The Purity Test

“Oh, stop whining,” the unicorn said. “I didn’t poke you that hard.”

“I think I’m bleeding, my back hurts, and I’m seeing unicorns,” Alison said. “I so have grounds.”

She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes and sat up slowly on the park bench. Spending her emergency train-fare-home money on margaritas in the first midtown bar that hadn’t carded her had seemed like a good idea at the time. She wasn’t even completely ready to give up on it yet, although the crazy hangover had been tipping the scales even before the unicorn had showed up and jabbed her.

The unicorn was extremely pretty, all long flowy silver hair and shiny hooves, indescribable grace, and a massive spiraling horn about four feet long that seemed like it should have dragged the unicorn’s head down to the ground, just on basic physics. Also, it looked kind of annoyed.

“Why a unicorn?” Alison wondered at her subconscious out loud. She wasn’t thirteen years old or anything. “I mean, dragons are so much cooler.”

“Excuse me?” the unicorn said indignantly. “Unicorns kill dragons all the time.”

“Really?” she said skeptically.

The unicorn pawed the ground a little with a forehoof. “Okay, usually only when they’re still small. But Zanzibar the Magnificent did kill Galphagor the Black in 1014.”

“O-kay,” Alison said. “Did you just make those names up?”

“You know what, shut up,” said the unicorn. “Entertaining as it would be to spend three weeks correcting your misguided preconceptions, there’s no time; the herd only gave me three days, and then that idiot Talmazan gets his turn. And if you knew him, you would understand what an unmitigated disaster that would be.”

“His turn at what?”

“Finding a virgin,” the unicorn said.

“Um,” she said. “Maybe he’d have more luck than you. I’m not—”

“La, la, la!” the unicorn sang loudly, drowning her out. It even sang beautifully, perfectly on-key. “Have you never heard of plausible deniability?” it hissed at her, when she’d stopped trying to finish the sentence.

“Excuse me, either you don’t know what ‘plausible’ means or I’m insulted,” she said.

“Look,” the unicorn said, “just be quiet a second and let me explain the situation to you.”

The hangover was moving to the front and center of Alison’s skull, and she was starting to get a little worried: The unicorn hallucination wasn’t going away. She shut her eyes and lay back down on the bench.

The unicorn apparently took it as a sign to keep going. “Okay,” it said. “So there’s this wizard—”

“Wow, of course there is,” Alison said.

“—and he’s been grabbing baby unicorns,” the unicorn said, through gritted teeth.

“You know,” Alison told her subconscious, “I’ve got to draw the line somewhere. Baby unicorns is going too far.”

“No kidding,” the unicorn said. “You don’t think I’d be wasting my time talking to a human otherwise? Anyway, wizard, baby unicorns, where was I—Oh, right. Probably he’s trying to make himself immortal, which never works, except wizards never listen when you tell them that, and we would really prefer if he got stopped before he cuts off the babies’ horns trying.”

“Let me guess,” Alison said. “Is his name Voldemort?”

“No, what freakish kind of name is Voldemort?” the unicorn said. “His name is Otto, Otto Penzler. He lives downtown.”

“So what do you need a virgin for?”

“Do you see hands at the ends of these?” the unicorn said. Alison cracked an eye open enough to see that yes, the unicorn was still there, and it was waving a silver hoof in her face. There wasn’t any dirt on the hoof, even though the unicorn was standing in the middle of a torn-up meadow.

“What does being a virgin have to do with opposable thumbs?” she said.

“Nothing!” the unicorn said. “But will anyone else in the herd listen to me? Of course not! They go off and grab the first thirteen-year-old who coos at them, and then it’s all, ‘Their purity will lead the way,’ blah, blah, blah. Lead the way to a whole bunch of dead baby unicorns, maybe. I want a little more competence in my heroine.”

“I’m drunk and sleeping on a bench in Central Park,” Alison said. “That meets your criteria?”

“Hello?” The unicorn dipped its horn and lifted the dangling sleeve from her wadded-up jacket, the one she’d been using as a pillow. “U.S. Marines?”

The jacket had come out of a two-dollar bin in the army-navy store. She actually had tried to enlist, two days ago, after the last-ditch attempt to get hired at McDonald’s had failed. She’d thought that the recruiters in Times Square would be hard up enough for volunteers that they wouldn’t be picky about her age, but that apparently awesome idea had nearly ended with her handed over to the cops for truancy, so even if the unicorn was a hallucination, she wasn’t going to let on that it was wrong.

