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There was a pink unicorn in my garage. Yep, a unicorn of all things. Because, you know, it was a Saturday night at our house and those tended to be a little on the wild side. Or rather, Jerome’s homework occasionally got a little on the wild side and it just happened to be a Saturday night. I was feeling old, so we were both home rather early.
The unicorn looked like it had been bred from a plain unicorn and a My Little Pony. The body was pink, the mane was a darker pink with blue braids, and the tail was the same dark pink with blue braids. Oddly, it had materialized that way, which made me wonder what Jerome had been thinking about before he focused all his energy on creating a unicorn.
“Well, what do you think?” Jerome asked me. His mom, Valerie, was already asleep. She had an exhausting coven healing session in the morning, so she always went to bed really early on Saturday nights. Jerome and I had gone out for dinner. Upon arriving back home about thirty minutes ago, he decided to do human trials with his imagination potion.
“I think that’s a very pink unicorn for a 14-year-old boy.”
“Fourteen-year-old boys can like unicorns too,” he said somewhat defensively.
“I don’t dispute that; I was just surprised you made it two shades of pink.”
“It’s for Mom,” he said, and I realized too late just how far down my own throat I’d shoved my foot, which was why it was a good thing I had small feet. I’d have choked otherwise.
Valerie had been cursed with breast cancer by a dark coven. She’d done chemo, radiation, changed her diet, changed her exercise, and was now taking part in magical healing sessions. Tomorrow would be her sixth magical treatment, and so far, the tumors hadn’t shrunk. If tomorrow had no effect, they were going to change tactics and work on getting her strong enough for major surgery using magic. It hadn’t metastasized yet, but she had a dozen tumors in both breasts, ranging from the size of an acorn to the size of a softball.
“It won’t stick around until morning, will it?” I asked, unsure what I would do with a unicorn in my house until morning.
“If I’ve done it correctly, it should disappear in an hour,” Jerome said, comforting me.
My house is a ranch style slab home in a forested neighborhood. It has two bathrooms and three bedrooms with a two-car garage. After I’d offered to let Valerie and Jerome move in with me a year ago, my father and uncles had turned the garage into Jerome’s witch laboratory. He was attending the premier school for witchcraft in St. Louis. Two evenings a week, he met with a tutor to learn about angels and nephilim magic. Just as two nights a week I met with a tutor to learn about witches and witchcraft.
Jerome was the most powerful witch I’d ever met, gifted as he was with innate instincts on dealing with demons. His instincts were nearly as strong as my own as a half angel. Most witches are schooled in witchcraft from birth, but unfortunately for Jerome, his father had been murdered by the same coven that had cursed Valerie, leaving her a single mom in Chicago. He’d started the year at the school of witchcraft behind in his formal training. He’d caught up, though, and was now working on his semester’s final project for potions.
He’d come up with the imagination potion mostly by himself. His first attempt had altered reality permanently. As a result, we now had a dog. Not a normal dog either, but a giant black dog that would scare the fur off a hellhound. The potion had improved drastically, and the time span his creations lasted was getting shorter and shorter with each new making.
“Well, it’s a lovely unicorn.” I finally said. “Much prettier than Angel.” Angel was our dog.
“I think I can make Angel prettier, if you want.”
“Temporarily or permanently prettier? Will it hurt her?” I asked.
“Permanently. And no, it won’t hurt her,” he said and sat down in his office chair.
“It would be nice if she wasn’t five feet high at the shoulders and not completely black, a white spot or two would make her look friendlier,” I offered.
“However, she has a great personality and that’s the most important part.”
Being a magical creation, Angel seemed to like all magical creatures with the exception of demons. She’d growl at them, but she didn’t growl at the brood of vampire children next door or the werewolf cubs that proliferated in the cul-de-sac. The vampires and weres used the forest to hunt. Our neighborhood had been specifically designed for that sort of thing. It catered to the hunting type of paranormal creature. Not a single human family lived among the 20 houses on this specific road, although my neighbors did have completely human relatives that visited at times.
Jerome was back to mixing things up in beakers and vials. The mixture in the beaker was completely white. Jerome added something that smelled like sulfur, and it turned green and smoked for a moment, then went back to being white.
