“You sound as if you really mean that.”
“I do. If there wasn’t a pregnant unicorn in the barn, I would show how very much I mean it.”
“Promises, promises,” she said pertly, and she watched with fascination as a heated darkness swept over Turner’s features. Suddenly she remembered the wolf’s ferocity and single-minded intensity, and imagining all of that transferred to the man in front of her made her both slightly faint and very, very eager.
For a moment, it looked as if they were both going to get what they wanted, but then there was a sound like a combination of a bagpipe and a shriek.
Without a single hesitation or moment of doubt, she ran back to the barn, hot on Turner’s heels. Maisey was still inthe corral, thank goodness, but she was pacing back and forth in agitation. She tossed her head as if to get rid of a fly that wasn’t there, and, as they watched, she rose half off her forelegs, making small kicking gestures that threatened to become the real thing.
The moment she saw Ilona, however, she visibly relaxed. All of the tension went out of her, and, with a soft whicker, she pressed herself against the slats of the corral. She was so enthusiastic that she made the wood shake, and Ilona hurriedly came to attend her, reaching up to scratch her along her cheeks and behind her ears. The sigh she made was nearly human in its satisfaction, and something in Ilona calmed down as well.
“You have a real way with her,” Turner murmured. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For this. For everything. Maisey's really special all on her own, but she’s also just very special to me.”
“Tell me.”
Turner’s face softened, and he reached through the slats to offer Maisey his hand. The unicorn gave it a cursory sniff without shaking Ilona’s hand from her head, and then, almost grudgingly, she lipped at Turner’s palm, making him laugh softly.
“She was the first unicorn I ever saw. My folks are biologists, both of them, and I grew up with the sad fact that unicorns had gone extinct in the United States. Too many people and towns, too few forests, same old terrible story. Canada has two herds, Scotland and Mongolia have a few more,but that is it. And then one day, my parents took me camping to Devil’s Lake in Wisconsin.
“That place is incredible, water and forests and rocks that’ve been there since the glaciers moved on. I couldn’t get enough of watching the sky brighten first thing in the morning. While my parents were still asleep, I’d creep down to the lake wrapped in my blanket just to take it all in.
“And then one morning, not long before we had to make the trip back home, there she was, as undeniably real as the rocks or the water. She’d come down to drink, and she was practically a baby. I could see how thin she was. Her beard wasn’t in yet, and she still carried her tail up and cocked like a foal. Still, she was incredible, and I watched her, my breath held, not daring to move, for forty minutes.”
“And then somehow you found each other again?”
“Ha, there’s no somehow about it. She’s from one of the herds in Canada, way up north, and believe you me when I say that the shifter conservationists up there have got a lock on each and every one. They’re numbered, and they’re tracked, and when one goes wandering, they find out about it. When I saw Maisey in Wisconsin, that was her first trip south. My parents called it in, and a team came down that month to bring her back. It was three wolf shifters working out of an RV, one driving and two others herding her back home.”
“They couldn’t just, I don’t know, get her into a van or something?”
Turner reached over and ran a finger along the unicorn’s horn. Up close, she could see that it was a natural honey-gold, the material close to deer antler.
“This is even harder than it looks, and if you piss off a unicorn, even a young one, she will use it. If they got her safely into a closed van, there’s a better than average chance that she’ll break it off, and that’s got some real nasty health outcomes and, weirdly enough, some social ones as well. She wouldn’t be able to defend herself when sparring with her age-mates, and that can get deadly. No, it took them a good month to get back, but that’s the best way. And then she did it again.”
Ilona made a choked sound, gazing at the unicorn who was so sweetly nuzzling her hand.
“You are a troublemaker!”
She didn’t think unicorns understood English, but this one gave her a smug look before moving her head so that Ilona could find the perfect spot to scratch. Turner laughed softly, a sweet rumble that Ilona could feel straight down to her toes.
“She is. She does this every few years, to the point where we’ve set up an alert system and people are on rotation to get her back home. I did it once a couple years back. It’s a pretty good time. This time, she turned up off the US side of Lake Superior, and she was pregnant.”
“Long trip back for an expectant mother!”
“Exactly. So she’s here in Illinois where I can keep an eye on her ‘til she pops, and then we’ll see about what comes next. If she’s gonna insist on coming down, maybe it’s time we start looking into reintroducing unicorns into the states. God knows the water supply needs it.”
“Er?”
“Oh, that’s one of the true stories. There’s that legend about unicorns purifying water, and according to modern watertesting, that’s true. They’re sort of enormous, walking water purification tabs.”
He said it so matter-of-factually that Ilona snorted a laugh. She had started today with nothing to think about except all the things she’d messed up, and apparently this whole time, she could have been thinking about the water purification qualities of unicorn. Another unicorn legend occurred to her suddenly, and she blinked.
“So. Unicorn legends and specifically how Maisey seems to think I hung the moon. Is this that thing about unicorns liking virgins? Because, not to put too fine a point on it, but wow, that’s not—”
“Not all the legends are true,” Turner said, grinning. “They do form fast attachments to people sometimes. Rare, but it happens. In this case, I know how she feels.”
