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A police officer returned from the woods with Penelope, and we all moved from Bill’s backyard into the road. Jerome was faintly glowing, an indication that he was using strong magic. Janet was also glowing slightly. I watched as the two performed complicated hand gestures over lines I could feel, but not see.
“They’re quite good at this,” Penelope said.
“Janet taught the spells to Jerome after she put them in place, as a precaution. He can recharge it himself if someone breaks it,” I told her.
“That was good thinking,” Penelope said, sounding sad. I looked at her. “I was just thinking it was a pity he can’t do that for our coven . . . .”
“He’s tried boosting it before—it drains him and makes the healing spells go wild.”
“I know,” she answered. “Your uncle is coming to give us a boost today, fingers crossed.” Michael has admitted he can cure Valerie, but it will kill him. Normally, a curse is broken after the caster dies, but not in Valerie’s case. They tied the curse to death magic, most likely the murder of her husband. No one has been able to break it, and Valerie put her foot down and refused Michael’s help when she learned it would kill him, even though he was willing to do it for her.
My Uncle Michael is suicidal to some degree. Healing people for the last dozen millennia has taken its toll on him. He feels all their pain—both physical and emotional— when he heals. It has made him want to die, but only for a good cause. Unfortunately for him, it’s hard to kill an angel. Valerie’s curse would do it, but she’d have to consent to him taking it from her. She refuses, saying it isn’t right to exchange one life for another.
“Just remember, Michael can only help as much as Valerie will allow, regardless of what he says he can do,” I told her.
“We know, we’ve used him for other healings and before we called him in on this case, we asked Valerie’s permission and she told me about her meeting with him in the hospital in Chicago. Thankfully, the magic won’t work unless she consents,” Penelope said. “He can’t do it and just expect her to live with the consequences.”
The coven didn’t charge for their healing sessions. I was slowly making donations to them for treating Valerie, although they didn’t know it, or if they did, they hadn’t mentioned it. Every couple of weeks, my parents and I went and bought gift cards for each of them and mailed them out with a return of address that would see them returned to a cousin on my mom’s side. Since my mom was really five hundred years old, it was hard to connect her family to my sister or myself.
The vet showed up in the middle of the chaos, and the police actually let him through after he said he was there about a unicorn, which was now eating the grass in my front yard. We’d left the garage door open and the unicorn was just hanging out there.
He parked a truck with a trailer in front of my house, got out, pulled a bag from the passenger’s seat and looked around.
As a nephilim, I don’t normally have wings, but I have found that once in a while wings appear, thanks to Jerome. He says I do have some, but they are hidden under my skin. I have yet to have an X-Ray of my back done to confirm this. As I stood in the circle talking to a patrol officer, I felt the magic touch me. I turned to look at Jerome and caught sight of big feathers dangling over my shoulders. The feathers were blue, further proof that I probably don’t have wings, as all the angels I know have whitish-yellow ones. I glared at Jerome, and he shrugged.
“You must be Soleil,” Dr. Hawes walked over to me.
“Yes. I don’t normally have wings,” I told him.
“I was going to comment that I’ve never seen an angel with blue wings; they are very pretty,” he said.
“Thanks, they are a magical construct, kind of like the unicorn.” I nodded at it. “Unfortunately, the wizard doing the magic seems incapable of making it a short-term spell as intended. We don’t know if it will last a couple of hours, a couple of days, a month, or the rest of his life, meaning we could end up with a unicorn for a very long time.”
“I brought some horse feed. I wasn’t sure if you would have any or have time to stop and get some, considering the crime scene tape,” he said as he looked over my shoulder.
“My neighbors were attacked. We found them after I called your office. I have three acres here and access to several acres of woods that run along the river. If it’s friendly and will sleep in a stable, I can have one built in a few weeks or less. But I don’t know jack about horses.”
“You did the right thing. Most people wouldn’t call a vet to learn about a horse, or in this case, a unicorn. It does behave like a horse, right?”
“Good question,” I said. “My parents have a stable, but no horses. My sister is going through a divorce and her ex-husband bought their daughters a horse. I’ve met it but meeting a single horse doesn’t mean I know anything about them. And theirs might be a dwarf horse or a very young horse. It’s not nearly this big.”
“Do they have a vet for it?” he asked.
“Not yet. It’s currently being kept at their other grandparents’ house. However, we all agree that their father will be done with taking care of a horse in a short time, so we suspect it will be shipped to my parents soon.” He handed me several cards.
“A stable is definitely better than a garage. They’ll need food and water containers. Horses will munch on grass, but they prefer horse feed and hay mixes. Shall we go look at your unicorn?”
“Sure,” I replied, and Jerome came with us. The vet inspected the unicorn’s hooves and commented on it wearing horseshoes. Jerome had to explain that he wasn’t sure why he thought it would have on horseshoes, but he did, so it did. Which sent the doctor and Jerome into a conversation on the imagination potion, The vet’s nieces and nephews were part witch and they had created imagination potions as well, but their creations had always disappeared within a short time frame, unlike Jerome’s. Jerome mentioned that I’d thought up a car and it had been gone by dawn, but his creations didn’t disappear as easily. He’d tried using the potion to imagine the unicorn gone and it hadn’t worked. He was prepared to take care of it, though, and do anything necessary.
