by Tasha Black
For a moment, Varik’s heart was whole again as he smiled down at the little one who meant so much to him.
In Faerie, Ronan had been the only son of a political rival to the ruling family of the Winter Court. Ronan was hired by the Winter Queen to swap him for a mortal boy, effectively ending the family’s political ambitions by removing their viable heir. When Varik refused to complete the switch, Ashe’s mother had chosen to simply have his fae parents assassinated instead.
She assumed that Varik would drop him at a fae orphanage, as she would have done herself, likely hoping the whole thing would give him something much worse to feel guilty about than what had happened with Willow. It should have been a lesson to him about following orders.
But he had surprised her, and himself, by taking responsibility for the boy. And so the Winter Queen had punished them both with her curse. He’d been caring for the boy ever since, and he wouldn’t trade that time for anything. But he was beginning to worry about the long-term effects on the boy who couldn’t grow up.
“We’ll figure it out, Ronan,” Varik promised him, for about the thousandth time in twenty-five years.
Dark clouds gathered overhead. A storm was brewing. Varik was about to set off into the woods to find the other Fae, when he heard a screech and spotted something whistling toward him through the overcast sky.
A snowy owl with brilliant amber eyes rocketed toward him as if it planned to strike. His first thought was of another Winter Court attack. Varik stepped in front of the pup and braced himself for the hit.
But the owl pulled back at the last second, landing on Varik’s left arm as lightly as if he had stepped onto it from a nearby tree branch.
Now that it was close, Varik recognized the animal.
Pompadour, the Winter Queen’s messenger owl.
The owl blinked at Varik haughtily, and then extended one claw. A decorative golden tube had been attached with a leather thong. Varik gingerly slid the message out of the tube and closed the end again.
He expected the creature to wait while he read it so that he could reply. But the bird launched himself from Varik’s forearm, leaving nothing but a shiver of wings and a vicious set of claw marks on Varik’s arm to show he had been there at all.
Ronan howled and yapped at the sky as the bird disappeared.
“You tell him, Ronan,” Varik chuckled.
He opened the message. It smelled like snowdrop wine, a bitter brew he always associated with the queen.
Your mission has changed.
We don’t want her captured.
We want her eliminated.
There was no signature, but the Winter Queen didn’t need one. The note could have come from no one else.
Once upon a time, Varik had felt a grudging respect for his queen’s ice-cold resolve. But over the years, he had learned to see her heartless approach for what it was - simple cruelty.
And this was so far beyond the pale.
Whether she had given birth to her or not, the queen was demanding her own daughter be killed.
Varik felt his blood buzz in his veins.
The queen had already proven she didn’t trust him. She would send someone else.
Or something.
Ashe was in danger.
The desire to shift to his wolf form nearly overwhelmed him. He had to get to Ashe to protect her. He had to get back to Faerie to stop the queen. He had to get up the mountain to find the guardian Fae of this realm.
Breathe. Think.
He had the pup, so he could not shift right now.
And his first priority was clear.
Varik didn’t need his enchanted compass - he knew exactly where she was headed. He scooped up the pup and took off in the direction of the Tarker’s Hollow public library, praying he was not too late.
The storm was almost upon them.
18
Ashe
Ashe glanced out the big front window as lightning flashed and then plunged the room into relative darkness again.
“Spooky, right?” Delilah said with a half-smile as she placed another book on their cart.
It was a little spooky, but nothing Ashe couldn’t handle.
She pulled out a book with a drawing of a girl and a wolf on the cover and turned it over to see what it was about. The overcast sky was providing just enough light to make out the print, if she squinted enough.
A thumping sound in the stacks behind them startled her and Ashe nearly dropped the book.
“What was that?” she asked, placing it into one of the backpacks.
Delilah shrugged, eyes wide.
Ashe put down the backpack, and crept over to investigate with Delilah by her side.
They had just reached the non-fiction section when Delilah laughed.
“It’s only Mrs. Hawkins,” she said.
“Who?” Ashe asked.
“The library cat,” Delilah explained. “See. She must have jumped down from the top shelf.”
Sure enough a big tabby cat sat cleaning her paws at the center of the next row of books.
Ashe let out her breath and laughed a little, too.
As she turned back to their cart of books, lighting flashed again and something caught her eye - not the light itself, but the shape it revealed. Just outside the huge glass front wall of the library, something pale swirled in front of the darkened sky.
“Delilah,” Ashe murmured, backing slowly away from the window.
She heard Delilah’s gasp and knew she’d spotted it as well.
A unicorn.
The enormous beast floated in the air just in front of the library, its hair swirling about it unnaturally, almost as if it were underwater.
The flowing mane and tail were composed of an icy mist and its muscular flanks and ribcage glistened as if they were formed of snow.
It was clearly a creature of the Winter Court.
A thick horn, like a gigantic icicle, jutted from its broad forehead before narrowing to a sinister point. The whole thing gleamed like a diamond, even in the dim light.