He turned on the toaster oven, mixed up something else that looked like flour and peanut butter, and then poured the white liquid into it. It made a strange looking blob of goop. He began to roll this in the air using magic until it formed a perfect ball. Then small pieces about the size of a quarter began to pull themselves off the bigger ball and set themselves on a small, silver plate.
“Your turn,” he said, and a beaker of the imagination potion scooted toward me across the table.
“I thought we weren’t using me for the experiments anymore,” I said. My first encounter with his potion had created a fountain in our living room. A fountain that seemed to always have water, despite not being hooked up to water. It bubbled and gurgled. But at least it wasn’t a dog or other living creature that needed feeding and walking. It turns out that when you’re given a potion and told to focus on something you’d like to have hang around for a short time, it’s nearly impossible to think of anything. We’d gained the fountain, Angel, a unicorn, more notebooks than Jerome or I would ever need in our lives, and somewhere in the woods a green turkey roamed free.
The fountain was the worst. Even worse than Angel. Once in a while we came home to find it overflowing and soaking the living room carpet. It seemed to happen when there was lots of magic in my house. My father and uncles always overflowed it.
I was a nephilim; my father is the Archangel Raphael. My mom is a human who tolerates my father quite admirably. They both treat the child in my garage like one of their own grandchildren, despite his not being related to us at all. Of course, if we can’t heal Valerie, eventually Jerome will become my son. Valerie has already made me his legal guardian, so I can make decisions about his school and things. It’s not a secret; she asked Jerome’s permission first and he agreed. Then they came and asked me together.
Because of this, I gave up my job as an exorcist with the government. I can’t travel all over the country and have a 14-year-old wizard in my care. Instead, I have opened my own private exorcism business. My mom works for me—she does all the billing to the insurance companies. Possession is considered a medical condition, and as such, insurance will usually pay for my services.
It means I’ve gone from dealing with criminals to mostly dealing with teens who played with Ouija boards once too often at three in the morning during a sleepover.
“Just think of something less permanent and less prone to damaging the carpets than a fountain,” Jerome said as he scooted the beaker the last couple of inches. I focused on a new car. Mine had been in an accident a few months earlier on some black ice. It hadn’t been totaled, but it was currently two-toned, because the shop that fixed it had failed to match the paint exactly. It was supposed to be a medium hue blue and the new paint was nearly black, leaving my car with the color scheme of a really bad bruise.
I reached down and took a swig of the potion. A car alarm blared outside, and we heard Angel growl. Jerome hit a button on his lab table and the garage door opened. We’d left the garage door intact so he could quickly ventilate the room if need be.
There was a grey 4Runner in the driveway next to my black and blue Volkswagen Tiguan. Jerome cocked his head to one side and stared at the car for a moment. Its alarm was the one blaring, and my neighbors were starting to come out of their houses. I got up and walked to the door, hoping I’d imagined the keys were in it. I double-checked my pockets, but they were empty.
I walked out and tried the door handle. It was locked. Bill, the guy who lived directly across from me, was a werewolf who had settled down with a nice werewolf female. They had three or four kids. All of them were outside on their lawn. Bill began walking toward me.
“Jerome’s potion?” he called as he reached the bottom of my driveway.
“Yes,” I replied. “Apparently, I didn’t imagine it with the doors unlocked or the keys in my pocket. But I also don’t remember imagining it having an alarm.”
“Maybe it just translocates something to your custody temporarily,” Bill offered.
“That doesn’t explain the unicorn or the fountain.” I commented drily. Nearly all the neighbors were also guinea pigs for Jerome’s potions once they were deemed safe for human consumption. The school provided a substance that would turn harmful potions into a solid. To date, none of Jerome’s potions had turned into a solid, even when they didn’t work exactly as planned.
“Well, maybe if I took it, I could imagine the car away,” he smiled.
“Nope,” Jerome said from his spot in the garage. “I already took away that function. It should disappear in an hour.”
“No offense, but I don’t want this thing going off for an hour,” Lyzette, my vampire neighbor said.
“I concur,” I said.
“Do you care what happens to it?” Bill asked. I shook my head and Bill walked over to the hood. He slammed his fists down. The hood caved in, the air bags deployed inside the vehicle, and the alarm shut off.