“How do you know I wasn’t dishonorably discharged?” she said.

The unicorn brightened, which Alison had to admit was something to see. “Are you a lesbian? I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count toward virginity.”

“I am pretty sure it does,” Alison said, “and sorry, but no.”

“Well, it was just a thought,” the unicorn said. “Let’s go.”

“I’m not going anywhere without coffee,” Alison said. She wanted a shower, too, but she had a total of nineteen dollars left, so coffee was more in reach.

The unicorn tossed its head and snorted and then whacked her on the head with its horn. “Ow! What was that for?” Alison said, and then she was wide-awake, not hungry, and felt cleaner than she had in two weeks of showering in hostels. “Oh. Okay, that’s a trick.”

Then she stared, because she was stone-cold sober, sitting on a bench in Central Park in the middle of the night, and there was a unicorn standing in front of her.

“Just let me do the talking if we run into any other unicorns,” the unicorn said, pacing her. At four in the morning by the clock on the CNN billboard, even the streets of Manhattan were pretty quiet, but Alison would still have expected the unicorn to get at least a few double takes from the taxi drivers and the drunks going home. Nobody did more than nod to her, or at least to the uniform jacket.

“Uh-huh.” She was halfheartedly trying to convince herself she really was hallucinating or still drunk, but it was a losing fight. She’d had freakish dreams before, but nothing like this, and there was something uncomfortably real about the unicorn. It was actually kind of creepy. The more she looked at it, the more it seemed like it was the only real thing, and the rest of the world was one of those really expensive computer games, flattened out, with too much color.

“Where did you come from, anyway? Like, Fairyland or something?”

The unicorn turned its head and gave her a blue-eyed glare. “Yes. Fairyland,” it said, dripping sarcasm. “Fairyland, where the fairies and the unicorns play, and never is heard a discouraging—”

“Okay, okay, jeez,” she said. “Do you want me to buy you an apple or something? Would that make you less cranky?”

The unicorn snorted and minced disdainfully over some flattened droppings left by one of the carriage horses. “Anyway, we’re always here, you idiots just don’t notice anything that doesn’t shove itself in your faces. You’ve never spotted the elves, either, and they’re taking up half the tables at Per Se every night.”

“Hey, Belcazar,” a cat said, walking by.

The unicorn very slightly flicked his tail. “Social climbers, cats,” the unicorn said with a sniff after they had passed farther on.

“Belcazar?” Alison said, eyeing his tail, long and white-furred with a tuft at the end, like a lion’s. “So, if I help you get the baby unicorns back, this is all going to stop, right? I don’t need to be hearing cats talking.”

“Who does?” the unicorn said evasively. “This way,” he added, and trotted across Columbus Circle to take Broadway downtown.

Otto Penzler lived on Gramercy Park in a neat three-story brownstone with an honest-to-God front yard and fresh flowers in the window boxes.

“I guess he can just magic up money or whatever,” Alison said, staring in through the fence bars. She’d been spending a lot of time in libraries reading the New York Times to find classified ads for jobs she wouldn’t get, so she had picked up what this place had to cost.

“Not unless he wants the Treasury Department to decide he’s a counterfeiter,” Belcazar said. “He probably has a day job. Come on.”

He jumped the ironwork fence in a single spectacularly graceful leap and trotted to a side window. Alison rolled her eyes and just went through the unlocked front gate. “What’s the plan, here, exactly?”

Belcazar touched the window with his horn. The latches on the inside slid by themselves, and the window rose smoothly open. “You climb through, let me in the front door, and then we find the baby unicorns and get out, hopefully before the wizard even wakes up,” he said.

“Uh,” Alison said. “I hate to break it to you, but he’s not keeping them in there.”

“How would you know?” Belcazar demanded.

Alison pointed inside the window. “If he blew that much money on hardwood floors, I do not think he is letting a bunch of horses walk on them. He’s got to have them somewhere else.”

Around back there was a padlocked cellar door. Belcazar backed away from the lock with a snort. “Cold iron,” he said unhappily.

“Would it help if it was warm iron?” Alison said. “I have a lighter.”

“Very funny, not,” Belcazar said. “That must be where he’s got them.” He looked at Alison expectantly.

It was New York, so there was a twenty-four-hour hardware store a couple of blocks away. The guy at the cash register had a vague expression on his face as he handed Alison the crowbar and put one of Alison’s last five-dollar bills into the register. Belcazar was standing just inside the door; he had somehow managed to cram himself in between the folding ladders and the mops.

