by R. J. Blain
“Wow. There’s a method to your madness, Dean?”
“You’ve been following me around for years and you’re just figuring this out?”
I sensed another argument on the horizon, which amused me more than anything else. “Before you settle in to fight, can you order dinner, please? If you two start bickering before food is ordered, we’ll all starve.”
“I’ll help her make a path to the door; you order food. Tomorrow is going to be a long day.”
Of that, I had no doubt.
Chapter Nine
I meant to resume painting after dinner, but I ate too much, which proved my undoing. Dean, in an effort to acclimate me to people touching me, had insisted I stretch out on the couch with my feet on his lap. As the unicorns expected I’d react with violence to them coming into my space without acclimating me to it, Dean started exposing me to affection through a foot rub.
As far as I was concerned, his hands and my feet could begin a long-term relationship. I found his attention so relaxing I dozed off.
A knock at the door woke me, and Dean patted my leg. “Relax, Layla. That’s just Juan. He caught the first flight out of Mexico. He called me. You slept through it.”
Xena bounced to the door, opened it, and a Hispanic man strolled in, a few streaks of gray in his dark hair. With a smile, he kissed Xena’s cheek. “Where’s this little mare Dad says I have to keep an eye on else we all suffer Dean’s wrath?”
I stretched, rolled off the couch, and got to my feet, keeping an eye on Juan while I went through the motions of preparing for the day. “While I’m little, I’m not a mare.”
“Yet,” Juan announced, strolling over.
Dean stood, and the instant the Hispanic man came into my reach, I dove for Juan, slammed one fist into his gut, and slapped my hand against the back of his head. I debated between Dean’s head or the coffee table as my target but opted against both. Instead, I patted him as a warning of what I could have done before letting him go. “If I can grab you, you’re in my space. If your name isn’t Dean, and you enter my space, I will break your face on Dean’s head.”
“Well,” Juan wheezed out, “I see Dad wasn’t joking when he’d warned me you liked your women feisty.”
“I wouldn’t call her feisty. I’d call her proactive in self-defense. That, plus I told her she could break your nose on my head whenever she wanted.”
“I don’t know what I did to upset you, but I apologize. Good form, lady. And if I offended you calling you a mare, I’m sorry. However, can I ask why you’d use Dean’s head to break my face? What did my face and his head do?”
“His head is the hardest surface in this hotel room.”
“But what about my face?”
I pointed at Dean. “Blame him.”
“Dean, what did you tell her?”
“I didn’t, not really. I was trying to tell her about the family. It went poorly.”
“I can’t imagine why.” Juan straightened his shoulders and grimaced. “Your lady hits hard. Dad said you plucked her out of prison?”
“I nudged North Carolina about her when I saw the court entry for a cupcake theft. She interested me.” Dean’s tone implied his interest covered more than base curiosity. “I looked into her public records, and well, she’s got a history.”
“I’m not sure Mom or Dad are going to be happy you were looking for a wife in the prison system.”
“If I wanted a wilting lily, I would’ve gone with one of the women our mother suggested.”
“Mom does keep throwing delicate ladies at you, this is true. I’m not sure what she’s thinking, really. You’re not the kind to be happy if you can step on your partner. You want her to have fight.” Juan grimaced and glanced at me. “Maybe you went to an extreme.”
“I probably should have discouraged her from wanting to break your nose, but you’re an ass, so I figured you deserved whatever she did to you. You’re supposed to be a strong man working security. You should be able to protect yourself from Layla. I’m grateful she didn’t introduce your nose to my skull, though.”
“I thought about it, but then I figured it would take a long time to get the blood out of your hair. I’ve already heard what your blood can do to an unsuspecting woman, so I think I’ll stop just before making him bleed.”
Dean laughed. “You wouldn’t be unsuspecting. Conversion is a lengthy process. You’d be well aware of the entire process. And I wouldn’t make you pretend you’re a vampire for a few years.”
After taking a few moments to think about it, I headed for the bathroom. The first night out of prison hadn’t bothered me too much, but I missed the rigid structure of my morning. “Don’t kill your brother without me, Dean.”
“I can work around that.”
A shower would do me a world of good. It took me a few minutes to figure out, but I got the water spraying at a comfortable temperature and went through my routine the same way I had done countless days before a pair of unicorns had turned my predictable life upside down. I questioned Dean’s motives, his willingness to gamble on an unknown with a record, and everything that had happened in the past few whirlwind days.
Worse, I questioned my willingness to consider his strange ploy to add me to his world. Permanently. I intended to take my time washing my hair, but the longer I took, the more anxious I became, expecting a cranky guard to cut the water to the shower. They’d never barged into my cell, but the threat of doing that haunted my memories.
I emerged from the bathroom unnerved by the lack of everything I expected from my life. Dean and Juan sat on the couch and chatted while Xena struggled to make sense of my painting supplies. She stared at the spray can of fixer meant to preserve a sketch, something I hadn’t used yet on my picture of Dean.
It sank in that the rest of my life would become a mystery, one I’d have to live each and every day, the unknown stretching before me. In prison, I’d feared things, but I knew what would come. The brief times I’d been free, I’d never expected to stay free long.
