Alison and Belcazar stood warily, but the troll really did seem to be asleep. “Wait here,” Belcazar said, and edged across the floor toward it.
“You aren’t going to kill it while it’s sleeping!” Alison hissed.
“Shh!” Belcazar said, and then bent his head and tapped the troll with his horn three times. Light went rippling down from the horn, washing over the troll’s body, and its skin went pale like concrete drying out on fast-forward. It almost seemed to settle down into itself. The arms and legs and head curled in closer, until the separations turned into nothing but faint cracks in a lumpy rock.
“I can’t believe you’re worrying about the troll that was going to eat us,” Belcazar said irritably, raising his head again. “Anyway, it was just a pile of rock to begin with.” He snorted. “Only wizards would go around trying to turn rocks into living things and think that was a good idea. Now come on. Let’s find the baby unicorns and get out of here.”
Alison crossed the antechamber and opened the door at the other end. She had a second to realize she was staring at a blank rock wall—the door didn’t go anywhere. Then the floor dropped out from under her feet, and she heard Belcazar whinny in startled fright before she was going down with him in a flailing heap and a flying hoof caught her on the head.
Alison woke up with her head ice-cold-clear and a horrible taste in her mouth. A smiling white-bearded man was standing beside her, with a small brown glass bottle in his hand. “There. All better,” he said, and she eyed him sidelong. He didn’t really look like the evil wizard type, but then she noticed her wrists were chained to the wall, which, okay, was more supporting evidence than she really needed, thanks.
Belcazar was chained next to her, and the light had gone out of his horn. He bent his head and nosed at her anxiously as the wizard went to put the bottle back on one of the crammed-full shelves, and then to putter over a smoking cauldron in the middle of the room. “Are you all right?” Belcazar whispered.
“Totally not,” Alison said. Whatever Otto the Wizard had given her, it wasn’t anywhere near as nice as getting sobered up by a unicorn. Her head wasn’t hurting exactly, but it didn’t feel like everything on the inside was lined up right either. She dragged herself to sit upright against the wall, chains rattling. They had a lot of slack, but they didn’t seem to have anything at all in the way of openings in the shackles.
Otto straightened up from the cauldron and waved a wand at the back wall of the room, muttering. The wall slid aside. “Belcazar, Belcazar,” a few small voices said, calling. The baby unicorns were penned up in a iron cage, five of them crowded in together, looking sad and matted and scared.
“Okay, okay, stop bleating, that’s not going to help anyone,” Belcazar said, pawing the ground with a hoof, sending up sparks. “All right, wizard, stop being an ass. You can’t make yourself immortal by sacrificing baby unicorns.”
Otto laughed without looking up from the new stuff he was throwing into the cauldron. “I know the baby unicorns aren’t enough,” he said. “Fortunately, I now have a grown unicorn—and its chosen virgin.”
“Oh my God!” Alison said. “I’m not a—ow!” Belcazar had just kicked her in the thigh.
“Would you believe it’s harder to find a virgin than a unicorn in New York?” Otto added, throwing some more bunches of herby stuff into the cauldron. “People get very suspicious if you start hanging around teenage girls. I even tried Craigslist, but I’m reasonably sure all of the responders were lying.”
“Well, I’m shocked,” Alison said, and then she started scrambling up, braced against the wall, because Otto was coming over with a bowl and a very sharp knife.
“Don’t worry,” Otto said cheerily. “I only need a little bit at this stage. The actual sacrifice will be painful, of course,” he added apologetically. “But that won’t be for a few hours yet.”
The chains were pulling tight, dragging her wrists up over her head. “That had better be a clean knife,” Alison managed, her throat dry, as Otto reached up to cut a thin shallow slice across her upper arm and held the bowl underneath.
“Oh, completely sterile,” Otto assured her, seriously, and carried the bowl of blood over to the cauldron. The chains relaxed and came loose again.
“You really aren’t?” Belcazar whispered to her anxiously. “Because this would be a bad time to find out you—”
“I’m really not!” Alison spat back.
“Good, then you should probably—,” Belcazar began, and then Otto tipped the blood into the cauldron and the whole thing went up into a giant mushrooming cloud of black smoke that billowed out and filled the entire room.
Otto yowled as whatever had been boiling in the cauldron went pouring over his alligator-skin shoes and steaming over the floor. He whirled and came at them with the wand. “What did you do? How did you do that? I’m going to flay the skin off your bones—” Then he got close enough that Alison could pull the Princess Leia maneuver and throw the chains around his neck.
She jerked them tight and dragged him in close as his face went purple and red, and she snatched the wand out of his hand.
“What do I do with this?” she yelled at Belcazar.
“Touch my chains!” Belcazar yelled back, while Otto made choked strangling noises. The wand popped open Belcazar’s shackles, white light blooming through the whole room as he began to glow again.
In the light the wand seemed to writhe and squirm like a snake, shining greasily. Alison ughed and flipped it out of her hand onto the floor, and Belcazar pounced on it, touching the twisting, gnarled stick with his horn. It glowed red and smelled like rotten eggs for a moment, and then it went up in a whole bunch of colorful flames.
“No-o-o,” Otto said, the O dragging out of him like the whine of a deflating balloon. It wasn’t just the sound, either; he was sinking in on himself, skin going greenish-white, and bones toppling slowly inward as a horrible rotting smell exploded outward. Alison covered her mouth with one hand and then the other as she did a little frantic dance trying to shake the chains loose of disgusting bits of Otto as he started falling apart.
“Hold still, do you want me to poke an eye out?” Belcazar demanded irritably, and then he tapped the shackles on her wrists with his horn. They popped open and clattered to the floor, along with the gaping remains of Otto’s skull, his teeth scattering away loose over the ground.
“That was so unbelievably gross,” Alison said, trying not to heave, or for that matter to look too close, “and I am saying that after I slept in a bus shelter yesterday.”
“You can throw up after we get out of here,” Belcazar said, whacking the lock off the baby unicorns’ cage. “Yes, yes, you’re all very grateful and happy to be rescued, I know,” he added to them.
“I’m hungry,” one of the baby unicorns said, popping out of the cage and shaking itself head to toe. The mats all fluffed out, leaving it looking a bit tufty, and then smoothed back down into place, neat and glowing.
“I want to roll in the grass,” another one said.
“I want some chocolate milk,” another one said.
“Chocolate milk, chocolate milk!” all the baby unicorns said, clamoring.
“Do not even look at me, I am cleaned out,” Alison said when Belcazar looked over at her in desperation.
“Okay, nobody back at the herd hears about this, you understand?” Belcazar said to the baby unicorns as they nudged and shoved against each other to get to the bowls Alison had set out, their hooves sliding and leaving streaks on the hardwood floor. “They really shouldn’t be drinking that,” he added fussily.
“Mm,” Alison said, tipping back a glass herself.