Purity Test
By Naomi Novik
“Oh, stop whining,” the unicorn said. “I didn’t poke you that hard.”
“I think I’m bleeding, my back hurts, and I’m seeing unicorns,” Alison said. “I so have grounds.”
She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes and sat up slowly on the park bench. Spending her emergency train-fare-home money on margaritas in the first midtown bar that hadn’t carded her had seemed like a good idea at the time. She wasn’t even completely ready to give up on it yet, although the crazy hangover had been tipping the scales even before the unicorn had showed up and jabbed her.
The unicorn was extremely pretty, all long flowy silver hair and shiny hooves, indescribable grace, and a massive spiraling horn about four feet long that seemed like it should have dragged the unicorn’s head down to the ground, just on basic physics. Also, it looked kind of annoyed.
“Why a unicorn?” Alison wondered at her subconscious out loud. She wasn’t thirteen years old or anything. “I mean, dragons are so much cooler.”
“Excuse me?” the unicorn said indignantly. “Unicorns kill dragons all the time.”
“Really?” she said skeptically.
The unicorn pawed the ground a little with a forehoof. “Okay, usually only when they’re still small. But Zanzibar the Magnificent did kill Galphagor the Black in 1014.”
“O-kay,” Alison said. “Did you just make those names up?”
“You know what, shut up,” said the unicorn. “Entertaining as it would be to spend three weeks correcting your misguided preconceptions, there’s no time; the herd only gave me three days, and then that idiot Talmazan gets his turn. And if you knew him, you would understand what an unmitigated disaster that would be.”
“His turn at what?”
“Finding a virgin,” the unicorn said.
“Um,” she said. “Maybe he’d have more luck than you. I’m not—”
“La, la, la!” the unicorn sang loudly, drowning her out. It even sang beautifully, perfectly on-key. “Have you never heard of plausible deniability?” it hissed at her, when she’d stopped trying to finish the sentence.
“Excuse me, either you don’t know what ‘plausible’ means or I’m insulted,” she said.
“Look,” the unicorn said, “just be quiet a second and let me explain the situation to you.”
The hangover was moving to the front and center of Alison’s skull, and she was starting to get a little worried: The unicorn hallucination wasn’t going away. She shut her eyes and lay back down on the bench.
The unicorn apparently took it as a sign to keep going. “Okay,” it said. “So there’s this wizard—”
“Wow, of course there is,” Alison said.
“—and he’s been grabbing baby unicorns,” the unicorn said, through gritted teeth.
“You know,” Alison told her subconscious, “I’ve got to draw the line somewhere. Baby unicorns is going too far.”
“No kidding,” the unicorn said. “You don’t think I’d be wasting my time talking to a human otherwise? Anyway, wizard, baby unicorns, where was I—Oh, right. Probably he’s trying to make himself immortal, which never works, except wizards never listen when you tell them that, and we would really prefer if he got stopped before he cuts off the babies’ horns trying.”
“Let me guess,” Alison said. “Is his name Voldemort?”
“No, what freakish kind of name is Voldemort?” the unicorn said. “His name is Otto, Otto Penzler. He lives downtown.”
“So what do you need a virgin for?”
“Do you see hands at the ends of these?” the unicorn said. Alison cracked an eye open enough to see that yes, the unicorn was still there, and it was waving a silver hoof in her face. There wasn’t any dirt on the hoof, even though the unicorn was standing in the middle of a torn-up meadow.
“What does being a virgin have to do with opposable thumbs?” she said.
“Nothing!” the unicorn said. “But will anyone else in the herd listen to me? Of course not! They go off and grab the first thirteen-year-old who coos at them, and then it’s all, ‘Their purity will lead the way,’ blah, blah, blah. Lead the way to a whole bunch of dead baby unicorns, maybe. I want a little more competence in my heroine.”
“I’m drunk and sleeping on a bench in Central Park,” Alison said. “That meets your criteria?”
“Hello?” The unicorn dipped its horn and lifted the dangling sleeve from her wadded-up jacket, the one she’d been using as a pillow. “U.S. Marines?”
The jacket had come out of a two-dollar bin in the army-navy store. She actually had tried to enlist, two days ago, after the last-ditch attempt to get hired at McDonald’s had failed. She’d thought that the recruiters in Times Square would be hard up enough for volunteers that they wouldn’t be picky about her age, but that apparently awesome idea had nearly ended with her handed over to the cops for truancy, so even if the unicorn was a hallucination, she wasn’t going to let on that it was wrong.
“How do you know I wasn’t dishonorably discharged?” she said.
The unicorn brightened, which Alison had to admit was something to see. “Are you a lesbian? I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count toward virginity.”
“I am pretty sure it does,” Alison said, “and sorry, but no.”
“Well, it was just a thought,” the unicorn said. “Let’s go.”
“I’m not going anywhere without coffee,” Alison said. She wanted a shower, too, but she had a total of nineteen dollars left, so coffee was more in reach.
The unicorn tossed its head and snorted and then whacked her on the head with its horn. “Ow! What was that for?” Alison said, and then she was wide-awake, not hungry, and felt cleaner than she had in two weeks of showering in hostels. “Oh. Okay, that’s a trick.”
Then she stared, because she was stone-cold sober, sitting on a bench in Central Park in the middle of the night, and there was a unicorn standing in front of her.
“Just let me do the talking if we run into any other unicorns,” the unicorn said, pacing her. At four in the morning by the clock on the CNN billboard, even the streets of Manhattan were pretty quiet, but Alison would still have expected the unicorn to get at least a few double takes from the taxi drivers and the drunks going home. Nobody did more than nod to her, or at least to the uniform jacket.
“Uh-huh.” She was halfheartedly trying to convince herself she really was hallucinating or still drunk, but it was a losing fight. She’d had freakish dreams before, but nothing like this, and there was something uncomfortably real about the unicorn. It was actually kind of creepy. The more she looked at it, the more it seemed like it was the only real thing, and the rest of the world was one of those really expensive computer games, flattened out, with too much color.
“Where did you come from, anyway? Like, Fairyland or something?”
The unicorn turned its head and gave her a blue-eyed glare. “Yes. Fairyland,” it said, dripping sarcasm. “Fairyland, where the fairies and the unicorns play, and never is heard a discouraging—”
“Okay, okay, jeez,” she said. “Do you want me to buy you an apple or something? Would that make you less cranky?”
The unicorn snorted and minced disdainfully over some flattened droppings left by one of the carriage horses. “Anyway, we’re always here, you idiots just don’t notice anything that doesn’t shove itself in your faces. You’ve never spotted the elves, either, and they’re taking up half the tables at Per Se every night.”
“Hey, Belcazar,” a cat said, walking by.
The unicorn very slightly flicked his tail. “Social climbers, cats,” the unicorn said with a sniff after they had passed farther on.