The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year. Volume 5

THE CARE AND FEEDING OF YOUR BABY KILLER UNICORN DIANA PETERFREUND

“Cool. It’s a freak show,” says Aidan. “I didn’t know they had those anymore.”

I don’t think we’re supposed to call them freak shows. Though I know my parents would freak if they knew I was anywhere near one. Too much nudity, too many pathways into the occult.

The tent is near the back of the carnival, decorated with garishly painted plywood signs and lit by a string of lights at the entrance flap that does little more than cast long shadows, obscuring most of the ads.

So far, the carnival has been pretty lame. There’s a Ferris wheel, but it costs four dollars to go around a single time—Yves says they must have to pay a fortune for insurance. The hot dogs look ancient and shriveled, and taste more like jerky. The cotton candy is deflated, the funnel cake soggy, and they aren’t selling anything cool like deep-fried Twinkies. I had to beg my parents to let me come too. You see, the fairgrounds back up to the woods, and I’m not allowed anywhere near the woods anymore.

Maybe if we played some games on the midway it would have been fun, but Aidan pronounced them childlike and insipid, suitable only for jocks and their sheeplike followers, and we all agreed. Except for Yves, in a move clearly designed to recall my collection of bobble-headed monkeys that we’d amassed over several summers spent being childish and insipid at the Skee-Ball range down the shore.

Yves loves telling cringe-worthy stories about the dumb stuff we used to do, especially since last fall. Most especially whenever he catches me flirting with Aidan.

“Ewww,” says Marissa, insinuating herself and her bare-midriff top between Aidan and me. “A two-headed cow? Is it, like, alive?”

“Probably not,” says Yves from behind us. “I bet it’s pickled.”

I look over my shoulder and wrinkle up my nose at him. Yves’s eyes are dark, framed by even darker lashes that were always too long and full for a boy. His hands are balled up in his jacket pockets and he’s giving me one of those long piercing looks that have been another one of his specialties since last fall.

Summer refuses to go inside the freak show, citing how inhumane it is to put people with deformities up on display. But a quick glance at the signs out front reveals only one sideshow performer whose “qualities” don’t seem self-inflicted: the wolf-boy. The others are a tattooed man, a sword swallower, and some guy called the human hanger who looks like his claim to carnival fame is dangling stuff from his body piercings. Gross. Maybe my parents have a point. I move down to examine the next sign, and freeze.

VENOM

THE WORLD’S ONLY LIVE CAPTIVE UNICORN

They said it couldn’t be done, but we have one!

Be one of the few to see this monster …and SURVIVE!

There’s a bad drawing beneath the words, nothing like the blurry photos on the news, or the pictures you’ve seen of the corpses. The unicorn on the sign looks like one from the old fairy books, white, rearing, its mane flying out behind it in artful spirals. Just like a fairy tale, except for the fangs and the blood-red eyes.

I stumble back and almost trip over Marissa. “A unicorn?” she says. “But it can’t be a real one.”

“Of course it’s not,” says Aidan. “They’d never be allowed to put it on display. Way too dangerous. It’s probably pickled too.”

Marissa points at the sign. “But it says it’s alive.”

“Maybe a fake one,” says Katey, clinging to her boyfriend, Noah. “They have this patented process where they graft the horns of a baby goat together, and it grows up with one horn. Like a bonsai tree. We learned about it in Bio class.”

I shudder and move away from the tent. Before unicorns came back, people used to do that and pretend it was this gentle, magical creature. No one realized the old stories were lies.

“Well, that’s totally worth five bucks,” says Aidan. “I want to check it out. A killer unicorn! You know they never caught the one that killed those kids in the woods last fall.”

“They can’t,” says Noah. “They say no one can catch one, and no one can tame one either. This one has got to be a fake.”

My arms tangle up, hugging myself to keep out the cold. But it’s a warm spring evening. Nothing like last fall, with its cold gray skies, crisp leaves, bloodcurdling screams.

Summer shakes her head vehemently. “Yeah, I’m definitely not going in now.”

“Come on,” says Katey. “It isn’t a real one. If it were, it would be on TV, not stuck in some sideshow tent.”

“Fine,” Aidan says to Summer. “Be lame.” He cocks his head at me, grinning. “Let’s go.”

If my folks disapproved of body piercings and the occult, then a unicorn was definitely off-limits. Especially for me.

“Wen?” Yves’s voice comes from way too close. He’s the only one outside my family who knows. “You don’t have to.”

I turn to him. He’s offering me his hand like we’re still six years old. Like holding his hand will be as simple as it was when we were kids. Like holding him can be as natural as it was last fall. But like I told him then, it was an accident. A mistake.

I stare at him. He’s holding out his hand like things can ever be the same between us again.

“Hey!” I call to Aidan and the others. “Wait up.”

It isn’t a fake.

I can tell the instant I’m inside the tent, though I can’t even see it yet. But it smells like last fall in here, the weird scent that at the time I thought was someone burning leaves, or plant matter rotting after the October rains.

The interior of the tent looks like a museum gallery, with a dark, winding path snaking past individual exhibits that stand out like islands of amber red light in the gloom. Noah has already pulled Katey into a dark corner behind the sea serpent bones to make out. I can see them even better inside the blackened tent than I could in the glare of the midway.

It’s the unicorn that does this to me. Its evil tingles along my nerve endings, waking them, tuning them like a drug so that everything is clearer, stronger, slower.

The two-headed calf is, in fact, pickled; a fetal calf mutation preserved in a giant tank that glows green to heighten the creep factor. Aidan and Marissa gape at it, then skip over to watch the sword swallower do his thing. I close my eyes and try to push the unicorn out. I’m hot all over, like that time my cousins Rebecca and John and I got into the brandy at Christmas.

The sword swallower licks the sword from end to end, grinning at us, then leans his head back and lifts the rapier into the air, poising it carefully over his mouth. I watch each inch of it descend into the man’s gullet, see every movement of his neck muscles, every twitch as he fights to suppress his gag reflex.

The suppressed magic breaks free, loosing within me a painful clarity, every moment of time stretched out to encompass unbearable detail. I can hear Marissa’s heartbeat, quickened because of the sight before her, quickening more when she shivers in disgust and leans against Aidan. Blood pounds in my ears, like that time my cousins Rebecca and John and I bet to see who could hold their breath longest at the bottom of their pool.

I can even feel the soil beneath my soles, and I let myself be pulled along in my steps like I’m a train car on a track, tugged inexorably toward something that lies in the darkness beyond.

Like the time my cousins Rebecca and John and I went out to the woods near their house last fall and I watched them die.

I never should have come in here. It was wrong; I knew that, but I’d wanted to show off for Aidan.

There’s a woman seated on a metal folding chair in front of a curtain partitioning off the back of the tent. Over the flap is another drawing of a unicorn, rampant red against a black field. She stamps out her cigarette. “You here to see Venom?” she asks. She’s dressed in flowing skirts and a corset, but looks more like a biker babe than a fairy-tale princess.

“Yes,” says Aidan, behind me.

“I have to go with you,” says the woman, pulling herself to her feet. “For safety.”

Marissa stands back. “So it is real?”

Aidan rolls his eyes. “Part of the show. Like the sword swallower popping those balloons to show it was sharp.”

I take a deep breath. And like the sword swallower, this is real. They have a real unicorn back there. Poisonous. Man-eating. We should run. Now.

The woman holds open the flap and ushers us inside, and the others jostle around me, but I can’t take another step. In my head I hear my cousins screaming. No one here knows, and Yves is still outside. They were two years older than me, seniors at another school. No one knows those kids who were killed by a unicorn were my cousins. No one knows I was there.

My parents said not to tell. Fewer questions, then, about how I’d survived. Less temptation, then, to explore the evil that dwells in my blood.

“Coming, Wen?” Aidan asks, and grabs my hand. Something like an electric shock breaks through my thoughts, and I follow him beyond the curtain. There’s a small observation space in front of a sturdy-looking metal grate. Beyond the grate: darkness and a tiny pool of yellow light.

The woman lifts a whistle on a chain hanging around her neck and blows a low, warbling note. Beyond the bars the unicorn steps into the light. Or actually, it hobbles. It’s a small one, not like the kind that killed Rebecca and John. Each of its cloven hooves is encircled with heavy metal clamps, and they are chained, left to right, front to back, so the unicorn can take only tiny steps. The front leg irons connect to a Y-shaped metal pole ending in another metal clamp securing the beast’s neck. Thus chained, it can only hold its head out straight, the better for us to admire its goatlike face and long corkscrew horn.

The unicorn is enormously fat. Underneath a coat of sparse, wiry white hair, its belly distends almost to its knobby knees. Patches of its coat are bare, and in the bald spots I can see scabs and even open sores, like it’s been chewing itself.

The unicorn’s watery blue eyes glare at each of my friends in turn. Its mouth opens in a snarl, revealing pointed yellow fangs and unhealthy-looking gums. It growls a low, bleating growl at Noah and Katey, at Marissa and Aidan. And then it turns to me.

