Alaskan Fury (54 page)

He dropped his head again, and
she saw him grit his jaw.  More tears came, which he wiped away in silence. 
Then, after a long silence, he said, “Even the feylords prize a unicorn.”  His
face was filled with bitterness.  “They usually train them as mounts.”

Which meant he
had
no safe
place.  Imelda took a moment to digest that.  “How old are you?” she finally
asked.

He shrugged.

“Do you have friends?”

His gaze once more timidly
flickered to her before he gave a disgusted snort and wiped tears from his face
with a hand.  His other hand continued to grip hers almost painfully-tight.

“Where do you live?”

The man just shook his head.

Frowning, she said, “Do you have
a
name
?”

Instead of shying away from her,
insulted, insisting that names were
secret
like most Second-Landers
would do, he hesitated and gave her a genuinely confused look and said, “Why
would I have a name?”

“Your parents…?” she suggested.

He shrugged again.

“You didn’t know your
parents
?”
she demanded.  Even
she
, more or less kidnapped from Barcelona when she
was a toddler, remembered her parents.  They were not all happy memories, with
her father being violent at times, and her mother more interested in gambling
than in caring for her family, but at least they were
memories
.

That
made him bristle.  “I
was little when they went away.  I don’t remember.”  Then he fired back with,
“Why?  How old are
you
?”

“Not as old as you, I would
wager,” Imelda said.  Lowering her voice, she added, “I’m thirty-three…and you’ve
been alone a very long time, haven’t you?”

The man stiffened like she’d hit
him, and quickly looked away.  Imelda wondered how long ago it had been since
he’d talked to another sentient soul… 

When a long silence had passed
between them, the unicorn offering up nothing more about himself, yet making no
move to release his grip on her wrist, Imelda glanced up at the sky and cleared
her throat.  She was cold, the snow freezing to the knees of her pants, the wet
trenchcoat leaving her shivering.  “Um, like I said, I really need to get back
to Alaska.  I have accounts they cannot touch.  I will pay you…”

The man’s hand tightened on her
wrist.  Seeing that, Imelda cut off the rest of her thought.  With desperate
inner laugh, she thought,
He’s never been around humanity long enough to
gain a name, and I think I can
pay
him?

Still, she had to try.  Zenaida
was a cancer that needed to be removed.  “Do you want a home?  A place to
stay?  Clothes?”

With the hand not gripping hers,
he started picking at a twig that was jutting from the snow. 

“Um,” Imelda said, trying to
reason her way through the situation logically.  “Are you curious about
technology?  I could show you our many advances…”

“What is this ‘tek-no-lo-gee?’”
he asked, without looking at her.

“The magic of the human realm,”
she explained.  “The magic of science.”

“No,” he said.

“I need to get back,” Imelda
said.  “Is there
anything
I could do to—”

“No.”

For a long time, Imelda simply
knelt there, her knees long since having gone numb, her wrist wrapped in the
pure tingle of a unicorn’s firm grip, like the pleasing wash of an unspoiled
mountain lake.  Eventually, very careful not to disturb him, Imelda started to
move, to go back to the fire.

“I could kill you,” the man said,
making her flinch.

“Uh,” Imelda said, freezing in
place, eying him warily, “I suppose you probably could, yes.”

“You’re at my mercy.”

Imelda saw the still-drying tears
on his cheeks and thought that, in reality, it was the other way around, but
she gave a tentative nod anyway.

“You have nowhere you can go on
your own,” he insisted.  “You’d die out here without my help.”

That was probably true enough. 
She gave him a reluctant nod.

“If I take you back…” he offered
slowly, “will you swear to be my prisoner afterwards?  For at least a little
while?”

Sensing some devil’s game of
which the Second Landers were so fond, Imelda immediately became cautious. 
“What kind of prisoner?”

He frowned at her.  “There’s more
than one kind?”

Then a more important question
occurred to her.  “
Why
do you want me as your prisoner?”

“You
are
my prisoner,” he
growled back.  “I don’t have to let you leave.”

Imelda thought of the
pepper-spray in her pocket, then wondered how far she would get through the
Canadian northlands before she froze to death.

