for some inexplicable reason, have you?”

“Just my weekly sacrifices to the forest gods,” Abigail muttered, hoping the building pressure behind her eyes was only imagined. “No, of course not. I’m not some city idiot-you know that.”

“Just had to check. Sometimes the most obvious answer is right.”

“Not this time.”

“I hope not. Bigcats are bad enough, but one that’s somehow immune to wards? We’d have to call in the militia from half the state to deal with it.”

Abigail scrubbed her face wearily, wishing she could simply go back to bed. “Wait-I think I missed something. You don’t think it’s a bigcat, right? So why do you think it’s something with very sharp nails? Or did I just misinterpret your question about leaving meat in the yard?”

“Well, there are those odd scuffs around your garden perimeter that are definitely not from someone’s shoes, and anyway, how would a person even know about the unicorn in order to come steal it? Why would they steal it?” Doug became more animated with each point he made.

Abigail just felt tired and stupid. “Well, if it wasn’t a person, how’d it cut the wards-ward-in the first place? And we don’t have anything around here large enough to drag a full-grown unicorn away. Though the missing dogs could just be because of coyotes-they’re almost as bad about getting through wards as foxes and unicorns.” Honestly, bigcats? Butch must have been putting one over on Doug, because that was the most ridiculous thing she’d heard all week.

Not that she’d actually talked to anyone since church on Sunday.

Doug slumped a little. “Well, yes, there are still holes in the theory.” He frowned at the piece of string sitting on the table in front of him. “I should probably call Ginny. Do you mind if I use your phone?”

Abigail half-heartedly waved a hand toward it. “Sure, but don’t you have radios or something?”

“They stopped working properly on Tuesday, and whatever Augustus did to fix them just made things worse.”

While Doug called Ginny, Abigail put her head down on the table and pretended it was actually her pillow. She didn’t quite manage to fall asleep, not with Doug delivering his report in a tone of voice she’d never thought to hear from him: actual deference. But at least it was amusing.

“We could request assistance from Breakwater. . . . You put a bet on me? -And Butch? . . . I don’t know whether to feel insulted or complimented.” Here Ginny must have said something scathing, because Doug resumed speaking, he sounded downright aggrieved. “Well then, how do you want me to handle this? If you don’t want me going in on my own, I could wait for Jim to finish up work this afternoon, but we probably shouldn’t leave it that long.”

“I could play backup,” Abigail interjected, feeling sorry for him and somewhat complicit. “You know I can be plenty sneaky, and Ben taught me how to hit what I’m aiming at, finally.” She lifted her head from the table and was somewhat pleased by Doug’s gob smacked expression.

“. . . What?” he finally said, quickly followed by, “No, not you, Ginny. Abigail just asked me to deputize her.”

“I offered to follow you with a shotgun,” Abigail corrected, feeling inexplicably pedantic. “Nothing more. Please don’t make it other than it is.”

And so off they went, after Doug spent another five minutes listening to Ginny’s instructions with an increasingly distracted expression while Abigail prepared for the expedition.

Despite the near-boiling heat, she shivered as she stepped into the shadow of the forest, uncomfortably aware of how old and deep and potentially unfriendly it was-like the ocean, but without the friendly smell of salt brine. But that awareness was quickly overwhelmed by the heat and dripping humidity, which made her long for the relative coolness of the dark room in her basement. Not that she didn’t keep seeing things out of the corner of her eye, but she couldn’t spare the energy to care about them.

“Are we there yet?” she muttered when her underwear soaked through and began clinging to her over-heated butt. She hadn’t realized butts could overheat, but hers most certainly had. And her sweaty hands kept slipping on the polished wood and metal of her shotgun. If she’d been running on a little less sleep, she might have thought to bring a pair of fingerless gloves.

Ah well. Beggars, horses, vicious djinni, and all that. At least she’d volunteered.

“No,” Doug said, but he sounded thoughtful, not annoyed. Maybe his uniform was spelled to keep him cool. “Which is odd. There’s no reason why our thief should have dragged his prize so far.”

“Well,” she said, scrubbing sweat and grime and strands of hair about her forehead, “do you really think this is going to get us anywhere other than lost?” Which she already was; her eye kept getting caught by small details, so that all she had to navigate by was a mental scrapheap of fragmented images like a dozen puzzles dumped together with most of the pieces missing. If the trail left the dried streambed they were currently walking down and something happened to Doug, she’d be a long time finding her way back to civilization.

