Page 1 of Silver Linings

Chapter One

I knew the exact date when a unicorn first appeared in the forest outside the town of Silver Hollow because my great-great-great-grandmother wrote it down in her diary.

May 16, 1855.

No one knew where the unicorn had come from. Mary Welling had ventured into the woods to gather berries and herbs, and suddenly it was there, shimmering white against the deep green foliage. She had sat down to rest, knowing her eldest was watching the other children and that it was safe to give herself a moment of silence and peace, and the unicorn had approached and laid its head in her lap.

Apparently, that whole thing about unicorns only being attracted to virgins was a myth…or a fabrication concocted by the patriarchy.

The shimmering, white-horned beast had remained with her for a while, then calmly got back up to its feet and disappeared into the woods.

But the unicorn wasn’t the only magical creature to emerge from the dense forest outside our little town in Humboldt County, California.

A few years later, a phoenix appeared. Luckily, the woods were so damp and lush that there was no chance of it catching anything on fire, but still, the magical bird had shocked Mary and her oldest daughter — my great-great-grandmother — when it fluttered out from seemingly nowhere and landed on Mary’s shoulder.

Ever since then, legendary beasts came and went, only appearing to the women of my family, and always returning whence they had come. Sometimes, nearly a decade would pass before another one would emerge from the depths of the forest, while on other occasions, an ancestor of mine might be visited by a griffin, a pegasus, and a sphinx in quick succession.

The women who’d preceded me kept the secret as best they could, even as the decades passed and logging companies came and went in the area, threatening to encroach on the creatures’ habitat.

Except it wasn’t their native land, not really. Those mythical beasts came from somewhere else, even if no one in the family could say exactly where that “somewhere” was located.

Until my mother and grandmother decided the mystery had dragged on for long enough, and that they needed to find out once and for all what sort of tunnel, wormhole, or rift in reality allowed creatures that shouldn’t even exist to come through to our plane of existence.

They disappeared while on that quest, leaving me alone in the world.

All right, I suppose if I wanted to be technical about it, then I wasn’t completely alone. My parents had gotten divorced when I was ten, and I knew my father had moved to San Francisco, but he rarely wrote, and I hadn’t heard from him in more than nine years, ever since I graduated from high school and went to Humboldt State for my undergrad work, followed by more years at UC Davis to become a doctor of veterinary medicine.

But when my mother and grandmother vanished almost three months ago, I had to come back to Silver Hollow, my veterinarian training almost complete…but without the DVM degree I needed to actually work as a vet.

Which was why I’d taken over the pet shop that had been in my mother’s family since the 1960s. At least that way, I could still be around animals…and people often came to me for medical advice regarding their pets, even if whatever information I dispensed couldn’t exactly be called official, and I certainly couldn’t prescribe anything.

But sometimes people just wanted their hands held.

I assumed that was the reason why Beverly Fernsby had shown up today. In addition to her three cats, she also took care of any wildland creatures that might wander onto the stretch of land her large, ramshackle house occupied near the western edge of town. Not griffins and dragons, of course, but squirrels and possums and, like today, rabbits.

The soft cocoa-brown bunny stared up at me with frightened dark eyes, but it didn’t try to wriggle out of her arms as I ran my hand over the injured leg that had been the reason for Beverly’s visit.

“Nothing’s broken,” I assured her. She was more than ten years older than my grandmother, well past eighty-five and widowed for almost a decade. From what I’d been able to tell, her late husband had gone along with her wish to surround herself with animals, although this need to bring in every woodchuck with a limp had increased a good bit lately, as if she desperately wanted company wherever she could find it.

That was where I came in, I supposed. Most people around town thought she should sell her house and find someplace a little more manageable to live, but I knew Beverly was far too stubborn for that. No, she’d continue as she always had until the time came to join her husband…and none of us dared to say a single thing about it.

“You’re sure?” she asked. I doubted that she’d ever been tall, but the years had shrunken her so the top of her head barely reached my shoulder. Faded blue eyes under wrinkled lids watched me with concern, and her wispy white hair had begun to escape the stub of a ponytail she always wore. Today, it was bound with a burgundy scrunchie to match the sweatshirt she had on. Yes, June was right around the corner, but we wouldn’t get any truly warm days here in Humboldt County for at least another month or so.

“Positive,” I said. “He probably just startled and wrenched his leg, but I don’t feel any breaks, and he’d react if he had even a hairline fracture. So I’d try giving him something yummy to eat and then let him go on his way.”

Beverly’s lips pursed. “You don’t think I should put him in the pen for a day or so, just to keep an eye on him?”

Back in the day, she’d raised rabbits, so the pen still occupied a corner of her sprawling yard, even if the animals she’d kept there were long gone. Sometime while I was off at college, she’d decided the bunnies were too much work, but that didn’t stop her from wanting to use the pen as a sort of impromptu animal hospital for any injured possums or raccoons that needed a few days to convalesce.

“No,” I said gently. “He might get scared and try to get out, and then he’d injure himself even more. I think it’s better to make sure he has some good food in him and then let him find his way back to his warren.”

For a moment, it looked as if she wanted to protest. But I only gazed back at her calmly, doing what I could to convey utter confidence in my instructions, and she seemed to get the hint.

“I suppose you’re right,” she said. “And I do have some new carrots I got out of the garden only yesterday.”

“That sounds perfect. I know he’ll appreciate something fresh and tasty like that.”

Beverly ran a careful hand over the rabbit’s ears. He didn’t wriggle, but only lay quiescent in her arms, as if he knew the best thing for him to do was go with the flow. Because he’d barely flinched when I touched his leg, I knew he was willing to let us big, clumsy humans do what we wanted.

---