But it was the creature’s evil, glowing blue eyes that struck fear through Ashe’s heart as they fixed on her.
She didn’t need magic to know this creature’s purpose. It had been sent from the Winter Court not to retrieve her, but to murder her.
“A unicorn,” Delilah breathed, as if she were a school child looking at a drawing in one of the picture books they had just abandoned.
“It’s not what you think,” Ashe warned her. “This thing is not friendly, and it’s here for me. You need to run.”
As soon as Ashe broke eye contact with the unicorn, it touched its horn to the glass. The entire front window exploded inward, littering the library floor in a dusting of glassy snow.
The unicorn slowly stepped inside. The moment his hooves touched the ground, the air temperature plummeted.
Ashe willed herself not to retreat. She had to give Delilah and baby Noah a chance to escape. She stood firm, watching her own breath plume in the frigid air.
The unicorn lifted his pale muzzle to take in the scent of his new environment.
He stepped past the ferns in the window box, and they frosted over and curled up before Ashe’s eyes, as if she had been watching a time-lapse of winter’s arrival.
The animal’s approach was mesmerizingly beautiful. His elegant legs moved in delicate, dancing steps, like a real horse but with no hoofbeats to add sound to the illusion.
Where those silent hooves touched the ground, ice formed and began to travel in every direction.
Soon, the whole library would be a skating rink.
Ashe glanced back at Delilah, who had made it to the center of the library.
She turned back in time to see the unicorn begin a charge, nostrils wide, a furious expression in those cold blue eyes.
Ashe turned and ran toward the women’s fiction section, sliding on an icy trail and landing hard on her hip as she slid across the wooden floor.
She looked up
to find the beast soundlessly galloping toward her again. She glanced left and right but both shelves of the women’s fiction row went all the way to the wall.
She was trapped.
Ashe closed her eyes and braced herself for the impact.
“Wrong girl, you dumb horse,” Delilah screamed from the other side of the library. “I’m the one you want.”
Ashe opened her eyes to see the beast pull up short and launch itself in the opposite direction. Unicorns weren’t known to be the smartest creatures, but they made up for it with an unmatched meanness.
“No,” Ashe cried.
Her whole row was covered in slippery ice. She would never make it back.
“Gods of Knowledge, forgive me,” she murmured as she climbed the shelf before her, feeling books give away under her and crash to the floor as she did.
Ashe had always been taught to take good care of her books. But lives were at stake.
Once she made it to the top, she crawled as fast as she could across the tops of the shelves, hoping they would hold up.
When she reached the end of the row, she launched herself at the flanks of the unicorn, who had backed Delilah and Noah into a corner.
She had expected to hit solid fur and muscle, but she was wrong. The thing was as insubstantial as a drift of snow.
As she moved through the body of the vicious equine, the cold sliced into her like knives, paralyzing her extremities with a freezing numbness.
She landed hard on the icy floor and slid forward under the belly of the unicorn and into Delilah’s feet.
Her attack had done nothing, except put her in a compromising position.
“Don’t you dare,” Ashe growled, struggling for control of her limbs, so she could do something to protect her friend.
The unicorn took a step backward and for an instant Ashe dared to hope that her tone was enough to make it think twice. She had been a princess, after all. She was used to giving orders.
But it was clearly only moving to give itself the momentum to charge.
“Lift me up,” Ashe begged Delilah.
She felt the other woman’s hands on her shoulders as the feeling began to flood back into to her legs.
Ashe launched herself upward, pinning Delilah and Noah to the wall, with her body between theirs and the unicorn. She knew she didn’t have a chance against this thing, and only hoped this might be enough to save them.
She should never have tried to stay in this realm.
Ashe closed her eyes and allowed her thoughts to go back to Varik for just an instant.
He had not told her the truth.
He was a hardened bounty hunter, with a lot of baggage in his past. He’d probably done plenty of things she wouldn’t want to know about.
But he loved her fiercely, enough to let her run from him, even as it broke his own heart. And he was obviously capable of caring - his treatment of Ronan made that clear.
If only things could have been different between them.
The unicorn made another soundless charge. Ashe braced herself for the icy pain of the wicked horn running her through.
Instead, she heard a crash as the doors to the library shattered open.
She turned to see Varik thundering inside, with Ronan in his arms, as if her very thoughts had summoned them.
The unicorn turned to him, obviously not expecting this additional intrusion.
“Hold Ronan,” Varik cried as he leaped over the checkout desk to reach them.
She opened her arms instinctively and took the pup.
Varik turned from her and bowed.
No.
He wasn’t bowing.
He was… changing.
In a heartbeat she was no longer looking at the man she loved.
She was looking at a gigantic wolf, the size of a pony.
Ronan wiggled in her arms and she glanced down to comfort him.
Ashe’s breath caught in her throat.
Ronan wasn’t a puppy anymore.
