ACCIDENTAL UNICORN, THE

by Cassidy, Dakota

  Vinnie grinned and it lit up her entire face, making him inexplicably pleased. “Not if Khristos is your husband, she’s not. He’d knock someone into the next century if they ever said that to him. But Quinn isn’t the kind of woman who lets stuff like that get in her way. She knows she has a job to do that’s of great import and nothing stops her. I have a lot of admiration for her. She stepped in, took her knocks like a true champ, and kept it moving. But she’s the only one who should be doing any matchmaking. Ever.”

  A small lick of hope sprang in his gut. “Maybe she’s the answer to this? Maybe Quinn can get rid of this horn?”

  “That’s not what her power’s about. She can’t reverse spells.”

  “Okay, so all that said, what’s next? Do we even have a plan of action? Or do we just see how big this thing on my forehead can get before I explode in a blaze of glitter?”

  “We pinpoint who my mother got the spell from and we talk to them. She’s not very communicative right now, which leads me to believe she’s afraid to tell us who she stole it from.”

  Oliver frowned. “Can she get into trouble for taking it? Is it the fear of repercussion she’s worried about? Because if that’s the case, we’ll find another way. Despite what she’s done, I like Alice, Vinnie.”

  “There’s always the possibility she could get into trouble, yes, but life is about consequences, Oliver. She shouldn’t have been where she didn’t belong. What if it had been a spell that ended the world, would you be so forgiving?”

  “I wouldn’t have the chance. The world would be done,” he joked.

  Vinnie gave him a small poke to his forearm. “You know what I mean, Oliver. It could have been far worse and affected more than just one person.”

  “That’s so black and white, don’t you think? We can allow for a little gray in this case.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Because you like my mother, you’re willing to have a sparkly horn that drains the very life from you, possibly forever?”

  “No. I’m just saying, I don’t want her to go to Goddess jail for it. Is that so wrong?”

  Vinnie sat quietly and didn’t answer, obviously at war with what to do next. The air between them became a little uncomfortable.

  No, it became a lot uncomfortable. But it was his horn, damn it. If he didn’t want Alice to get into trouble for giving it to him, that should be his choice.

  Just as he was about to suggest they take a step back, maybe have some lunch, Alice poked her head around the corner of the dining room, her eyes watery with worry.

  She twisted her fingers around her long braid and looked at him with a sheepish gaze, her voice shaking and barely above a whisper. “I think we might have someone you can talk to, Oliver. It’s just a small kernel of help, but it’s something.”

  He sat up straight and tried to smile at her, even though he felt like the world was going to tip on its side. He couldn’t bear the look of guilt on her face. They’d worked well together these past couple of months. She had a strong work ethic, even if she was a little disorganized.

  So Oliver smiled and asked in what he hoped was an interested, accommodating tone, “What’d you find, Alice?”

  She came all the way into the living room, her face hopeful at his warm reception. “We’re not sure it means anything, but it’s a small snippet of a story a friend once head at a party. I hope it’s helpful, anyway.”

  “That’s awesome, Alice. Tell me,” he encouraged.

  She pulled her pink phone out of her sweater pocket and squinted at the screen as Oliver and Vinnie waited expectantly. “Okay, so it says here, glad to hear you’re well, blah, blah, blah. You know, the typical pleasantries. Donna’s marrying the God of her dreams and they’re having the wedding—”

  “Mom,” Vinnie said with a warning tone. “Get to the point, please.”

  Alice sighed and looked back down at her phone, running her finger over the screen. “Sorry. Got off track. Okay, um… Wedding, Paris… Book club and your virginity.” Then Alice looked up expectantly.

  Oliver blinked. “Pardon me?”

  Alice flapped a hand in Vinnie’s direction as she looked once more to the screen of her phone. “This could have something to do with Vinnie’s virginity.”

  Vinnie hissed a wheezing gasp, her face turning bright red, but Oliver didn’t know what to do or say.

  He did know this—he was going to call his mother when this was all over and tell her he loved her, because man. All this time, he’d thought his mother was an oversharing drag.

  But it looked like Alice was the clear winner of that race.