Its pupils dilate, its mouth closes, and then it moves toward the bars.

We all jump back.

“Venom!” yells the woman. The unicorn’s horn scrapes the bars. It bends its knees now, struggling to lower its head in the confines of the irons, bleating as the edges of the neck brace scrape against its skin.

“Venom!” the woman screams. “Get back. Now!” The unicorn does not obey.

My friends take another big step back toward the curtains. “Lady…” Aidan says. I can hear their heartbeats pounding away. But I can’t take my eyes off the unicorn.

The monster limps and stumbles, trying to put one knee on the ground and then the other, constrained by its bonds, never breaking eye contact with me, never letting go of the pleading look in its eyes.

The woman snaps to and turns to me. “You.”

I blink as she grabs my arm. The unicorn stops what it’s doing and begins growling again.

“You’re one of us,” she hisses at me.

Oh, no.

“Lady, get your monster under control,” Aidan says. The unicorn bangs against the grate, and the bars bend under its weight.

Under her weight, I realize at once. It’s a female.

“Who are you?” the unicorn wrangler asks, and her grip tightens. She’s so strong. Insanely strong.

But so am I. I yank my arm loose, then fly back through the curtains, mindless of her shouts or my friends’ shock or the soundless pleas of the unicorn. I run with speed I haven’t felt since last fall. Speed that meant I was the only one who got away when that unicorn attacked my cousins and me on the trail. Speed that those people from the Italian nunnery mentioned when they came to my parents’ house to explain to us that I’m something special when it comes to unicorns. I draw them in like unicorn catnip. I’m immune to their deadly venom. I’m capable of hearing their thoughts. When I’m around them, I’m blindingly fast and scarily strong. And I, unlike most of the people on the planet, have the ability to capture and kill them, if properly trained.

They said they had a place to train girls with powers like mine. They called us unicorn hunters. My parents kicked them out. My father said they were papists at best and exploiters and magicians at worst, and there was no way he was letting me get anywhere near a unicorn. After all, we’d already seen what those monsters had done to Rebecca and John.

I flee with this inhuman speed through the twisting paths of the sideshow tent and break through the flaps into the benign neon night. And the first thing I see, when the moon stops spinning in the sky and the sense of unicorn fades, is that Yves and Summer are sitting on a bench in the shadows, and they’re kissing.

Yves gives Summer a ride home, which means I’m sitting in the back. He turned sixteen last summer, which makes him almost a year older than the rest of our crowd. I choose the seat behind the driver’s side, so I can’t see Yves in the mirror, even if I wanted to. Summer chatters the whole way, splitting her monologue between the two of us, and I wonder what she thinks of me, and of the rumors about me and Yves. When we arrive at Summer’s house, Yves gets out of the car and walks her to her front door, and I stare as hard as I can at the moon. It seems to take a really long time for him to get back. He doesn’t move to put the car in gear.

“You staying back there? Am I your chauffeur?”

I kick the back of his seat.

“What was the unicorn like?”

“Real.” I say, and then, to keep him from asking anything else, “What was Summer’s tongue like?”

Yves peels out.

As soon as Yves pulls into his driveway, I open my door and tumble out, unsteady because the car is still moving. I sprint across his lawn, jump over Biscuit, old Mrs. Schaffer’s annoying yellow cat, and am halfway up my front walk before I hear the engine die, before he shouts at me.

“Wen! Wait, Wen, we should talk about this!”

And then I’m inside my house, and I can’t hear him yelling anymore, and I can’t see the moon, and most of all, I can’t feel that unicorn calling out to me from all the way across town.

That’s the part I still don’t get, after I’ve knocked on my folks’ door to say good night and changed into my pajamas and said my prayers and gotten into bed. Because if I’d done like those Italian nuns had asked, if I’d gone off with them, I’d have trained to be a unicorn hunter. A unicorn killer.

But there was no mistaking that unicorn. She wanted my help. Did she want me to kill her? I could easily believe that living in captivity, confined day and night by all those chains, might be unbearable. Was that what she wanted? A mercy killing?

I punch my pillow down and pull the covers over my head to protect my eyes from the moonlight, which seems so much brighter now than it did at the carnival. Just stop thinking about the unicorn. Just stop.

For six months I lived in fear of waking up one morning and finding a whole herd of monsters in my backyard, such was my power to draw their evil down on me. But now that I’ve met another unicorn, now that I know what it is to have one near, I understand. I recognize what it feels like now. I just have to overcome it. The trick is to think of something else. Something pleasant.

So I imagine I’m kissing Aidan, that he is touching my back the way he touched my hand in the tent tonight. It’s probably not the right image, though, because the only experience I have kissing anyone is with Yves, last fall. And instead of feeling Aidan’s long blond hair between my fingers, I am feeling Yves’s dark, wiry curls; I’m feeling Yves’s full lips against mine; I’m hearing Yves whisper my name, just like he did last fall, like instead of grabbing him by the shoulders and kissing him I’d waved my arms and conjured lightning out of a blue sky.

I’m glad for Summer. I really am. I want Yves to find a girlfriend and forget about trying to go out with me. I want him to forget about kissing me, even if it was his first kiss as well. And I want to forget too.

I want to forget it all.

Yves isn’t waiting for me at my locker on Monday morning. He and Summer spend lunch canoodling at the far end of the table. Which is fine by me. Less fine is that Marissa hangs off Aidan all through the food line and arranges the seating so he’s nearest her and farthest from me at lunch. Plus, they only want to talk about their current events class. Apparently the government napalmed some unicorn-infested prairie out West somewhere to try to control the spread of the monsters. It didn’t work.

“The pictures on the news didn’t look anything like that thing we saw at the sideshow,” says Aidan. “Maybe it was a fake.”

I keep my mouth filled with coleslaw. Least fine of all is that the unicorn has been calling to me all weekend. Even in church on Sunday. I almost told my parents, but I was too scared by what they’d say. Like maybe if I still feel it, it’s because I haven’t been trying hard enough to banish this evil from my heart.

I can feel it tugging on me now.

“Of course it was a fake,” says Marissa. “Everyone knows that unicorns can’t be captured.”

“ Everyone knows a lot of things,” Noah points out. “Like how you can’t kill them with napalm. But then they also show unicorn corpses on the news. Who killed them, and how?”

I dare to look up then, and I notice that Yves is focusing on me. Only we know who is really killing unicorns, and I swore Yves to secrecy last fall.

Right before I kissed him.

Katey shudders and pulls the crusts off her sandwich. “Fake or not, it was scary. Unicorns are awful—the ones on the news, the little fat one at the fair—doesn’t matter. I hope whoever is killing them gets that one in the woods. The one that killed those kids last fall.”

“Don’t you think there are better things to do than just wipe them out?” Summer asks. “They’re an endangered species.”

“They’re dangerous ,” Noah corrects, slipping his arm around Katey. “I bet you’d drop your whole animal rights act if you had seen that thing try to break through the bars and eat Wen last weekend.”

“It tried to eat you?” Yves asks abruptly.

You’d know that if you weren’t so busy macking with Summer , I almost snap at him. But the truth is, I don’t think it was trying to eat me. Get to me, certainly. But eat me?

I wonder what else they say about unicorns that isn’t true. I wonder, if I’d gone with those guys from Italy last fall, would I know now?

After school I head straight to the library, because if not, Yves might think I want a ride home, which would probably complicate whatever after school plans he has with Summer. In the library I do a little bit of homework and a lot of thinking, and eventually I go over to the computers and look up the city bus routes online.

It takes me three different buses to get out to the fairgrounds, and I almost turn around and go home at each change. I probably shouldn’t be doing this, but at the same time, I have to know. Maybe I’m imagining it, letting the fear of last fall put all sort of ideas in my head.

The sun’s already low in the sky by the time I reach the entrance gate, and once inside the fairgrounds, I lose my nerve. I buy and drink a soda. Then I play ten straight rounds of Skee-Ball and win so many tickets that the carnie manning the machines starts giving me the stink eye, so I finish up and trade my tickets for the first thing my eyes land on: a unicorn doll.

“Not a common choice,” the carnie says, digging it out of the pile of teddy bears and puppy dogs. “Not these days, anyway. Kids are too scared by the news stories.”

He hands me the doll, and its gilt horn sags over one eye. I focus on it and say nothing, worried for a second that he’s calling me a sicko for picking up such a macabre doll.

“You know we have one here, in the sideshow?” says the carnie, who apparently never learned when to leave well enough alone. “At least, that’s the pitch. They keep it locked up real tight, though, so maybe it is real.”

I nod.

“But they weren’t showing it today.” He shrugs. “Said it’s sick.”

And then, over the din of bells and alarms on the midway, over the screams of the people on the rides and the raucous music emanating from every speaker on the fairgrounds, I hear her. The unicorn. She is sick. And she needs help.

