Page 2 of Lion's Share
Were they protecting the gateway over there, just as they’d charged me to do here? Was the forest in that world also under some kind of attack?
I had no way of knowing for sure, since the note the unicorn had delivered to me had only stated they were safe and that I needed to protect the crossing.
Well, I was doing what I could, but I didn’t know whether it would be enough. Although I hadn’t spied any mythical creatures in the forest, I’d seen more and more of the little white flowers known as fairy bells. In the past, their presence seemed to indicate that a portal had appeared somewhere in their vicinity, but now I wasn’t sure whether that hypothesis was actually accurate.
If it was, then that meant portals had to be popping up all over, and I knew that definitely wasn’t supposed to happen. Ben and I still hadn’t completely figured out how the process worked, but we’d theorized that the portals might not always appear in the same place every time. All fine and good…except they were only supposed to emerge on this plane during the dark of the moon, and the presence of so many fairy bells meant…what? That multiple portals were appearing during one particular moon phase, or that the portals, for whatever reason, had decided to show up whenever and wherever they damn well wanted?
Neither scenario was at all appealing.
I rolled over onto my side, since trying to sleep on my back didn’t seem to be working very well. Now I faced the window, where a soft, cool breeze tugged at the curtains and pale moonlight drifted inside, along with the hum of the crickets in the garden outside. A gibbous just a few days past full; I’d become very familiar with the phases of the moon ever since Ben put two and two together and realized that the new moon was when the portal appeared.
We’d gone looking for it at the end of June and hadn’t found anything, and now, several weeks after that, I knew we’d have to wait until the end of July for that gate into other worlds to reappear.
If it did at all.
I pulled the covers more tightly around myself and prayed for sleep.
The next morning, I saw the unicorn.
Just the briefest flash as I was standing at the kitchen sink and rinsing out my coffee mug, and yet I knew that blaze of pure white at the edge of the forest couldn’t have been anything else. I set down the mug and stared, but the unicorn had already disappeared.
I’d never seen him during the daytime hours before. Sometimes at the edge of dusk before true dark descended, but that was very different from the creature standing there in broad daylight before he vanished into the forest once again.
What did it mean?
I had no idea. If something was making the portal into this world unstable, then maybe that would explain why the unicorn had shown up now. True, he — and his predecessors — seemed to have more mobility than the other legendary beasts that wandered in these woods, coming and going with far more regularity than only appearing during the dark of the moon when the portal opened, but I still couldn’t figure out why he would have taken the risk of showing himself during the daytime. My house was located toward the edge of town and sat on a big plot of land, nearly three acres, and yet I had neighbors close enough that someone might have spied the unicorn if they happened to look out their windows at the exact right time.
But maybe all they would have thought they’d seen was a white horse. After all, if the unicorn’s magic could make it seem as if Victor Maplehurst had died of a stroke rather than getting gored by a yard-long horn, then almost anything was possible, up to and including deploying some sort of protective camouflage to make sure no one spied the creature if he didn’t want them to see him.
I stuck my coffee mug in the dishwasher and dried my hands, then went upstairs to brush my teeth. Magical conundrums would have to wait for now.
It was time for me to get to work.
Tourist traffic had definitely picked up this summer. I guessed it was partly because of the very visible campaign we were waging against Northwest Pacific; a lot of our visitors came here to hike or to birdwatch or simply soak up nature, so they weren’t exactly the types to be on the side of the big, bad logging company. No, if they’d caught wind of what the outfit was trying to do to our small, historic town, then they might have decided Silver Hollow was a good place to spend their vacation dollars.
It couldn’t be people visiting because they were hoping to catch a glimpse of a unicorn. Ben knew how important it was to keep that secret between us, so he wouldn’t have said anything…even if spilling the beans would have meant hugely increased traffic to his cryptozoology-focused YouTube channel.
No, he’d been doing his best to get settled in, and also to see whether he could decipher anything more from the Ogham letters — an ancient Irish alphabet — that we’d found carved into some oak trees in a grove hidden deep within the forest. I knew he’d been communicating with a professor at UC Davis, Dr. Henry Ogilvy, but it didn’t seem as if they’d been able to figure out too much so far beyond the basics.
Whatever the reason for the increased foot traffic in Silver Hollow Feathers and Fur, the pet store my family had owned for more than fifty years, I was glad of it, if only because waiting on all those customers kept me busy and stopped me from brooding too much about what was going on in the forest…or what might or might not be happening between Ben and me.
Eliza Cartwright stopped in around three-thirty, right after she would have closed up her eponymous café, which only served breakfast and lunch and therefore gave her a good chunk of the afternoon to do with as she wished. Her daughter Bethany had started high school the year before and was on the cheer squad, so even over the summer, she tended to be busy right up until dinnertime, allowing her mother to be something of a free agent during those hours.
“Almost there,” Eliza said as she set her clipboard down on the counter. She was tall and thin, with elegant bone structure and blonde hair in a pixie cut, and sort of looked like a runway model who’d decided to give up the high life so she could retire to a small town and make omelets. “Just nine signatures to go, and then we’ll have the thousand we need to officially recall Tillman.”
Considering that Silver Hollow’s entire population was only a little over two thousand people, that was a pretty impressive accomplishment. The charter was clear, though; at least half the town had to agree that the mayor needed to be recalled from office, or the whole thing would be a no-go.
“Everyone seems fairly united on this,” I replied. “I doubt you’ll have too much trouble getting those extra nine signatures.”
She grimaced. “You’d be surprised. Only eligible voters can weigh in, so they have to be over eighteen and they have to be legal to vote in local elections.” Her expression turned a little sly as she added, “But your Ben very kindly changed his voter registration right away, so I was able to add him to the petition.”
“He’s not ‘my’ Ben,” I told her, although I knew the protest sounded a little feeble even to me.
Her greenish eyes danced. “Well, he’s certainly not anyone else’s. And it’s about time you got yourself a personal life. You can’t tell me he picked up stakes and moved here just because he suddenly became an environmentalist.”
“Archaeology and environmental concerns often go hand in hand,” I said primly, but she just chuckled.
“It doesn’t look like he’s doing much archaeology these days,” she remarked. “Just that YouTube channel about all those crazy monsters.”