She’d heard there were forests where you could leave blazes on the trees and they would reliably stay where you’d put them, and the compasses didn’t point north one day and south-south-west the next, but this wasn’t one of them.

“Maybe not.” If she hadn’t seen the hard line of his shoulders, how tightly he held his rifle, she would have said he sounded as casual as a man debating his morning choice of socks. “But we don’t have anything else to work with, and whatever we’re following, I can’t imagine it’s friendly. If it’s a choice between us and the town’s stickball team tangling with it, I vote us; at least we’re armed.”

“And legged too, but I guess we won’t be making a run for it.” Not that she was entirely convinced they were chasing an ‘it’ at all. Someone with a knife and a lack of respect for other peoples’ property made a lot more sense to her.

“Let’s hope we won’t have to,” Doug said, abruptly grim, and began walking faster, so that Abigail had to jog to keep up. When he stopped without warning, she almost ran right into him before slumping gratefully against a tree. “Well,” he announced, grimness gone again to wherever it had come from, “whatever we’re chasing, it’s not a person with a sharp knife and an inexplicable fondness for your garden.” He pointed to a ridge of pearlescent powder trailing across the leafmold. “No way anyone with half a brain would leave that here to disintegrate.”

“Is that the alicorn?” And then, because she sounded to herself too young, too awestruck, “Are you sure it’s from the one I shot?”

He pinched some of the powder and rubbed it between his fingers. “Relatively. It was removed from the body with the correct timeframe, and I don’t see anything to suggest it’s not from the one you shot. There’s no signs of a fight or another dead body, and the trail continues past here unwavering.”

“All right,” she sighed, and heaved herself back into motion as he took off again. “Claws it is.” She would have preferred knives; people could usually be reasoned with.

Whatever energy she’d gained from breakfast and her pretend-nap was quickly draining away, and twenty minutes after they’d started she had to call a stop. “Sorry,” she gasped, collapsing at the foot the tree and putting her shotgun down with rather less care than she should have. “Haven’t been getting much sleep recently.”

“Or exercise?” Doug enquired, teasing, and she flapped a hand at him, annoyed and feeling very much like she was sixteen again. He sat down next to her after a minute. “I guess we can spare five minutes for you to catch your breath.”

“Thanks,” she said dryly, but refrained from reminding him that she was the one doing him a favor and not the other way around. Instead she closed her eyes and listened to the sounds of territorial birds and angry squirrels and the occasional crash of some earth-bound creature fleeing the possibility of winding up as someone’s lunch. The cicadas sang their metallic song like an organic echo of ocean waves upon the shore.

She felt very nearly at peace for the first time in a long while.

And then Doug shifted beside her and she knew it wasn’t going to last more than another twenty seconds. “So . . . you busy Friday evening?”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Abigail asked, eyes still shut. “And shouldn’t we be trying to keep quiet?”

He scuffed his foot noisily, as if to demonstrated how badly they’d already failed at that. “The trail’s old enough I doubt we need to worry about spooking anything important, and I just asked because Jim’s doing barbeque that night and we’re having the neighbors over.”

“You live on the other side of town, so we’re not neighbors. And anyway, Ben will finally be home, and I wouldn’t want to leave him alone all evening.” Doug made a dubious noise at that last bit. Abigail opened her eyes and turned to frown at him. “What? Don’t tell me you were going to invite him too, because I know you weren’t.” He made a noncommital sound, but his eyes slid away from hers almost guiltily. “Oh, that was your not-so-subtle way of trying to set me up with James again, wasn’t it?” And it was, because he didn’t deny it. She got to her feet, angry and tired and hurt inside, because she’d known something like this would happen. “I’m married. We’ve been over this before.”

“You eloped!” Doug protested, scrambling to his feet again, looking almost as upset as she felt. “That doesn’t count!”

“See, this is why I stopped talking to you. I don’t care how convinced you are that I’d be the perfect addition to your family reunions, it’s not happening.” She held up a finger as Doug started to protest. “Yes. Even if I wind up a war widow, which I won’t. Ben’s very good at what he does, and he made me a promise.” Not ‘come back alive’, but ‘be careful’, and when Ben was careful, he was untouchable.

She’d give two fingers off her right hand to have him beside her instead of Doug.

“I said I’d come with you because I thought you’d grown up and learned to leave well enough alone. I’m not going to turn around now, but I’m not going to respond to anything else not related to whatever it is we’re tracking. Understood?”

“All right,” Doug said, mulish. “You could give Ginny a run for her money, you know that?”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Abigail said, glaring at him. “Now, thing with very sharp claws?”

