ACCIDENTAL UNICORN, THE Read online

  What was the big deal? He was just as much a man as he’d been earlier today.

  Jesus, Oliver. You’re no less a man for this, and no more, either. That’s such a sexist thought. Evolved Twitter would eat your face off if you tweeted something so sexist.

  Still, this made for an incredibly uncomfortable admission.

  And who knew? He could be dead wrong. Maybe his guess about what happened—what was happening at this very moment—was one hundred percent incorrect.

  But you won’t know until you ask, will you?

  And who better to ask than a group of women who claimed to be paranormal? Even if they weren’t really paranormal—and c’mon, he wasn’t falling for that; a were-vamp, seriously?—maybe they knew people who could help him. That’s what he needed. Help. A whole lotta help.

  “Oliver?”

  A drumming of fingers on a hard surface swelled in his ears, if bated breath could be heard, he heard theirs.

  “Spill, Ollie. Now, or we hang the fuck up!”

  His heart crashed in his chest, his pulse slammed in his ears from the pressure of being forced to say the words out loud.

  “Oooolllie-ooolllie-oxen free!” Nina sang out. “You’ve got three seconds. Three—two—”

  “I think I’m a unicorn!” he blurted out, jumping up from his chair and scaring Baloney awake.

  There wasn’t even a pause out of respect. Not even a breath of recognition.

  You know what there was plenty of, though?

  Raucous laughter. Including, but not limited to, snorting, wheezing, and even some hyena-ish squeals.

  Well, hell. So much for evolution, huh?

  Chapter 2

  When he clicked the phone off and threw it down on the table in a fit of anger he fully recognized as childish, Baloney skittered from the protection of his flannel jacket, hanging on the dining room chair before launching herself at him.

  She clung to his shirt and scurried up his torso to burrow in the hair by his ear. Her little body shook with tremors of fear, making him regret his hasty behavior.

  Oliver scooped her into his hand and held her to his cheek. “It’s okay, Baloney. Daddy’s just a little freaked out and annoyed. You want a peanut? That’ll make it all better, right?”

  She loved peanuts. She jammed them into her tiny cheeks and hid them all over his house. In his shoes, under the refrigerator, in the cardboard box his six-pack of beer came in—anywhere she felt they’d be safe from her perceived, albeit, nonexistent predators.

  She twitched against his skin, which he took to mean she felt like a peanut was an acceptable trade-off for frightening her.

  Setting her on his shoulder, Oliver headed into the kitchen he’d just remodeled as a “get Denise out of his system” project and went on the hunt for peanuts in his new pantry. He grabbed the bag he kept on the second shelf and pulled a couple out, handing one to her.

  She snatched it from him with quick hands and drove it into the pouch of her cheeks, her small body quivering with delight.

  He stroked her head and smiled. “That’s nice, right, buddy? See? All better. I apologize for waking you that way. Now c’mon. We have to figure out what the hell to do about this thing growing out of my head. You in?”

  Baloney rubbed up against his cheek, which was as much of a sign as any she was up for this adventure.

  Yanking off his knit cap, he threw it on the countertop and made his way back through the dining room, through the living room, and into the half bath. Flipping on the soft globe lighting encased in burnt-copper shells shaped like bells, he smiled in satisfaction at another room he’d successfully remodeled via You Tube and a million trips to a big box store.

  He liked the warm tones of the matte rustic gray and honey-colored wood flooring against the soft white of the antique dresser he’d turned into a vanity. It made him feel accomplished.

  Until he looked in the oval white mirror, that is.

  Then he forgot all about the pleasure he’d taken in his grudge projects and winced, running his finger over the almost two-inch-long sparkly protrusion jutting from his forehead, just beneath his hairline.

  Oliver pulled a dark strand of hair out of the way and examined his eyes, dilated and wide. The big black dot in the center of his blue eyes made it appear as though he’d been doing drugs.

  Baloney skittered out from under the scruff of his hair and looked in the mirror with him, her eyes blinking as she cleaned her tiny paws.

  “Yeah,” he agreed with a smile when he looked at her. “It’s a helluva thing, huh, B?”

  She looked at him with her soft brown eyes as if to say, “Who do ya think you’re telling, buster?”

