CHAPTER 1
Rachel flipped down her car’s visor mirror and winced at what she saw staring back. As usual, her makeup was mediocre at best—foundation cakey, eyeliner unsteady, and she always filled in her eyebrows too dark. But beauty was only skin-deep, and that was the real problem, wasn’t it? What was under her skin. Or more specifically, who.
She sighed and tried not to spiral before her appointment. It was just so hard to muster up the energy for another interview. The place in front of which she was currently parked, waiting for one p.m. to roll around, was not promising. When most people hear “law firm,” they think of towering glass buildings and posh assistants that glare at you. Not a hot, dry mini-mall in far-suburban Virginia, a three-room office suite wedged between an Afro-Sushi hole-in-the-wall and a nail salon. D. Moran Esq. read the weathered sign. “Esq.” was usually a red flag.
Still, there was no reason to be pessimistic. She had an impressive resume. An impressive resume with, admittedly, some holes in it, but impressive nonetheless. She was decent-looking, makeup notwithstanding, and she carried herself well. She knew that she was smart and witty and could make enough small talk to last a whole interview. And she knew the rules: greatest weakness should be a cleverly disguised strength, like Well gosh, I just can’t function without my morning cup of coffee! Which I’d pick up along with yours, sir, and have on your desk by seven a.m. every day!
But. All the interview prowess in the world couldn’t help with Rachel’s very basic problem. The fact that she was, well … creepy.
There was something odd about her. Off. Maybe it was her sickly pale skin; maybe it was the unsettling sheen over her eyes. People just naturally didn’t like her, and it didn’t seem to matter that they couldn’t explain why. She had figured out by now that she gave most people a sense of icy dread, made them feel like when they met her eye the hair on the backs of their necks stood up, and they could hear someone wailing far off in the distance.
And sometimes when she sneezed, she sprayed ectoplasm all over the room, dissolving half the furniture. There was also that time she cracked her knuckles and it somehow summoned this massive dark cloud that swirled and groaned, shooting off pale pink bolts of lightning and sucking up cluttered paperwork from the interviewer’s office while the guy screamed and clutched on to his ficus.
Yeah. She’d been on a lot of interviews.
She looked again at the law firm of D. Moran Esq. The sun was baking hot, and she just knew she was going to have pit stains before she even got to the front door.
Abruptly, it wasn’t daytime anymore, it was night—blackest night—and it wasn’t hot, it was freezing cold. The wind was howling, whipping against her skin. Because she was moving, hurtling forward—no, sideways. She was on a train, gripping on to an iron rail that was oily and frigid, a river stretched out below her, stars above. There was a screaming sound—the steam from the engine—and human screams too. Gunshots. And she just knew, in her bones, that she wasn’t going to be on this train when it reached its final destination. Somehow, she knew that she was going to be in that river instead.
She shook her head, coming back to reality. Why was it always trains? Heaving one last sigh, she opened her car door to the scorching afternoon.
The receptionist, who was in no way posh, took her back fairly quickly. Her interviewer, the famous D. Moran, was pretty much what she’d been expecting—a schlubby, middle-aged guy with a flat face and a flat affect. He stood and smiled as she came in the room, offering his hand, and once they sat back down he said, “Nice to meet you. Welcome to the job interview. Always painful, but hey, I promise we can at least keep it relatively short.” He delivered this with a dry gravity and very slight smile that immediately made her like him. He had palpable dad energy. Well, not her dad, but a dad.
She smiled in response to his quip, but he seemed to see through it. “I don’t know why I use that joke, it’s not always painful,” Moran said, scratching the back of his neck. “Anyway. Uh, so. The junior litigator position.”
“Yes,” Rachel said, smiling brightly. Don’t be creepy. Don’t exude dread. No wailing, no ghostly clouds, no plasm of any kind, ecto- or otherwise.
He started by telling her a bit about the firm, most of which was unsurprising. It was a small shingle, just Moran and his receptionist at the moment. “Eventually we’d like to get some big juicy corporate clients, but right now it’s mostly divorces, property disputes, y’know,” he said, eyeing her a little more closely than she was entirely comfortable with. “Probably the kind of stuff you’d find pretty boring.”
“Not at all!” she said. “I’m—I’m eager to get to work.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, again with that small, knowing smile that was probably not a good sign for her job prospects. She fidgeted with her suit lapels and took a subtle deep breath.