“Thing with very sharp claws,” Doug agreed, frustration fading into amusement, and turned back to his task, bowing to her as he went. “You always were good at laying down the law.”

“And you never listened,” Abigail growled at his back. “Which is why I had to keep doing it. I hope you’re better at doing what Ginny says.”

“Ginny’s my superior officer,” Doug pointed out, tone suddenly that of utter reasonability. “You weren’t and aren’t and won’t be.”

“No. And for that I’m grateful.” In her kitchen, he’d seemed almost ethereal, half-imagined. Here, surrounded by the seemingly-endless forest, he was too much, too pronounced: himself in too great a quantity. And she felt rubbed raw by that. She was relieved that he allowed the conversation to end there.

Again, she had to almost run to keep up with him, but this time for only a few minutes before he stopped, frozen, like a pointer dog.

“What is it?” Abigail asked, enmity momentarily forgotten, and edged a bit closer to him despite the heat and general ickiness.

“Can you smell it?” he hissed, eyes fixed on the brambles in front of them.

“Smell what?” But she took an obedient sniff. As usual, she smelled nothing except the leftover odor of developer that seemed to permanently coat the inside of her nose. “Not really. Forest?”

“Somewhat dead and rotting forest,” Doug corrected. Oh? Oh. She swallowed nervously, grateful for the first time in her life that she spent so much time inhaling chemicals. “Could be a deer,” Doug continued sotto voce, relaxing a little at their continued survival. “But seems unlikely.”

“What do we do, then?”

Doug shook his head. “I try to sneak up on it? I must admit I hadn’t thought about what to do once we caught up with it. Too used to being able to set traps, I suppose.”

If she remembered correctly, she’d worn these pants the week before, while shooting the county fair, so maybe. . . . A quick rummage through her multitudinous pockets produced her new pride and joy: the F-423 flying camera and accompanying equipment. “Why don’t we take a look?” While Doug was still gaping at her, she donned the viewer-goggles and control gloves and tapped all the activation marks. One-quarter power, it looked like, but that was plenty for what she would be doing.

The camera unfolded itself in her hand like some metallic insect, wings beating fast enough to become a mere blur in the corner of the eye. No shots left on the roll of film, but that hardly mattered; the viewfinder alone would have been sufficient.

“I didn’t know you had one of those,” Doug said after the camera was out of sight, sounding slightly taken-aback.

“It’s new. Ben sent it to me as an anniversary present.” It came out sounding annoyed, which wasn’t her intention but navigating forest growth turned out to require a lot more care than did fair booths, and she hadn’t been using the thing long enough for the controls to have become familiar. Each time she dodged a branch with the camera, she had to remind herself what hand motion to use.

“Seems pricey for a soldier’s salary.” Doug was obviously aiming for ‘non-committal’, but missed the mark entirely.

“It was refurbished.” And this time she was annoyed. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

“No, I suppose not.” But he didn’t sound apologetic. He never sounded apologetic. “I do wo-” she hissed at him to be quiet; the camera was finally in view of the stolen unicorn carcass. And it wasn’t alone.

“I found those missing dogs,” Abigail said, swallowing hard in an attempt to keep her breakfast where it belonged. “And a sheep, it looks like.” They all seemed to be sort of piled against one tree, which seemed odd, but then the whole thing was odd.

“Damn,” Doug muttered bitterly. “Ginny’s going to make me do the condolence calls-she’s been threatening me with it all week.”

“Condolence calls for dogs?” That was nice, she supposed, though it seemed a bit outside the their field of duty.

“We used to try passing them off to the sheriff’s department, but they kept ‘misplacing’ the paperwork. So we finally gave up and started doing it ourselves.”

“Oh.” She landed the camera on the ground, across the clearing from the unicorn, and pushed the goggles up onto her forehead so she could actually look Doug in the eye. “So, do we turn around now? Whatever this thing is, sure looks like it’s planning on coming back here.”

“How’re you at doing ‘nothing here’ wards?” Doug looked like he was planning something; Abigail felt mistrustful.

“Good enough. That’s how I was able to get the unicorn in the first place.” Of course, she’d been able to do proper prep-work for that: spelled string and primed in and a bit of chicken’s blood from the store. Here, though- “But I don’t have any supplies with me. Why?” Well, there was always the trick Ben had showed her.