  Baloney was part of the reason he’d impulsively and—now, he felt—quite foolishly called OOPS to begin with.

  Because when he’d arrived home after work, his head pounding, having spent the latter part of the afternoon trying to keep this sparkly rod under wraps with a hat, she’d greeted him with her usual enthusiasm.

  Just like she was doing now as she scrambled up the side of his skull and went straight for the spot on his forehead, the same way she’d done earlier this evening…

  Only then, her lame hind leg had dragged behind her.

  He grabbed her by the loose skin of her back and held her up, shaking his head, which didn’t hurt as much as it had earlier today.

  “Oh, no you don’t, miss. We don’t know what this will do to you. You mind your p’s and q’s until I can figure this out. Understood?”

  Oliver dropped her back on his shoulder and ran a light finger over the hard, swirly nub, and blinked.

  Baloney had immediately taken an interest in the thing—whatever this thing was. A horn, maybe? She’d jumped on it and began to gnaw, grinding her little teeth against it until he thought his head would explode and his body would follow right behind.

  The vibrations screaming throughout his nerve-endings and limbs when she’d latched on were almost more than he could bear, they were so debilitating. He literally had to fight every instinct in him not to fling her tiny body off his head.

  Somehow, he’d managed to get ahold of her and put her in her habitat while he got a grip.

  When he’d gone to apologize and make it up to her with some late-in-the-season strawberries, she’d skipped out of her cage ten times as fast as she ever had.

  And her left hind leg no longer dragged limply along.

  In fact, she was running like the world’s tiniest version of The Flash.

  Oliver squinted into the mirror again, almost laughing at how ridiculous it was, trying to cover this up with a hat. There was no hiding from it. When it had popped out just after lunch, he’d been sitting in his office, going over some drafts for a new senior housing community he’d designed before stamping them with his final approval.

  The horn, if you will, burst through his forehead with such force it had almost knocked him backward in his chair, leaving in its wake glitter in all the colors of the rainbow all over his shirt and forehead, and covering his desk.

  He’d once heard his sister say glitter was the crafting world’s version of herpes, and he’d proved her right. It had taken a metric ton of paper towels and spray cleaner to clean it all up.

  Since then, the damn thing had grown at least another inch, and he had not an inkling how or why or even where it had come from.

  Relieved he had a ton of vacation time saved, Oliver had called his boss once he got home and pleaded a family emergency.

  The doorbell sounded, interrupting his desperate musings, a soft tinkling set of notes he’d decided he liked much better than your typical grating ding-dong, making him cock his head.

  His eyes narrowed as he scooped up Baloney and dropped her in the pocket of his sweater. “You stay put. Christ knows who’d be ringing the doorbell at this time of night, but it’s time I got my ass in gear and put in that new doorbell camera, eh?”

  Leaving the bathroom, he padded softly back to the kitchen, grabbed hi
s knit hat, threw it on and glanced in suspicion at the front door—also new, thank you very much.

  What a bitch that had been to get level, but he loved the oyster white of it and the rectangle of colored glass at the top.

  He heard arguing female voices tussling with one another—and that made him pause before asking who was at the door.

  Yet, he almost knew who was at the door.

  “Shut the fuck up, Marty. JFC, you gotta lot to say for someone who was in a coma not too long ago. Makin’ up for lost time, Ass-Sniffer? Just be glad we didn’t have to drive here and quit moaning about shredding your nylons. Flying comes with collateral damage—especially when I have both your asses on my damn back. You’re not exactly living off a grape and one fucking square of cheese a day.”

  “Did you just call me fat, you monster?” one of them squealed in outrage.

  “The fuck I did, Marty! Don’t start with that body-shaming bullshit. Stop turning everything into a Twitter feed of outrage. I said the two of you put together aren’t exactly featherweights. I think it’s safe to assume you both weigh more than a feather, yes?”

  “Don’t you turn this around on me, Mistress of The Night…”

  No. It couldn’t be. This couldn’t be the women he’d just spoken to but fifteen minutes earlier. How had they found him?

  Oliver froze.

  Nina had said she could sniff him out…

  No.