“If I get locked up for this, you are so busting me out,” Alison said shortly after working the crowbar into the lock and leaning on it. The padlock popped open like a gunshot, and she looked up and around to make sure no one had gotten curious and stuck their head out a window to see her breaking into some nice upstanding wizard’s cellar in the dead of night.

“I’ll hire you a goblin lawyer,” Belcazar said. “Hurry up before it gets light.”

She was still careful opening the doors, keeping them as quiet as she could, lifting them slowly. She wasn’t sure what she was expecting; this all still seemed unreal, the streetlamp casting Belcazar’s shadow with the tapering horn on the ground next to her. But you could get used to pretty much anything, if you gave it enough time—eating in soup kitchens, sleeping on the street. Unicorns were not that hard, and breaking into an evil wizard’s basement was turning out to be easier than getting into the high school weight room after hours.

The doors opened on a broad staircase going down into black, with the annoying kind of fancy steps that were so long you had to take an extra step before you got to the edge, but not long enough to take two extra steps, so you were always going down on the same foot. She couldn’t see the bottom, even after they had ducked all the way in.

Belcazar’s horn glowed white as they descended, a sort of cool, unforgiving pearly light. The walls were weird and smooth and curved, like they were auditioning for an Escher painting. It seemed like they were trying to bend away from the light.

“Ew,” Alison said, twenty steps down, with the dark cornflower blue rectangle of open sky above getting farther away than she wanted it, and a rotten stink getting closer. “Is this going to end up in the sewers or something?”

“Ugh, no; it’s a troll,” Belcazar said, stopping.

They hadn’t quite stepped off the stairs, but they’d bottomed out in a small antechamber, pretty much just a landing with a door at the other end. Alison didn’t see what Belcazar meant until the big lumpy pile of rock by the door sat up and unfolded concrete gray arms and legs and blinked little black pebble eyes at them. “Yum,” the troll said, and came lumbering toward them.

“Uh,” Alison said, backing away rapidly. Belcazar just stood there, though, and the troll got yanked up a foot short of the stairs by a chain around its neck.

“Yum,” it said unhappily, stretching its thick stumpy arms out at them futilely.

“They won’t stay put unless you chain them,” the unicorn said to Alison a little loftily.

“Thanks for letting me know!” she said. “So now what? Can you kill this thing?”

“No,” the unicorn said.

“I thought you guys could take out dragons?”

Belcazar pawed the ground. “Okay, theoretically I could kill it, but if it grabbed on to me, it’s stronger, and it’s not like there’s a lot of room to maneuver in here.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s going to let us by if we just ask nicely,” Alison said.

“Yep,” the troll said immediately. “Let you by. Go ’head.” It backed up against the wall and waved a hand at the passageway. It even tried a hopeful smile, full of teeth like broken rocks.

“Nice try,” Alison said.

“Aw,” the troll said.

“You’re a soldier!” Belcazar said. “Haven’t you got any better ideas?”

“Oh, yeah, absolutely. I’ll go upstairs, call around, and find someone in Manhattan with a grenade launcher, and we’ll come right back,” Alison said sarcastically. She wondered what a real marine would do. Probably shoot it with the gun a real marine would be carrying and know how to use, which wasn’t a lot of help.

“Riddle game?” the troll said. “I get wrong, you go by.”

“Will he stick to that?” Alison asked Belcazar.

“Of course not,” Belcazar said. His sides heaved out in a deep breath. “I knew I should have let Talmazan do this,” he muttered, and lowered his horn, his hindquarters bunching awkwardly on the steps.

“Wait, wait, hang on,” Alison said, because the troll’s hands were the size of basketballs and looked like they’d been carved out of solid rock. She didn’t really want to see what they’d do to Belcazar if he got close enough to touch.

“I thought you didn’t have any better ideas,” Belcazar said, lifting his head.

And Alison didn’t, at first, but then she said to the troll, “Are you only up for dinner if it talks, or would you be okay with chicken?”

The troll brightened right up. “Big Mac!” it said.

“Fabulous,” Alison said, sighing.

“That isn’t going to be more than an appetizer for that thing,” Belcazar said when they’d come out of the McDonald’s with the burger in a sack.

“That’s why we’re going to stuff it full of crushed Benadryl,” Alison said, crossing the street toward the twenty-four-hour Duane Reade on the other side.