And before I know it I’ve taken off, backpack flouncing hard against my spine, unicorn doll grasped firmly in my fist. The same speed that carried me far away from the unicorn last Saturday now takes me back to the sideshow tent, but I know—somehow I know—she’s not inside. It never occurs to me to stop, to push this unicorn sense away, to pray for God’s protection from this evil. Instead, I just go.

I wave at the guy manning the entrance, and as soon as his attention’s elsewhere, I sidle toward the side, pretending to read the garish posters advertising the acts within, then skitter around the corner. The side wall of the tent comes flush with the fences surrounding the fairgrounds, but I can see that the tent actually extends a ways beyond that. I press against the canvas walls, but they’re pulled snug, with little room to maneuver around, and massive bungee cords secure the sides to the fence so no one can sneak inside the fairgrounds—or, apparently, sneak out.

I’m ready to go back to the entrance of the fairgrounds and walk all the way around the outside, when I hear the unicorn cry out again. And this time it’s not in my head but a shrieking roar of anguish so loud that I can see the people on the midway pause in surprise.

And then my foot is on the lowest bungee cord and I’m pulling myself over the top of the fence with one hand. I drop to the ground on the other side, soft as a cat. The sun has dipped below the horizon, and twilight blurs the edges of the trailers, caravans, and Porta Potties that fan out haphazardly over the dirt. Still, I know exactly where she is, and I beeline toward her.

What I’m going to do once I get there, I don’t know. Even if the unicorn wants to die, I have no clue how to kill her.

The unicorn wrangler’s trailer is dented and in need of a new paint job. I plaster myself to its rusted sides as I hear a voice coming from a tentlike patio spilling out the back. I recognize the voice as the woman who grabbed my arm last weekend, and she’s saying words my father would wash my mouth out for.

The unicorn is alternating pitiful little bleats with full-on growls, and I edge closer, trying to peek between the trailer and the canvas flaps and see what’s going on. The canvas lean-to is secured to the top of the trailer with ropes and staked into the bare ground like a picnic cover on a camper. Is the woman beating the poor thing? Or maybe punishing it for eating a fellow carnie?

“Don’t you dare—” the woman puffs, out of breath. “Not until I come back, do you hear?”

The unicorn moans again, and I hear a screen door smack against the aluminum siding. I drop to my stomach and peek through the gap between the ground and the canvas tent flap. The unicorn is staring at me. It’s shifting from foot to foot, lowing, and as it struggles to turn, I can see that there’s something weird sticking out of its butt. It looks like two sticks or something, but then I peer closer and realize they are legs. Two tiny legs ending in cloven hooves.

The unicorn’s not fat. She’s in labor.

She struggles to lie down on the hay coating the ground, pulling against her chains so she can lick her backside. I hear the screen door open again, and my view is blocked by the women’s feet and the dirty hem of her skirt.

“I said wait,” the woman snaps at the monster, who merely growls in response. “I don’t have it ready yet.” She sets down a large bucket, and cold water sloshes over the top and splashes me.

That’s weird. I’ve heard of people boiling hot water before births—though I’m not sure why—but a bucket of cold water?

The unicorn pauses in her labor pains and lays her head against the ground. One big blue eye bores right into mine.

“You better pray this one is stillborn, Venom,” the woman says, and her foot taps the earth near my face. “I hate doing this.”

The unicorn stares at me, her bloodshot eye wide with terror. And with a shudder that goes from the top of my head into the tip of my toes, I get it.

The unicorn bleats and moans and licks and pushes, and slowly I can see the baby’s head pushing out to meet those spindly legs. The head is mottled white and red, and its eyes bulge out from either side of its oblong cranium. Between the baby’s eyes is nothing—no horn. Maybe it grows in later, like antlers on a deer. Some sort of glossy membrane encases the baby’s body, and it’s turning translucent in the air, or maybe because it’s being stretched. I can’t tell.

I’m scared someone will come round the corner and catch me peeping underneath the tent. I’m terrified the wrangler will lean down and see me. I can’t believe I’m watching the birth of a unicorn. How many people alive have ever seen anything so extraordinary?

The unicorn wrangler is clearly one of them, as I can hear her hissing with impatience, and her foot hasn’t stopped its restive tapping. The unicorn turns to lick at the baby, and the membrane splits wide. For the first time I see the baby unicorn move. It blinks and wiggles and slides even farther out of its mother.

The wrangler hurries over to the unicorn, grabs the baby by its slimy two front legs, and yanks it the rest of the way out. Venom screams in pain, and then the ground is covered with some sort of foul-smelling liquid.

“Jesus, Venom!” cries the woman, dangling the baby just out of my sight range. “You reek.” She takes a single step back toward the bucket, and the unicorn pauses in its anguish to lock gazes with me.

My hand shoots out beneath the flap and tips the bucket over.

Cold water floods the hay inside the tent and spills outside to soak the front of my shirt and pants. I bite back a gasp, but I needn’t bother, since the wrangler is screaming bloody murder. She drops the baby unicorn, who tumbles into the wet hay in a heap. Then the woman snatches up the bucket and vanishes into the trailer.

The baby shifts feebly on the ground, bits of membrane and hay sticking to its wet hide as it tries to slither back toward its mother’s warmth. But there’s something wrong with Venom. She keeps trying to raise herself and move toward her child, but can’t. She looks at me again, pain and pleading shooting at me like an arrow.

“No,” I say. “I can’t.”

From inside the trailer I hear water running. She’s refilling the bucket. She’s going to come out here any minute, and then she’s going to drown that baby. That poor, innocent little unicorn baby who never killed anyone’s cousins. Who never did anything but get dropped moments after it was born. How can it be evil?

Venom pulls herself over to the foal, licks the rest of the membrane away, and rubs it all over with her snout. The baby’s crying high-pitched, pitiful little bleats and trying to crawl under its mother’s fur. The unicorn glares at me and growls.

I say that word the wrangler used, stuff the doll into my backpack, and pull myself beneath the tent flaps, smearing mud, wet hay, and much nastier stuff all over my clothes. As soon as I’m inside, Venom nudges the baby at me with her nose.

“I can’t,” I repeat, but then why am I here?

The pitch of water hitting bucket grows higher. Soon the bucket will be filled. Venom bleats again and, with much effort, shoves herself to her feet to face me.

I stumble backward as Venom bends her knees and bows, touching her long corkscrew horn to the ground. She looks up at me from her supine position, and her desperate supplication hits me with the force of a blow.

The sound of running water dies.

I snatch up the baby and run, not looking back when I hear the screen door slam, not stopping when the wrangler screams, not noticing until I’m miles away how fast I’m going. Or how I don’t even feel out of breath.

When I finally do arrive home, it’s black out. I sneak around the side of the house into the garage and unwrap the foal from my gym uniform, which is now every bit as streaked with afterbirth and mud as my clothes. I don’t know how I’m going to explain the mess to my mother.

I don’t know how I’m going to explain the unicorn, either.

The baby unicorn hasn’t shivered since I wrapped it up in my clothes, and its skin is dry and crusty now. I’m pretty sure its mother would have licked it clean, but I’m not about to do that. Still, I know I need to keep the baby warm. And find it something to eat.

Our garage is too stuffed with junk to fit the car anymore, but that makes it a perfect hiding place for the foal. I shove aside boxes of picture albums and Christmas ornaments and pull down a ratty old quilt we sometimes use for picnics. If I can make a nest of the blanket, maybe I can put it behind the storage freezer. The heat from the motor will probably be enough to keep the baby warm overnight. I look back to where I left the unicorn on the pile of my dirty gym clothes. The foal is pushing itself up on wobbly feet and taking a few tentative steps.

Uh-oh.

Near the door there’s an old plastic laundry basket filled with gardening tools that I dump out onto the concrete. I arrange the blanket inside, hoping the tall sides of the basket will be enough to keep the unicorn from getting out. And the sides and lid have enough holes in them that I won’t worry about the baby suffocating. I wedge the basket in the space I’ve made behind the freezer and put the unicorn inside. As an afterthought I pull out the unicorn doll I won on the midway and put it in there with the baby.

It’s bleating again, but you can’t hear it above the sound of the freezer. Bet it’s hungry. I wonder what I can feed it, since unicorn milk isn’t an option. I grab my book bag and head inside, making a beeline for the stairs.

“Wen!” my mother calls from the kitchen, but I don’t stop. “Wendy Elizabeth, you get down here!”

I grimace at the use of my full name. “Can’t,” I call from the top of the darkened stairwell. “My, um…”

Mom starts up the stairs, so I duck into my bedroom and pull off my clothes, stuffing the dirty stuff into the back of my closet. I’m in my underwear when she tries the door and I push against it.

“Mom!” I cry. “I’m not dressed!”

“You’re late for dinner! Why didn’t you call?”