  Now a hard fist pounded on the door, making the shelf with framed pictures of places he’d been bounce. “Open up, My Little Pony! I can fucking smell you in there. So quit hidin’ your sparklies and open the GD door. I’m not gonna wait around all fucking night. You want help or not?”

  “Marty? Would you put your hand over her mouth? I know it’s going to be a stretch because your hand’s so tiny and her mouth’s so stinkin’ big, but if you don’t shut her piehole, I’ll have to do it, and as she so kindly pointed out, I’m just so darn bulky these days it’d be like an elephant chasing a cheetah.”

  Boy, they sure could argue. Far worse than his sisters ever had. He’d grown used to the scuffling sound with these three, he just wasn’t sure he wanted to witness it.

  “Please, Oliver,” the voice he’d come to know as Wanda begged. “I won’t sleep tonight for the guilt I feel at having laughed at your predicament. It was cruel, and we’re so terribly sorry. Also, I’m pregnant and exhausted. After the mode of transportation we used to get here, precarious at best, I could really use the bathroom. Who am I kidding. I can always use the bathroom. So please, Oliver, open the door and let us explain, won’t you?”

  “Oh, fuck all, Wanda. I’m not even a little bit sorry. Dude’s a unicorn, for shit’s sake. That shit is funny. F-u-n-n-y. Funny.”

  “Nina, shut up!” Marty whisper-yelled. “You’re going to wake all the neighbors and make this worse. God, what was I thinking when I decided handing the reins of the final stages of the merger between Bobbie-Sue and Pack over to Mara so I could spend more time devoted to OOPS was a good idea?”

  Oliver couldn’t take it anymore. They would wake his neighbors, and the last thing he needed was that soccer mom, Melissa, dropping by for no reason at all other than to slyly suggest they should sleep together as payback since both their partners had jumped ship.

  But to be fair, she did always bring cookies when she made her advances, and they were good, but not good enough to coax him into bed with her errant husband, Cornelius “Corny” Fortinski, always lurking in the background.

  He decided he couldn’t take a chance they’d rouse his neighbors. His neighborhood was a quiet one, chosen especially for his future children with Denise in mind.

  Without thinking, he popped the door open—so quickly, in fact, they all fell into his entryway like dominoes, stumbling and tripping as they went.

  Baloney shivered in his shirt pocket, her fear of strangers, especially of the female variety, leading him to place a protective hand over the front of his sweater.

  Planting one hand on his hip as they righted themselves and filed into a line, he kicked the door shut with his foot and got his first glimpse of the women who’d thought both he and his late-hour confession were pretty damn funny.

  He gave them a real critical once-over, assessing them from the ground right up to their glittering eyes.

  You know, for a bunch of supposed paranormals, they sure didn’t look much different than your average homo sapiens.

  They were all definitely very attractive and well groomed for almost four in the morning. From the blonde with the long hair curled into beachy waves—another term he knew because of Denise—to the outrageous, almost unearthly beauty of the brunette who, for some reason, he knew instinctively was Nina, to her very pregnant and elegantly coiffed friend, Wanda, Oliver decided they weren’t what he’d envisioned in his mind’s eye.

  Wanda looked at him with wide eyes fringed with naturally long, thick lashes. “Bathroom?” she squeaked, hopping from foot to foot.

  Oliver pointed over his shoulder, but he didn’t say a word. Not a single word. He still felt quite grudgey about their gleeful mirth.

  As Wanda went off to the bathroom, Marty held out her hand, the silver bangle bracelets she wore shimmering under the soft glow of the interior lighting of his house.

  “Oliver, I’m Marty Flaherty, and from the bottom of my heart, I apologize. I paranormal-shamed you, and I regret it deeply. It was unprofessional and absolutely uncalled for. Let’s start again, okay?”

  He took her hand and nodded, but he didn’t return her pretty, accommodating smile.

  The brunette—tall, willowy-lean and supermodel gorgeous—gave him a glittery-eyed once-over, but she didn’t offer her hand.

  Nope. She jutted her chin out, pushed her hoodie from her head, let her brilliantly shiny hair spill over her shoulders, and thinned her lips in displeasure.