  Chapter 9

  “Mom!” Vinnie hopped up off the couch, her cheeks hot, her eyes blazing as she reached for her mother’s arm and pulled her away to the hall by the entryway.

  Alice’s face fell. Obviously, Vinnie had crushed her again. “I blew it again, didn’t I?”

  Nina came up behind her mother and leaned around her body to nod her head. “Um, yup. You done fucked up again, Alice. I kinda get the impression Junior Goddess here didn’t want anybody to know she ain’t into the bedsport. It’s personal.”

  Vinnie slapped her hands against her thighs in exasperation. “It’s not that I’m not into it, Nina, it’s that I just haven’t found the right person.”

  Alice pressed her fist to her mouth before reaching for Vinnie’s arm. “I’m so sorry, honey. I was just reading the text and…”

  Okay, so yes. Vincenza Raphaela Morretti was, indeed, a virgin. And also yes. She knew well the reaction when people found out she was a virgin at the ripe old age of twenty-eight. She had her rebuttal down pat, she knew the reaction so well. In fact, she didn’t even blink an eye when she said it anymore.

  She was used to what people thought and she was used to lying about why she was a virgin and it didn’t really have anything to do with saving herself for the right person. Well, maybe it had a little to do with saving herself for the right person, but it had more to do with an embarrassing incident and her anxiety—or so had been her experience thus far.

  But that didn’t mean she wanted everyone privy to something so personal.

  Nina gave her a light punch to her shoulder. “Hey, who gives a fuck if you’re a virgin? I don’t give a fuck. You do you, boo. Unless it has some shit to do with the Glitter Shitter. Then I want to know all the fuck about it. Otherwise, whatever.”

  Licking her dry lips, she swallowed hard as she leaned up against the hall entryway wall and tried to explain while keeping her complete and utter humiliation to herself.

  “There are a lot of legends about virgins being the keepers of unicorns, which I’m sure is what my mother was reading when she read that text, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with helping Oliver—or I don’t think it does. Am I right, Mom?”

  Alice nodded, swiping at a tear. “You’re right. It was just part of the legend Dorinda sent me, along with the other information she found. It has nothing to do with what happened to Oliver. I’m so sorry, honey. I would never want to share your embarrassing secret without permission.”

  Ugh.

  “Mom, it’s not so much that I’m embarrassed to be a…um, virgin, as I am that you just told a roomful of people we hardly know. I’ve told you that a million times. Why don’t you ever listen to me?”

  This was their problem in a nutshell. Her mother never heard what the real problem was between them.

  “Either way, fuck that noise.” Nina said, her face genuinely sympathetic. “Listen, if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, and because I’m not exactly a warm-fuzzy, is this—do what’s right for you no matter what. Do what’s healthy or whatever the hell everyone says when it comes to crap like that. That self-care bullshit I hear so much about? It’s important. You ain’t got shit to be embarrassed about, kiddo. Not that you need my approval, but stick to your guns, whatever the fuck your guns are. Now if we could just get Mom here to keep her big yap shut, we’d be good to go.”

  Vinnie�
�s smile was tremulous, but she giggled. “Thanks, Nina.” Then she turned to her mother. “Well, now that the cat’s out of the bag, what else did your friend Dorinda say?”

  Vinnie wasn’t exactly aware of all her mother’s friends or what their names were, but she did recall Dorinda—an uppity descendant of Venus. From here on out, she was going to make it her mission to learn who her mother’s “friends” were.

  Alice sighed, closing her eyes. “She said there is no one else like Oliver. Not one soul alive, which as you said, makes him very valuable.”

  “Did you tell this Dorinda what you did to Oliver?” Nina asked. “Because we don’t need a bunch of crazies running around, looking to profit from our boy here if she spreads the word. You understand, Alice? We can’t afford to take any chances.”

  “I tried to be as careful as possible,” Alice responded. “But if we’re to have any hope of helping Oliver, I might not have a choice but to share what I’ve done with the person I took the spell from.”

  “Why would Dorinda even have a love spell, Mom? That’s not her area of expertise.”