“Are you thinking of replacing the Tiguan?” Lyzette asked.
“Yes, preferably with a car that I have the keys to.” I smiled at her.
“Next Saturday we’re having a barbecue,” she said. Lyzette organized neighborhood barbecues all summer long. Modern vampires didn’t drink blood. Instead they got infusions a couple times a month. Vampirism prevents them from making red blood cells. Infusions meant the blood was screened for diseases and disorders that might make it unsafe. “You didn’t respond to my invitation.”
“Oh, we’ll be there,” I said. “I forgot to text you back, I’ve been swamped with the final renovations to my office, hiring staff, and trying to get Jerome’s workshop up and running.”
“You need a bigger house,” Lyzette said.
“I don’t want to move. I like this neighborhood.”
“Then we’ll just have to burn it down and build a new one. Maybe we can send the Tiguan to a fiery death along with the house and you can replace both,” Bill said.
“I don’t have a cushy government job anymore—I can’t afford to burn down my house and build another or replace the Tiguan. I’m a small business owner and I have a family to take care of.”
I didn’t mention to anyone that Jerome’s school was costing me an arm and a leg every semester or that my parents were kindly offsetting the cost of it right now while I started my business. Not that they minded. They had more money than they knew how to spend. As soon as I’d quit my job with the Bureau of Exorcism, they’d decided to give me money, enough to pay off the mortgage on my house and the loan on my car. I had enough for the first six months of office rental space. I started with a small, single room office, but had to expand three months ago to a larger space because I needed a biller and a receptionist. I was now in a strip mall in Chesterfield sharing an office with a witch who doubled as a private investigator and consulted with the St. Louis Police Department. It had been a hair and nail salon before I rented the place and we were still doing the renovations. Shortly after signing the lease, my parents bought the building, saving me even more money.
“That’s why you have homeowner’s insurance,” Bill said.
“Yeah, that won’t look suspicious at all.” I smirked.
“I’ll never mention we had this conversation. I’ll do it one weekend when you’re all gone.”
“Can we borrow your movie projector next weekend?” Lyzette asked, changing the subject.
“Of course,” I said. We occasionally did neighborhood movie nights and projected the movies on the side of a house and set up lawn chairs. The kids sold popcorn and lemonade, tea, coffee, and occasionally hot chocolate if it was spring or fall.
“Good, I just got in a new movie,” Lyzette said. “You’ll love it.”
“What is it?” I asked suspiciously.
“The Prophecy,” she smirked.
“I’ll invite my parents and uncles.” I smirked back.
“That movie is so old, and the special effects are terrible. We should consider picking newer movies for these,” Jerome said, coming to join us. “Speaking of modern, I’m making dog treats that will allow you to change your dog’s appearance, if anyone wants some.”
“Change it how?” Bill asked, raising an eyebrow.
“I’m going to make Angel shorter and give her some more coloring. So, height and color for sure. You could make Chance taller.” Chance was a dachshund who was rotund and occasionally dragged his belly on the ground if he was going over a small hill.
“Oh yes, Daddy, then he wouldn’t get lost if we ignore mowing the lawn for two weeks!” one of Bill’s daughters said.
“Chance may not like being a little taller, it may make him clumsy.”
“Dad, can we get a unicorn?” she asked, after a moment of silence. I heard Jerome’s unicorn shift behind us.
“Does your unicorn have on horseshoes?” I asked.
“Yes,” Jerome answered.
“Okay...” I said. Of course, it was wearing horseshoes, I thought. Jerome was from the big city, the only horses he’d probably ever encountered had been crowd control horses with the Chicago Police Department, and they would have been shod.
“I like your unicorn,” a girl named Mazy said to Jerome. “He’s very pink.” Mazy was 12 and a vampire. I was convinced she had a crush on Jerome, but he didn’t agree.
“It’s a girl unicorn and she’ll disappear in an hour or so,” Jerome answered.
“Can you ride her?” Bill’s daughter asked. I could never remember her name.
“I don’t know,” Jerome said. “I just thought her up a little while ago, and I didn’t think about whether I could ride her or not when I was imagining her. I just made her so she wouldn’t be a biter.” Awesome, I thought.