Chapter 26: Unwanted Attention

Day twenty-three brought a man in polished boots and a cape.

Andy had strong opinions about capes. The opinions had been formed in his previous life (where capes existed only in costume shops and on people who took Halloween too seriously) and had not been softened by his transition to a world where capes were apparently a legitimate wardrobe choice for people of authority. The cape was unnecessary, theatrical, the clothing equivalent of a notification sound set to maximum volume.

The man in the cape arrived at the edge of Andy’s territory with an escort of four armored individuals and the bearing of a person who expected the forest to arrange itself around his convenience. He was tall, pale, expensively dressed beneath the cape (the clothes had the precise, unblemished quality of garments that had never been subjected to practical use), and his face wore an expression of benevolent entitlement that Andy recognized instantly: a man who believed that his proximity to power was the same thing as power itself.

Veronica saw them first. She had been sitting against Andy’s shoulder, sketching in her notebook (she was documenting his horn’s growth; the daily measurements had become another ritual, and Andy had stopped asking himself whether she needed to measure it quite so often), when her head turned and her body went rigid and her heartbeat spiked from sixty-eight to ninety in the space of a breath.

She stood up. She said something sharp, short, not directed at Andy but at the approaching party, and the tone was immediately recognizable even without vocabulary: professional. Formal. The voice of a subordinate addressing a superior, the words shaped by hierarchy even as the body language communicated reluctance.

“Who is that?” Andy projected.

Veronica didn’t respond (couldn’t respond in words he understood), but her body language was answer enough: squared shoulders, straight spine, hands clasped behind her back, chin level. The kind of posture a person adopts when facing someone they must obey and do not respect.

The man in the cape entered the clearing. His boots (click, click, click on every exposed root) left crisp impressions in the soft ground, the impressions of a visitor. He surveyed the clearing with the evaluative gaze of a landlord inspecting a property, his eyes moving across the luminous flowers, the enhanced growth, Veronica’s camp, and landing, finally, on Andy.

On Andy’s horn.

The man’s expression changed. The benevolent entitlement sharpened into acquisitive interest, the look of a person who has identified an asset and is already calculating its value. The excitement of a collector who has just spotted a very impressive piece he intends to acquire. Andy’s horn, naturally, was impossible not to stare at. But there was a difference between the way Veronica stared at his horn and the way this man stared at his horn, and the difference was the difference between admiration and appraisal.

Andy’s truth sense activated automatically. The readout: the man’s pleasant exterior did not match his internal state. Beneath the magnanimity, the emotional signature was calculating and proprietary. The man was looking at Andy the way Andy’s horn looked at corruption: as a problem to be acquired and processed.

“I don’t like him,” Andy projected toward Veronica.

She glanced at Andy. Her expression was careful, controlled, the professional mask firmly in place. But her eyes, for a fraction of a second, communicated agreement.

The man spoke. A speech, delivered with the practiced cadence of a person accustomed to being listened to. Andy could not understand the content but he could read the performance: the man was making a claim. The claim involved Andy (gestured toward several times), the clearing (a sweeping arm), and Veronica (a brief, dismissive nod that told Andy everything he needed to know about this man’s regard for people who did actual work).

Veronica responded. Flat, controlled, deferential in form but not in feeling. The truth sense told Andy her emotional state was: anger, constrained by obligation. Professional composure over volcanic feelings.

The man smiled at her response. The smile was patronizing. Andy had been a human man for twenty-four years and recognized it instantly: the smile that said your objection was quaint and had been noted and would be ignored.

“Veronica,” Andy projected. “Who is he?”

She said a name. Two words. A title and a name, spoken with the exaggerated clarity she used when teaching him vocabulary.

Andy would come to think of him as Lord Supercilious, because the name fit and because naming things was a coping mechanism and because the man radiated superciliousness the way Andy’s horn radiated moonlight: constantly, powerfully, and with a total lack of self-awareness about the effect.

Lord Supercilious approached Andy. Not cautiously (a cautious approach would have been wise; Andy was a one-fifty-five magical megafauna with a purification blast that had brought down a corrupted chimera), but with the confident stride of a person who had never met a creature he could not acquire.

The man reached for the horn.

Andy moved his head. Nope. The controlled repositioning placed his horn out of the man’s reach by approximately thirty centimeters. Andy had opinions about who got to touch his horn. Strong opinions. The horn was not a grab-and-go situation. The horn required consent, and the consent required a relationship, and the relationship required not being a man in a cape who had been in the clearing for three minutes.

Veronica touched his horn. The fox, occasionally, brushed against it in passing. The hawk had landed near it once during the chimera fight. These contacts were permitted. They were earned. You didn’t just walk up and grab someone’s horn. There was a process. The process involved apples and trust and months of daily visits, not polished boots and a cape.

Lord Supercilious’s hand closed on empty air. His expression flickered: surprise, then irritation, then recalculation. He spoke again, tone shifting from magnanimity to something more direct.

The man tried to touch the horn again. Andy moved his head again. The man’s jaw tightened. Two attempts, two rejections. Andy’s horn had never been so discriminating and Andy had never been more proud of it.

“You cannot touch the horn,” Andy projected toward Veronica, knowing she would hear the words and the emotional context and trusting her to interpret them correctly. “The horn is not for him. Tell him the horn is not for him.”

Veronica spoke to the man. Her voice was different now, less deferential, carrying an edge that suggested she was telling him something he did not want to hear, and the man’s expression confirmed it: the patronizing smile curdled into something less pleasant, the face of someone who had expected compliance and was receiving resistance.