  “Because she’s an ancient Goddess, Vincenza. Those annals have been passed down to her from generation to generation. The books don’t only include love spells. That just happens to be what I found.”

  “When you were snooping in someone else’s house,” Vinnie reminded her, because she couldn’t help herself.

  Alice frowned with guilt all over her face. “Yes. Yes, I snooped, okay. Does it really hurt that I want to see the inner workings of how the other half lives?”

  “I dunno, Alice,” Nina quipped with a chuckle and hitched her thumb in Oliver’s direction. “Does it?”

  They were getting off track again. Vinnie redirected. “When did you get the spell from her anyway?”

  “She had a Tupperware party, and I don’t really care much about Tupperware—”

  “But you went to the party anyway because any access to that group of snotty elitists in okay by you, right?” Vinnie chided. Of course her mother didn’t care about Tupperware. She didn’t care about anything that organized your life.

  But Nina whipped a hand in the air. “Okay, enough with the blame. What’s done is done. Now you accept it’s fucking done and we move on and try to do better. Right, Alice?”

  Her mother looked down at her feet. “Yes,” she whispered, the shame in her voice crystal clear.

  “How did you get the spell, Mother?” She had visions of her mother creeping around Dorinda’s bedroom, opening drawers and sifting through the Goddess’s belongings.

  “I was bored, so I wandered off to her library and took a peek around. Dorinda has a massive house, as you know.”

  She sure did. Dorinda’s son Byron’s birthday was right before hers, and her mother had made her attend his soiree, which compounded the fact that her sad Barney birthday was an epic fail. Byron had made fun of her at school about it for at least a month.

  “And you poked around in her books and found a book of spells,” Vinnie finished for her. She didn’t really need to hear the details, but she wanted the rest of the gang to know what they were dealing with in Alice.

  “Right. And I hastily copied it down on a piece of paper…”

  Vinnie closed her eyes as her mother’s voice grew sorrowful, steeling herself against the inevitable guilt she’d feel for calling Alice out. “What possessed you to do something so crazy, Mom? Do you have any idea the trouble you’ll be in if Dorinda finds out what you’ve done and tells an elder God? You’ll be sunk.”

  “All the best laid plans, right?” she replied weakly. “I truly believed I could pull this off and no one would ever know. I’d introduce you, Oliver would fall madly in love with you, and you’d ride off into the sunset.”

  “Did it ever occur to you I might not reciprocate those feelings? What if I didn’t fall in love with him, but he was nuts about me? He would have ended up hurt, Mother.”

  Oliver was handsome and funny and obviously very handy, if the parts of the house he’d renovated that she’d seen were any indication. Vinnie had no doubt he’d be a great date, and they definitely had chemistry, if she judged the way her stomach had all those butterflies floating around in it when she’d sat next to him and held his hand.

  But what if they hadn’t? What if her mother’s spell hadn’t failed, and they’d met and hated one another—or worse, were indifferent?

  “I guess I didn’t think about that, Vincenza,” she groaned. Quite clearly miserable. “I know I’ve made a mess of things. But I promise you, that was never my intent.”

  Vinnie rolled her eyes. “I know you don’t mean any harm, Mom, but you didn’t think any of this through. Life isn’t all about instant gratification. You didn’t think past your vision of what my life should be instead of hearing what mine is.”

  Alice huffed then, aggravated. “Do you always want to hide away in that cave with your pets and some old dusty books, Vincenza? Or do you want to live? Experience life with someone? Fall in love?”

  Sure, she wanted to experience life, she just didn’t want to do it on her mother’s terms or on her timetable, and she’d stubbornly stuck to her guns.

  But now, seeing the OOPS ladies, and overhearing snippets of some of the adventures they’d shared when they weren’t helping someone in peril, hearing about their home lives, Vinnie wondered if she’d gone too far in the other direction in order to defy her mother’s wishes.

  She had a lot of good things in her life, but maybe she didn’t have enough of them. Maybe there was room for more.

  But that was neither here nor there at the moment.

