Once There Was: Chapters 1–5

The ground was soft and damp, and the air smelled of loam and moss.

The unicorn watched her for another moment, then turned and loped off into the woods, favoring its wounded leg, and was not seen again for a hundred years.

“Um, have you ever heard of asking before you stick someone with a sharp object? What was that?”
“A sterile needle,” she said.

That’s how she seemed to me in that moment. Poised and alert, scanning for information.

Mostly she was too consumed with her dogs, her plants, and her anarchy to do much legal guarding.

A little kitchen with a tired old electric range and a noisy refrigerator that was probably in violation of the Paris Accords; a living room where very little living had ever happened; and a dark upper floor with two bedrooms, one bathroom, and an extra room full of boxed-up stuff that we never used for anything.

On the great steppes of old Scythia, in the time of year when the grass dies and the wind howls across the plains, a young nomad discovered a strange and pitiful beast curled up beneath an outcropping of rocks.

When the seasons turned again, the tribe headed north to the high steppes. Their herd grew fat on the rich grasses that sprang up that year.

And among the patterns of the carpets they wove, the shirdal could always be found, just at the edges, invisible to all but the keenest eye.

His tweed jacket and brown slacks would have looked fusty if they hadn’t been so perfectly tailored.

The griffon had been in his family for three hundred years. Simon’s ancestor, a merchant sailor named Aloysius Stoddard, had rescued it from an abandoned nest near the city of Aleppo, in Ottoman Syria, when it was just a whelp. “He must have been the runt,” said Simon.

Aloysius, a man of humble roots, had been knighted by the king of England himself. The family wealth had grown at a steady, respectable pace.

Horses tottered in muddy paddocks.

An undergrowth of ferns and blackberry brambles sprouted at the edges of the creek, and continued on either side beneath the slender birches.

They used to be for fox and grouse hunting.

With a grand flourish, the trees fell away to reveal a gabled brownstone manor bigger than any house I’d ever seen before, crawling with woodbine and flanked by manicured gardens on one side, and a large pond flecked with tiny green lily pads on the other.

A paisley rug of cream and burgundy stretched the length of the massive room.

His rear haunches, tucked in tight against his ribs, were the paws of a lion, and had the dusty color of lion’s fur.

I held out my empty palms to show that I had nothing to hide, and I looked down to let Kipling assert his dominance.

Up close, I could see that his feathers were molted off in places.

I reached out my hand and stroked the feathers of his neck, following their smooth grain down to the withers, where they became fur.

We induced vomiting. We gave her activated charcoal.

Strychnine poisoning in dogs causes violent convulsions that lead to death if not treated immediately.

“I think he’s talking to my school right now. Hopefully, corroborating my story.”

“And you’re acquainted with my wayward nephew.” He gave Sebastian a scolding glance.
“I’d do it again too,” said Sebastian, standing up in defiance.

“Tomorrow?” said Sebastian with dismay.
“Be grateful I’m not shipping you back tonight.”

“He believes in…something. Looking after Kipling—he thinks things must be done a certain way, or the covenant is broken.”
“What covenant?”
Sebastian laughed. “Some think Kipling’s given us everything we have, that he chose us because we were somehow deserving, and that we must continue to live as we always have, or else he’ll leave, and take all our good luck with him.”

Because even if he thought the secret I’d shared within my tiny two-person family was the same wondrous one his family had treasured for so long, and not the small, chaotic, frustrating secret of an erratic and unreliable single father who maybe loved me but who also disappeared for days on end with no contact and no explanation—even if Sebastian thought that, he still understood me better than any of my friends.

Even with the undercut pompadour she’d debuted on the first day of school, Grace was the shortest of the three of us.

She had a loud, raspy voice that cut through background noise like a finely honed scalpel, and a way of walking—and even just standing still—that seemed to create a kind of electrical charge around her.

Then she did a haughty spin on her heel and stomped off in an exaggerated huff.

The family room at Carrie’s house was our default hangout.

It was long and low, like it was trying to sneak underneath a bigger car. The inside felt low too, and the gray upholstery was worn and cracked.

What was funny was watching Grace, who was normally so composed and confident, act like Carrie before an exam.

He rested two dainty paws against the lip of the carrier, then leaned his weight against it until it tipped over.

Zorro opened his snout and began to pant. It’s hard to read expressions on canid faces, but if you see enough of them—for example, if you grow up hanging around a veterinary clinic—you start to notice where they show their feelings.

“It does,” I affirmed, then quickly corrected my intonation. “I mean, it does?”

Neither the shock of the news nor the cackle of an iffy cell phone connection did anything to dampen the natural singsong cadence of Malloryn’s voice.

His fur, a mottle of red and gray that favored the gray, shimmered where it caught the light.

It split first into two, then three, then four, each strand unbraiding itself, coming free with an elegant whorl.