That wiped out the rest of her cash, but the troll bounced right up when Alison tossed it the burger. Then it spent about half an hour eating it slowly and lingeringly, one tiny bite at a time, and licking its lips after each one. Then it ate the fries, the wrapper, and the bag, said, “Yum!” and fell over snoring.

Alison and Belcazar stood warily, but the troll really did seem to be asleep. “Wait here,” Belcazar said, and edged across the floor toward it.

“You aren’t going to kill it while it’s sleeping!” Alison hissed.

“Shh!” Belcazar said, and then bent his head and tapped the troll with his horn three times. Light went rippling down from the horn, washing over the troll’s body, and its skin went pale like concrete drying out on fast-forward. It almost seemed to settle down into itself. The arms and legs and head curled in closer, until the separations turned into nothing but faint cracks in a lumpy rock.

“I can’t believe you’re worrying about the troll that was going to eat us,” Belcazar said irritably, raising his head again. “Anyway, it was just a pile of rock to begin with.” He snorted. “Only wizards would go around trying to turn rocks into living things and think that was a good idea. Now come on. Let’s find the baby unicorns and get out of here.”

Alison crossed the antechamber and opened the door at the other end. She had a second to realize she was staring at a blank rock wall—the door didn’t go anywhere. Then the floor dropped out from under her feet, and she heard Belcazar whinny in startled fright before she was going down with him in a flailing heap and a flying hoof caught her on the head.

Alison woke up with her head ice-cold-clear and a horrible taste in her mouth. A smiling white-bearded man was standing beside her, with a small brown glass bottle in his hand. “There. All better,” he said, and she eyed him sidelong. He didn’t really look like the evil wizard type, but then she noticed her wrists were chained to the wall, which, okay, was more supporting evidence than she really needed, thanks.

Belcazar was chained next to her, and the light had gone out of his horn. He bent his head and nosed at her anxiously as the wizard went to put the bottle back on one of the crammed-full shelves, and then to putter over a smoking cauldron in the middle of the room. “Are you all right?” Belcazar whispered.

“Totally not,” Alison said. Whatever Otto the Wizard had given her, it wasn’t anywhere near as nice as getting sobered up by a unicorn. Her head wasn’t hurting exactly, but it didn’t feel like everything on the inside was lined up right either. She dragged herself to sit upright against the wall, chains rattling. They had a lot of slack, but they didn’t seem to have anything at all in the way of openings in the shackles.

Otto straightened up from the cauldron and waved a wand at the back wall of the room, muttering. The wall slid aside. “Belcazar, Belcazar,” a few small voices said, calling. The baby unicorns were penned up in a iron cage, five of them crowded in together, looking sad and matted and scared.

“Okay, okay, stop bleating, that’s not going to help anyone,” Belcazar said, pawing the ground with a hoof, sending up sparks. “All right, wizard, stop being an ass. You can’t make yourself immortal by sacrificing baby unicorns.”

Otto laughed without looking up from the new stuff he was throwing into the cauldron. “I know the baby unicorns aren’t enough,” he said. “Fortunately, I now have a grown unicorn—and its chosen virgin.”

“Oh my God!” Alison said. “I’m not a—ow!” Belcazar had just kicked her in the thigh.

“Would you believe it’s harder to find a virgin than a unicorn in New York?” Otto added, throwing some more bunches of herby stuff into the cauldron. “People get very suspicious if you start hanging around teenage girls. I even tried Craigslist, but I’m reasonably sure all of the responders were lying.”

“Well, I’m shocked,” Alison said, and then she started scrambling up, braced against the wall, because Otto was coming over with a bowl and a very sharp knife.

“Don’t worry,” Otto said cheerily. “I only need a little bit at this stage. The actual sacrifice will be painful, of course,” he added apologetically. “But that won’t be for a few hours yet.”

The chains were pulling tight, dragging her wrists up over her head. “That had better be a clean knife,” Alison managed, her throat dry, as Otto reached up to cut a thin shallow slice across her upper arm and held the bowl underneath.

“Oh, completely sterile,” Otto assured her, seriously, and carried the bowl of blood over to the cauldron. The chains relaxed and came loose again.

“You really aren’t?” Belcazar whispered to her anxiously. “Because this would be a bad time to find out you—”

“I’m really not!” Alison spat back.

“Good, then you should probably—,” Belcazar began, and then Otto tipped the blood into the cauldron and the whole thing went up into a giant mushrooming cloud of black smoke that billowed out and filled the entire room.