“So that’s why you saved me?” she
demanded.  “To have a prisoner?”

“No!” he blurted.  But by the
startled look in his eyes, it was all-too-obvious that was exactly what had
happened.

Oh shit
, Imelda thought,
finding herself scrambling to correct the unicorn’s mistake and fix the
situation before she became the star of her very own fairy-tale.  “Um, good
sir, I would not make a good prisoner.”

“Why not?” he demanded.

“Oh, well…”  Imelda yanked his
arm forward, over her body, and heaved him upward and back, throwing him over
her shoulder in a defensive move that her Padre had taught her, many years ago.

In doing so, she passed out.

Sometime later, she opened her
eyes and the man was standing above her, looking both wary and interested. 
“You probably need food and drink.  You don’t have enough blood in your system. 
Can all Inquisitors do that?”

“It’s pretty standard training,”
she managed, still staring up at him, her head pounding.  With a groan, she sat
up.  “Are you going to take me back to Alaska, now?”

“Are you going to swear to be my
prisoner?”

“I told you I won’t make a good
prisoner.”

“So you threw me over a
shoulder.  I could stomp on you.”

“
Look
,” Imelda said,
“People are going to
die
if I don’t make it back there, and
soon
. 
I don’t have time to argue this with you right now.”

The man raised that single silver
brow at her and crossed his arms over his chest.  “I don’t have to take you
anywhere.” 

Imelda peered up at him, holding
her head, and sighed.  “How long?”

“How long for what?”

“How long do I have to be your
prisoner, in exchange for you being my steed?”

Immediately, the man stiffened,
anger flashing in his cerulean eyes.  “I’m not your steed.”

“You want a prisoner?” she
demanded.  “I need a steed.”

For a long moment, it looked as
if the unicorn would argue.  Then, “Fine.”

“Fine what?” she demanded.  “How
long will it be?”

“As long as I want,” he said
immediately.

“Bullshit!” Imelda snapped,
knowing the Second Landers and their notoriously never-ending bargains of
servitude.  “It will be a maximum of one year, or not at all.”

“A prisoner doesn’t get to decide
that,” the man growled.

She didn’t have
time
for
this.  “You know where the dragons live?”

The man went utterly stiff.  “I’m
not taking you to the dragons.”

“Why not?” Imelda demanded. 
Then, wincing, she realized.  “They take unicorns?”

“If they can,” he agreed.  “A
girl dragon tried to put an iron collar on me, once, but I stabbed her with my
horn.”

Something which, if what Imelda
had seen, probably hadn’t been too detrimental to the dragon, though it had
probably given her enough pause for the unicorn to escape.

“Okay,” Imelda said.  “How about
you take me
close
to the dragons, and I walk the rest of the way?”

He gave her a suspicious look. 
“Then how will I know you’ll come back?”

Imelda felt the beginnings of
another migraine.  “I’ll be your prisoner until the dragons, but once we reach
them, I go my own way.”

“You’re my prisoner
now
,
and I don’t have to take you anywhere,” he insisted stubbornly.

“Two years,” Imelda muttered. 
“I’ll give you two years.”

“Six.”

“
Three
,” Imelda snapped
back, “and that’s
it
,
plus
you will take me
anywhere
I
want to go during that time, otherwise, deal’s off.”

The man gave her a long look. 
“On my back?”

“As my mount.”

He made a face.  “No saddle, no
bridle, no reins.”

“How will I keep from falling
off?”

He snorted.  “You won’t fall
off.”

“I’m not a good rider,” Imelda
insisted.  “I never got a chance to learn…”

“You won’t be
riding
me,”
the unicorn growled, the rumble sounding almost leonine.  “I will be
carrying
you.”

Imelda wasn’t about to mince
words with a Second Lander.  “Well, whether you’re
carrying
me or I’m
riding
,
I still don’t want to fall off.  We will need to fashion me some sort of
saddle.”