The exchange continued. Andy’s truth sense painted the room: Veronica was afraid (not of the man but of the authority he represented, the institutional power that could override her judgment), the man was entitled and impatient, and the four armored escorts were bored. Professionally bored. The boredom of people who stood behind powerful people and waited for instructions and did not think about what the instructions meant.

The man left after an hour. He left with his spine stiff and his chin high, clearly intending to return, the cape swooshing behind him with the theatrical flourish that Andy had identified as its primary function. The four escorts followed. The clearing was quiet again. Veronica stood in the center of it with her arms crossed, her jaw set, her eyes on the trail where the man had disappeared.

“Lord Supercilious,” Andy projected.

She looked at him. Her mouth twitched. Not a smile, not yet, but the beginning of one, the involuntary cracking of tension that humor produced even in moments of genuine stress.

“That’s what I’m calling him. Lord Supercilious. The man with the cape who wanted to touch my horn without so much as buying me dinner first. I have opinions about him and the opinions are unfavorable.”

The almost-smile broke through. She sat down on the ground, the graceless thump of someone whose legs had been tense for an hour. She spoke to Andy, a long, rapid stream of explanation that he received as sound and emotion: worry, frustration, bureaucratic anger, the kind that comes from being caught between a creature she wanted to protect and a system she was obligated to serve.

Andy lowered his head. His horn extended toward her, the offer that had become their shorthand for I’m here. She reached for the horn. Her fingers wrapped around the spiral. The horn sang, because it always sang for her, because Veronica’s touch was the one stimulus the horn never failed to rise to.

In the singing, the truth sense gave him the complete picture: she was scared. Not of the man. Of what the man represented. Of structures above her that could decide Andy’s fate without consulting her. Of the possibility that her protection was insufficient against the machinery of political power that had just discovered a unicorn was forming in her territory.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Andy projected, the emotional bleed carrying the certainty, the stubbornness, the absolute, horn-first refusal to be treated as a commodity by a man in a cape. “I have survived five tiers of increasingly absurd evolution and a chimera. I am not leaving this clearing because a man with impractical footwear decided I’m an asset.”

She laughed. The laugh was small and wet and relieved and it vibrated through his horn and the vibration was a frequency he would learn to recognize as the sound of a shared burden. Two people facing a problem together. Despite the problem and the man and the cape, still here.

* * *

The second visitor was worse, because the second visitor did not announce herself.

Andy’s truth sense detected the presence before his other senses did: a spike of resonance at exactly ten meters, the exact edge of his range. Whoever this was had stopped at the precise boundary of his awareness. The precision was deliberate.

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The emotional signature was: masked. Controlled, deliberately so. The cultivated neutrality of someone who had been managing their emotional output for a very long time, the way a dam contains a river: the river is real, the dam is real, and the relationship between them is ancient and deliberate.

A woman stepped out of the treeline.

She was stunning. Not beautiful the way Veronica was beautiful (warm, specific, twelve freckles and capable hands and a laugh that vibrated through horn-contact). This woman’s beauty was architectural. The kind that registered as fact rather than opinion, the kind that made you understand what people meant by “striking” because seeing her was, neurologically, an impact.

She was tall, with silver-white hair that fell past her shoulders in a sheet of color that Andy recognized because it was the same color as his own mane, the same color as moonlight, the same color as the light his horn produced. Her eyes were gold. Pure, metallic, ancient gold, the gold of something that had been gold for so long it had become a geological feature.

And on her forehead, visible for a moment before she raised a hand and the horn disappeared behind a shimmer of glamour, was a horn. Small, in humanoid form. Spiraling. Luminous.

She had a horn. She had a humanoid form. These two facts arrived in Andy’s consciousness simultaneously and with roughly equal impact.

A unicorn.

Andy’s horn reacted before his consciousness did. The moonlight glow intensified, the spiral humming with a resonance that was different from the Veronica resonance and different from the healing resonance. A new frequency. Recognition. The horn on his head recognizing the horn on hers the way a tuning fork recognizes its own note: specifically, unmistakably. His horn had gotten excited about a lot of things over five tiers, but this was the first time it had gotten excited about meeting another horn.

She looked at him. The gold eyes assessed him from horn to hooves with the thoroughness of an expert: horn (studied for a long time, expression shifting to interest), coat (luminous white, life magic saturation), build (megafauna-class, proper hooves), and eyes. She met his gaze and held it. The holding was a test. The kind that involved nothing except the willingness to be seen. He passed it because Veronica had been seeing him every day for weeks, and the seeing had made him braver.

She spoke. One sentence. Her voice was like the rest of her: composed, controlled, resonant with authority that was inherent rather than performed.

“I can’t understand you,” Andy projected. “But I suspect you already know that.”

Her expression shifted. The composed neutrality cracked, just slightly, the way a frozen lake cracks when something presses on it from below: not breaking, but registering the pressure. She had heard his telepathic projection and was surprised. Not by the telepathy itself but by something about the quality, the content, the emotional bleed.

She spoke again, pointing at herself with the same deliberate clarity Veronica used. The introduction protocol appeared to be universal.

A name. Two syllables. Georgina. Or was it three? Geor-gee-na. Yes, three. That was how the sounds resolved in his awareness, the closest phonetic approximation his English-trained consciousness could produce.

“Andy,” he projected back, orienting his horn toward her. “Andy Snodgrass. Nice horn.”