I lower my voice, and then I tell my mother a lie. “My, uh, my period started at Katey’s house and it made a mess and I was too embarrassed so I walked home.”

“Oh, honey.” My mom’s voice is softer now. “Well, wash up and come downstairs. Make sure you get your pants in the laundry tonight, though, so it doesn’t stick. There’s stain remover by the washer downstairs.”

“Thanks,” I say. If the blood does stain, how will I explain getting my period all over my shirt? But that’s the least of my problems. After washing the blood off my arms and face—which grosses me out more than I can say—I pull on fresh clothes and log on to the Internet. I look up both how to care for orphaned deer fawns and how to care for orphaned lions, figuring that if anything, a unicorn is a mix of the two.

This is going to be harder than I thought. Apparently it’s not as simple as just giving them milk. Fawns drink something called “deer colostrum,” and lions take special high-protein baby formulas. Neither of which I have any ability to get my hands on.

What am I doing? I can’t take care of a baby unicorn. Even if I could figure out how to feed it, it can’t be legal! And it can’t be right.

Back downstairs Mom and Dad are waiting at the table. I slide into my seat, and Dad says grace. Dinner takes forever, and I can barely eat a bite. Dad doesn’t eat much either, because Mom is trying out a Moroccan recipe she got from Yves’s mother, and Dad thinks anything more exotic than spaghetti is too weird to count as food.

But it does give me an idea. Yves’s mom sometimes cooks with goat’s milk. Maybe that’s closer to unicorn than cow. After the endless dinner and the even more endless washing up, I turn to Mom. “Can I run over to Yves’s house really quickly? I need to get his notes from history class.” Lie number two.

“Be quick,” my mother warns.

Yves answers at the kitchen door. “Hey,” he says, leaning against the frame. “What’s up?”

“I need to borrow some goat’s milk.”

“Borrow?” He raises his eyebrows. “Like you’re going to bring it back?”

“No. I mean I would like you to give me some goat’s milk. Please.”

Yves shrugs and heads toward the fridge. “Just so you know,” he says, retrieving the slim carton from a shelf on the door, “it’s pretty nasty all by itself. What do you need it for?”

So I lie again. “My mom has this new recipe she’s trying out and she, uh, remembered you’d have some…”

“At nine o’clock at night?” Yves’s big, dark eyes are staring right through me. It’s not fair. It’s hard enough lying to my parents, but Yves?

“Yeah. It needs to… marinate overnight or something. I don’t know. She just sent me over here.” I look away. “So, in case we ever need to get more, where does your mom buy this stuff?”

“There’s a Caribbean grocer downtown,” Yves says, handing me the carton. “Hey, Wen, you okay?”

I step off the stoop into the darkness so he can’t see my eyes. Biscuit the cat is off on another of his nocturnal strolls. He’s shredding Yves’s mom’s flower bed. Mrs. Schaffer really needs to get that beast under control. “I’m fine.”

I’m not fine. I haven’t been this not-fine in months. And we both know what happened then.

Part of me expects him to come forward and touch my arm the way he’s been doing since last fall, but he doesn’t. He stays on the stoop, and there’s a space the size of Summer between us.

“Well, see you at school,” he says.

I return to my own yard and approach the garage with trepidation. I hope this works. I hope I’m not too late. How soon after birth should a baby unicorn eat?

What if it’s already dead? I catch my breath, freezing with my hand on the door. What if I went through all this and the unicorn died while I was eating dinner? All that effort, all that terror, and it might just croak in my garage, alone, without its mother nearby.

And maybe that would be all right. Maybe the wrangler knew what she was doing when she tried to drown it. After all, these things are deadly. Dangerous. Evil. Maybe she had the right idea, to never let it grow up. But then I remember the look in Venom’s eyes, and I rush inside.

Behind the storage freezer the laundry basket is still and silent. I open the lid, and the unicorn is curled up inside, nestled up against the plush unicorn doll on the blanket. I reach inside and touch its flank. A heartbeat flutters through its velvety skin. It starts from its sleep and turns its head toward my hand, noses my palm and wraps its lips around my finger. Something inside me lets go. Yes, it’s a tiny little man-eating monster. But it needs me.

I grab an empty water bottle, a rubber band, and a pair of my mother’s rubber-tipped gardening gloves. I cut a finger off the gloves and poke a hole in the tip. Then I fill the bottle with the goat’s milk and secure the glove finger onto the opening with the rubber band. A few moments against the back of the freezer, and the milk loses its refrigerator chill. That’s going to have to be enough.

“Come here, baby,” I say to the unicorn, lifting it out of the nest and cradling it against me. I try to get the bottle into its mouth, but the unicorn is having none of that, and struggles while goat’s milk streams out of the hole in the glove and smears over us both.

Gross. The unicorn begins to cry, soft little bleats, and tries to burrow into my torso. I bite my lip, knowing just how it feels. What do I think I’m doing? Goat milk. What a dumb idea.

I pull off the rubber and stick my finger into the bottle. “Here,” I say again, pushing my milk-coated finger past its lips. This time the baby unicorn suckles, its tongue surprisingly firm. I plunge my finger into the bottle again and again, and slowly, painstakingly, we make it through about a sixth of the bottle. This is going to take a while. There has to be a better way.

I put the glove finger back on the bottle, then squeeze my finger over it, covering both the bottle opening and the pinprick hole in the glove tip. Milk dribbles out and down my finger, but slowly, controlled by the pressure of my finger on the rubber. I place my finger back into the baby’s mouth and let it eat.

Its eyes are closed as it suckles, its spindly legs drawn up against its body for warmth. Its skin is mostly white, covered with a soft, velvety down. It doesn’t look dangerous at all. I guess this early, without its venomous horn, it’s not. Just soft and fragile and dainty. I run a finger down its delicate snout. Between its eyes is a reddish mark, like a starburst or a flower.

“Flower,” I say, and it opens its eyes for a moment and looks at me.

Oh, no. Now I’ve named it.

I can’t sleep. Down the hall, my parents’ room has been dark for hours, but I’m tossing and turning, trying to imagine what it’s like for the little unicorn, alone in the garage. Is it awake? Hungry? Suffocating? Dying of carbon monoxide poisoning from the fumes off the freezer?

Finally I toss a jacket on, slip into my flats, and tiptoe down the hall. Outside, the moon is bright on the lawn, and I realize I should have brought a flashlight. If my parents wake up and see the light on in the garage, they’ll freak out.

But once I’m inside the garage, I find I can see just fine. Maybe it’s the moonlight. Maybe it’s the unicorn. I peek into the laundry basket. Flower is curled up next to the doll again, and I can see its chest move as it breathes. I hope it’s a girl. Flower would be a pretty funny name for a boy.

Except, wasn’t the skunk in Bambi a boy? His name was Flower, and that turned out okay. Bambi, also, was a boy with a girl’s name.

I lay my head against the side of the freezer. I can’t name this thing Flower. I can’t keep it either. It’s so dangerous, not only to my parents, who might have to come into the garage for the lawn mower and end up eaten—but also for me. It’s magic, and it’s all around me, and that’s just not right.

Did God place this unicorn in my path as a temptation meant to be overcome? I stare down at the tiny creature curled up in the basket. It’s so fragile, like a lamb. How is it to blame for its lot in life? I rest my hand on the unicorn’s back, just to feel it breathe. I watch its eyelids flutter, its tiny tail swish slightly against the blanket.

When I wake the next morning, my neck is killing me from sleeping hunched over, and I can’t feel anything below my elbow, since the rim of the laundry basket has cut off my circulation. The sun is peeking into the windows of the garage, and the air is stained with the scent of sour milk. The unicorn stirs, yawns adorably, then proceeds to have diarrhea all over the picnic blanket.

No goat milk. Check.

As I’m cleaning up—Flower is now cuddled on a red and white Christmas tree apron—I realize that I’m going to be gone at school all day. I’ll have no chance to feed the baby before I go, and what if my mom comes in here and wonders where her gardening stuff has gone and why the freezer is pulled away from the wall?

Flower starts bleating again as I leave the garage and make my way into the house. In the kitchen my dad is eating oatmeal and grousing about how Biscuit peed on the newspaper again. The funny pages survived; the business section did not. He takes in my pajama pants and jacket.

“Where were you?”

“You weren’t in the woods, were you?” Mom’s eyes are wide with fright.

“No!” I’m so tired of lying. “I was looking for something in the garage.”

This, of course, sets off another round of lying, as I try to make up a non-unicorn-based object that I was looking for, and my mother offers to scour the garage for it later, and I tell yet more lies in order to convince her to keep out of there.

Here’s a question for Sunday school: Can one lie to one’s parents in order to save a life?

