Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume 5 An anthology of stories

I tug on the clippers and keep my eyes down.

“I know the past few months have been hard on you, with all our restrictions.” She places her other hand over mine. “But it’s for your own safety—your life and your eternal soul. Those monsters—they’re demons.”

“They’re animals,” I reply, and pull the clippers away. “We learned in bioc lass that they’re back because of environmental degradation of their habitat.”

Mom smiles at me and nods. I half-expect her to pat me on the head. “That’s the science, my dear. But what happened to Rebecca and John—that was the work of the Devil. And what happens to you when you are near the creatures? It’s sorcery. The snake in the Garden of Eden was an animal as well. Remember that. Don’t let that evil into your heart.”

She leaves me on the porch, blinking back tears. I want to run inside and climb into her lap and have her sing me lullabies or hymns or whatever it takes to drown out Flower’s cries of fear and hunger. The unicorn has been calling to me since the second I got out of Yves’s car.

What if I just left it there? It won’t be able to survive alone much longer. If Flower dies, I won’t be able to hear it cry, won’t feel its pain. I won’t be caring for a demon, like Mom says. No matter how innocent the baby unicorn looks, I know what lurks within. It was foolish of me to obey Venom yesterday, foolish of me to defy my parents and everything I knew was right.

Maybe after it’s dead I can go and bury it. Or drag it into the woods. Or…

Except how could I save it from drowning, from the quick death the wrangler offered—only to subject it to a day and night of terror and hunger and loneliness? What right do I have to torture it so?

Ignoring the garage and my backpack filled with groceries, I head to my bedroom. I do my homework, I surf the Internet, and I pray to God to deafen me to the baby unicorn that screams inside my head.

I resist it for two hours, and then I find myself on my way to the garage, backpack in hand. All my life I have learned that my God is a God of love, and that above all He wishes me to be compassionate. And then He places in my path a monster. If this is a test, then surely I am failing.

Inside the garage the unicorn is standing and pushing its face against the lid of the laundry basket. It has made a mess inside again. I sigh and empty out the basket. While I get its formula ready, the unicorn takes a few tottering steps on the concrete floor, unsteady on its matchstick legs, then wipes out and starts crying. I do my best to ignore it while I blend the formula according to directions, then add a few handfuls of raw hamburger and set the blender to puree. The resulting mixture looks and smells like something you’d see on a reality television show, and I wonder if this will be any more palatable to the unicorn. Baby birds eat regurgitated bits of bugs or other meat from their mothers, though. Maybe unicorns work the same way.

Flower seems to like it, sucking from the bottle like a pro and pawing at me for more. After eating, it settles down pretty quickly into the cardboard box nest I’ve made for it. It drifts off to sleep as I’m rinsing out the blender, but when I cross the garage to return Mom’s gardening tools to the laundry basket, the unicorn wakes up and starts crying at me.

I swallow until I can speak. “Stop.”

Bleat, bleat. Bleeeeeaaaaaaaaaat.

“Stop, please!” Why couldn’t I kill it? Why couldn’t I let it die? I clap my hands over my ears and squeeze my eyes shut.

Bleeeeaaaaaat. I hear Flower throwing itself against the sides of the box.

“No!” I say sharply. “Stop it. Settle down.”

And, amazingly, the unicorn listens.

By the end of the following week, I’ve fallen into a routine. My life circles around Flower—when to feed the unicorn, when to clean out his box, when to sneak out of the house, how quickly I need to run home from school to take care of the little monster. In the middle of the night, I can tell when he stirs from his sleep, when he needs me. Oh, yes, it’s a boy. I made that little discovery the other day when I got a good look at his backside.

Flower thrives on the burger-formula solution and begins growing by leaps and bounds. Wooly white hair sprouts all over his body, and I worry less about whether or not he will be too cold at night. I’ve taken to sneaking out of the house to walk the unicorn around the backyard, hoping to tire him out enough that he won’t go wandering around the garage the next day. Luckily, he seems to be a nocturnal creature, happy to snooze the day away. I’m not so lucky, and I walk around school half in a daze, doze off in class, and suffer long, concerned looks from Yves at his place at the other end of the lunch table. He hasn’t spoken to me since the goat milk incident.

If I weren’t so tired, I’d wonder about that, and also about the damage this behavior is doing to my eternal soul. Every night I pray to God to send me strength, but it’s never been enough to kill Flower, nor even to leave him alone long enough to let him die. Apparently my parents had nothing to worry about. Even if they had let me go with those people, I’d never have been able to bring myself to hunt unicorns.

Saturday afternoon our crowd has a picnic at the newly reopened park. All around, families are walking the trails, playing Frisbee in the fields, or barbecuing in the pavilions.

“I think it’s premature,” says Katey, unpacking sandwiches and bags of potato chips from a cooler. “They caught one unicorn. Doesn’t mean there aren’t more.”

“If you’re so scared, why did you come?” asks Marissa, pulling out a six-pack of sodas. Today she’s in a pair of shorts cut almost to the crotch.

Katey gives Marissa a smile that is more like a growl. “Noah will protect me. Won’t you, sweetie?”

Noah is standing next to Marissa, but moves really quickly. Yves is sitting on the picnic table, and Summer is on the bench propped up against his knee. Aidan is stealing carrots from the plate where I’m setting out vegetables. He grins at me, his mouth a row of baby carrots laid end to end.

“Hey,” he says through the veggies, “did you see the corpse they put on the news yet?”

I have not. My parents deemed it unnecessarily macabre, and not only forbade me from watching the news, but also hid the metro section of the newspaper the following day. Aidan has brought the video, downloaded from YouTube, on his cell phone. We cluster around to watch. The audio is terrible, and the first minute is all the mayor shaking hands with the wildlife control people, none of whom, I note with interest, look like they could be unicorn hunters. To start with, there’s not a single girl in the bunch.

There’s a ticker running across the bottom of the screen that explains what neighborhood watch group found the corpse. Apparently the wildlife control folks aren’t the ones who killed the unicorn after all. Then the video cuts to another scene, where photographers and people with cameras cluster around a small table in the police station. The camera zooms in on the corpse.

It’s Venom.

I reel back from the group, a gasp lodged in my throat. How I recognize the remains of Flower’s mother on a two-inch screen, I don’t know. But it’s her. The unicorn from the carnival. The one that bowed before me and begged me to save her child. Dead .

When? How? Did the wrangler kill her when I escaped with the baby? Venom wasn’t looking too good that night, was having trouble standing after the wrangler ripped Flower out of her. Did she somehow injure herself then?

But what I know for certain is it’s not the unicorn that killed Rebecca and John. It’s not even the same kind. That one was big, and dark, with a horn that curved instead of twisted.