“So,” he said, picking a sheet of paper up from his desk. “This is a very impressive resume.” She did not miss the skepticism in his voice as he said that. “Montrose Law, moot court, law review, summers at Macht and Adams,” he said, ticking items off. Then he pretended to squint at the paper, probably as some sort of unconscious courtesy, and said, “It doesn’t say here when you graduated.”
“Hmm,” Rachel said. It was the best answer she had come up with so far to the unspoken question. She tugged on the hem of her suit jacket, straightening it, and heard the scream of a steam engine again, felt the biting rush of wind. She cleared her throat and willed herself not to get sucked into another past-life memory.
“So,” Moran said, with a look that was so direct it made Rachel uncomfortable. “Why are you here? Why aren’t you interviewing at one of the big firms in Boston?”
Explanations and lengthy monologues were on the tip of her tongue, forged from dozens and dozens of interviews past, but abruptly they all vanished. Looking into Moran Esq.’s sharp eyes, Rachel just … broke.
She let out a long, long sigh, her posture loosening, as every last one of her inhibitions evaporated. “Because Virginia is one of four states that will let you take the bar without graduating law school,” she said.
Moran didn’t miss a beat. “And why didn’t you graduate?”
“Because I died.”
Moran jerked. He tilted his head, his eyes going wide, as if she had finally surprised him. She felt irrationally proud of herself. “You … died,” he said slowly, blinking.
“Mm-hmm,” she confirmed.
Curiosity lit up his eyes, but she saw the exact moment it got brought up short by something else, and he remained silent. And then Rachel couldn’t help it—she laughed.
Moran blinked again, looking more confused than ever, but Rachel couldn’t stop laughing. Christ, this was going in the Crappy Interview Hall of Fame. “Sorry—I’ve never said that in an interview before,” she got out between chuckles, “but I don’t know why I expected a follow-up question from you. You’re a lawyer! A lawyer would never ask something as litigation-provoking as ‘what are you.’ Because officially, y’know, discrimination against supernatural entities in hiring, and housing, and the provision of medical care is illegal.” Rachel sighed, her laughter fading. “But that’s not going to stop you, or anyone. That’s what no one ever wants to admit about the law, that it’s bullshit. But I’ve been on seven interviews in the last three days and I’ve lost count how many interviews before that and I’m…” She scrubbed a hand over her face, mussing her mediocre makeup. “I’m tired.”
Moran’s surprise and confusion had faded back down under his more familiar dry affect. “The law is bullshit, huh?” he asked.
“No, no. The law is noble and fascinating,” Rachel said. “But if you do discriminate against me on the basis of my undead status, which is plainly illegal, I wouldn’t have any recourse. So, y’know, practically. It’s bullshit.”
Moran sat forward on his elbows. “Why wouldn’t you have any recourse?”
“I’d have to sue you, which would require money,” Rachel said. She left out the part where she was living in her car. “But even if I had money, I’d have to find a judge willing to actually entertain a suit by someone like me, and I’m not exactly an appealing plaintiff, seeing as I’m a corpse.”
Moran flinched but said nothing, so she went on. “No, to win a suit like that I’d have to be a sexy werewolf or a beautiful faerie or, I dunno. Someone who’d look human and sympathetic in all the pictures you’d take for the articles and the posts.” Someone who wasn’t visibly, intangibly off-putting; who didn’t make others shrink back in fear of her ghostly aura. “Because you wouldn’t win that case without public sentiment on your side. No nonhumans on the bench. Openly, anyway.”
Moran was tapping a finger against his jaw. “You think lawsuits are won and lost on the basis of how appealing the plaintiffs are?”
She thought for a moment, and then conceded, “Not all of them. But the first one. The first big one. And … most of the rest of them. Because the law is—”
“Bullshit, right,” Moran finished. He was starting to smile again. “Okay. So if, as you say, you have no recourse, I guess I’m not risking a lawsuit if I ask…” He narrowed his eyes, but there was only curiosity in his tone, not horror or fear, when he asked: “What exactly are you?”
“I’m haunted,” Rachel told him.
He raised his eyebrows. “Haven’t heard of that one.”
“I’m possessed by a poltergeist,” she explained. “Like a haunted house, except I’m a haunted person.”
“What does that mean?” Moran asked.
“It means … I’m not fully my human self anymore, but I’m not just a meat puppet for the spirit inside me either,” she said. “I’m something new. And, old.”
Moran leaned forward more, squinting at her. She knew he was probably cataloguing all the same things others did: her pale, lifeless skin; her oily, undead eyes; her aura of death and decay. But she didn’t actually glow or have visible horns, so she could see Moran wrestling with the skeptic within.