I hop in the shower, throw on clean clothes, say a quick prayer that Flower survives and goes undetected until this afternoon, and head to school. School consists of the following: English, math, and history classes, where I fail to pay attention while I fret about Flower; lunchtime, where I brainstorm ideas about what to feed the unicorn and try to avoid glancing at the end of the table, where Summer is sitting on Yves’s lap; study hall, where I think about how if I were the kind of girl who knew how to skip and sneak out of school, this would have been an excellent time to slip home and check up on the unicorn; gym, where we play kick ball; and then bio class, where the teacher says our new unit is going to be on endangered species and extinction, and how there are all kinds of animals that we once thought were extinct (like these tree frogs in South America) or imaginary (like giant squids and unicorns) and it turns out that they were just really endangered, and how changes in the environment can either bring the population back or else put the animal in danger.

“So we might have all these unicorns around this past year because we destroyed their natural habitat?” asks Summer, sitting in the front row with Yves.

“They’ve got the woods all to themselves now,” grumbles Noah. After what happened to Rebecca and John, the government closed all the local parks and the state forest that backs up to so many of our housing developments until they could determine the risk to the public. The deer hunters and the Boy Scouts are still pretty livid about it. As for me, even if they ever do open the woods again, I won’t be allowed to go back. Not until the unicorns are gone.

“Not anymore,” says Aidan. “Didn’t you hear? They caught that unicorn, the one that killed the kids. It’s dead.”

My head whips around. “What?”

Aidan is sprawled out behind his desk, and as usual, he’s gotten half the class’s attention. “Was on the news last night. They showed the corpse and everything.”

My knuckles grow white, my breath grows shallow, and it’s funny but I can feel Yves’s gaze on the back of my head as easily as I could feel Venom calling to me from across the fairgrounds. Class devolves into a discussion of what they are not showing us on TV, until the teacher manages to regain control.

They caught it . A chorus of angels are singing somewhere in the vicinity of my sternum. They caught it. I don’t care what my folks said about the special unicorn hunters. Maybe they use magic, but they answered my prayers. Someone avenged my cousins’ deaths. We’re all safe.

And then I remember Flower.

When school lets out, Aidan invites me to go with him and the others to the mall, but I need to tend to the unicorn in my parents’ garage. I head to the grocery store, where I buy a real baby bottle, some formula, and some hamburger meat. I’m terrified of what the lady at the checkout counter will think of my purchases, but she says nothing, just takes my money and watches me stuff everything into my backpack.

Yves honks at me as I hit the street. “Need a ride?”

“Stalker,” I say, and climb in. “Aren’t you going to the mall?”

“Nah.” He shrugs. “Summer has yearbook, and I don’t need an Orange Julius.” He pulls out onto the road and casts me a sidelong glance. “So, they caught that unicorn.”

“Yeah.” I look out the window.

“How do you feel?”

“Better.” And as soon as I say it, I realize it’s the truth. Who knew I had such viciousness inside me? I wonder if that’s what comes of spending the night communing with a killer unicorn. Even a newborn one. I’m sure my parents would agree.

Then again, they are probably also thrilled to hear that my cousins’ killer is dead.

We ride the rest of the way home in silence, and my heart plummets as I see my mom on our front yard wielding hedge clippers.

“Hey, Mrs. G,” Yves says as we get out of his car.

I clutch my backpack to my chest and try very hard not to look at the garage. Does she know? Even from here I can tell Flower is scared, starving, alone. Is it possible my mom didn’t see it? Or doesn’t know what it is she saw? After all, Flower has no horn.

My mom brushes her hair out of her eyes and waves, and I can breathe again.

“How did that marinade work out for you?” Yves asks Mom.

She cocks her head to the side. “I’m sorry, dear?”

Yves fixes me with a look. “Never mind. I must have been confused.”

I beeline for the house, hoping Mom will stay outside long enough for me to snag the blender without notice.

“Thanks for the ride, Yves!” Yves calls after me. “You’re my knight in shining armor!”

My knight has another damsel. Not that I care.

I dump my textbooks on the kitchen table, grab the blender off the counter, and shove it into my backpack.

Back outside, Yves is nowhere to be seen and my mom looks like she’s packing it in. She stretches and rolls out her neck muscles.

“I can take those clippers back to the garage for you,” I say quickly.

“Thank you, sweetie.” My mom brushes dirt off her knees. “I need to get better at keeping my gardening stuff in one place. You know I had these clippers under the porch all winter?”

Well, that was a close call. I go to take the clippers from her, but she doesn’t let go.

“I’m …glad to see you going out with your friends again, sweetie.”

I tug on the clippers and keep my eyes down.

“I know the past few months have been hard on you, with all our restrictions.” She places her other hand over mine. “But it’s for your own safety—your life and your eternal soul. Those monsters—they’re demons.”

“They’re animals,” I reply, and pull the clippers away. “We learned in bioc lass that they’re back because of environmental degradation of their habitat.”

Mom smiles at me and nods. I half-expect her to pat me on the head. “That’s the science, my dear. But what happened to Rebecca and John—that was the work of the Devil. And what happens to you when you are near the creatures? It’s sorcery. The snake in the Garden of Eden was an animal as well. Remember that. Don’t let that evil into your heart.”

She leaves me on the porch, blinking back tears. I want to run inside and climb into her lap and have her sing me lullabies or hymns or whatever it takes to drown out Flower’s cries of fear and hunger. The unicorn has been calling to me since the second I got out of Yves’s car.

What if I just left it there? It won’t be able to survive alone much longer. If Flower dies, I won’t be able to hear it cry, won’t feel its pain. I won’t be caring for a demon, like Mom says. No matter how innocent the baby unicorn looks, I know what lurks within. It was foolish of me to obey Venom yesterday, foolish of me to defy my parents and everything I knew was right.

Maybe after it’s dead I can go and bury it. Or drag it into the woods. Or…

Except how could I save it from drowning, from the quick death the wrangler offered—only to subject it to a day and night of terror and hunger and loneliness? What right do I have to torture it so?

Ignoring the garage and my backpack filled with groceries, I head to my bedroom. I do my homework, I surf the Internet, and I pray to God to deafen me to the baby unicorn that screams inside my head.

I resist it for two hours, and then I find myself on my way to the garage, backpack in hand. All my life I have learned that my God is a God of love, and that above all He wishes me to be compassionate. And then He places in my path a monster. If this is a test, then surely I am failing.

Inside the garage the unicorn is standing and pushing its face against the lid of the laundry basket. It has made a mess inside again. I sigh and empty out the basket. While I get its formula ready, the unicorn takes a few tottering steps on the concrete floor, unsteady on its matchstick legs, then wipes out and starts crying. I do my best to ignore it while I blend the formula according to directions, then add a few handfuls of raw hamburger and set the blender to puree. The resulting mixture looks and smells like something you’d see on a reality television show, and I wonder if this will be any more palatable to the unicorn. Baby birds eat regurgitated bits of bugs or other meat from their mothers, though. Maybe unicorns work the same way.

Flower seems to like it, sucking from the bottle like a pro and pawing at me for more. After eating, it settles down pretty quickly into the cardboard box nest I’ve made for it. It drifts off to sleep as I’m rinsing out the blender, but when I cross the garage to return Mom’s gardening tools to the laundry basket, the unicorn wakes up and starts crying at me.

I swallow until I can speak. “Stop.”

Bleat, bleat. Bleeeeeaaaaaaaaaat.

“Stop, please!” Why couldn’t I kill it? Why couldn’t I let it die? I clap my hands over my ears and squeeze my eyes shut.

Bleeeeaaaaaat. I hear Flower throwing itself against the sides of the box.

“No!” I say sharply. “Stop it. Settle down.”

And, amazingly, the unicorn listens.

By the end of the following week, I’ve fallen into a routine. My life circles around Flower—when to feed the unicorn, when to clean out his box, when to sneak out of the house, how quickly I need to run home from school to take care of the little monster. In the middle of the night, I can tell when he stirs from his sleep, when he needs me. Oh, yes, it’s a boy. I made that little discovery the other day when I got a good look at his backside.

Flower thrives on the burger-formula solution and begins growing by leaps and bounds. Wooly white hair sprouts all over his body, and I worry less about whether or not he will be too cold at night. I’ve taken to sneaking out of the house to walk the unicorn around the backyard, hoping to tire him out enough that he won’t go wandering around the garage the next day. Luckily, he seems to be a nocturnal creature, happy to snooze the day away. I’m not so lucky, and I walk around school half in a daze, doze off in class, and suffer long, concerned looks from Yves at his place at the other end of the lunch table. He hasn’t spoken to me since the goat milk incident.

If I weren’t so tired, I’d wonder about that, and also about the damage this behavior is doing to my eternal soul. Every night I pray to God to send me strength, but it’s never been enough to kill Flower, nor even to leave him alone long enough to let him die. Apparently my parents had nothing to worry about. Even if they had let me go with those people, I’d never have been able to bring myself to hunt unicorns.

Saturday afternoon our crowd has a picnic at the newly reopened park. All around, families are walking the trails, playing Frisbee in the fields, or barbecuing in the pavilions.

