Page 1 of Lion's Share
Chapter One
The unicorn’s fierce, dark gaze was fixed on me, its shimmering horn no longer a thing of beauty, but a deadly weapon pointed directly at my heart.
I’d seen what that horn could do…had seen the way it gored Victor Maplehurst, an executive with Northwest Pacific lumber, and killed him with a single thrust. The unicorn’s magic, or possibly the magic of the portal itself, had erased those injuries and made it look as if he’d died of a stroke, but I knew better.
And now the unicorn had made me its target.
No chance to turn or flee. The creature charged, and its horn sank deep into my breast. I gasped…
…and then sat up in bed, heart pounding and my breath coming in quick, panicky pants. One hand went to my chest, which of course was just fine. Smooth, unbroken skin beneath my fingers, not a bloody, gaping wound.
Just a dream, I reassured myself.
Except…was it maybe more than that? I’d been having these nightmares for nearly a week now, which felt like a signal that they had to contain some significance beyond merely proving that my subconscious had some stuff I still needed to work out.
Then again, when unicorns and portals to other dimensions were involved, all bets were off.
In that moment of panic, my other hand had gone to the empty space in the bed next to me, as if somewhere deep down, I’d thought I might find Ben Sanders sleeping there. Completely ridiculous, I knew, because even though something was developing between us…something I thought might turn out to be wonderful…we were still in the very early stages of our relationship.
Hell, we hadn’t even kissed yet, which meant it was silly to think he’d be there in bed beside me.
But God, I really wished he were. It had been months since I’d shared a bed with anyone — I’d broken up with Owen Halloran, my boyfriend at UC Davis, when I had to come home to Silver Hollow after my mother and grandmother disappeared into the forest in February — but I couldn’t deny that waking up from a nightmare and not having anyone there to comfort me pretty much sucked.
Even though Owen had never been the most comforting presence in the world.
I looked over at the clock on my nightstand.
One fifty-five.
Damn it. I’d been hoping that maybe the dark outside my bedroom window was only the black hour before the sun began to rise, that it would be sometime past five in the morning so I could convince myself I might as well get up.
But in no universe — either this one or the place where my mother and grandmother were apparently trapped — would I allow myself to consider nearly two in the morning an okay time to start my day.
That didn’t mean I couldn’t get up and get myself some water, though, maybe use the bathroom before I went back to bed.
I pushed back the covers and headed into the bathroom to take care of business, and then poured some water into the tumbler that always sat on the counter. Technically, this was the bathroom that the other bedrooms on the second floor were supposed to share…even before I’d learned that my mother and grandmother were still alive, I couldn’t quite bring myself to move into the main suite…but it had always been “my” bathroom, since the one in the primary suite had an extra door that opened into the room where my mother had slept.
The water helped. Maybe I should have splashed some on my face, too, but the last thing I wanted was to be any more awake than I already was. No, better to drink a few more swallows, reapply the lip balm I always wore to bed, and then do my best to get some sleep.
Easier said than done. At this time of year — we were now in mid-July — I always kept the window open at least halfway. Before I’d seen the portal in the woods…before I’d seen the unicorn take Victor Maplehurst and his rapacious plans to clear-cut in the forest neatly, if violently, out of the equation…I’d been lulled to sleep by the sound of the wind in the trees and the cheerful chirping of the crickets in the tall grass.
Now, though, I couldn’t help being on edge, wondering what else was going to emerge from the forest. A month earlier, I’d spied a griffin standing majestically on a rocky outcropping deep in the woods, but I certainly hadn’t seen it since. The unicorn had also been MIA, which could have been a good thing…or not. He certainly hadn’t shown up to deliver any more notes from my mother and grandmother, although I was doing my best to follow the single command they’d given me.
Protect the crossing.
With Maplehurst dead and his under-the-table agreement with Mayor Tillman effectively gone forever, some people might have thought we were out of the woods, so to speak. But I knew that Maplehurst, even though he’d been high up in the organization, was still just a cog in the Northwest Pacific machine. There was too much money to be made from logging in the forest for me to believe they were just going to let it alone, despite the current quiet on that front.
Luckily, the people of Silver Hollow also believed pretty much the same thing, even though none of them knew the truth about Maplehurst’s demise. The recall campaign my friend Eliza Cartwright was spearheading had been gaining steam over the past few weeks, and the petition to remove Tillman and have a new mayoral election only needed about fifty or so additional signatures for it to become a reality. Having someone in charge of my hometown who truly cared about it and didn’t merely see the place as a means for lining his pockets would help if and when Northwest Pacific decided to make its move, but I still wasn’t about to let my guard down.
That meant that, with Ben’s help, we’d leveled up our campaign about preserving the forest from hanging a few posters around town to launching an actual website with more information about all the animals and trees and plants we’d be protecting, along with a few pithy tidbits he’d dug up about the way the lumber company had overstepped during other projects in different locations. All of it was factual…Ben was far too careful to put anything out there that he couldn’t back up with actual newspaper articles and the like…and yet none of it was anything that Northwest Pacific would have cared to have gathered in one place. Put together in such a way, the information was pretty damning.
I’d provided some input on the site design, but Ben had been the one to put it all together and actually launch it, since he already had his own website devoted to his study of cryptozoology, a site with lots of links to his YouTube channel, since that was where he made the bulk of his income. Also, because he’d gone through the process before, he was able to give me some practical advice about how to register the domain and get the thing up and running.
As helpful as he’d been, though, thinking about him wasn’t doing much in terms of getting me back to sleep. Several times over the past month, ever since he’d settled in Silver Hollow after closing out his rented house in Southern California, I’d wondered when he would be ready to take the next step. Our eyes had locked on more than one occasion, and I could practically feel the sexual tension simmering between us.
And yet…nothing.
Did he think it wasn’t a good idea to start anything now, with so much still up in the air? True, I now knew for certain that my mother and grandmother were alive, and it seemed they were safe and unharmed, but it also sounded as if they needed to stay on the other side of the portal, for whatever reason.