“You don’t believe me,” she said. This was a new problem—she’d been focusing most of her energy on seeming less dreadful, not convincing anyone of exactly how filled with dread they should be.
She closed her eyes and thought of trains, of a frigid, starry sky, and the icy bite of a coiled black river. She thought of all the human parts she didn’t have anymore—the mortal flesh, the fully beating heart, the unblemished soul. She heard the scream of a steam engine, smelled her skin starting to putrefy, felt her eyes clouding over.
When Rachel looked in the mirror these days, she saw her same old self—except for her hair; ugh, she was never going to get over what the damn poltergeist had done to her hair—a bit paler, maybe, a bit creepy; but still mostly just the same old Rachel.
That wasn’t the case for everyone. People like Moran, sure, they saw her regular old mostly human self. But everyone she’d known before she had died, everyone she’d known as a human—they could only see her corpse. The horrifying state of it, she presumed, if she had simply died, instead of becoming possessed.
That was why she was here, after all. She hadn’t just died in a technical sense. The woman she had been had died, the life she’d lived had ended; and now she was this new thing. Something that was utterly and completely incompatible with the life she’d had before.
Not that anyone had really wanted her around, even if she hadn’t died.
So. She was dead, sort of; and though she didn’t normally look like an extra on a zombie show, she could summon it upon demand.
Moran jerked in his seat, and Rachel quickly cracked her neck, pulling it all back in. A glance down at her hand confirmed that her nails were back to their regular size, her skin back to its— Well, her skin didn’t exactly glow, but it wasn’t rotted and falling off her anymore.
Moran was still pale and shaking. “Jesus,” he panted. “Jesus.”
“I can also do party tricks,” she offered, though this was more of a bluff. She lifted a hand toward his desk and actually got a small stapler to levitate briefly, though it clattered back down after only a few seconds. “I’m still learning.”
Moran was staring at her in slack-jawed horror. Gently, Rachel said, “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Right,” he said jerkily, sitting forward. “Sorry. I just—I don’t understand. Are you—” He glanced at her resume. “Rachel Dewitt-Bronson, or are you … that entity?”
“Both,” she said. “I’m a PB and J sandwich, except the peanut butter is a human woman, and the jam is…” She trailed off theatrically, letting a waggling hand gesture encompass the rest.
Moran’s eyes were fixed on her. “Can you … exorcise it?”
She stifled her anger at the question. It wasn’t his fault; and anyway, her personal feelings on the matter weren’t really relevant to the answer. “No.”
He was shaking his head and rubbing his jaw, looking for all the world like a concerned father. It was almost sweet. “How did this … How?”
That was the relevant question, and she didn’t even know where to start.
How? Magic. Fate. Desperation.
The fact that, even while she’d been alive, Rachel had been an unbelievable fuckup. Now she was just a rotting fuckup.
Rachel took a steadying breath and said, “I had a bad day.”
Moran stared at her. Rachel felt oddly … cleansed. She’d torpedoed the interview, but maybe this had gotten it out of her system. Maybe she’d worked through some shit.
“Thank you for your time,” she said, standing up. “This was fun. Well, more fun than the other interviews.”
Moran stood at the same time and said, “You’re hired.”
A crack of thunder sounded outside from a clear blue sky, but Moran didn’t seem to notice. Rachel was blinking at him. “Excuse me?”
He shrugged, and started to smile again. “I’m getting a Montrose Law grad for pennies on the dollar. Well, almost-grad. And, you know I’ll be paying you pennies, right?”
Rachel was starting to smile too. “How many pennies?”
CHAPTER 2
SIX MONTHS LATER
The unicorn awoke as a human for the first time in a field under dappled sunlight. The stiff grass was itchy and unpleasant against her sensitive human skin—raw and vulnerable without her coat—and there was an irritating high-pitched noise coming from somewhere nearby.
She sat up, struggling at first with the unfamiliar anatomy, before she realized that the noise was coming from a small metal device she was holding in her—oh wow, her hand. She lifted it to her face, dropping the metal thing, and stared at her fingers and knuckles and palm in fascination. Hands. She had two of them!
Her attempt to admire the beauty of her human hands was stymied by the clamor from the buzzing metal device. Exasperated, she picked it up and realized that there were symbols on its smooth surface, pulsating and seeming to demand some action from her. She poked at the symbols randomly—fingers!—and the noise finally stopped, but was immediately replaced with a tinny, artificial human voice.
“Hi!” said the object. “Where are you?”