“I think it’s premature,” says Katey, unpacking sandwiches and bags of potato chips from a cooler. “They caught one unicorn. Doesn’t mean there aren’t more.”

“If you’re so scared, why did you come?” asks Marissa, pulling out a six-pack of sodas. Today she’s in a pair of shorts cut almost to the crotch.

Katey gives Marissa a smile that is more like a growl. “Noah will protect me. Won’t you, sweetie?”

Noah is standing next to Marissa, but moves really quickly. Yves is sitting on the picnic table, and Summer is on the bench propped up against his knee. Aidan is stealing carrots from the plate where I’m setting out vegetables. He grins at me, his mouth a row of baby carrots laid end to end.

“Hey,” he says through the veggies, “did you see the corpse they put on the news yet?”

I have not. My parents deemed it unnecessarily macabre, and not only forbade me from watching the news, but also hid the metro section of the newspaper the following day. Aidan has brought the video, downloaded from YouTube, on his cell phone. We cluster around to watch. The audio is terrible, and the first minute is all the mayor shaking hands with the wildlife control people, none of whom, I note with interest, look like they could be unicorn hunters. To start with, there’s not a single girl in the bunch.

There’s a ticker running across the bottom of the screen that explains what neighborhood watch group found the corpse. Apparently the wildlife control folks aren’t the ones who killed the unicorn after all. Then the video cuts to another scene, where photographers and people with cameras cluster around a small table in the police station. The camera zooms in on the corpse.

It’s Venom.

I reel back from the group, a gasp lodged in my throat. How I recognize the remains of Flower’s mother on a two-inch screen, I don’t know. But it’s her. The unicorn from the carnival. The one that bowed before me and begged me to save her child. Dead .

When? How? Did the wrangler kill her when I escaped with the baby? Venom wasn’t looking too good that night, was having trouble standing after the wrangler ripped Flower out of her. Did she somehow injure herself then?

But what I know for certain is it’s not the unicorn that killed Rebecca and John. It’s not even the same kind. That one was big, and dark, with a horn that curved instead of twisted.

And then I realize something else. If the unicorn they “caught” was Venom, it means the one terrorizing these woods is still out there. Which means that all my friends, all these people in the park—they’re in terrible danger.

Even more because they are here with me.

I turn and sprint away as my friends start calling my name. I run into the parking lot, breathing hard and wondering how I can get the city to close the parks down again. I hear feet pounding behind me, then feel a hand on my arm.

“Wen!” It’s Yves, and Summer and Aidan are right behind him. They each stop a few feet away, giving me space, but not enough. I back up again.

“Get away,” I tell Yves. “Don’t come near me.” I breathe the air, tasting it for any trace of unicorn. We’re safe, so far.

“It’s okay, Wen,” he says.

“What’s wrong?” asks Aidan.

“It’s the unicorn,” Summer explains. “Those kids it killed—they were her cousins.”

I rip my arm out of Yves’s grip and glare at him so hard he stumbles backward. “You told her?”

“Wen,” says Aidan, coming forward. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. Man, I’m such a moron. I—”

“That’s not it. That unicorn, in the video. That’s the one from the fair. They have the wrong one. The one that killed Rebec—it’s still out there.” I’m crying now, words choking me, breath stinging my throat.

“What do you mean?” Yves says.

Oh, no. This burning, this clarity, this smell of rot and forest fire. I know it. It’s coming.

“Get away!” I scream at him. “Get away from me right now!”

And then I start to run.

They say on the news that no one died in the attack. Yves calls from the hospital, reporting that the unicorn knocked Aidan down and broke his arm, then ran right by them.

Of course. It was trying to get to me.

I huddle under an old afghan on the couch while Mom makes me hot chocolate and smoothes my hair. I can hear the helicopters overhead, watch as their searchlights scour the woods behind our house. The parks and forests have been closed again, and the whole town is on lockdown. I wonder if the unicorn is waiting out there for me, or if it has enough sense to go back into hiding.

“You did the right thing,” Mom says. “Running away from a populated area. It was stupid to reopen the parks, to think there was only one of them out there….”

I sip my hot chocolate and don’t correct her. After all, it’s true that there was more than one unicorn in our town. And even if they do kill this one, there’s still Flower, tucked away safe and sound in the garage.

Sometime late that night they report that the unicorn has been eliminated, but that the wilderness shutdown remains in full effect, for public safety. Yeah, right. They couldn’t have gotten hunters over here from Italy so fast. My parents, now seated on either side of me, praise God for his protection and mercy, but I just sob into their hugs and reassurances and promises that they can keep me safe. My parents are so much older and wiser than I am. How can they be so wrong about this? How can any of us be safe when I’m raising the instrument of our destruction in our own garage? How can we guard ourselves against unicorns when I’m spending half my nights feeding one from a bottle?

I excuse myself, claiming I need some alone time. This is, miraculously, not a lie. Then I head to the garage.

In my father’s toolbox is a small hand axe. I’m doing this for the right reasons. The wrangler was correct all along. Maybe she was in the same situation I’m in. Tricked into caring for a unicorn that became increasingly dangerous, that created little monsters of its own. Maybe she was right to try to drown Venom’s offspring, to let Venom die—or even kill the unicorn herself at last. Maybe the wrangler possessed the grace that I could not muster on my own.

I approach Flower’s box. I can tell he’s happy I’ve come, but something’s wrong. There’s a hole chewed in the side of the box. The box is empty.

“Flower?” I say, spinning. He’s still in the garage, hiding. He thinks this is a game. Flower’s joy is palpable. He’s so proud of himself. Clever beast, escaping. Freedom. Showing off for me when I come home. Each emotion is clearer than the last, and I realize that every moment I spend with the unicorn is giving it more access to my mind, to my soul.

I tighten my grip on the handle of the axe. I must cast it out. “Come here, Flower.”

The unicorn usually obeys my every command, but he’s hesitant now. Perhaps he’s even smarter than I thought. Perhaps since I can read his thoughts, he can read mine and knows I mean him harm. I try to project my usual tenderness.

“Flower,” I coax, following my senses through the garage, behind the saw table, under the disused weight bench, over to the old camping equipment. There are holes in the bag where we keep our cooking supplies, and utensils are strewn all over the floor. “Come here, baby.”

I hear rustling from the darkness. Flower is unsure of my motives, confused by my tone.

“Flower,” I try again, my voice wavering over more sobs. How do soldiers do it? How do the real unicorn hunters? The trained ones? “Don’t you get it? I have to! I have to…”

The unicorn steps out of the shadows, his blue eyes trained on me. His mouth is open, panting slightly, so that he almost looks like he’s smiling. I can see brand-new white teeth breaking through the gums. Teeth that helped him chew through the cardboard. Teeth he might use on my parents, or my friends.

I have to , I cry to the unicorn inside my head. Flower’s matchstick legs wobble a few steps closer, and he watches me, eyes full of trust. This is the creature I’ve held and fed every night and every morning.

The flower in the center of his forehead is red now, glistening, enflamed and engorged like a massive, starburst-shaped boil. The horn is coming. The horn, and the poison, and all of the danger that marks this monster’s—this demon’s—entire species. I can’t let him survive. I can’t.

This is the animal I caressed until he fell asleep, who I crooned to while he cried, who I dreamed of every night, who I’ve run through the yard by moonlight, who I rushed home to day after day. I watched him be born; I held him in my arms, still wet from his mother; and I crushed him to my chest so he wouldn’t freeze. I’ve hidden him and protected him and given up everything to keep him safe.

Flower bends his forelegs and lowers his head to the floor. He bows before me, just like his mother, and stretches out his neck as if for sacrifice. I could do it now; it would be so easy.

I drop the axe and fall to my knees.

Under cover of twilight I take Flower out to the woods. The deadly woods. The forbidden woods. With an old rubber-coated bicycle chain for a collar and a leash made from steel cable that Dad uses to tie his boat to his truck, I secure the unicorn to a tree, then create a makeshift shelter in the brush right next to it. From a few feet away you can hardly tell there’s anything unnatural there. And at least he’s out of our yard. No one will go into the woods—not after this new attack.

Flower is quiet while I work, and still, as if he knows how close he came to death. He trots obediently into the shelter and settles down on a pile of leaves. I leave the unicorn a package of ground turkey for dinner. Now that his teeth are in, I don’t even need to bother with the blender anymore, but I figure that the food should still be soft. Baby food, for a predator.

The woods are still now. No helicopters, no searchlights. No sounds of birds or insects, either, as if they also recognize the presence of my monster. Beyond Flower, I can sense no unicorn. I stretch out my awareness to its limit, searching for the other one I know must still be alive, and I find nothing. It feels incredible, but then I recoil from the magic.

After all, haven’t I sinned enough for one day?

In Sunday school the next morning, we talk about the Book of Daniel. When we get to the part about the one-horned goat, everyone goes quiet. It’s bad timing on the teacher’s part.