“Neither do I.” Doug sighed. “Maybe it’ll be distracted enough by the unicorn that it won’t notice us.” So they were sticking around, then. “Can you tell which way the wind’s blowing? Maybe if we stay downwind of the body-”

Abigail picked up a stick and interrupted before she had a chance to convince herself of the stupidity of what she was about to do. “Here, let me try something.” And five minutes later they were crouched against the bast of a tree, pressed together despite the heat and both irritable. More irritable. The inside of Abigail’s head felt like over-cooked soup.

“You really think this is going to work?” Doug asked dubiously, eying the squiggles in the dirt and splotches of blood surrounding the two of them, hand pressed to his nose in an effort to block the overwhelming smell of rotting flesh.

“If I understood Ben correctly, yes.” Abigail’s thumb hadn’t stopped bleeding, and didn’t look to any time soon, so she stuck it in her mouth, where it throbbed painfully. Having to supply your own blood for setting spells stunk. She squinted at one of the squiggles but after a moment’s consideration decided it was good enough and she really didn’t feel like having to reset the whole thing. “Besides, whose fault is it that we’re in this position in the first place?”

Doug raised the hand not cradling his gun in mock surrender, elbowing her in the shoulder as he did so. “Yes, yes-I accept all blame for whatever catastrophe might happen because of this.” He made a face at her. “Not like your darling Ben hasn’t wound up in the same sort of situation, if he’s had to use this spell.”

It sounded wrong, for him to refer to Ben so casually, so callously. “Sometimes he goes months without contacting base camp.”

“You mean, without contacting you,” Doug said slyly, and Abigail’s eyes were stinging from sweat, not unshed tears. They were.

“Are you imply something?” she asked as icily as she could manage.

“Are you inferring something?” he countered, so sure of himself she wanted to slap him. “All I’m saying is that I’ve heard you don’t get much mail and you don’t send much either, which doesn’t sound like the marriage you were so defensive of earlier.” He may have realized he’d gone too far, because his smug expression immediately slid into one of ‘not quite panicked and too stubborn to admit it’.

“Not one more word, Doug Hendrickson,” Abigail hissed, so blindingly furious that the whole world went red for a moment. “Say one more word and I will shoot you some place not fatal and then walk away.” And she might really do it, too, although she knew, dimly, distantly, that she would regret it later.

But Doug held his tongue, even as he turned bright red-whether from anger or embarrassment, she didn’t much care. After a little while he began singing quietly, but only The hunter and the ghosts of Finback Mountain, which was probably about as inoffensive as he could manage under the circumstances, up until the verse about Sweet Nancy who wept for the soldier who’d left her.

“He’s kept all his promises to me,” Abigail told him, almost as quietly as he’d been singing. “And I to him. We both knew it would be like this.” The lines of Doug’s body went tight beside her, against her, and when she turned her head to look him in the face, she could see the muscle at the corner of his jaw bulge, as though he’d bitten down on something too hard to chew.

“I don’t want to get shot,” he said finally, all but spitting the words out, like gristle or bone.

“I see,” she sighed, and turned away again to watch the flies dance up and down the unicorn’s white side. “We were friends once,” she told the flies, because Doug already knew. “What happened?”

Doug shifted, inhaling to reply in a way that probably would have gotten him shot, but before he could say it, something big and impossible and absolutely wrong stalked out of the across the clearing, intent on the unicorn.

For a long moment, Abigail’s eyes couldn’t make any sense out of what she was looking at-too many heads, not enough bodies or legs. It looked more like a child’s jumble-toy than a real animal. She hadn’t been expecting anything in particular, but if she had, this wouldn’t have been it. Her first conscious thought after that was unprintable; her second was ‘what is it, anyway?’ She hissed that question into Doug’s ear.

“I think it’s a chimera, but I don’t see how that’s possible.”

“Maybe someone made it,” she murmured. “Aren’t those collars around its . . . necks?” There were three heads: lion, snake, and goat, and each bore a wide band of leather, marked with distinctive spell-codes and shimmering in that non-visible way that meant the spells were currently powered up.

If it had been human, its expression would have been one of baffled frustration as it nosed the unicorn’s mangled body, as though it knew it should be doing something but didn’t know what. Eventually it lay down and began gnawing half-heartedly on one of the unicorn’s legs, like a dog with a displeasing bone. Its claws, Abigail noticed unhappily, looked very, very sharp. Too sharp to have come with the body. Rather much like knives, in fact, though curved and made of bone, not metal-and not whatever claws normally consisted of. James's wards hadn't stood a chance.

“Well,” Doug breathed, motionless as the tree at their backs. “I guess we now know ‘what’-and are left with ‘where the hell did that come from’?”