“What?” she asked, and immediately recoiled at the sound of her voice. Her human voice—how strange. She touched her human throat—soft, delicate, bumpy—and shook her head. So many changes to adjust to. Maybe she’d rushed into this.
“What do you see?” said the device—the phone, she now realized. She’d dropped it in the grass in her shock, but the voice was still coming through clearly. “I’m nearby, but I need your help to find you.”
“What?” the unicorn said again. “Who is speaking?”
“Actually, y’know what, I think I can hear you,” said the voice, just as it started to echo slightly—the phone’s squawking preempted by a distant, real human voice that matched it. “Is that you, by the tree line?”
“The what?” she asked, glancing around. That was indeed the edge of a forest behind her, but it wasn’t her Wood. She could tell that immediately.
With another glance up at the pale human sky, and the sight of a small human city in the distance, it suddenly hit her how very, very far from home she was.
She took a deep breath. Nose and lungs seemed more or less the same. She could do this.
A human was approaching her, crunching through the grass, a phone held to her ear. The unicorn tensed, unsure if this was friend or foe, but the human smiled at her—a small, relieved smile, which seemed to hold no malice behind it. “There you are,” she said. She did something to the phone she was holding, and the one in the grass finally, blessedly went silent. “Here, I have clothes.”
Right, clothes. She’d seen enough visions of humans removing their clothing to know that wearing it was typically considered essential. She looked down at her own brand-new human body—in many ways similar to her true form, if bizarrely hairless—and was caught on the sight of her legs. “They’re so small,” she said, horrified. Could she even run with these? Would those tiny, spindly feet support her weight? She wiggled her toes experimentally, eyeing them with distrust. They looked like they’d burst if she tried to so much as kick something.
“Hmm? Oh, compared to—yeah, that’s alright, they look healthy to me,” said the human, with a quick, impersonal glance over her. “Yep—human body, English language skills, and a cell phone. I’ve seen worse.”
The unicorn blinked, and said again, “What?”
The human shook her head and seemed to remember herself. “I’m Lily, your Dimensional Integration Consultant. I’m here to help you acclimate to the human world.” She proffered the plastic bag she’d had slung over her shoulder, peeling it back to reveal plain human clothing within. “You should get dressed. People do that here.”
“Right,” she said, and hesitantly reached for the fabric in the bag. It was the first time she’d touched something with her hands—well, aside from the phone, and the grass, and her own skin—and it was not unpleasant. The clothes seemed soft enough. She paused for a moment, letting the fabric slide over her human fingertips, slightly transfixed by it all.
“I know, it’s a lot,” Lily said, watching as she simply stared at the clothing. “You’ll be fine.”
Lily helped her into the clothes—soft leggings and a few different layers for her upper half, which she had to admit did help keep her bare skin warm. Then Lily helped her stand up, a strange affair on only the two legs—made even more awkward by the footwear Lily assured her was necessary for traversing the human plane. Once she’d gotten her balance, Lily picked the phone up from where she’d dropped it in the grass and slipped it into a pocket in the clothes, ignoring her grimace. “Trust me,” she said. “You’ll need it.”
Then Lily started steering her toward the human city. “We need to get some food in you,” she said. “It’s important, for the spell.”
The spell. It hit the unicorn in a dizzying rush, the realization that she was here. She was human.
She hadn’t been able to do it alone. Some unicorns could shift into human form all by themselves, but she did not possess that magic. She wasn’t a foaling—no matter what her people liked to call her—but she was relatively young and inexperienced, so despite her persistent interest in the human world, she’d never dreamed she would have the chance to come here. To live as a human, even if only for a short while.
Their world was beautiful in its own way—smaller and flatter than her Wood, but the sky was a nice blue color, intercut with clouds both wispy and straight. And the human village Lily directed her to looked cheery and warm, decorated all over with small twinkling lights.
The human world was also, however, very loud. The cars alone created a cacophony of noise and smoke and movement. And as Lily helped her venture farther into the city, the sounds of humanity rose around them like a din: whispers, shouts, murmured conversation, screams and laughter, babbling nonsense and loud moaning.
It took quite some time for the unicorn to realize that most of these sounds were not traveling through the air, like the growling of the cars or the occasional scattered conversations. No, these other noises were coming from within the humans.
At first it was all a clamor—more noise than she had ever heard at once, almost dizzying. There was music, something she had only ever heard before in a vision of life on this plane, but also the sounds of humans shouting, grunting, and gasping. She sensed excitement and jitters and a crushing, viselike feeling. The humans, on their insides, felt squirmy and leaping, like bolts of lightning captured in a jar and left to ferment.
