by Zoe Chant
SILVER UNICORN
Silver Shifters #3
ZOE CHANT
While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.
SILVER UNICORN
First edition. February 9, 2020.
Copyright © 2020 Zoe Chant.
Written by Zoe Chant.
ONE
JEN
“Do I really have to be tied up with duct tape?” Bird Long asked wistfully.
Laughter bubbled inside Jen’s chest, an unfamiliar sensation. She could count how many times she’d laughed these past few years.
“Of course you have to be tied up with duct tape,” Godiva exclaimed, a tiny figure with a long white braid, toothpick arms akimbo. “I gotta see what it looks like as you struggle to get yourself free.”
“Bird, I’ll be the victim if you would rather,” Mikhail Long offered—clearly wanting to spare his wife the slightest discomfort.
Godiva’s “But I need you for the martial arts,” clashed with Bird’s “It’s all right, Mikhail, I don’t mind! It’s just that the adhesive takes forever to scrub off my skin.”
Godiva said, “Oh, we can fix that. Put your sweater back on, and we’ll tape over the sleeves. As a United States Senator, you were wearing your power suit when you were kidnapped. We’ll tape over your jeans,” she added, pointing to Bird’s ankles. “As for the gag, a cloth will do just as well as duct tape. Maybe better.”
As Bird sunnily put on her sweater and sat down to be taped up to play a kidnap victim, another bubble of laughter ascended behind Jen’s ribs at the ridiculousness of the scene.
Laughter. So rare.
So dangerous.
Her breathing shuddered, her emotions teetering as if she balanced on a high wire in a wind. The problem with laughter was how fast it could turn into tears. And she was totally, completely, and absolutely done with guilt and tears.
So she squashed it down hard, until she recovered the steadying numbness she had worked so hard to achieve.
She turned a determined smile toward Bird, whose sweet face under her soft gray cap of tousled curls looked as unsenatorial as you could get. But Bird was Godiva’s favorite victim in these scenarios—she was an expert at dying in very dramatic ways.
Godiva’s vast readership expected her mystery novels to start with vivid action scenes setting up the new whodunnit. And to get that vividness, Godiva turned to Jen, Bird, and Doris, the other three of what she called their Gang of Four—friends who’d met in the Baker Street Writers’ Workshop. Bird was the dead victim expert, and Doris, the only one among them truly good at acting, played a wide variety of roles—if she wasn’t behind the camera.
Jen, six feet tall and built like her Viking ancestors, was invariably the villain.
For this scenario, they had the benefit of two extras, Bird’s husband Mikhail, and Doris’s new boyfriend Joey, who had offered to serve as cameraman.
“Okay.” Godiva smacked her hands and rubbed them. “This mystery is gonna be more of a techno-thriller. Doris! You’re the cop chasing Jen, who is a cyber-enhanced Big Evil. Bullets are no good. I want you to shoot at Jen two or three times. Then Jen, you give the cop a super-villain martial arts bop. She goes down, and Mikhail, you come to the rescue, and we see some hand to hand. What I really want here is karate razzle-dazzle. Since I don’t know spit about martial arts, I’ll be rewatching this vid to get it all down on paper. Got it?”
Mikhail was taller than Jen—not many people were, male or female—and rather austere. But his expression lightened with the quiet smile that made him such a great match for Bird. “Thank you for permitting me to be in one of your scenes. I look forward to the result.”
Godiva cackled. “Well, by the time I’m done with you, you won’t recognize yourself in the book. But thank you for playing along. Ready, everybody?”
Jen cast a quick glance around, assessing the space she had to move in. They stood on a side-street in Playa del Encanto, the small town on the coast of Southern California where Jen and her friends had lived for many years. It was early in the morning, before there was any traffic in the sleepy little town. Behind them lay the Baker Street Pastry Shop, owned and run by the current moderator of the writers’ workshop. Godiva had promised to treat them all to fresh pastries once they had the video in the bag.