The chimera didn’t so much as glance in their direction, which answered the unspoken question of whether Abigail had accomplished anything by stabbing herself in the thumb and then drawing lines in the dirt. “Are you going to shoot it?” she asked.

“Not until it starts to leave again-or whoever built it shows up so I can try out my handcuffs.” He felt for them with one hand, almost sticking it in Abigail’s pocket instead. “Anyways, I’m not sure how much good unspelled bullets would do against the amount of magic that must be holding that thing together.”

Abigail watched the chimera chew with teeth that looked like stone and silently agreed. “Think buckshot would be more effective?”

“Maybe-it’s hard to do much of anything when you’re full of holes.”

The unexpected sound of unguarded voices had Doug suddenly on guard, shifting so he could get to his feet more quickly, though mostly all he managed to do was elbow Abigail in the shoulder twice.

Two men strolled out of the underbrush, apparently unaware of the creature just in front of them, and Abigail inhaled to shout a warning-and then exhaled silently when she notice that each man had a bandana pulled up over his mouth and nose, just like the old highway and train bandits. And although the chimera got to its feet at their approach, it made no aggressive move toward them.

“Look, it’s still not eating anything.” The taller man kicked at the unicorn. The chimera’s lion’s head put its ears back, and the tail-snake writhed, but the creature stayed where it was. “I told you the internal organs weren’t hooked up right.”

“And I told you it didn’t matter,” the other man snapped, bending over the chimera to examine the collars. Abigail half-expected it to attack him, but instead it bumped its lion’s head against his legs. “It’s not like it needs to eat. Anyway, the stitches are still sound, and that’s what matters.”

“And the collars?”

“Still on, still working.” The shorter man straightened, his whole body radiating suppressed anger. “As should be obvious, given that it’s still alive and we haven’t had our throats ripped out.”

“Snippy, snippy! You sound just like a little girl.” The taller man slapped the tree beside him, and Abigail abruptly realized that something metallic had been embedded in it. “Homing spell’s still up and running, so it looks like we’re all good.” But his partner had gone absolutely rigid, pure fury pouring off him in almost visible waves.

“‘Little girl’? ‘Little girl’? Did you just call me a-”

“That’s Hog Dresselmeyer,” Doug muttered, stiffening beside her as does a man who doesn’t want to believe what he’s seeing. “And that must be his brother Drey.”

“Friends of yours?” Abigail inquired sweetly despite the unexpected pang that came with the words. She’d known everyone Doug knew, once.

“They’re the best taxidermists in the county, though that’s not saying much.” He sighed unhappily. “Guess that explains the chimera.”

Across the clearing, the brother’s conversation was making a noisy descent into flat-out argument, at a volume that made Abigail consider sticking her fingers in her ears. “This isn’t what I had in mind!” the shorter, possibly younger one finally shouted. “Any more of this, and we’ll have the Wildlife Commission all over us like flies on rotting meat.”

“You wussing out?” The other man sounded more amused than annoyed. “Same as always, Hog. When are you going to grow up and grow a pair?”

And Hog snarled, like some cornered animal, a sound echoed a moment later by the chimera, although it continued gnawing the unicorn’s leg.

“Uh oh.” Doug nudged Abigail. “See that?”

“Yeah.” Abigail eyed the distance to the ground unhappily. “I suppose we’re morally obligated to keep them from killing each other?”

“I don’t know about you, but I have a paycheck riding on it.”

“Can we do it with just the two of us, though? We’re outnumbered, and who knows how the chimera will react,” Abigail pointed out. “We need some way to even the odds. Ginny-” But Doug was already shaking his head.

“She couldn’t make it out here-not safely, anyway, not with those guys and a chimera wandering around.” His mouth twisted into a bitter smile. “And anyway, our radios aren’t working, remember?”

“Well, we can’t stay here much longer. My bladder’s about ready to pop.” She flexed her shoulders and then clamped her legs a little more tightly together. To add to her discomfort, the closeness of Doug was growing increasingly intolerable: she could feel every seam on his uniform, could have sketched his holster from the impression it was leaving on her ribs, the deeper indentations made when they happened to inhale simultaneously. When she paid attention, she could feel his sweat seeping through her shirt sleeve.

If things hadn’t started happening just then, she might have begun to yell as loudly as Hog and Drey.

After, she never could separate those few seconds out into any sort of order: there was shouting and a couple of gun shots, one from beside Abigail; the chimera jumped at Drey; Doug threw himself out of the warded circle and into the fray, also shouting, rifle up and aimed at something; Hog tried to run but fell, clutching a bleeding thigh.