Lily was watching her in concern. “What is it?” she asked. “The sunlight? The smog?”
“I think it’s … the people,” she managed.
“Ah,” Lily said, and didn’t ask more.
She led her into a small building that smelled strongly of grease and meat. The unicorn shuddered, but Lily reassured her that this was their intended destination. There were people there too, although fewer than there had been outside, and yet the roar and ruckus of their cravings were just as bright. So many eyes seemed to settle on her as they walked in the door, but she could also feel the humans looking at each other, and it was—it was all—
“Sit,” Lily said firmly, leading her to a booth. After a moment another human brought them glasses of water, and Lily instructed her to drink. Remarkably, as she did so, some of the clamor subsided. She dimly registered the same human coming back to their table and talking to Lily briefly, but she was too distracted by the blissful feeling of the water going down her throat and the noise of the humans calming to pay it much mind.
“Good ole tap,” Lily said, as she finished and licked her lips. “Seems like that helped.”
“Hmm?”
“The water.”
“Oh, yes,” the unicorn said. “It’s very nice.”
“Good,” Lily said, with a smile that seemed genuine. “So. Do you have a name?”
She tried to answer, then frowned, and touched her throat again. “I … I can’t—”
“No equivalent in the human tongue, huh?” Lily said. “Okay, so you get to pick a new name. That’s fun! I always recommend Lily, but no one’s taken me up on it yet.”
The unicorn stared at her, and Lily cleared her throat and took a sip of her own drink—something dark brown and with a pungent odor that was, apparently, nonetheless potable. A few moments later, the other human returned and put a plate of greens in front of her. They were wilted and dull, but Lily nodded at the plate encouragingly. “Go ahead.”
She picked up a leaf and chewed on it reluctantly. It was about as appetizing as it looked, but as with the water, it seemed to have a grounding effect.
Now that the chaos had subsided somewhat, she took the opportunity to observe their surroundings. This was surely a restaurant—she had seen several in her visions of the human world before. It was enormously strange, being in a realm that was completely alien to her except for the tiny glimpses she had gotten here and there of a familiar item or a familiar ritual. She’d only glimpsed a threadbare patchwork of the human world, but she had memorized every single strand.
She was also starting to realize that, with the noise somewhat lessened, she could pick out individual humans and their inner musings. A man at the counter was eating something fried, watching a pornographic film on his phone, and thinking about how he was overdue with some remittances and could face punishment if he did not pay them soon. The woman who had brought them their food was thinking of a noxious customer she had served earlier, and was fantasizing about having defiled his meal.
At the booth behind Lily, a pair of humans both had full plates in front of them, but only the woman was eating. The man was watching her eat, fascinated by the sight of her plump lips closing around each morsel of food, thinking of her teeth and her guts and the curve of her hips. The woman saw him watching and was embarrassed but also aroused, and the man nudged her plate closer to her, wanting more.
Lily’s perky voice interrupted her observations. “So,” she said. “Welcome to Earth.”
“Thank you.”
“Like I said before, the coven that performed the spell that brought you here hired me to help you acclimate to this realm.” Holding up several fingers in turn, she said, “A few disclaimers: I cannot help you conquer any or all of the human world. I cannot help you commit any crimes or violence. And I cannot help you transport a human being to your home dimension against their will.”
She frowned. “Why would I want to do that?”
Lily had already moved on. “Any allergens you’re aware of? Human substances that might be toxic to you?”
“No.”
“Okay. You should probably stay away from silver, iron, and honey,” Lily said. “Those tend to be the big ones, but if you encounter something you’re not sure about, or if you have any issues, call me. Oh, and you’ll need to remember to eat occasionally.”
She glanced down at her wilted leaves. “Not like the humans do, for sustenance,” Lily added quickly, seeing her expression, “but you need some tie to the human world to help sustain your new form.”
“How often?” she asked reluctantly.
“Once a week should be fine.”
“Hmm.”
“Okay.” Lily’s tone became less businesslike and more awkward. “Now, you may know that the humans, uh, have recently become aware that we exist. Uh, we nonhumans. Back in the day a lot of my job was helping people like us go about undetected, but, well—that’s not strictly necessary anymore. Still, I’d recommend discretion. Humans can be … intolerant. Sometimes even hostile.”
This was not new information. In her experience, when humans had crossed paths with her people, they reacted with fear at best and grotesque violence at worst. That was just one of the many reasons so few unicorns had any desire to see more of the human world. And she would certainly stand out here; her human form was almost indistinguishable from the real thing, but for some reason, she had come through with bright blue skin. So discretion would be … challenging.