Jen pushed away from the wall she’d been standing against. Since she was going to do martial arts, she’d worn her black practice T-shirt and loose white yoga pants instead of her usual jeans and top. Mikhail, she noticed, wore dark slacks and a loose shirt that she suspected was his workout outfit—for a guy in his seventies or so, he was as fit as anyone at her studio.
He took up a ready stance behind Doris, who now affected a cop walk.
“Joey, is the camera ready?” Godiva asked, hopping out of the way. She reminded Jen of a spry little wren.
Joey Hu, the slim, elegant professor with tousled silvery-blond hair with whom Doris was now living happily, held Godiva’s cell camera up to frame the shot. He said agreeably, “I’ve got my finger poised over the button.”
“Okay, Jen!” Godiva began narrating a story. “You bend over the kidnap victim here, looming like a vulture, when you hear the cops coming. Bird! Stop laughing, and start working those bonds—awesome! Remember, you’re a tough senator from the streets, and you’re trying your best to rip free. Jen—you don’t want her getting loose, so you act like you’re going to conk her a good one. Doris! Bring up your weapon.”
Doris was a short, pear-shaped woman in her early sixties, but she’d been teaching drama to high school students for many years. Somehow her wide stance and tight shoulders said cop. She raised her arms, holding a pink plastic water pistol as if it was a heavy-caliber police weapon. “Pew! Pew! Pew!” she said.
Jen pretended her T-shirt was mithril, the magical silver armor the elves had worn in Lord of the Rings. She jolted slightly on each pew, as if the bullets bounced harmlessly off her.
“Great, Jen, perfect!” Godiva bellowed. “Now you deck the cop!”
Jen snapped off a showy roundhouse kick, tapping Doris’s jaw lightly.
Doris recoiled as if she’d been struck by a steel girder, spun away, and went splat!
“Awesome!” Godiva squawked. “Mikhail, your partner just got munched, and you—”
Before Mikhail could take a step, two figures shot past him and slammed into Jen—
Or tried to.
Years of martial arts training took over Jen’s muscles before her mind could catch up. She sidestepped to allow one attacker to pass by with barely an inch to spare, then whirled to avoid the second. The first skidded to a stop and came back at Jen, fists flying.
Jen had a millisecond to see the earnest face of a girl of sixteen or so, and pulled the lethal strike she’d been about to bring up from her hips. She turned her arm, blocked a punch, and dodged, causing the girl’s left-hand strike to flail uselessly along Jen’s back—
The second attacker—also a girl, with a cloud of dark hair—came at Jen with a flying side-kick that Jen barely fended off. She wasn’t about to hurt a couple of kids, unless they pulled a weapon, and even then she’d work to put them down on the ground . . .
“Cleo! Petra!” a man spoke commandingly.
Jen whipped around as the girls faded back. They left Jen facing a man taller than she was, wearing a loose white shirt over a dark T-shirt and dark jeans. He had his hands up, and closed the distance between them, snapping two fast feints, blocks, and punches—testing blows. He was very, very good. Startled,
she glanced up at his face, and caught a quick impression of black hair glinting with silver, and a craggy face lit by a flashing grin.
She had no idea who this guy was, but she knew two things: he was at least as good as she in martial arts, and like the expert he was, he’d instantly seen that this wasn’t a serious situation.
In other words, he was offering a challenge.
Mikhail had dropped back, she noticed distractedly, so she just . . . went with it. It felt so good to cut loose again, trusting her partner to know exactly how far to push. Her body hummed with energy for the first time since—
Since before her husband died.
Somewhere far in the distance, Jen was vaguely aware of Godiva crowing, “Keep that camera going! Jen, don’t stop—this is fan-hootin’-tastic!”
Jen couldn’t have stopped, not when she was having so much . . . fun.
This was far different from the elementary stop-and-start of the women’s self-defense classes she’d begun teaching again at her kung fu studio. Jen let years of trained habit take over, laughing under her breath when he landed a good one—with a touch as light as a breath—or when she got past his formidable guard and tapped him.