She was holding a baby - a plump, adorable baby with a dimple on his left cheek and a swirl of soft brown hair that flopped to one side.
Baby Ronan reached a chubby hand up and grabbed a hank of Ashe’s hair, but he might as well have been wrapping his little fingers around her heart.
19
Varik
Varik had no time to see what Ashe thought of Ronan and himself in their other forms.
The unicorn had turned on him and was tracking him with brilliant, ice-blue eyes.
It was only a matter of time before it remembered its mission and turned its horrible attention back to the girl.
Varik let out a vicious snarl and lunged toward the beast, feigning an attack, then sidestepping it at the last moment. He coiled the muscles of his haunches again, then leapt past it, into the stacks.
If he could get it to chase him among the rows of tall shelves, he could buy time for Ashe and her friend to get away with the babies.
Varik landed, all four paws splayed. He was usually graceful and sure-footed in his wolf form, but he wasn’t prepared to land on a plane of ice.
He scrambled, claws trying to find purchase as he slid halfway down the aisle.
The unicorn was already heading his way.
His wolf senses tasted its bitterly clean scent on the air.
Varik lowered his body and eased himself around the corner and into the next section of shelves.
He waited what felt like a long time.
The unicorn could afford to move slowly and cautiously. It had its supernatural abilities on its side. The ice was nothing to it.
Varik forced himself to breathe slowly and steadily, keeping his ears swiveled forward, snout lifted to pick up the slightest hint.
Ashe’s scream pierced the air and he realized his mistake. The beast had doubled back instead of following him deeper into the books.
He threw his head back and howled as loudly as he could.
Ashe’s screaming stopped.
He could sense the temperature dropping slowly as the unicorn turned its focus back to him and traveled up the aisle he had originally slid down.
Varik began moving again, slowly, inching backward past another aisle.
If he could lure the thing out the broken front window Ashe and her friend would be safe, and he could figure out how to defeat this foul creature.
It chuffed in the aisle just on the other side of him, tasting the air as if trying to find him. He hoped its senses were no match for his own.
Varik froze and waited, summoning all of his patience.
Suddenly, a cascade of books tumbled onto Varik’s head as the beast’s gleaming horn thrust through the shelf behind him.
The books froze solid at the horn’s touch, and shattered as they hit the floor.
The unicorn sucked in another deep breath, its pale muzzle pulled back over icy, razor sharp teeth.
Varik sprung onto his paws and darted into the next aisle, grateful to have found a patch of wood floor that wasn’t yet coated in ice.
He reached the front wall of the library.
It was only a matter of getting back to the broken window, then luring the thing out.
He could hear the beast snorting and puffing behind him. It was gaining on him astonishingly fast. He’d misjudged its speed. He wasn’t going to make it to the window in time. If the unicorn caught him in here, Ashe and the others would be trapped.
He turned his attention back to the window just in time to see an enormous, brown blur fly past him.
A bear.
Varik’s first thought was of the fae bear that had interfered with him in the parking lot of the diner. He couldn’t handle another adversary right now.
But it only took him a moment to realize this wasn’t another fae creature.
It landed heavily on four paws, and then stood up on its back legs and let out an ear-splitting roar that stopped the unicorn in its icy tracks.
No fae creature projected that much power in the mort
al realm. This bear was definitely a local.
And by the looks of it, he was here to help.
20
Ashe
Ashe’s jaw dropped.
A bear.
There was a bear in the library. And it looked furious.
She clutched Ronan closer, wishing she had some kind of magic more than she ever had before, knowing that her mortal arms were not enough to keep him safe.
Beside her, Delilah seemed to be in much better spirits.
“Hey, remember how I kept telling you I wanted you to meet my husband?” Delilah whispered, the lightness of her question belying the hopelessness of their situation.
Ashe turned to her, confused by the apparent shift in the conversation.
Delilah smiled and inclined her head toward the bear. In her arms, baby Noah stretched out his arms and waggled his tiny fingers at the bellowing giant as he yelled, “DadadaDAH!”
“No,” Ashe said.
“Yes,” Delilah told her, sounding decidedly proud this time. “That’s our Axel. I have a feeling he and Varik are really going to get along.”
The three mythical creatures crashed into the center of the library.
Varik was nipping at the unicorn’s heels, trying to tire it out, in typical wolf fashion. Each time the equine tried to turn to Varik, Axel swiped at it with a massive paw.
Again and again they went after it, but the creature seemed tireless.
Varik got a little too close with one attack, and the unicorn let out a terrible whinny as it lashed out, slicing Varik’s haunch with its wicked horn and knocking him back against one of the old radiators with a thud.
The wolf moaned, and Ashe could see the injury was serious. Frost trailed in both directions, spreading out of the wound and creeping along his legs and chest, as if it might engulf him completely.
The bear launched himself at the unicorn to distract him, but met the same fate that Ashe had, as his big furry body slid right through the evil equine. He landed on all fours on the other side with a yowl of pain.