And then it was over. Three bodies lay on the ground, two of them moaning loudly and flailing weakly-for their guns, presumably, though Doug had already kicked them out of reach. Abigail watched him with a blank mind and ringing ears, until it finally occurred to her that he was asking her to come and help. So she did.

“I don’t suppose you have bandages in those pockets,” he asked without looking away from the poachers.

“No, and I’m not sacrificing any articles of clothing for them.” She took a couple of steps toward Hog, making sure to stay well out of grabbing range. “How bad is it?”

“What are you asking him for?” Drey roared, surging to his feet heedless of the way Doug swung around to aim at him. “I’m the one his monster tried to kill.” He clutched at his shredded arm, glaring at his brother like he wished he had his fingers wrapped around Hog’s neck instead.

“It was your idea-” Hog yelled at the same time Doug shouted at Drey to lie back down and Abigail noticed what none of the men had: the chimera’s head-tail-snake-thing had begun to move.

“Look out-” she started, but by then it was too late. There was more shouting (well, shrieking, really, and Abigail never wanted to hear a sound that high made by a grown man that large ever again) and the chimera had somehow gotten to its feet again, no sign visible that it had been shot scant minutes earlier. And with Drey writhing and shrieking on the ground, its focus was now clearly on Doug-who was shouting something Abigail couldn’t hear over the sound of everything within her saying No.

So she ran close enough to reach out and touch the thing and fired both barrels into its side-

-one-

-two-

-and reloaded and did it again, just in case.

And then everything went quiet for a little bit while she watched the chimera to make sure it really wasn’t going to try anything else, because she had another two shells ready if it did.

When the world came back from wherever it had gone, Doug was shaking her shoulder and saying her name like he might have been scared of her. Or for her, she thought distantly as she turned her head to look at him. Hard to tell the difference sometimes.

“We have to take the collars off,” he was saying. “Hog thinks it might just get back up if we don’t.”

Abigail looked down again at the chimera. It had holes all the way through it, and most of the goat head had been blown away. Not that it had been the one causing the problems before. She felt kind of sorry for it-not like it could have done anything to stop the rest of it from getting into trouble. It had just been dragged along for the ride.

“All right,” she heard herself say, and bent down to unbuckle the collars, fumbling a little as she did it one-handed. They looked undamaged still, so maybe Hog was right about not leaving them on.”You’ll need these for evidence, anyway, won’t you?” She handed them to Doug and scrubbed her hand against her now-disgusting pants because some kinds of dirty were cleaner than others.

“Yes.” Doug sounded almost startled, though she couldn’t think why. “Though first I’m going to use them to keep Drey alive, I hope.” He turned to Hog, who was still clutching his leg but had stopped the writhing and moaning and was instead staring at his brother with a guilty expression. “These have some kind of stasis spell on them, right?”

Hog gaped up at him like an unhappy fish. “I, uh, yes? I think? I just followed the directions out of a book.”

“Which obviously wasn’t very well written if it didn’t warn you about sympathetic actions by the chimera on behalf of its creator.” But he put two of the collars on Drey, the smallest on his arm, above where the lion head had bitten, and a larger one around the thigh, above the snake bite. “I hope that works.” Drey, who had been just lying motionless and whimpering quietly, didn’t react at all. His eyes had gone sort of glassy and unfocused.

Doug tossed the third collar to Hog. “Here, put this on, above where you got shot. We have a lot of walking ahead of us. And give me your shirt and bandanna.”

Hog looked like he wanted to protest, but did as ordered. Abigail stood on silent and unneeded guard while Doug first tied Hog’s shirt around Drey’s arm and then sacrificed his own to build a very crude travois for Drey. “Ginny’s going to have my hide for this.”

‘Better your hide than a man’s life’, Abigail opened her mouth to say, but realized she wasn’t sure she believed it. “I’m sure she’ll understand,” she substituted, awkwardly.

“That’s nice,” Doug said, in a way that suggested they both knew she was lying, and stood up again after handcuffing Drey’s uninjured arm to the travois. “Hog, are you going to be sensible about this, or do I need to confiscate your boots and tie you up with the laces?”

“I won’t try to run,” Hog answered somewhat defensively. “I didn’t mean to hurt Drey-just couldn’t take any more of his talk.”

