Chapter Twenty-Four

It was impossible to say how fast we moved in Sideways or how much distance we covered. I barely felt the motion even as the ground fell away under Lialanni’s hooves. He was two separate entities to me. I couldn't settle the concept in my mind that Li was the unicorn. Logically, I knew that was the case, but my heart wouldn't accept it. There was the unicorn and there was Li, and whether or not they occupied the same space, they weren’t the same being. At least, not to me.

When the sun was just beginning to head downhill, its rays distorted by the grayscale scrim of Sideways, we came to a stop outside an abandoned plot of wasteland. I dismounted, and the unicorn flickered along with the world. It was abruptly, uncomfortably bright, then my eyes regained focus.

There was a rundown shack a little way off, a scattering of bitterly gnarled vegetation, and an outstandingly dusty old Volvo parked in the doubtful shade of a scraggly juniper.

"This does not look promising," I said.

"Incognito," he replied. "Think incognito."

I glanced at him, stupid gorgeous model athlete that he was, with a birthmark like a smudge of soot on his forehead, wearing unique, baggy, spidersilk clothing. Of course, my new sash wasn't exactly designed to go unnoticed, brilliant blue hairpiece that it was.

"Sure," I said. "We won't draw a single eye."

He had left keys taped to the underside of the vehicle's carriage. I didn't wait for him before plopping into the passenger seat. I knew the inside of the car should have given me heatstroke, shade or no, but somehow it was almost comfortable. I felt like a lizard basking on a stone. It was also nice to have cushioned seats again.

Li started the engine and told me we weren't far from a city whose name I didn't recognize. I didn't know much about Nevada, but I was glad we were close. I think bodily functions are slowed when you go Sideways, which is as unsettling a thought as it is useful. I was only slightly hungry despite the hours of travel, but I did have other, more pressing urges.

“Hurry up and drive, wherever we’re going," I said, setting my warm water bottle between us. "I have needs."

Li snorted, cruising down a long dirt and gravel path that finally connected with a highway. Cars rushed in both directions. Traffic--how long had it been? Already it felt like coming home.

"First, we visit the bank," he said.

"Unicorns have savings accounts?"

"It's 2015," he said. "Everyone does."

I believed him, but it still seemed wrong somehow. Next he would tell me about the guy he had diversifying his investments, and I would just have to tell him no. No. Mythical creatures are not allowed to have stock portfolios, no matter how pretty they happen to be

We followed the highway to a small city built around a river and a reservoir, not far from an Indian reservation. I was most interested in observing the resident population; people everywhere, cars tangling the streets, shouts and laughter and honking horns. It wasn't a big city by any measure, but contrasted with the few months spent on Milton's ranch, it was a metropolis.

Li pulled into a clean looking First Citizen’s parking lot in a low traffic area. Inside, a graying blonde watched me expectantly and looked surprised when Li handed her a withdrawal slip. She blinked at it, and at him, before counting out a sizable amount of cash. No one aside from this teller, behind her glass partition, paid us any mind. When Li had everything he needed in a few paper envelopes, the woman became bemused, as if someone had disappeared only she wasn't sure there had been someone there at all.

When Li and I exited she was still blinking, trying to bring the world back into focus.

"Where did you get a Social Security number?" I asked him in the parking lot.

"Trade secret," he grinned, and he handed me the cash.

I took it without thinking. "What's this for?" I asked, after I realized there were several thousand dollars in my hands.

"You’ll handle the money," he said, then shrugged. "No pockets." He flicked his fingers down his sides to demonstrate the absence.

"Seriously?"

"These are very special clothes," he chastened. "Don't criticize."

Then we went to Taco Bell. It was my idea. I adore the place, it was the closest fast food vendor in the area, and I really had to use the bathroom. Li laughed at my hurry, which was not nice, but when I returned, there were several chalupas waiting. I accepted them as an apology.

"Shouldn't we be worried about my mom finding us out on the town?" I managed to say between bites.

Li was looking over a crunch wrap supreme like he didn't know what to do with it; Frisbee or beret? "She can't be everywhere at once," he said, "and she is not patient."