Otto yowled as whatever had been boiling in the cauldron went pouring over his alligator-skin shoes and steaming over the floor. He whirled and came at them with the wand. “What did you do? How did you do that? I’m going to flay the skin off your bones—” Then he got close enough that Alison could pull the Princess Leia maneuver and throw the chains around his neck.

She jerked them tight and dragged him in close as his face went purple and red, and she snatched the wand out of his hand.

“What do I do with this?” she yelled at Belcazar.

“Touch my chains!” Belcazar yelled back, while Otto made choked strangling noises. The wand popped open Belcazar’s shackles, white light blooming through the whole room as he began to glow again.

In the light the wand seemed to writhe and squirm like a snake, shining greasily. Alison ughed and flipped it out of her hand onto the floor, and Belcazar pounced on it, touching the twisting, gnarled stick with his horn. It glowed red and smelled like rotten eggs for a moment, and then it went up in a whole bunch of colorful flames.

“No-o-o,” Otto said, the O dragging out of him like the whine of a deflating balloon. It wasn’t just the sound, either; he was sinking in on himself, skin going greenish-white, and bones toppling slowly inward as a horrible rotting smell exploded outward. Alison covered her mouth with one hand and then the other as she did a little frantic dance trying to shake the chains loose of disgusting bits of Otto as he started falling apart.

“Hold still, do you want me to poke an eye out?” Belcazar demanded irritably, and then he tapped the shackles on her wrists with his horn. They popped open and clattered to the floor, along with the gaping remains of Otto’s skull, his teeth scattering away loose over the ground.

“That was so unbelievably gross,” Alison said, trying not to heave, or for that matter to look too close, “and I am saying that after I slept in a bus shelter yesterday.”

“You can throw up after we get out of here,” Belcazar said, whacking the lock off the baby unicorns’ cage. “Yes, yes, you’re all very grateful and happy to be rescued, I know,” he added to them.

“I’m hungry,” one of the baby unicorns said, popping out of the cage and shaking itself head to toe. The mats all fluffed out, leaving it looking a bit tufty, and then smoothed back down into place, neat and glowing.

“I want to roll in the grass,” another one said.

“I want some chocolate milk,” another one said.

“Chocolate milk, chocolate milk!” all the baby unicorns said, clamoring.

“Do not even look at me, I am cleaned out,” Alison said when Belcazar looked over at her in desperation.

“Okay, nobody back at the herd hears about this, you understand?” Belcazar said to the baby unicorns as they nudged and shoved against each other to get to the bowls Alison had set out, their hooves sliding and leaving streaks on the hardwood floor. “They really shouldn’t be drinking that,” he added fussily.

“Mm,” Alison said, tipping back a glass herself.

Belcazar eyed her darkly, and then he nudged her shoulder. “Give me a bowl too.”

Otto had kept a giant bag full of cash and diamonds upstairs in a wall safe that fortunately had been made out of steel, to keep out burglars instead of unicorns.

“I bet if I keep this, I’m going to get in trouble or something,” Alison said, looking at the money while the unicorns finished drinking. She hadn’t counted it yet, but the bag was crazy huge, and it was almost all in thousand-dollar bills. “Also, oh my God, we just killed that guy.”

“He was fairly close to dead to begin with,” Belcazar said, lifting his head and shaking chocolate milk off his nose, “so I don’t think anyone is going to miss him. Give that here.” He tapped the bag with his horn, and the money all riffled quietly like a deck of cards before settling back down, looking somehow cleaner and more crisp. The diamonds glowed briefly. “I hope you don’t plan on spending any of it soon.”

“What?” Alison said.

“I’m certainly not herding five baby unicorns home alone,” Belcazar said. “They’ll end up in New Jersey.”

“So, where is home, then, the Bronx?” she asked.

Belcazar straightened his neck and tossed his head back a little, somehow managing to avoid putting a giant dent in the ceiling with his horn while he shook his mane out. “The entrance is in Fort Tryon Park,” he said.

“To what?” Alison said suspiciously.

“Er,” Belcazar said. “Home.”

“Fairyland!” one of the baby unicorns said, lifting its head up. “I want to go home!”

“Fairyland, Fairyland!” the others chimed in.

Alison looked at Belcazar.

“The correct name is actually the Land of Faerie,” Belcazar said stiffly, somehow managing to squash in a whole bunch of extra vowels. “Only infants and idiots call it—okay, you know what, just shut up and give me some more chocolate milk.”