“Good to know, but I was thinking more in relation to the creation and maintenance of a class two restricted construct, in a location such that others might have been injured or killed.” Doug frowned. “Actually, at least one person has been injured, so that bumps up the penalty. Reckless endangerment is frowned on by pretty much everyone.”

“But I didn’t mean to-!” Hog yelped, taking an unsteady half step toward Doug and halting when Abigail pointedly aimed at his uninjured leg.

“That’s kind of the point,” Doug said grimly. “Now, just tell me you’ll cooperate so we can get out of here, would you?”

Hog looked over at his brother, face twisted into an expression Abigail couldn’t interpret-guilt and anger and despair, perhaps. “All right. I won’t run. Not like I could, anyway,” he added, wincing as he shifted his injured leg.

“All right,” Doug echoed, and sighed. “Let’s go.”

Doug took charge of Drey, leaving Abigail to manage with Hog and her shotgun, which, unlike Doug’s rifle, didn’t have a strap allowing it to be slung across her back. “I don’t know how we were ever friends,” she told Doug’s rifle as they slogged through knee-high brush, Hog an awkward and unwelcome weight dragging on her-only his silence made his presence bearable. Even with that, Abigail had almost dropped him at least a dozen times by now. A single word and he’d be hopping back to civilization all on his lonesome. In comparison, even Doug seemed the very paragon of every virtue.

Hog smelled of formaldehyde and magic and death things, a combination that made Abigail’s sinuses and skin crawl, like in preparation for a full-body sneeze. And he kept lurching and pulling on her at just the wrong moment, as though he was trying to make her wrench an ankle. “Just remember, if I go down, you’re going too,” she warned him after almost landing face-first in a pricker bush.

“Are you threatening the prisoner?” Doug sounded like he was back to his usual ebullient self. It kind of made Abigail want to punch him in the nose, except they were both so hampered by the Dresselmeyer brothers that she’d probably wind up injuring herself instead.

“Just informing him of the situation.” She tried to shift Hog’s grip so he wasn’t strangling her or copping a highly unwelcome feel.

“Just as long as I don’t have to report you,” Doug continued, oblivious, and started whistling.

What made her mood worse-other than a pounding headache, sweat-soaked clothing, and bits of tree that had somehow worked their way into her bra-was how the midday light filtered through the leaves so that it seemed heaven itself must be hovering just above them. She ached for a camera and film and time enough to use them.

And eyes that would focus properly. If she were honest with herself, it would take at least eleven hours of sleep before she would be able to take pictures that didn’t look like trash.

“So, tell me,” Doug said after a while, breaking in on her increasingly gloomy thoughts, “Where’d you get the lion?”

“Don’t know,” Hog said slowly, leaning on Abigail so hard that she had to struggle to stay upright. “Just showed up one day, special delivery. Address, no name. Mistake, I suppose. Figured when nobody called for it after a week that I could do with it as I liked. Always wanted to try my hand at something exotic.”

“Yeah, I’d say you managed that.” In other circumstances, Abigail might have laughed at Doug’s dry comment, but given the way Hog kept lurching as they walked, that would probably mean a twisted ankle. So she just snorted and kept watching the ground for tanglevine and loose stones. “Doesn’t get much more exotic than an impossible myth.”

“That was all Drey’s idea,” Hog protested, instantly on the defensive. “Said he bet I couldn’t do it.”

“Hoist with his own petard,” Abigail murmured. “Really, though, are you eight? Doing something just because he dared you?” Hog didn’t say anything, just shifted his grip across her shoulders until she was half-choked and considering putting down the shotgun long enough to punch him in the nose.

She wished she could blame her increasing inclination toward violence on the company she was currently keeping, but more likely it because of sleep deprivation.

Instead of punching him, she wrenched his arm off her and stepped away from him, leaving him swaying unsupported. “I don’t have to help you,” she told him. “There are other ways this could happen, but they’re all a lot less pleasant, and you know it.”

Hog just stared at her silently, sullen-faced.

“Keep your hands to yourself, understand? Or I really will make you limp back on your own.” Doug had stopped too, now, and was watching them.

“She will,” he interjected. “And I’ll let her. Come on, Hog. Stop being such an idiot.” Hog stared at him for a long minute before nodding once.

“All right,” Hog said at last. “But this is brutality, this is. I’m telling everyone once we get back.”

“That’s good,” Doug said affably. “I’m sure they’ll want to hear all the details. Like how you wound up in this position in the first place, and just why Abigail felt the need to make her position so very clear to you. And then they’ll want you to repeat it all in court.”