His blue eyes held hers in her a
long, flat look.  Then his face began elongating, a twist of opal jutting from
his brow, his body bending over, his arms dropping to the ground, a blanket of
soft white fur sprouting from his body.  “Get on,” he said, once he again stood
beside her in his natural form, roughly the height of a draft horse, but with a
slender body and willowy legs.  He offered his back to her by leaning back in a
sort of bow, making his shoulder a bit more accessible.

“Um,” Imelda said, not having
realized before just how
high
his back was from the ground.  No
wonder
it had hurt.  “Why?”

“I want to show you something.”

She took a nervous step
backwards, getting the very distinct idea it wasn’t going to be pleasant. 

The unicorn made an impatient
sound and stomped the snow. 

“I’d be okay with just a
rope
,”
she insisted.  “We could rip a few strips off the bottom of my coat, tie it
around your neck.

He peered at her.  “Do you want
me to stab you again?”

Remembering that flesh-eating
wave of agony, she grimace.  “Um, no.”

“Then get on my back.  This
hurts.”  He gestured with his horn at the way he was leaning down for her.  It
did look awkward and somewhat painful.

Very reluctantly, her feet
gingerly finding purchase on his knee, her fingers snagging in his lionlike
mane, she pulled herself over his silky neck, then slid backwards down his
spine.  “Okay,” she said nervously.  “What are you planning to show me?”

“Do not vomit on my back.”  The
unicorn stood smoothly and Imelda’s fingers spasmed on his mane as the ground
fell far away to nauseating proportions.  She’d never ridden anything as big as
a draft horse before.  The higher the back from the ground, the further the
rider had to fall.

Then she realized what he had
said. 

Do not…vomit? 

Oh God,
she whimpered,
tightening her grip,
this is not going to be good.

Even as she had the thought, the
unicorn lurched forward and her world tilted suddenly, like she had been
dropped inside one of those gyroscope machines at the Fair, and, as she was
trying to adjust to that, the unicorn walked up a
tree
, danced across a
few treetops, pirouetted on its hindquarters, flipped to repeat the process on
his
front
quarters, then did a somersault off of the top of a cottonwood
canopy, making the horizon lurch precariously and tumble around her as they
spun back to the ground.

Imelda was still screaming, her
hands fisted on the creature’s mane in a death-grip, when the unicorn turned
back to look at her with a flat expression.  “So.  Are you satisfied I’m not
going to drop you?” 

It took several minutes of
hyperventilation before Imelda could calm down enough to reassure herself that
she was alive.  Slowly, she tore her eyes from the way her white knuckles were
buried in his hair and lifted her head to meet his gaze in astonishment. 
Through it all—upside-down, over backwards, lunging, twisting,
falling
—Imelda
realized, stunned, she hadn’t even slipped.

“You’re pulling my hair.”

She released his mane
reflexively.  Then, carefully, she slid from his back and stumbled to the fire,
where she sat down abruptly and tried to comprehend why she wasn’t laying
tangled in the snow with a broken neck. 

“So,” the unicorn said, as he
shifted back to the slender, naked human and squatted across the fire from her,
“You agree to be my prisoner, then?”  He sounded…anxious.

Heart still thundering from the
somersaults, she managed, “Three years?  Me as your prisoner, you as my mount?”

“If that doesn’t sound fair, we
could renegotiate,” he said, sounding almost desperate.  “I mean, you don’t
have to be scared.  I think a lot of people are scared to be prisoners, but you
don’t have to be.  I’ll be nice.”

“I’m not sure…” she said,
resisting the urge to smile.  “I
only
have to spend three years as your
prisoner?”  The unicorn was…adorable.

“I’ll take good care of you,” the
man insisted.  He gestured at the fire and the little lean-to half-hidden by
the snow.

Imelda kept her face straight,
knowing that God did not like those who took advantage of innocents.  But, on
the other hand, she also knew that this could be no less than a gift from God,
so she had to progress delicately and with extreme honor.  “I accept your
ransom, unicorn, if you will accept mine.  I will grudgingly spend three years
as your prisoner, if you will serve as my mount and take me anywhere I want to
go during that time.”

The unicorn’s mouth fell open and
he stared at her a few minutes before he shook himself.  “Oh, yeah, I mean
yes
.”