After a couple of hours, the doctor pronounced the unicorn healthy as a horse, and gave Jerome a list of things to do to care for it. I had a moment when I had to decide whether I was going to let him keep it.
“Hey, I have a question, are horses allowed in the neighborhood?” I asked Lyzette and her family. They had lived here the longest.
“I think it will require a vote,” Lyzette said. “Until then, ask the vet for a place to board it.”
“I can board it at my parent’s house, temporarily,” I said. “But I just have this feeling it’s a permanent addition to our reality. Since it’s Jerome’s, I was thinking keeping it here would be a better solution in the long run.”
“I’ll send out notices and see if we can get people to give an opinion on it,” Lyzette said. We didn’t have a homeowner’s association, but big changes normally required everyone in the neighborhood to agree, and a unicorn and accompanying horse stable seemed like a big change.
My parents showed up a little while later with what appeared to be a brand-new truck and horse trailer. My mom is a petite blond woman born in the 1630s or 1640s. She stopped aging when she became pregnant with their first child in the 1660s. As a result, she was eternally youthful and didn’t look a day over 35, despite being several centuries old.
She literally hopped out of the truck and ran to Jerome. At 14, Jerome is an inch or two taller than she is. This doesn’t stop her from enveloping him in her arms when she hugs him. Jerome braced himself for my mom’s hug. His maternal grandparents had never been part of his life and his paternal grandparents were dead. He’d been unprepared for grandma hugs as a result, especially grandma hugs from a small blond woman. He was used to them now, though, and knew to brace for impact.
Mom didn’t just wrap an arm around someone and simply give them a quick little squeeze when she hugged. She enveloped them in both arms, pulled them in close, and squeezed like they were a giant tube of toothpaste, sometimes shaking as she squeezed. If you weren’t prepared for this tiny woman to do such a thing, it could knock you off balance. This was accompanied by forehead kisses, but since Jerome was taller, she settled for kissing his cheek while hugging him tightly and shaking him. After she finished with Jerome, she repeated everything but the kiss with Valerie. My mom was a hugger.
My father gave Jerome a high five and gave Valerie a very quick, one-armed hug. However, this wasn’t the norm for my dad, who was also a hugger. He looked at the unicorn and then at Jerome.
“I think it works like it’s supposed to for Soleil because she has very little imagination,” he said after a moment and no one, not even me, disagreed with him. Growing up, my parents had enough imagination for both my sister and I. It hadn’t seemed terribly necessary for us to have lots of imagination too. “But Jerome is one of those people that can think of six impossible things before breakfast, so sometimes it goes a little haywire for him. When you present it for your teacher, you should have Soleil be the demonstration dummy.” I wanted to snort out that in that way Jerome was exactly like my dad, but I didn’t.
“Have you named her?” Mom asked Jerome.
“No, should I?” he asked.
“I think so,” Dad responded. “After all, she was created by your magic and imagination, so she may be around a good long time. You’ll want to call her something, and you can bond better with something that has a name.”
“You could name her Pink Lady, given her color,” my mom suggested.
“I was thinking Star Dancer or something,” Jerome admitted. “She reminds me of one of those My Little Pony horses and they always have weird names like that.”
“I think the pink one is named Pinkie Pie,” Dad offered.
“I prefer Star Dancer,” I informed him. My nieces were currently big on My Little Pony, so there was no need to ask how Dad knew what they were named. Although if you asked my sister, it was our dad that had gotten the girls really interested in My Little Pony, and he’d bought them about a dozen of the small horses each. I had little doubt they probably had a Pinkie Pie or two among their collections. Pink was his favorite color.
“Well, let’s get Star Dancer in the trailer, so your mom....” my dad looked around. “What’s been going on here this morning, other than the unicorn?”
“Someone attacked Bill and his family,” Lyzette said from where she stood on our property line.
“Are they okay?” he asked.
“They will be,” I said hurriedly. “We should probably get a move on though, the coven only has a few hours with Valerie for her healing, and we’re eating up that time.”
“Michael hasn’t arrived yet,” Penelope said, checking her watch.
“My brother?” Dad asked. We all nodded.
“But I have limits to what kind of help I will and will not accept,” Valerie said with a stern edge in her voice.
“I know, that wasn’t my thought,” my dad said. “I was thinking it’s good he’s out and about in the world again.” He and Valerie talked quietly, with Valerie reiterating that she would not allow Michael to die to cure her. I don’t know if she was trying to ease my dad’s mind or her own. He reassured her that Michael was a big boy, and no one would hold her responsible for his actions.
Jerome took hold of the halter the doctor had put on the unicorn and led her to the trailer. She was docile and willing to let herself be loaded without complaint. The entire thing went smoothly, and my thought was that at least Jerome had created a tame unicorn. I was glad he hadn’t decided to name her Pinkie Pie, although I was sure my nieces would be like Bill’s youngest and want one of their own that they would indeed name Pinkie Pie.