Freedom had been an unobtainable dream, and I’d never thought much about what I would do once I walked under the sun unchained.
“Everything okay, Layla?” Dean asked.
“What happens next?” I asked, afraid of confessing my growing doubt over how the rest of my life would play out.
My broken routine dumped me into a reality I had no idea how to handle.
No matter how they tried to reassure me, I couldn’t paint myself a future.
The unicorns exchanged glances. While Dean and Xena floundered, Juan rose to his feet, circled the coffee table, and stepped right out of my reach. “What do you want to happen next?”
Something about his stance reminded me of the hardest men the prison had to offer, a living promise of violence brewing on a stormy horizon. I tensed. “I don’t know.”
“Well, that’s a problem. You’ve been conditioned to a strict schedule, and you’re now in a chaotic environment where you’re encouraged and expected to set your own schedule. You’re not the first ex-convict I’ve worked with. You see me, and I’m a threat because you know that people who stand like me are inclined towards violence. That’s what my body language is telling you, and you don’t know how to process the mixed signals. Logically, you know I’m here to help, and that I’m their brother. But my body language is sending you the only message you know to trust. Dean’s body language is typically relaxed. He comes across as harmless, doesn’t he? He’s not, but he is much better at putting on an act than I am.”
“Why do you work with ex-convicts?”
“I give them purpose after prison. Jails in Mexico are pretty rough. From what I’ve read, it’s been pretty rough for you. There was a notation in your record of more than fifty incidents of violence flagged as self-defense. You’re not that old. But you don’t know how old you are, do you?”
“It’s a number.”
“The number is going to get a lot weirder. Dean, how old did the records you look a
t claim she is?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“She’s sixty-seven.”
Dean’s mouth dropped open, and he pointed at me. “There is no way she is sixty-seven, Juan. She looks in her twenties. She looks a little young for twenty-seven, but I figured that was because she was kept healthy by the guards so they wouldn’t lose their painter.”
“Yeah. I hacked the system last night while waiting for my morning flight. I wanted to get a good idea of what we were working with. Every ten years, they’d lose her in the system, move her to a different prison, and start her over. They were getting ready to move her again and lose her in the system again. I got the names of the guards who were consistent through her file, and I hacked their systems to find out more about them and their efforts. I suspect they have been working with a demon of some sort to alter her memories somewhat each time they’ve moved her.”
“But Dad sends me a card every year on my birthday.”
“Your mother disappeared shortly after your birth, and your father has been dead for a very long time. I’m sorry. I don’t know who left you in a prison to rot. I wasn’t able to find that information out in the short time I was able to research your case. Nothing you know is real, and I realize that’s going to be hard for you to accept. I’d rather tell you the truth now than have you discover it for yourself later.”
I frowned. “How old is sixty-seven?”
“The average lifespan of a human woman is seventy-four without significant medical or magical intervention. She’s older than you are, Dean.”
“But she seems so young,” Xena whispered.
“I figure her species has something to do with that. She’s probably just reaching maturity as her species. I’m not even sure you’ll be able to convert her depending on what she actually is. She’s not a demon or devil; there’s no way one would emerge out of prison so infernally sweet. And that’s one thing that was documented in the files I found. They can’t break her. They’ve tried.”
Dean’s expression changed, and something dark burned in his eyes. “Who?”
“If I told you, there would be a lot of murders at your hand, and I don’t feel like cleaning up that many bodies this week. She doesn’t need a mass murderer. We don’t have enough information to act. So, you have some decisions to make. You have sixty or so years of conditioning to undo. She’s been spending every day adhering to a very specific routine. I have a copy of her usual schedule. You’re going to have to put her in a structured environment until she breaks out of that herself. She’s used to obeying, and there’ll be problems if you toss her into a new life where she has to decide everything.”
“She was happiest in the art supply store,” Xena announced.
“That’s what she knows. That’s a common issue with long-term prisoners. Outside of prison, they gravitate towards what they know. That’s why I get so many ex-convicts. They understand security. They understand the system. They understand the work, and they know how to make that fit the life they know. I’ve had a few life convictions get out early, and the first thing they do is shower and exercise in the morning. Give her twenty minutes, and she’ll be itching to get in her exercise. If you tell her you’re rescheduling it for later in the day and establish a new schedule, it’ll be okay, but habit is hard to break and she’s been in that habit longer than you’ve been alive.”
“I can’t be that old.” Saying it didn’t help. Too many doubts crept in. “And what do you mean about my species?”
“There is no way you’re a human.” Juan pulled out a phone and showed me a picture of an older woman. “This is what a woman closer to your real age looks like. Like Dean said, you look like you’re in your late twenties—a little younger, really. But there are plenty of long-lived species. Look at Xena and Dean. They’re closer to middle aged in human years, but they’re both very young in unicorn standards. Some lines of unicorns are shorter lived than others. But our line? We live a long time. Our ancestors lived before the flood.”
“The flood? What flood?”