"True," I agreed. That is standard cartoon villain behavior; leave before the job is done because you don't feel like waiting. “Doesn't she have minions or something? Henchmen she could have left behind to keep an eye out for us?”

Li shook his head and I was briefly mesmerized by the sheen of his dark hair as it swayed. Only briefly, I swear.

"The magical world is really very limited. There are no armies anymore. Numia is as large a gathering of sighted individuals outside of the Fae as you're ever likely to see. Since she doesn't have the resources to watch the entire city and its surrounding landscape with any efficiency, she probably abandoned it entirely. Someone is waiting for us, I'm sure, but not at the local Taco Bell.”

A small world hidden inside a big one, and getting smaller. That message seemed to sum up everything I had learned about magical existence. "Okay," I said. “But I still don't see why she didn't try to snatch us in Numia, or on the way out."

Li became thoughtful. "There are other places we could have gone to ground, though not many. Malice could not be sure. I have a hunch that Milton hurt her on his way out, weakened her enough to make her cautious."

"On his way out?" I had to resist the urge to jump and run. My voice shrank into a sharp whisper. "You mean you think he escaped?"

"No," Li hedged. "I'm not sure what happened to him. I only meant that there are other worlds than these."

While I was attempting to puzzle this out, a girl approached the table.

“Cool contacts,” she said to Li. Tall and pretty and fair, in a spaghetti strap halter and a skirt, she was pointedly ignoring me. “I love your eyes.” She leaned forward.

I wanted to bite her.

“Thank you,” said Li with a bland sort of wryness, and when it was obvious nothing else was forthcoming, the girl sniffed and went on to join a gaggle of friends. Li did not watch her go.

After a minute spent wrangling my irritation, I was struck by something more important than unwarranted jealousy.

“She noticed you,” I said. “No one at the bank noticed you.” For my part, I could have picked him out of a crowd of ten million, but others hadn’t.

Li quirked his mouth, much too amused. “Young people can see better, usually. Even when they don’t recognize what it is they are seeing.” I digested this.

“So we should be on the lookout for teenage witches?”

He snorted. “Hardly. As I said, I don’t think we’ll have any trouble in this city, as long as we’re on our way.”

With that in mind, we finished our dinner and made our foray into the airport. Well, airport might be generous. It was an airstrip, but we were able to procure seats on a flight scheduled that evening that would take us to a legitimate concourse. From there, we could go anywhere.

It was still unclear to me what our final destination was to be. All Li would say was that he was going to try to contact the Wizard’s Council, wherever they happened to be, and that he couldn’t do it in Nevada. To pass the hours before our flight, I suggested we go to a book store, and Li agreed that would do as well as any place.

We discovered a Barnes and Nobel’s, the last great book chain around, and I laid claim to a comfortable nook in the reading section. There was a deep-cushioned chair, and nearby, a shiny new urban fantasy novel. I practically squeaked with delight.

Li was casually surveying everywhere at once, so unobservably observant that I had to wonder aloud whether he was expecting someone.

“No,” he said wryly, “but if I was, I’d rather I saw them before they saw me.”

So instead of sitting down and reading like any person going ‘incognito,’ he insisted on standing guard, even going so far as to surreptitiously scout different quadrants of the store while always staying within sight of me. I could only shake my head. He hadn’t been nearly so concerned before, but maybe he thought we were taking too long.

The book was a winner, a paperback that had already been a bestseller. It told the story of a traveling midnight circus housing two rival magicians. A boy and a girl, engaged in a dangerous contest to the death, but…they’re falling in love. I almost laughed out loud over the sensationalism, but then again, there was always…

… The romance of a dragon and a unicorn, adversaries since the world began; pursued by sorcerers, aided by Fairies, they embark on a quest to halt the breaking of the world.

Oh, shush.

I couldn’t go any farther. Across the length of the book lane, I saw Li being approached by another girl, probably complimenting his eyes. At least she looked a little more subtle than the Taco Bell girl. She was pretty and too close to him, but I found solace in the fact that she wore a real shirt, sans spaghetti straps. He said something, and shot me a glance, and she left. It was like he was a movie star, the way they looked at him. I didn’t know girls did that.