But she was not afraid. “I am aware,” she answered Lily. “And I know how to defend myself.”
This was true in theory, but perhaps less so now that she occupied this ridiculous human form. She glanced down at her frail, twiglike legs, capped with those sinewy, fleshy tubes that had to be swaddled in cloth and rubber to even tread upon the ground. Pathetic.
Then she shook off this concern. Fleshy bodies or not, the humans found plenty of ways to inflict damage upon themselves and others. She could surely manage the same in her own defense.
“Good,” Lily said. “And really, it’s not that bad. There’s a lot to explore on good ole Earth. So—” She smiled encouragingly. “How can I help you?”
The unicorn blinked. “What do you mean? Should I eat more food?”
Lily chuckled. “No, I meant—why are you here, on this plane? What is it you want to do here?”
It was surreal to even be asked the question. Of all the many times back in the Wood that the unicorn had found human artifacts, seen the human world in visions, and dreamed of all the human things she had not yet seen, it had never occurred to her that she would actually have a chance to go to the human realm. Not until the day she had come upon something in the Wood far more alarming than an abandoned human object.
She had been grazing peacefully when the air flickered between two tree trunks ahead of her, and in the next moment a small, flimsy portal opened between them, showing what looked very much like the human world. It was a dark, dirty alley, and a human man was there, sitting crouched against the wall, trying to stay warm in the collection of haphazard rags he was wearing.
When the human spotted her through the portal, his eyes had widened. Beautiful! he’d said, his voice shocked and animated and hoarse. They’re so beautiful! Unicorns!
Someone farther away in the human world shouted back, Shut up, Earl! and before he had a chance to reply, the portal had vanished with all the weight of a bubble popping.
The thunder of hooves told her she was not alone, and soon her Kin—a great-aunt on her Sire’s side—burst into the clearing next to her, drawn by the mystical energy of the strange event. Foaling, she’d said, warm but concerned. What happened here? Are you well?
I am. She’d looked at the trees, curious and exhilarated. It wasn’t just an object from the human world. It was … a window.
Her Kin shook her head uneasily and snorted. She was one of the oldest and wisest unicorns in their Wood, and the most beautiful. A window that shouldn’t be, she’d said, sounding fearful. The barriers between worlds are failing.
The unicorn was shocked. Are you sure?
Her Kin trod closer to where the portal had been mere moments ago, nudging curiously at the trees. It is feared everywhere; it is understood nowhere. And no one knows how it can be stopped. The older unicorn turned back and took a step closer to her. The connections we share with other realms have always been tenuous and hard to understand, and that is why so many of us shrink away from them. But we must understand these connections, especially now that they are growing so gossamer thin. If our worlds continue to overlap or break down, the consequences could be dire. This is no ordinary quest.
It had taken the unicorn a moment to catch up. There’s a quest?
We need an answer not about one specific foe or disaster or crisis, her Kin went on, direly serious. The entire universe is narrowing—possibly collapsing in on itself. Learning why will not be an easy task.
Learning why?
Her Kin had stared deep into her eyes. You have never been one to shy away from the human world, foaling.
No, she had said.
Would you go there? her Kin asked. If I could get the spell for you, would you brave the human plane and seek answers about the Convergence of the worlds? For your people? For me?
And now she was here—in the human world, in a human restaurant, with a human sitting across from her, waiting for an answer to her very simple question.
But to the unicorn, speaking of these things—of her Kin, of the Convergence—felt almost … intimate. As if she would be sharing something private to her people. “I’ve always wanted to come here,” she said instead, which was true. “I’ve always wanted to … understand this place.”
“Sure,” Lily said. Then the silence stretched a bit. “So—just general sightseeing then? Taking in all the splendor of Earth?”
The unicorn stared out the window at the gray street and the darkening sky, and couldn’t think of anything else to say. It wasn’t just nerves about her Kin and the Convergence; the reason she had accepted her great-aunt’s quest so readily was that this world had always entranced her, left her unable to think of anything else. Because it felt like what she needed to do.
But now she was here, with a mission she barely understood and wasn’t ready to share with anyone, and no idea where to even get started. She couldn’t even come up with something to tell Lily—some place or ritual she wanted to explore, some human event she especially wanted to witness. Which should have been easy, after everything she had seen. Everything she had yearned for.
With Lily’s questions hanging in the air between them, and her human mouth all glued up with anxiety and fear, the unicorn felt … ridiculous.