“Ms. Guzman?” A boy raises his hand. “Do you think that’s a unicorn? That one they put on the news the other day—it kind of looked like a goat.”

“It’s possible,” Ms. Guzman says. “In fact, there are older translations of the Bible that call it a unicorn. When this translation was made, however, we didn’t know there were unicorns, so they called it a goat instead. If Daniel did see a unicorn in his prophetic vision, what do you think it meant?”

“That whatever was coming would be much more vicious and dangerous than if it was a goat,” says one of the girls. “If it really was a unicorn in his vision, that makes it a much scarier one.”

“And it makes more sense if it is a unicorn,” says another girl, “because it goes on to say that neither the ram nor anyone else was strong enough to withstand the goat’s power. And that’s what they say about unicorns, that no one can cure the poison, that no one can catch or kill them.”

“Someone can catch them,” I find myself saying. “And maybe the goat kind of unicorn—Well, maybe they aren’t vicious. So maybe the vision meant that Daniel should—”

“What?” asks the boy. “Hang out with the man-eating monster?”

“He hung out with man-eating lions,” I snap.

“I think we’re getting a little off topic,” says Ms. Guzman. “The point is, no matter how powerful this unicorn might be—and the angel Gabriel explains to Daniel that the unicorn in the vision represents the pagan king Alexander the Great—all these kingdoms, the ram, the unicorn, all of it, are destined to fall because they are man’s kingdoms, human kingdoms, and not the kingdom of God.”

Ms. Guzman talks about God a little more, but I can’t pay attention. I’ve been praying to God about Flower for weeks, hoping He’ll forgive me for lying to my parents, hoping He’ll forgive me for betraying Rebecca’s and John’s memories by taking care of a unicorn. I’ve been waiting for a single sign of violence from Flower, a clear sign that he is as dangerous as all the others so I can kill him with a clear conscience—but I’ve not seen anything. Is it because Flower isn’t a killer? Or is it because I’m like Daniel in the lion’s den? Is God protecting me?

And if so, why didn’t He protect Rebecca and John?

Weeks pass, and Flower remains my secret. The unicorn is eating real food now—chicken thighs and kidneys and pork shoulders and anything else I can find on sale at the supermarket. I’m burning through my savings at an alarming rate, but I know my mom would notice if I started stealing meat from our fridge. Flower must be deadly bored, hanging out in the makeshift shelter all day, but he’s out of sight of my parents and out of reach of any danger, so that’s all that matters. With the woods off-limits to everyone in the neighborhood, the only thing that could hurt him is one of his elders, and I haven’t sensed any during our nightly runs through the forest. The unicorn likes when I run alongside him, I’ve learned, and I admit, I love how fast we can go together. Branches and roots are never in my way when I’m flying through the forest with the unicorn at my side. If only he weren’t illegal, I’d keep Flower around and stay on the track team.

But if I tried that, the unicorn might try to eat the spectators. Plus, Aidan would totally call me out on being a jock. Not that it matters. Even if Aidan did decide he liked me, I could never go out with him. Every time I see his cast, I’m reminded that it’s only through God’s grace that I avoided being the cause of his death. I could have killed them all, and yet I persist in this defiant path through my own weakness.

School is torture now. Since finding out about my cousins, Summer writes my odd behavior off as post-traumatic stress when it comes to unicorns. Yves doesn’t correct her, and I don’t enlighten any of them. They know unicorns are deadly, my parents tell me that they are evil, and I know everyone is right.

But I still love mine.

Flower is already half as tall as his mother, and his silver-white coat turns long and wavy. I draw the line at brushing it, but I’m pretty sure that if I bothered to, Flower would look as pretty as any unicorn in a fairy story. Even his dangerous horn is pretty—a smooth, creamy gray that twists like a corkscrew and seems to grow longer by the day. You can hardly see the remnants of the flower-shaped marking that gave my Flower his name.

One night, as I sneak into the woods for our usual evening romp, I catch a strange scent in the air. The reek of unicorn is as strong as ever, but there’s something else carried aloft on the summer breeze. Something horrible. Flower rustles in the shelter as I approach, and the unicorn’s elation stings like a cramp. What kind of life have I consigned this animal to? Alone all day, chained to a tree, never allowed to run except for a short half-hour each night when I should be in bed?

From my pocket I retrieve the bits of ham I secreted away from dinner and hurry toward the clearing. The smell grows stronger, and as I round the last tree, I put my foot down in something slick and sprawl onto the forest floor.

At eye level is a rabbit. Or what used to be a rabbit. The remains—mostly skin—are almost unrecognizable, except for a pair of floppy ears.

A few feet farther on is the half-digested skin of a chipmunk. Then a squirrel, and a scattering of sparrows.

I raise myself on my elbows and try not to gag.

In the center of the carnage sits Flower, with what looks like leftover raccoon all over his snout, and his chain lying in crumpled chewed-up chunks at his hooves. Flower looks at me, proud as punch, and thumps his tail against the earth.

Flower? Try Flayer .

My killer unicorn is finally living up to the name.

I fix the restraints, but the unicorn gnaws through them again. I spend the last of my savings on the heaviest chain the local hardware store supplies. Flayer, as I’ve taken to calling him, takes four days to chew up this one and then, in retaliation, procures a feast. I find the unicorn on his back in the shelter, four hooves in the air, drunk with the blood of small woodland creatures.

Oddly enough, this new evidence of the unicorn’s deadly abilities only confuses me further. I wonder if killer unicorns are really the work of the Devil. I’ve seen Flayer in his natural element, covered in gore, tearing apart flesh and bone, and loving every minute—and though he’s not exactly a candidate for a petting farm, neither does he seem like an evil demon. Dogs and cats and great white sharks do that too. Biscuit likes leaving mice and frogs and crickets as gifts on old Mrs. Schaffer’s porch. I eat cows and chickens and pigs and fish. Flayer is a predator. That’s not against God’s plan.

But then I remember what that other unicorn did to my cousins, and I’m not so sure. Perhaps my ability to accept these acts of violence in my unicorn is nothing more than a sign of my own corrupted soul. I defied my parents, indulged the magic, raised a killer unicorn by hand. Maybe I’m past all redemption.

As if to prove the point, on our run this evening Flayer decides to snatch bats out of thin air for an evening snack. I hear him crunch their little bones, listen to them squeak their last, and shut my eyes to the sight of him tearing through their leathery wings. An animal that eats bats must be a creature of darkness, right?

We return to the shelter and I get Flayer settled down for the night, encouraging him to lie quietly and remain here, and above all, not to destroy the final length of chain. Thankfully, even when he has escaped his bonds, the unicorn hasn’t wandered too far on his own yet. With the woods being off-limits, I can only hope that whatever slim precautions I can take will be enough to protect him from people, and enough to protect people from him . I’ve read stuff online about how baby fawns will wait in the brush for their mother to forage, but Flayer’s obviously not going to be a baby much longer. He’ll graduate from bats to people. Then what will I do?

I think about this on my much slower walk back to my yard and as I edge around the moonlight on my lawn, sticking to shadows in case my parents are randomly looking out the window.

They aren’t. But someone else is. As I am rounding the back porch, I catch movement out of the corner of my eye. Yves is standing at his bedroom window, and he’s staring down at me.

I successfully avoid him the entire next day at school, and volunteer to accompany Mom on a shopping trip on Saturday, so I miss both of his phone calls and the time he drops by the house for a chat. My parents raised me to return calls, but I find that disobeying them concerning the unicorn is indeed a slippery slope, and I avoid calling him all evening. He’s waiting for me on the porch after church on Sunday, though, and since my parents are there, I can hardly run past him and into the house—or worse, up to the woods.

“Hey there, Wen,” he says. “Long time, no see.”

If I were any good at lying, I’d have explained to my folks that I was mad at Yves. If I were any good at lying, I’d tell Yves he was imagining things in his bedroom that night.

But I’m not, and Yves knows it. And as soon as the screen door closes after my parents, the smile fades from his face.

“What’s going on with you?” The spring sun suddenly feels more like the glow of an interrogation lamp. I can feel my church skirt sticking to the back of my knees.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t give me that. You’re hiding from everyone in school, and you’re sneaking into the woods.”

I look away. Old Mrs. Schaffer is shuffling down the street, pausing at telephone poles and mailboxes and peering into open garage doors.

At church today I prayed that God would show me a way out of this mess. I can’t let Flayer go, but I can’t keep him either. I can’t tell my parents what I’ve been up to. I can’t figure out what to do. I know now why the lady at the carnival was so upset. Like me, she was trapped.

And Venom ended up dead. My throat closes up if I try to picture a future like that for my unicorn.

“Do you have a death wish?” Yves’s voice cuts through my reverie.

“What?” I turn back to him.

“Are you out there looking for—for unicorns? You think you can kill them or something, because of what those people said to you?”

