She flew past me, grabbing my hand as she ran. “Hurryup!”
Laughing, I let her drag me to her car. “You’re sure you’re not too excited to drive? Maybe you should give me the keys.”
“Ha! Nice try.” She got in and so did I.
It took us exactly five minutes and thirty seconds to drive from Gabriela’s house to mine. It should have taken twice that. You can make good time if you don’t use a brake. She tapped her hands impatiently on the steering wheel as I typed in our code to open the front gate and then zoomed in to park by the front door.
I’d been working on talking the council into letting Gabriela actually visit Home, but since the Door was only recently open to wyverns, there was resistance to sending humans through. Plus no one was sure exactly what the Door would do to a human body.
She seemed to like this consolation prize, though.
“I promise I won’t scream and scare it,” she said.
Scooting in front of her, I opened the front door before she barreled through it like a cartoon character in overdrive. She skidded to a stop. “Where is it?” she asked.
Mom came out of the music room, which was being transformed into a special room to hold the Door. She was wearing overalls, her hair was in a bandana, and a splotch of white paint was smeared on her cheek. Still, she looked like she’d walked off a photo shoot for a magazine on home decorating. She and Dad had decided to paint the walls themselves, on the theory that home improvement would give them a chance to work through the strain recent events had put on their marriage. She’d read that advice in some magazine, and Dad had agreed without hesitation—these days, he pretty much agreed to anything she said without hesitation. “Ah, Gabriela,” Mom said. “How are you doing?”
“She’s ready,” I told Mom.
If she had been any more ready, she’d be vibrating. As it was, she was hopping from foot to foot, more excited than a kindergartner at her birthday party.
Mom grinned. “It’s in the kitchen. Just a visit, remember. You can’t keep it.”
Gabriela whooped and ran toward the living room.
“This way!” I called after her.
She pivoted and followed me into the kitchen.
The Door was on the counter, next to a plate of microwave pizza rolls. It was cradled in a velvet-lined box. Once Mom was finished remodeling the music room, it would have a more honored place in our house. But for now, we just kept it where we were hanging out. Glowing slightly, it drew Gabriela like a moth to a flame. “It’s not here yet. Are you sure—”
The jewel began to pulse with rainbow light.
And then it was there, in our kitchen: a real, live unicorn, with Novi beside it. Its horn shimmered like the moon, its hide glowed as white as the stars, and its liquid blue eyes looked at Gabriela.
Gabriela screamed a shriek of pure joy. But the unicorn wasn’t scared. Delicately, gracefully, and with all the dignity of a fabled mythical creature, it sniffed the pizza rolls.
“Its herdmaster said this one volunteered to come—it wanted to meet its first human,” Novi said. She unstoppered a vial, drank its contents, and then gestured at the empty container. “Your wizard brewed us an even stronger headache medicine for portal travel. It might not be magic, but it’s close.”
Gabriela latched on to the first bit that Novi said. “It wanted to meetme? But I’m no one special.”
“Yes, you are,” I said. “After all we’ve been through, after all you did…yes, youare! And you were before any of this too.”
To the unicorn, she breathed, “You really wanted to meetme?”
It whickered at her, a bell-like sound.
Hands shaking, Gabriela picked up the plate of pizza rolls. “Are you hungry? What do you eat? Anything besides sunshine and rainbows? These are…well, I don’t know how to describe them. You probably don’t have pizza in your world. But you can try one, if you’d like.” She was talking so fast that her words spilled over one another. “Or maybe that’s a bad idea. It might disagree with you.”
I could have sworn the unicorn rolled its luminous blue eyes at her.
It then plucked a pizza roll off the plate with its teeth and swallowed it whole. We all stared at it. Gabriela made a tiny sound, like a bird’s chirp. “Oh, I think I’m going to cry.”
The unicorn, still elegant and radiant, let out a tiny burp.
Leaving Gabriela to bond with the unicorn, I led Novi through the house. She’d come with a second purpose, she said—to check on Worm, per order of her parents. I wasn’t convinced that her parents had anything to do with it, but that was none of my business.
“He goes by Benden now,” I told her.