After a moment, Lily reached over and cupped her hand comfortingly. That was pleasant, how human hands could overlap and entwine to provide warmth or companionship. “It’s okay,” Lily said. “It’s a big transition, huh? Why don’t you think about it for a while?”
“Okay,” she said unhappily, and sipped some more of her water for want of anything else to do.
At least Lily seemed to be waiting patiently for her answer without any sense of judgment. She was human in appearance, with pale brown skin, long bouncing blonde hair, and the kind of pouting lips that seemed so in vogue among the humans. She was wearing a boxy tan suit, but she didn’t seem harried or preoccupied like some of the other more formally dressed humans.
In fact, she realized after a moment, she was not getting any sense of Lily’s innermost thoughts whatsoever. Sitting here with her was … quiet. Peaceful.
She may have looked human, but clearly she was not.
Lily reached over and took her phone. “Look—my number is preprogrammed into your phone. That’s me,” she said, pointing at the sole entry. She glanced up quickly, and added, “Can you read this?”
The lettering on the phone seemed simple enough. “Yes.”
“Good,” Lily said, sounding relieved. “So—if you think about it, and you have any questions, you can always call. My recommendation: we should start by finding you someplace to live.”
“Don’t I live … here, now?” she asked. “In the human realm?”
“Yes, I mean a specific residence,” Lily said. “You can’t just sleep outside. It’s too cold for this new body. And it’s technically illegal.”
“It’s … illegal?” she asked in confusion. “To … not have someplace to live?”
Lily winced. “Yeah. Well, when you put it like that, it makes the human world sound kind of … nightmarish.” She grimaced broadly, a caricature of glee. “Welcome!”
The unicorn huffed. “Anyway,” Lily said. “To get an apartment, and more food and more clothes, you’ll need income. Your people told the coven that they have a lockbox at the bank with valuables in it, which should keep you afloat for at least a while, but you might want to consider a job. Mainly, you’re going to want to befriend some humans. Or, better yet, some nonhumans. I know some guys who are looking for a roommate…”
She looked out the window as Lily nattered on. A gentle rain had started to fall, and the humans she could see on the street out the window were scurrying for cover.
The entire scene was like something out of a dream. She was here—among the humans—conversing with a human, or someone close to it, and eating human food. She had done it; she had made it here, and so far the human world was both overwhelming and somewhat banal. But the unicorn still felt that familiar itch under her skin—to see, to understand. She wanted to learn more.
And she wanted, rather badly, to feel sure of this place she had dreamed of for so long. To know that she had made the right choice in accepting her Kin’s quest. Right now the human realm was just a place, and when Lily asked what she wanted here—why she had come—there was nothing in this restaurant she could point to.
Squaring her shoulders, she turned back to Lily and said, “Thank you for your help. I think I can take it from here.”
Lily’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh. Are you sure?”
“Yes,” the unicorn said, standing. “It is time for me to explore the human realm on my own.”
“Got it,” Lily said slowly. “Well, um—okay. Just—don’t forget, keep that phone on you. And I’m here if you need anything!”
Bracing herself, the unicorn walked back out onto the human street, this time on her own. It was somewhat dizzying to simply wander in a completely foreign world, but it was an exhilarating kind of dizziness. She did get a few odd looks from the humans as she made her way down the street, but no one approached her. She was belatedly grateful that the human garment Lily had given her had a hood, and she pulled the fabric tight around her face.
She walked for some time, past shops and homes and wide green spaces and foul-smelling, bleak industrial parks. The human world was unbelievably varied, with surprises and confusions seemingly around every corner. And none of it was like what she had seen before in her visions. She wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or not.
As the day wound into evening, she found herself walking by a house that was simply overflowing with humans drinking and listening to music. The entire house seemed lit up, both within and in the twinkling lights draped all around it. It was warm and loud and merry, and the unicorn felt a sure sense that this was where she should go next.
There were a great many humans at the house, making it difficult to wade through both physically and psychically. But these humans were, for the most part, excited and joyous, and their thoughts buoyed her along as she mingled and explored the house. Some of the humans were dancing, though most were just talking amongst themselves, and some were playing a table game with red plastic cups.
She made her way to the opposite end of the house and ended up on a porch in the back. It wasn’t as densely populated as inside the house, but there were a few humans back here. She found a quiet corner and settled in to observe.
Across the deck from her, too far for her to hear their words but close enough to discern their thoughts, a pair of humans were locked in intimate conversation. They were almost leaning into one another, though they weren’t touching anywhere. It looked more as if they were always about to touch, swaying into one another and then back again.