My expression made him smile, I don’t know why. I intended it to make him cringe.

After what could have been an hour or an eon, he pulled up a smaller chair beside mine. There were plenty of people around, but none close enough to hear us.

“The girl with the curls seemed nice,” I said. “Did you check to see if any ancient evils were chasing her?”

He gave me the eyebrow at full mast. “Worried about something?”

I made a show of reopening the circus book. Li settled back into his chair, crossed his legs, and appeared at ease. He could have been a statue, but his eyes never stilled.

“Did Milton ever explain why Malice wanted you, aside from being your mother?”

“Nuh-uh,” I mumbled, not looking up. They had given some vague hints of illicit rituals, but I wasn’t going to mention them if he didn’t. Li put on his faraway mask, the one that said the reality I know is eddies in a desert wind compared to what has been. Then he spoke in a way that made me listen.

“At the end of the Wilding War, the wizards that remained faced a choice. Close the Gates and watch magic die, or risk tearing reality apart in the next war. With too much magic, laws are not laws any longer. Chaos reigns; the Shadow wins. There was argument that lasted decades. Wizards do nothing quickly, and finally, there were duels to quell the last dissenters.

So they gave up a portion of their power to save themselves, and the Gates were closed.”

A woman was loitering at the end of the aisle, pretending to be interested in a book she held upside down. She wore a jogging suit and sneakers, chestnut hair bound in a ponytail, not at all unattractive, but she had to be like, thirty. She could not be one of his admirers. Suddenly, her attention registered and Li gave her a look that sent her scurrying.

Oh, come on ! She was an adult . Li continued as if nothing had happened.

“The wizards put seals on the Gates so they could only be opened by the rarest of keys, different for each major Gate or network, so one would not work for all. The fact that they allowed keys at all was a compromise. The original goal was to close them off permanently, but the seals were proposed as a way to win the support of those who weren’t willing to take so final a step. They needed a failsafe so they wouldn’t have to cope with the idea that magic would surely die. They needed to believe that it could be brought back, if it was ever deemed safe, or if a need arose that would require it again.”

I had forgotten about my book. I could see where this was headed. It was so obvious, so final, that I almost wished he wouldn’t say it. Once it was said, there would be no taking it back, not ever.

“The seals were keyed to the great bloodlines. The Cariads descended from all the gods, dead and sleeping. The failsafe itself had a failsafe, almost as if they were giving the seals a probationary period before they became permanent. The lines have faded with the magic so that only a few remain. For every key that died, a Gate became useless, impassable. So the true sealing has been happening across the ages ever since, key by key.

The Dragon Gate, the Phoenix Gate, and the Unicorn; we are the last. If there are others that could still be used, I do not know them. We are the last, Abigail, and Malice does not have the spells it would take to bind me as I would need to be bound to be used in that way. This leaves only you.”

My mouth went dry. “My mother is a key, too, then. Why can’t she open it herself?”

Li turned sad, full of sympathy, like he was working up a way to tell me I had a terminal disease. He was no longer sitting so easy.

“A key cannot turn itself. Even if it could, what breaks the seal breaks with it.”

“Oh,” I said. So that was that. I already knew my mother was evil. I shouldn’t have been surprised that she would use me as if I was an ingredient for cake mix. The sorcerers had said much the same thing, but less specifically, and I hadn’t had to believe them. Li was different.

“The Wyrm is alive in her,” he said in a voice so low I could barely understand. “His hunger drives her and it is not rational. She seeks destruction as much as she seeks power.” He stood. “I think we should go.”

I followed him. There was time left before our flight, but I wanted to be moving as much as he did. Malice, my mother, was as good as any bogeyman.

A chubby girl in jeans and a tan camisole had been tiptoeing in our direction. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen, and ducked for cover as Li came her way, dodging him like an enemy bomber. What was this place? There were guys around, too, but they were normal.

Just as we reached the entrance, I heard the telltale smack of a hardcover book hitting the floor. Beside a front display was a child with stringy hair and mouth agape, like she had spotted David Radcliffe and Robert Pattison holding hands with the Jonas brothers.

What the hell?

Then, I finally got it. Ooh, he’s a unicorn.

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