I laugh. “Trust me, Yves. If there’s one thing I’m positive I can’t do, it’s kill a unicorn.” Spoil it rotten with hamburger meat? Teach it to come when called? Treat it like a jogging partner? Sure. But kill one? Forget it.

Yves’s collar is open, and there’s a dab of moisture in the hollow at his throat. I wonder how long he’s been waiting out here for me. And if it’s this hot for him, Flayer must really be sweltering in his shelter—if the unicorn is even there, and not out on a rampage.

I shut my eyes for a moment. If I don’t stop dwelling on Flayer, Yves will be able to read the truth on my face. If I don’t stop staring at him, things will get even weirder.

“Wen, I saw you.” He takes two steps, and suddenly he’s on top of me, speaking in a voice that’s so low I almost need my unicorn senses to hear him. He puts his hand over mine on the porch railing, and it practically sears my skin. “Tell me. You know you can tell me anything.”

“Hello, children.” Mrs. Schaffer’s standing on the walk. “You haven’t seen my Biscuit around anywhere, have you?”

“No, ma’am,” Yves mumbles. Beside him, I stiffen. He glances at our joined hands, and when I try to pull away, he clamps down. He knows me so well.

“I haven’t seen the poor thing since Friday morning.”

I can’t swallow. I certainly can’t speak. Yves squeezes my hand in his, and it’s not hard enough to bring tears, but somehow they’re welling up in my eyes.

“I’m just so worried about him,” Mrs. Schaffer goes on.

I hate that mangy old cat. It pees on our newspaper. It rips up our flower beds. It tears down the wind catchers Mom hangs on our porch.

And it’s totally toast.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Schaffer,” I choke out. “I—”

“—hope you find him soon,” Yves finishes, and tugs my hand. “We have to go.”

I stumble, blind with tears, into the backyard. I’ve hated Biscuit for years, but that doesn’t make him food. Random, nameless rabbits and raccoons are one thing. But Biscuit? Mrs. Schaffer loved him like I love Flayer. What have I done?

Yves pulls me into the shade behind the kitchen door and makes me look at him. We used to make mud pies back here. We used to make dandelion crowns and willow swords.

“It’s a unicorn, isn’t it?” he asks. “A unicorn ate Biscuit.”

I nod, miserably.

“Oh, no. Wen, I’m so sorry.” He pulls me into a hug. “I know it was just a stupid cat, but it must remind you of—”

“No.” I shove the word out as I push him away. “You don’t understand. It’s my fault.”

“Stop saying that,” he cries. “This is exactly what I’m talking about. You have to stop blaming yourself for this. Stop punishing yourself. Stop going into the woods and endangering yourself. I don’t care if you think you’re irresistible to unicorns or whatever stupid stuff those people told you.”

“Invincible,” I say with a sniff. “ And irresistible, I guess.”

“Listen to me,” he says, and tilts his head close to mine. “Look at me.” I do. I see a hundred Sunday afternoons and a thousand after-school playdates and one very black night last fall. Yves’s eyes are dark and clear. “Rebecca and John weren’t your fault, and Biscuit isn’t either.”

“It is. This one is.” I take a deep breath, but I don’t look away. “Yves.”

“Wen.” It’s a whisper.

“I have to show you something. You’re the only one who’ll understand.”

He doesn’t hesitate, not even for a moment. I’m the girl who beats him at Skee-Ball; he’s the first boy I ever kissed. Yves takes my hand, and I lead him into the forbidden woods.

I can feel the unicorn, sleeping through the afternoon heat. We’ll just have to keep our distance, like with Venom at the sideshow. Flayer is chained, so Yves will be safe.

As we reach the shelter, Flayer rouses and bounds out, tail wagging, silver hair shining in the sunlight, horn still streaked with the blood of his latest kill. The beast pauses as he sees Yves, then bares his teeth in a growl.

And in the slowness and clarity that comes with my powers, I can see my fatal mistake. It took Flayer four days to chew through this chain the last time, and that was Thursday night. It’s Sunday afternoon. I’ve cut it too close. The chain dangles at the unicorn’s throat, mangled beyond hope of repair.

I hold fast to Yves’s hand as the monster lunges.

“No!”

My sharp tone stops the unicorn short. Yves gasps.

“Sit.”

Flayer parks his behind on the earth and looks at me in frustration.

“Wen?” Yves’s voice trembles.

“Down,” I order. The unicorn grumbles, and lowers himself to the ground, tilting his deadly horn up and away. I grab the broken end of the chain, hold on tight, and turn back to my friend. “This is Flayer.”

Yves looks as though he might faint.

“Remember that night at the carnival?” I crouch next the unicorn and rub his stomach. “The unicorn there—Venom—she was pregnant.”

“Pregnant,” Yves repeats flatly.

“And I went back a few days later and found her giving birth. And… I can’t explain it, but it was like she asked me to take care of the baby. So I took it.”

Flayer lifts his hind leg in the air and bleats. I intensify my massage.

“I’ve been caring for him ever since.” The unicorn’s mouth opens, and his bloodstained tongue lolls between fanged jaws. “And, aside from Biscuit—well, and I guess some squirrels and stuff—”

I babble on. I don’t know for how long. It feels so good, to confess all this to Yves. I tell him about the goat’s milk, and the laundry basket. I tell him about the hamburger and the bicycle chains. I tell him about the moonlight runs through the forest. I tell him about the time with the axe, and the way Flayer can call to me from half a mile away.

Yves listens to everything, and then he says, “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

I nod, staring down at my pet. “Yeah. Broke the law. Endangered our entire neighborhood. Lied to everyone.”

He shakes his head. “Wen, you trained a killer unicorn. No one can do that. No one can catch one, no one can kill one, no one can tame one! But you did!”

“I—”

“Even the one at the carnival was covered in chains. They’re wild, vicious, but this one…” Yves gestures to Flayer, who wags his tail like Yves is about to throw him a ham hock. “He listens to you! He stays where you want him to. It’s a miracle.”

I stare down at the unicorn. A miracle .

I’ve been praying to God to deliver me from my unwelcome powers, the curse of my dangerous and unholy magic. I’ve been praying for Him to direct my hand, to give me strength to destroy the demon unicorn Heplaced in my path. And all this time, I thought He’d refused because of my own sins—my defiance of the law, my disobedience toward my parents. I thought I’d failed Him.

But what if… God wanted me to care for this unicorn? What if He sent it to me to discover a way to prevent what happened to my cousins from ever occurring again?

What if my powers aren’t a curse at all? What if they’re… a gift?

“We have to tell the world,” Yves finishes.

I snuggle the unicorn close to my chest. “No way. If I come out of the woods with Flayer by my side, he’ll be taken from me, experimented on, destroyed. What chance does this little guy have against helicopters and searchlights? Against napalm?”

Yves says, “There has to be something. Maybe your parents—”

“My parents think unicorns are demons and my powers are witchcraft.”

It’ll never work. Too many lives have been destroyed by unicorns. Even Yves looks uncertain as I continue to cuddle the killer unicorn in my lap.

If only they could feel what it’s like to run through the woods by Flayer’s side. If only they knew how much Flayer loves me, and I him. I never feel so free, so right as I do when I’m alone in the forest with the unicorn. If only God would reveal His plan to them as well.

“Okay,” says Yves. “What about those people in Italy? The unicorn hunters? They understand your powers, right?”

Yeah, but even they wanted to use my powers to help them kill unicorns. Maybe I could show them how to use our gifts for this instead, but first I’d have to persuade them to spare my unicorn. I scratch the base of Flayer’s horn, where the tiny flower marking is barely visible. Protecting Flayer is what matters most. The world can wait.

“Stay,” I say to the unicorn as I join Yves again. “What if I left?”

“You mean, like, run away?” Yves looks stricken. “Wen, you can’t—”

“Flayer and me, we’re safe in the forest. And I can keep an eye on him, make sure he eats only wild animals. And me… I used to be a really good camper.”

“But what about school? What about food? What about the other unicorns?” Yves shakes his head. “No, there’s got to be another way.”

“A way where I can save Flayer?” I ask. “What way is that? Everyone in the world wants him dead but me!”

“We could—” Yves casts about desperately for an alternative. “We could ask Summer. She’s involved in the Sierra Club, she knows people at the World Wildlife Fund…”

Right. Her.

“Yves.” I bite my lip, but it’s too late and the words pour out. “I know you and Summer—”

He kisses me then. Full on, noses smashing. Our arms go around each other, and Flayer bleats in surprise, but I don’t care. Last fall may have been a mistake, but this isn’t. I just wish I had figured it out before. Before Summer. Before Flayer. Before I feared I’d never see him again.

We’re still kissing when Mom and Dad come up over the hill. I feel Flayer’s alarm, hear him start to growl, and I pull away from Yves. My parents’ faces are dark with fury, dim with shock. Their daughter, their little Wen. Lying. Woods. Magic. Kissing.

I move to stand beside my killer unicorn.