Time suspended. She was scarcely aware of sweat stinging her eyes and her breath coming hard, when the spell broke as Joey exclaimed, “Oh, no, the phone battery is in the red.”
Jen’s unknown partner stepped back, and she lowered the foot she’d been readying for a jumping side kick. When he brought his hands up, palm over fist for the formal, respectful bow to one’s opponent, old habit kicked in and she bowed as well.
“Hell’s bells,” Godiva crowed. “I hope all that got on the video. It’s all going straight into the book, that’s fer double-barreled damn sure!” She stopped and tipped back her nut-brown, vivid face as she looked up at the newcomer. “Who are you, anyway?”
“Nikos Demitros,” he said with a brief glance Jen’s way. Jen sensed that he was answering Godiva, but speaking to her. He spoke with some sort of accent. Greek?
“Godiva Hildago.” Godiva patted her chest. “You might be wondering what we’re doing here . . .” As she went on to explain that she was a mystery writer, and her friends acted out the scenes that she’d write up as the opening to a new mystery, Jen saw him glance her way again, and sensed some kind of question. He had black eyes that sparkled in the morning sun. Meeting that gaze felt . . . odd, as if that morning sun had come up right behind her. No, right inside her.
She shut her eyes, not wanting to be caught staring. No more sparring on an empty stomach, she told herself. This weird, light-headed sensation had to be low blood sugar. That, and feeling a mite off-balance from being right up in intimate space with the man, after four years of being walled off from that sort of human contact.
She couldn’t resist a third glance, to find him looking at her again, unspoken question in his gaze as Godiva finished telling him about how Bird (who had been cut free by Mikhail) had become the world’s expert on croaking in various ways.
Then Jen made herself step forward to do the polite thing and introduce herself.
Only, what came out was . . . “Hi. Thanks for sparring with me—not that I asked you, that is, it happened so suddenly, which I’m not complaining about, it’s just that it’s been a while—the sparring, I mean, and working on cement is not optimal, at least for martial arts training—which is funny when you think about it because you train to defend yourself, but if some bad guy comes at you, you can’t hold up your hand and say, ooops, wrong type of ground, bad for the feet, we’ll have to take this to wood, or better, durable vinyl, ha, ha . . .”
Jen listened in growing horror as the cascade of blather fell out of her mouth, when she had only meant to say I’m Jen Carlsen. She felt like someone had frozen her into a statue except for the crazy she was now spouting in a way she hadn’t since high school.
Making a superhuman effort, she mustered every iota of inner strength to stem the tide—and to her horror, out came her old mental catchphrase, “ . . . so what I was getting to was, rubber chicken!”
Everybody stilled.
The world stilled.
Somewhere in Western India, a fly buzzed on a wall, and she was sure that everybody on five continents at least could hear it in the sudden silence.
Then Nikos cleared his throat.
“I beg your pardon, but did you . . .” he began carefully.
Before the horrible words could come out again, Jen stiffened her spine, stared at her shoes, and made a desperate effort. “Soooo, what I meant to say was, I’m Jen Carlsen.”
She couldn’t prevent a quick glance, fully expecting to see him jetting out of there at Mach 3.
But he smiled. That was all. Smiled, a real smile that shot another jolt of sunlight through her veins.
Oh yes, it was definitely way too long since she had sparred. With a man, she thought hazily. Though finishing a good workout with any of her old partners had never left her with quite this much sheer . . . euphoria.
“I am honored to meet you, Jen Carlsen,” he said.
She took in his long, well-made hands, which were bare except for an old-fashioned ring with a glittering red stone that he wore on one pinky. She tried to recover the shreds of her rusty social skills to prove that she was not actually one step away from the nice people in white coats chasing her with a butterfly net. “So . . . where did you study martial arts?” Yes! That was normal! Right? Right? See, she could do normal!
“It was part of my education at home,” he said.
She gulped in air again—who had stolen all the air here at the edge of the Pacific Ocean? He really was tall, taller even than Mikhail, with the splendid build you’d expect of a martial artist, and stop staring.