“Noah’s flood. He changed the face of the Earth in a catastrophe. Nobody really knows why, but it’s compared to a preliminary End of Days.”
“What’s that?”
“The end of the world and life as we know it as prophesied according to the Christian faith. Honestly, a lot of faiths have such things, and it’s the one thing that is consistent. All faiths will converge at the End of Days. In that one case, they’ll all be right. It will be a time of chaos and destruction, but once it’s over, the Earth will be reborn, and the cycle will begin again. Light and dark, good and evil, all things in opposition will exist before life is renewed. We’re just here to make the most of the time we do have. That’s one of the things that long-lived races have. We may very well get to see the end of all things. Honestly, I prefer the way my people handled things.”
“Your people?”
“A tribe in Mexico. I’ll spare you from trying to pronounce it. We’d lose several hours. Or, possibly not. It depends. Some species, like us, can understand any language.” Juan’s eyes narrowed. “Art transcends language, so it’s possible it doesn’t matter what language I speak.”
“May as well try it. It’s not like this will get more complicated, and it would explain her grasp of English.”
Juan said something in another language, one I’d never heard before, almost lyrical in its intonations while still possessing a hard, wild edge. “Did you understand that?”
I shook my head.
Dean scowled. “She may not have, but I did.”
Juan smirked. “I know.”
“What did you say?”
“You’d make a beautiful sacrifice on a bloody altar to save the world from the wrath of our hungering gods. Your heart’s blood has the worth of a hundred or more men without question.”
“That’s oddly sweet yet horribly barbaric.”
“My people believed sacrificing people would stave off the end of the world. It was a great honor to be chosen for sacrifice if you were willing, and those guilty of great crimes were sacrificed so their deaths would have value.”
“Do you think it worked?” I asked, tilting my head to the side.
“Who knows? We’re still here, so perhaps. I was born shortly before the conquistadors came and wiped my people out. I’m the last. It was in a time where Mom and Dad had us foals mingle with those of our homelands. Xena was the first foal who was taken from her homeland before she learned their ways. But they faced genocide, and they weren’t going to risk her life. Dad has made several forays back to learn what he can of her culture, but they’re all but gone, too. That’s why Mom and Dad are in Europe right now. They can have a foal or two in a culture that is less likely to be wiped out. They’re tired of watching our people die. But we’re also all that’s left.”
Xena sighed and shrugged. “They try, and that’s what matters, right? We’re living legacies, Layla. Mom and Dad have lived among countless cultures. They remember long after humans forget. They remember the true history, not the one the winners present to the world to see. They’ve watched civilizations rise and fall. But that’s what we are. We’re history and myth on the hoof.”
“So much for the idea that you’re creatures of purity and innocence.”
“Anything but. That’s just another myth. Now, we’re among the nicer species of unicorns, but we’ll still kill and eat you if you really piss us off. We’re just slower to anger than some of our brethren.”
My brows shot up. “You eat people?”
“Humans are best grilled, but I’ll take one or two raw every now and then.”
I couldn’t tell if he was joking, and I turned to Dean. “Is he serious?”
“He hasn’t eaten anyone for a few hundred years. I’m currently participating in a human-free diet, nor have I been on any battlegrounds. During times of war, vultures weren’t the only ones to clear a battlefield. Unicorns often helped. Some species more than other, but yeah. He�
�s serious. Leaving human bodies around to rot is rude, so we help get rid of them. We do like helping to prevent the spread of disease.”
As I couldn’t tell if he was joking, too, I turned to Xena.
“It’s true. Don’t looked so shocked. Our kind was around long before humans even learned they could tame fire or speak. We try not to eat people now, but I figure we’re a better choice than others. I mean, there are demonic corpse eaters. Which would you rather have take care of your body? It’s a lot faster for us to take care of the bodies, too.”
“But how?”
Xena smiled. “Magic, of course. We don’t particularly like the taste of human, really. But it’s part of what we are. We’re drawn to battlegrounds that haven’t been put to peace. We send the spirits of the departed on their way. We take flesh as our price of shepherding. Usually we take a nibble or two from each body before shepherding, and then we strip the remaining decaying flesh from their corpses and destroy it to prevent the spread of disease. Eating a bite lets us do all that work. But we can’t destroy the decaying flesh without that bite.”
I couldn’t decide if unicorns were fantastic or fantastically awful. “How long does it take for you to dispose of a body that way?”
“About three seconds a corpse. Our herd can graze down an entire battlefield in an afternoon,” Xena announced with pride in her voice. “We all learn how to do it, but Mom and Dad usually make us learn on deer or cattle. We get together and practice every few years. It’s usually expensive unless there’s a state doing a deer cull. They call us. Deer do not like us. They know we might hunt them. Our pretty horns are excellent weapons, and there’s nothing more satisfying than hitting dinner at a full charge. We’re taught to go for the kill in one hit. It’s rude to draw out a death.”
“You don’t actively hunt humans?”
“Not usually. And don’t listen to Dean. He’s just upset over your circumstances. If they cross paths, I expect he’ll charge and have a snack or ten. Or twenty. Juan? How many are in this ring?”