And with that cheery thought to keep them company, they finished out their sweaty, miserable trek in silence.

Drey was still alive when they finally got back to Abigail’s house, so she supposed that counted as a success, although his leg was definitely swelling up and his mangled arm hadn’t stopped oozing yet. Doug handcuffed him anyway, and a sullen Hog. “Keep an eye on them, would you?” he requested, and borrowed her keys to go inside and call for help.

So she sat on her front stoop, cold despite the blistering noon heat, listening through the open window to Doug’s conversation, eyes fixed on but not really seeing the brothers sitting on the ground beside Doug’s truck.

Brothers. Doug had been like a brother to her once, and James too, though you couldn’t tell it now. Just because she’d gone away to college and fallen in love with a solider boy from some other town and never brought him home to be approved of-

Well. It was a mess, wasn’t it?

But before she could thoroughly depress herself with that thought, various emergency and law enforcement vehicles started arriving, the first of which was driven by Ginny, who made everything seem less chaotic simply by being there.

She ignored the Dresselmeyer brothers and marched up to Abigail, sitting down beside her on the steps with a groan. “So, all this just because you shot a unicorn for the crime of eating your tomatoes.”

“They were for Ben,” Abigail said, and then burst into unexpected tears all over Ginny’s uniformed shoulder.

She cried all through the ambulance arriving and leaving, and the sheriff’s department getting into an argument with Doug over who had jurisdiction, and only managed to stop when Ginny told her she had to stand up so she could go pee. “Every twenty minutes, on the second,” she told her, which was more than Abigail had ever wanted to know.

“Bathroom’s the first door past the kitchen,” Abigail told her, still sniffling a little. Her own bladder seemed to have simply buckled down for the long haul, although now her kidneys-or what felt like them- were beginning to complain.

“I left something on your kitchen table,” Ginny told her once she reemerged. “Will you be all right now? I really need to get back to the station and start in on the mountain of paperwork spawned by all this.”

“I suppose so,” Abigail said, still feeling inexplicably shaken. “Thank you-I didn’t mean to cry on you like that.”

“That’s all right,” Ginny said cheerfully. “It’s practice for when the kid finally emerges. You any good with babies?” Somehow Abigail’s ‘no’ turned into a ‘let me know whenever you need a sitter’, and when Ginny finally drove away, she had Abigail’s phone number in her pocket.

“It’s a good thing she’s on the side of law and order,” Doug commented from behind her, and Abigail looked up to see him standing in the doorway, looking very tired.

“Yes,” she agreed, feeling her bemusement drain away into unhappy anticipation. “Are you leaving now, too?”

“In a moment,” he said, and came down to sit on the steps beside her, hat in his hands. “This didn’t go at all how I’d imagined it,” he told her after a long, unsettling silence.

“Oh?” She had no response for that, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“I was going to come in and make your problem go away, and you were going to be grateful and admit you shouldn’t have eloped with a soldier none of us had ever met, and-”

“And?” she prompted when he didn’t finish the sentence, stomach churning.

“And I never really figured out what would happen after that part. I expect I knew somewhere deep down that it wouldn’t actually go that way.”

“No, it wouldn’t have. Not even if all this” -she waved a hand toward the forest and her garden and where the unicorn had been- “hadn’t happened. Not if you were think all that about my marriage.”

“Yes, about that. . . .” He looked down at the brim of his hat, which he was slowly bending completely out of shape. “I’m sorry for calling the validity of your marriage into question.”

“You should be,” Abigail said, feeling stiff and sick inside and still not inclined to give him any slack. “Some days those vows we made are all I have to hold onto. For you to suggest they aren’t real, for some reason-”

“I know.” He reminded her a little of how he’d been in her kitchen that morning, mere hours and so very long ago. “I won’t do it again. I am sorry.” He closed his eyes for a moment, looking as if he wanted to cry, but when he opened them again, they were dry. “I am sorry, Abigail James Worth, and do withdraw any doubts I may have expressed as to your state of matrimony.” And he’d said it three times, so it had to be true.

“Oh,” she said, inadequately, and then, “I forgive you, then.”

“Thank you.” He smiled at her sweetly, like the boy she’d once known, put his mangled hat back on, and left.

“I’m sorry too,” she told the empty yard as she watched him drive away, and went inside to take a shower and sleep and wait for her love to come home.

And when Ben arrived late that night, he was greeted with an almost indecently long kiss and an overflowing basket of tomatoes. “Compliments of the Wildlife Commission,” Abigail told him, and refused to elaborate until the next morning.