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“What, then?” I ask.
Kiddo lifts her face out of the fabric. “If it’s going to hurt the unicorn, I can’t leave.”
“There’s an obvious answer here.” Anthony glances at me.
“What do you mean?” Paxton stares at him from over the pillow.
Anthony sighs. “Well, the unicorn needs to go home before one of those things finds it.”
For six seconds, Paxton makes a face like he suggested we go out to the backyard and shoot the unicorn like a lame horse. Her shock and grief fade fast. She is, after all, a mature and sensitive young lady. Her rational mind kicked in to weigh the safety of the unicorn against her joy at having one nearby. Rather than object, she reburies her face in the pillow and sniffles.
Her reaction is more or less a ‘yeah I know it has to happen but I don’t wanna’ thing.
“I’m sure she—I mean the unicorn—knows she has to go home,” says Tammy.
“But where did she come from?” Anthony scratches his head.
The silence of the night outside the house is abruptly broken by an inhuman shrieking wail. This is the kind of sound that brings an entire town to a standstill as the locals stare into the dark, paralyzed in fear while long-forgotten primordial instincts kick in. A cry like that breaks the illusion of safety from civilization and hurls the primitive part of our brains back into our genetic memory of a time when we had to be afraid of the dark.
I motion for Pax to sit between Tammy and Anthony, which she does. I tell them all to wait here while I hurry to the kitchen sink. Not exactly the usual reaction to a supernatural menace in the neighborhood, but there’s a reason. Need water. After turning the faucet on, I reach toward the stream. Faint blue light glows around my hand, then seeps into the flowing water. The stream bends up away from the sink into the air, rapidly coalescing into my ice sword.
I turn off the water and run out the back door, unfurling my wings once I’m in the yard. Though the unicorn’s nowhere to be seen, it still feels like she’s here. Good chance that bizarre scream-shriek scared her into invisibility. I take to the air, though not very high, maybe fifty feet.
Also, I’m not very surprised to see Anthony run up behind me, drawing his golden sword out of thin air. I know the kid is still in training, but they trusted him enough to give him that. No way he’s listening if I tell him to go back inside. Thankfully, Tammy stayed with Pax in the living room. I know this because I hear the guttural grunt of a big cat. Yeah, Tammy in her black panther form. Pax is safe.
And that’s when I see it, in the far corner of my backyard. No, not the unicorn. The thing that made that sound.
It has got to be at least ten feet tall, maybe more. It’s beyond gangly. Long, thin arms and legs jut out at weird angles, almost like an upside-down view of a giant bat hanging from the ceiling. The legs are thin, almost skeletal, with backward-bent knees and bird feet. Its body is entirely black, shiny in parts like a chitinous shell. The elongated head is massive—almost as big as Tammy’s entire body, tapered to a narrow point tipped with a fanged mouth. Shadowy vapors roll off this thing like a negative version of dry ice in a pool.
Weirdly, it seems to see my son first, and charges him.
Well, there goes any potential hesitation or guilt I might’ve felt at launching straight into an attack without trying to talk first. Not like this creature looks as if it had any interest in conversation. Pretty sure it’s not dropping by for tea or to sell us cookies. As it charges, it raises its huge clawed hands...
Hell to the no, as Tammy would say.
I dive bomb this thing with my ice blade in a two-handed grip. My sword smashes into the top of its giant head—kinda hard to miss this canoe-sized thing—and goes right through it.
There’s a faint click but only a hint of solidity. At the same time the creature staggers forward, I pass entirely through its body and smash chest first into the pavement, knocking the wind out of my lungs. Learn something new every day. Apparently, a strong enough blunt impact to the chest is going to leave me helpless for a few seconds.
The monster stumbles forward. Despite the apparent uselessness of my attack, it’s behaving as if I hurt it. Smacking into the road has left me unable to move and seeing stars… but this thing is also knocked loopy. What is this, Schrodinger’s monster, both immune to my attack and injured at the same time?
Anthony strides over looking like Jean-Claude Van Damme cockily about to dismiss a random bad guy with a single kick, and takes a mighty swing at it. His sword promptly wiffs through the creature’s neck, failing to sever its head. It does, however, send the monster stumbling sideways.
“Huh. Wasn’t expecting that,” says Anthony. “You okay, Ma?”
“Been worse,” I squeak.
The enraged shadow beast shreds its claws at a parked car in front of it, leaving a few slice marks on the door surrounded by black stains. Not as much damage as one might expect. This thing isn’t fully solid, apparently.
Well, duh. I found that out already.
A bolt of golden energy flies into the creature’s side, causing it to let out another shrieking roar noticeably louder than the other cries of pain it made. Though the beam passes through the creature without causing any visible damage, its reaction says otherwise. Apparently, my son’s fiery sword can now launch fire bolts. Go figure. Was that evidence of the unicorn’s magical influence?
Anyway, I push myself up to my knees and gasp for air.
My angel-in-training approaches the creature to attack again. He only gets one step closer before the thing collapses into a cloud of black smoke and zooms through the backyard to my house.
It promptly reforms back to its quasi-skeletal solid form right in front of my back door. I’m on my wings again, flashing through the air, flying low to the ground, my ice blade out before me.