  “Let’s not get into this now, Mom. We’ll have plenty of time to talk about this later, after we figure out how to help Oliver. So what information did Dorinda have, if any, that could be helpful? Because we could really use a win here.”

  “She referenced an alleged incident that happened maybe a thousand years ago with an alleged unicorn who lost his powers after he found a troll at the end of a rainbow.”

  Vinnie let her head fall back against the wall, her shoulders sagging. “That’s ridiculous, Mom. A troll and a rainbow? I mean, c’mon. And you used the words alleged incident. We don’t even know if it really happened. Did Dorinda witness it?”

  Alice dropped her chin to her chest. “No. She simply said she recalled there being a story about it.”

  Even Gods and Goddesses had their equivalent of Bigfoot, and trolls were it. But trolls didn’t really exist unless you counted the ones on social media.

  Vinnie crossed her arms over her chest. “So, I think it’s fair to say we shouldn’t go looking for trolls and rainbows. Did you ask Dorinda if I could drop by and talk to her about this theory? Maybe someone she knows from the era when unicorns supposedly roamed the earth is still alive.”

  “Well,” Alice said with a snide smile. “She’s certainly old enough to have friends from that era, so I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Oooo, Alice is a comedienne,” Nina drawled with a grin.

  “I’m happy to go with you, if you’d like,” Alice offered with a conspiratorial grin. “Because if I think you’re going to do what I think you’re going to do, I know exactly where to find the book.”

  “Um, no. As long as you stuck to the story we gave you about me teaching a class on urban legend and mythology, we should be fine. I’ll talk to her about unicorns and trolls or whatever else I have to while Nina and Marty look for the book.”

  “Why can’t we just ask her for the book, Vincenza? Do you really believe Dorinda would tell anyone about Oliver? She’s been a good friend—”

  “No, Mom. She hasn’t been a good friend. I don’t know what your definition of friend is, but Dorinda isn’t it. I wish I could teach you the difference.”

  “Do you want to go to the clink, Mama Bear?” Nina asked, standing beside Vinnie. “If this Dorinda finds out why we need the book, and she’s as much of a bitch as Vinnie says, she’ll be all up in this mess. We d
on’t need that. Listen, you let us handle this shit, Alice. You go sit with Wanda, have some lunch, and wait this one out. Me and Marty got this.”

  Alice gave her a skeptical glance and a wince. “You do know you won’t be well received, dear, don’t you? I’m sorry, but I’m only being truthful. Dorinda’s a bit of a…snob.”

  Nina’s raven eyebrow lifted. “You mean because I’m not a pure vampire, right?”

  “Yes,” Alice whispered sheepishly.

  Nina grabbed Alice’s hand and looked her in the eye. “You think that shit bothers me? Nah, Mama Bear. I am who I am. I didn’t ask for this thing called vampire, but I have it, and I’m damn well going to use it. Sometimes I use it to help other people. I’ve found others who do the same thing and made them my family. So fuck the hater elitists. Just let this Dorinda give me shit, and I’ll show her what the hell this impure bitch is capable of. You gotta march to the beat of your own drum, Alice. It’s the only way to live.”

  Vinnie couldn’t help but grin. She’d probably never be able to tell Nina in actual words, because her anxiety would take over, but she really was as much of a badass as legend claimed. Her mother needed to hear that kind of strength, the kind that cared only about doing the right thing and to hell with the whispers.

  If even just a little of Nina would rub off on her mother, that would be half the battle.

  Vinnie didn’t care that Nina didn’t love displays of affection; it was the only way she was capable of conveying her gratitude. Words were Nina’s thing, and affection was Vinnie’s. Thus, she put her arms around the vampire’s neck and squeezed tight, dropping a kiss on her leanly chiseled cheek.

  “Thank you. You said that perfectly.”

  She gave Vinnie a quick pat before she made a face of distaste. “Get the fuck off me, weirdo. We don’t know each other like that.” And then she laughed. “Now let’s get Marty and go see a Goddess about a love spell gone fucking off the chain.”

  Vinnie wasn’t looking forward to going to Dorinda and asking for anything. She was part of a group of people who’d mocked her very existence for as long as she could remember.