And they wanted each other, their thoughts in complete and enthusiastic union on that point. But neither of them was sure that the other wanted them back, and that uncertainty and fear only excited them more. It was a game—a dance—and the longer she stared at them, the more the unicorn almost felt that she could see the tiny golden threads drawing them together, sparkling and gossamer thin. They were drawn to each other but still wary, and their hearts fluttered, buoyed by the risk, the chance, as the golden threads tightened around them. It was like a puzzle they were determined to solve in each other’s eyes, their words, and the pitch of their bodies toward each other; as those glittering threads drew them closer together, inch by precious inch.
The unicorn found that she was smiling. Fascinating.
She realized belatedly that a human had approached her and was speaking. He was tall and thin, with thick, bushy eyebrows, and he was saying something about not having seen her around here before.
“Yes,” she told him. “I’m new.”
“Cool,” he said with a smile. “Well, welcome.” His thoughts were churning with carnal urges, the desire to find a warm, feminine body and press it against his own.
“Thank you,” she said. “It’s a lot to take in.”
His eyes widened as she turned fully to face him. “Oh, uh—wow,” he said. “You’re … you’re beautiful.”
She could sense his shock—Lily was right; the humans knew now that they were not the only beings in existence, but he was still startled by the sight of her blue skin.
And, she slowly realized, he was stunned by her beauty. It dawned on her belatedly that the feminine body she had seen in his mind’s eye, the one he lusted after, was her own human form. It was so new to her that she hadn’t recognized it by sight.
He was staring at her lips, the curve of her cheek, the shape of her breasts he could make out through her clothing. This human found her human form incredibly appealing. He was coming up with all manner of ideas of what he would like to do to it.
She tilted her head at him. He seemed to read something into this, and stepped forward, tilting down until his lips met hers.
She stiffened in surprise, but didn’t otherwise move, curious to see what would happen next. The human made a muffled sort of groaning noise and stepped closer to her, his arms going around her waist, and his kiss became more aggressive—bulbous lips pressing and squishing against hers, nose smashed against her nose. Human faces did not seem optimized for this sort of intimacy, but judging from this human’s behavior, he was enjoying it a great deal.
Then his tongue broached her lips, thick and repellently moist. She shoved him away in sudden disgust, causing him to flail. “Uh, sorry, sorry.”
The unicorn wiped at her human lips, now coated with the man’s saliva. She had seen humans kissing in visions before, of course, but she had never imagined it would be so—so palpable. So primitive. So slimy.
And she felt tainted by this human kiss in a way she had never before felt tainted by her visions of the humans or her interest in them. Feeling this man’s secretions still drying on her lips, she felt ashamed.
The unicorn left the human party and returned to the heart of the city. It was growing very cold as the evening wore on, and she had to bundle her human clothes closer against herself to stay warm.
So far, in the human world, she had found noise, smells, clamor, fear, cold, lust, and shame. Her human heart was pounding fiercely, just as her true heart did when she was fearful or alarmed. For the first time since arriving, she was unable to stop the thought from forming completely in her mind:
What if coming here had been a mistake?
She shivered as she took a step onto a wide green field, the center of some kind of nexus of human buildings. Without more structures to block it, the wind was fiercer here, even whipping some flakes of snow into her face. She pulled the hood of her garment tight, and turned to look up at the stars.
She paused when she caught sight of the tall building to her right. It jutted far above the others, made of plain red brick and iron bars; and at the top of it, glowing like the moon itself, was a giant circle made of circles—a device measured out with numbers and arrows to guide the humans through their days.
A sense of calm washed over her. She was here, in the human realm, because she had needed to come here. There was something here she had to understand. She would find the answers her Kin was seeking, and save her people; and by the time that was done, she would be able to articulate exactly why she had needed to come here; what this place meant to her. She felt sure of it.
She fished the phone out of her pocket and managed to call Lily. “Lily,” she said. “I need the shelter you were speaking of.”
“Oh yes!” Lily said. “I know some guys who need a roommate. I’ll get you a meeting.”
“Thank you,” the unicorn said.
“By the way, did you pick a human name?”
The unicorn looked to her right, to the storefront at the base of the beautiful, giant clock. It looked to be a bookshop, full of delicately illustrated texts displayed for purchase. Their titles were now legible to her, with her new human knowledge. Romeo & Juliet. The Poetry of John Dunne. Tristan & Isolde.
“Yes,” she said.
Copyright © 2026 by Lucy Lehane.