“Ah, that’s Vasilikos Alogo, an island in the Adriatic Sea.” He paused there.
She wasn’t sure if he wanted her to respond, but she didn’t dare lest she geyser inanities again, and anyway, she had to eat something before this dizziness turned into something embarrassing. Rubber chicken rubber chicken rubber chicken.
“Sounds wonderful,” she said, edging away. Rubber chicken. “I’m going to . . .” She shut her teeth with a click before she could start spouting a thousand page bulletin about her daily breakfast routine, and moved firmly away.
She really had forgotten how to be social!
She walked into the bakery and stopped before a display without seeing any of the delicacies freshly put out. Instead she found herself staring at Nikos Demitros’s reflection in the glass of the display case.
Come on, Jen, she told herself, shutting her eyes. This is high school behavior. You’re a widow of fifty-five. And you’ve sparred all your life. A terrific bout with someone at your level—possibly even higher—is nothing new. Even if it came out of nowhere.
“ . . . Jen?”
Jen blinked at the familiar voice, and turned to see Doris next to her, eyes owl-round. Next to her, Bird, eyes even rounder. “Jen, are you okay?”
Jen forced a laugh. “I’m fine. Great.”
“Okay, if you say so,” Bird said sweetly, but Jen almost saw the question marks whirling around her head like some Disney cartoon.
At that moment Godiva ranged up next to them, giving Jen the Hairy Eyeball from Planet X-Ray Vision. “Did you really say . . . rubber chicken?”
Jen sighed. “I used to stutter. When I was a kid. Until my high school English teacher told me that many stutters were tied to, ah, high emotional energy or anxiety. He helped me find a funny phrase that I could repeat in my mind, to diffuse my nervousness before I had to speak.”
Doris grinned. “Kind of like teaching kids who are afraid of public speaking to imagine their audience dressed in pink bunny suits, complete with cotton tails.”
“Exactly,” Jen said, relieved. “When I was sixteen, nothing was funnier than ‘rubber chicken.’ So, today, it sort of came blurping out.” Now both Godiva’s eyes had narrowed into twin lasers, so Jen finished quickly, “S
parring on an empty stomach will do that to me.”
The worried pucker in Godiva’s forehead smoothed a little. “Oh, if that’s all, we’ve got the solution right over there.”
Doris indicated a table a few feet away. “Godiva just bought out half of Linette’s pastries, fresh out of the oven. Come and grab ‘em while they’re hot.”
Jen followed Doris to the table, inhaling the heavenly smell of the fresh baked goods Godiva had chosen. As her fingers hovered between a cider donut and a layered apple tart, she was aware of Nikos’s voice coming through the open door.
She shot a quick glance that way, to see him talking to Joey and Mikhail. From the back, Nikos could have been any age—broad shoulders tapering to narrow hips, his glossy black hair tied back simply. Silver strands had begun to weave among the black at his temples—
Aaaaaand she was staring again.
She jerked herself around straight and chomped on her donut, aware of a silence at the table. She glanced up to find Bird and Doris looking at her with twin expressions of . . .
Jen couldn’t define those looks, but told herself sternly to get a grip.
She had made a private vow to stop stressing her friends with her grief. They had been wonderful after Robert died. Somehow a hot, home-cooked meal ended up in her kitchen every day, with Doris sitting across from her, asking Jen to try a bite, and another bite, until the plate was empty. And somehow she’d emerged from her room to find Bird quietly tidying the tiny house she’d shared with Robert. Another time or two she’d discovered Godiva fiercely fending off the vultures who called or mailed or even showed up, wanting to “help” her arrange the funeral and her affairs—if she’d just sign this little contract here.
These women had proved to be good friends, but they had their own lives. Jen was a grownup.
So act like one.
She looked up, to find her friends still watching her with expressions ranging from worry (Bird) to wariness (Godiva). She forced a smile, proud of her easy tone as she said to Doris, “I was trying to think if these cider donuts are better than the last batch we ate here, or if it’s just me being extra hungry.”