“Like the locksmith you call when you accidentally lock yourself out of your house,” Simon put in.
Iris’s eyes lit up. “Exactly! That kind of locksmith doesn’t make the lock, he just tinkers with it. It’s still more than I could do, but it’s lot easier than what the master craftsman does.”
Ironically, Keith had actually locked himself out of his house before, but he hadn’t had to call a locksmith. He’d just called Evie, who had shifted, crawled in through an infinitesimal crack under the door, turned human again on the other side, and let him in. There wasn’t a direct magical equivalent for that.
“So I can let myself in,” Iris continued, “and even prop the door open for a while, but someone like Keith could actually lock someone out, if he wanted to.”
“But not prop the door open a little longer?”
Iris shook her head. “There’s a reason we call it a barrier and not a gate. It’s mostly made to keep things out, and it knows that. It’s easier to get it to follow its essential function than work against it.”
Keith had never thought of it that way before, but it really drove the point home for him.
“She’s right. It’s in the door’s nature to be closed and locked, so no matter how it seems to us, making sure someone’s key always jams isn’t a huge deal to themagic. It’s just more of what it’s supposed to be doing anyway. Copying a key would be a lot harder. Most of all, though, the door doesn’t want to come off its hinges.” He hesitated for a second and then added, “I think my grandmother could have done it.”
He saw all his teammates’ eyes widen. He had outlined his family situation to them before, but only briefly and vaguely.
For the most part, Keith had tried to get all that information out of the way fast. It was the conversational equivalent of handing somebody your driver’s license:ah, I see, vital statistics are all here, long and storied family history, yeah, parents, yeah, unbelievable pressure to be someone you no longer want to be, got it.
Then he’d done his best not to think about it, and he’d definitely done his best to not invite any questions about it. He tried to focus on other people, not on himself. He’d spent years convinced that he was a can of worms that nobody should try to pry open.
His team had valiantly tried to tell him otherwise, but Keith was good at avoiding conversations he didn’t want to have.
Iris was the one who had made it sink in. She’d always seen the unpleasant underside of unicorn life, and she knew exactly the kind of person he’d tried to imitate and the kind of environment he’d been raised in—and she still believed he was the person he wanted to be. She didn’t think his past was a dark abyss he was in constant danger of falling back into, andshe would know.
Now, if he ever did start to slip, she was by his side to catch him. She didn’t just ground him, she made him see all the ground that he’d already shored up beneath his feet.
“Well, I for one understand unicorn magic much better now,” Iz said brightly, shooting Keith a quick smile. She wasn’t in the habit of talking about her family much either, except her mom. “And we’ll make sure to remember that you can’t leave the door propped open for us, so we won’t try to rush in.”
Keith felt a real wave of nausea thinking about his team, like Iris, making the turn to head through the barrier only to find themselves in an accordion of shredded metal.
No matter what happened, though, they would be driving slowly. They weren’t familiar with the areaorthe magic involved, so they wouldn’t feel confident enough to go above, say, twenty miles an hour as they were easing through a faint shimmer in the air.
That was a little bit reassuring. If there was a crash because the barrier once more proved unreliable or finicky, it wouldn’t be such a dangerous one.
“We’re going to station a guard on the human side of the barrier,” Cooper added. “One of Sinclair’s suggestions. He thinks it might be an outsider who found a way in.”
Keith hated to admit it, but that wasn’t a terrible suggestion. He didn’t think an outsider was to blame, but the village would be clinging to that possibility: people found it a lot easier to cope with a murderous intruder than the revelation that the real enemy had been with them all along. Tonight, the barrier would feel like a massive weak spot in their defenses.
People would be scared, and knowing someone was standing guard would make them feel a little bit safer. If the team went a whole night—or even a few in a row—without seeing anything suspicious, maybe that would defuse some of the tension.
Of course, the downside of that was that people like Lady Alicia might go right back to blaming Iris. But Iris had already accounted for that by urging Keith to stay off the case, and he couldn’t think of anything else they could do.
This wasn’t how this week was supposed to go.
His team headed off, intending to squeeze in an interview with Seraphina and Blake before they went to Polis for the night.
Keith stood in the open doorway with Iris, his arms wrapped around her. The two of them looked out at the hazy purple twilight.
Nights here were quiet, but right now, the streets really were unnaturally deserted. Everyone was cowering in their separate corners.
This wasn’t how Purity was supposed to feel. Even by its own warped standards, this was wrong. This place had always been afraid of disapproval and new ideas, but now it was just plain afraid.
Iris said what he was thinking: “If we can’t fix this, things here are about to get so much worse. They’ll crack down so hard on anyone who’s even a little bit different, because now different will look murderous.”
“We’ll fix it,” Keith promised. “If there’s another Iris here, we won’t leave her in a worse spot than she was before.” He stroked her cheek. “Then we’ll get out of town, and we’ll see the world.”
He could hear the lilt of a would-be smile in her voice as she said, “Even if we’re unconventional about it, we really are unicorns, aren’t we? We need to do our duty by the community before we can relax and do something for ourselves. We fit in here better than Lady Alicia would ever want to admit.”