  “I’m Nina Statleon, and I’m not all that sorry. I don’t think I’m ever gonna to be sorry because, something you should know straight up? I’m an insensitive bitch, and it’s all I can fucking do not to laugh right now because you’re a unicorn.” Then she snickered, not even bothering to cover her mouth with her hand to muffle it. “I’m gonna bet, you have a horn and it sparkles. That shit’s funny.”

  Okay, so maybe everyone hadn’t evolved as much as he’d hoped.

  Wanda came up behind her and flipped a long length of Nina’s hair upward. “Shake hands with the man like a good little vampire then quiet those dark forces within and behave.”

  Nina rolled her coal-black eyes at him and stuck out her hand. “Wanna be friends, Horned One?” Then she snickered again.

  He was going to ignore the fun she was making of him and be a gentleman, but the moment he held out his hand, Baloney bolted upright out of his pocket and flung herself at Nina with a tiny screech.

  Marty, whose pretty blue eyes went wide, opened her equally pretty mouth and screamed as Baloney became a blur of sound and motion.

  “Oh my God!” she howled as she jumped on Nina, wrapping her legs around her friend’s waist and clinging to her. “Ahhhhhh! It’s a raaat! Get it out, Nina! Get—it—out! Eat it or something!”

  As Baloney leapt off Nina and onto the floor, all he could think about was what she’d said about his esophagus, and he panicked. Visions of this violent woman with her terrified friend on her back, eating his chipmunk, as irrational as that sounded, whizzed through his head like a picture book of small woodland creature death.

  Swiftly stepping in front of Nina, who’d swung around to see what direction Baloney had gone, Oliver shouted in her face, “No!”

  To which Nina gave him the oddest look, a look that said how dare you have the audacity to tell me no, right before she grabbed his wrist, twisted his arm around his back and gave him a shove so hard into the wall, he dented the sheetrock of his entryway—the sheetrock he’d just damn well painted.

  While he was busy being utterly astonished at her strength, she howled, “Get off me,
Ass-Sniffer!” Swinging wildly, she grabbed Marty around the waist and virtually pulled the woman up over her head, dropping her on the floor with such force, it made the entire room shake.

  And then she went after Baloney, her nostrils flaring, her eyes on fire. She dove for the floor in the living room to the left of the entryway and scrambled her way to a big rustic wood buffet, reaching behind it with a blurred swipe of her hand.

  He’d recovered enough to bellow, “No! Please don’t hurt her!”

  But Nina had her between two fingers, rising as quickly as she’d dove to the ground. “Well, look at you,” she cooed at Baloney, her once hard eyes now soft and warm.

  It was all he could do not to stalk to her position in the room and snatch Baloney away from her, but he was afraid she’d eat her before he could get there.

  “Please don’t eat her,” he begged. There wasn’t much in this world he’d beg for, but Baloney was like his kid. It had been just him and Baloney since he and Denise had broken up.

  Nina held up her free hand, her long fingers pointing in his direction. “Shut it, Unicorn Man. I’d never hurt her.” She made kissy noises in Baloney’s direction, her eyes soft and welcoming. “I would never hurt you, little lady. I love all the tiny babies. All of ’em! Now, who’s a good-good chipmunk?” she cooed in a sticky-sweet voice. “You are, Nugget, that’s who. Now, don’t be afraid, okay? Come see Auntie Nina and we’ll get to know each other. We’ll be friends, even if your dad’s a sparkly freaked-out mess.”

  Then she set Baloney in the palm of her hand and stroked her striped back with two gentle fingers.

  And Baloney, president of the female woman-haters club, rolled over on her back and offered Nina her belly as though she’d never been terrified of every woman since Denise had lived with them.

  Son of a bitch.

  Chapter 3

  While his mouth fell open, Wanda patted him reassuringly on the back. “She’d never hurt any animal, Oliver. Nina’s a monster with people—almost all people until she gets to know you. But give her a child, the elderly, or any animal…and I do mean any animal. She has an opossum that lives in her backyard maze she built a heated hut for because she couldn’t talk the poor thing into coming inside and she was worried he’d freeze. She’d nurture it to death before she’d hurt it. Your chipmunk’s safe with Nina. Your anything that walks on all fours, wears a diaper or is defenseless is safe with her. Promise.”