The Unicorn Hunter

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Quercus

55 Baker Street
7th Floor, South Block
London W1U 8EW

Copyright © Che Golden 2013

The quotation in
Chapter Two
is from
The Second Battle of Moytura
, translated by Whitley Stokes in
Revue Celtique
, vol. 12, Paris, F. Vieweg (1891), sourced via CELT (
www.ucc.ie/celt
)

The moral right of Che Golden to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available from the British Library

eBook ISBN 978 0 85738 533 8
Print ISBN 978 0 85738 380 8

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

You can find this and many other great books at:
www.quercusbooks.co.uk

Che Golden has led a typical second-generation Irish life, spending most of her childhood shuttling backwards and forwards between London and Blarney, Co. Cork, trying to get people on both sides of the Irish Sea to pronounce her name properly. An ex-journalist, she has now settled permanently in Somerset with her husband and two children, blissfully making up whopping, complicated lies that sometimes turn into books.

Praise for
The Feral Child

‘Gripping, mystical and adventurous, young readers will be hooked …'

Irish World

‘An exciting adventure story combining contemporary life and fantasy'

Irish Examiner

For India and Maya.

I hope you always see unicorns.

A Note from the Author

In this book, some of the characters have unusual names.

To find out how to say them, see
this section
.

As soon as the dart hit the mare's shoulder, the world solidified around the stallion. The air enveloped the gleaming white beast in a damp cloak and sounds shattered against his ears. He watched as his mate sank to the ground, her nose settling upon her knee. Dark clouds rushed in overhead as birds flew up from the trees. For a fraction of a second the earth shuddered on its axis, throwing wind patterns into chaos and aiming a stream of cold air at one small country in the western hemisphere. The stallion started as the blare of a car horn in the distance reached his ears, but as suddenly as the sounds of the mortal world had battered him, they retreated as the snow began to fall. Big, soft flakes swirled lazily from the gunmetal sky to coat her body and hush the air. The ground was soon blotted out with white and drifts formed against the mare's sides. The stallion bent his head and tried to move her but she did
not stir. Her chest and eyelids were still and her mane was plastered to her head and shoulders with melted snow.

He lifted his head and called for help. There was no answering cry in the forest; no one came. The woodland creatures hid and tucked their faces into their tails. He looked at her with agony in his breast and then, as the sun went down, turned and fled toward a presence that called him, a presence that would surely help them both.

The unicorn stallion ran from the forest until he reached a muddy lane that ran behind a little row of cottages. Smoke spiralling from their chimneys stung his eyes and nostrils and the scent of people nearby terrified him. Still he ran, eyes and nostrils flaring red, running toward that soothing presence. He turned sharply and leaped over a wooden gate, his knees buckling briefly as he crashed down on to a gravelled path. He ran up to a green wooden door and frantically beat at it with a hoof, as cats gathered on the roof above him, staring at him with golden eyes.

His sides heaved as he panted and waited for the door to swing open, his hoof scraping at the gravel to leave a wound of bare brown earth. Then she was beside him, her cool hands on his face and the soothing sound of her blood thrumming against his body as she pressed herself to his flank. He lowered his head, confused
and exhausted as the Feral Child combed her fingers through his tangled mane and whispered words of awe. The purring of the cats rose to a hum above his head and the stars spun as his world became a dark and dangerous place.

Maddy woke up slowly and stared at her bedroom ceiling. Her stomach clenched with dread as she realized it was cold, much colder than it should be. The old wound in her shoulder ached and that only happened on cold mornings. But it was early autumn – that ache should not have been bothering her for at least another month. She rubbed at the scar through the thin cotton of the T-shirt she slept in and frowned. A memory flickered deep in her mind, unravelling in flashes before her waking eyes before she had a chance to shut the lid on it. A blade of ice, sliding clean and blue into her flesh, the hot red blood that flooded the air with a scent of iron, and a white face with boiled white eyes twisting into an evil smile as she shrieked.

It had been almost a year since Maddy had gone into the faerie realm of Tír na nÓg to rescue little Stephen Forest, a child that in the mortal world slept just beyond
her bedroom wall. He had been snatched by a faerie when the mounds had opened at Halloween, the one night of the year faeries could cross into the mortal world freely. The Feral Child, the faeries had called her, when she had fought, starved and frozen to get him back. But she was no such thing. She just wanted to forget but the horrible, roiling tension in the pit of her stomach told her they were not going to let her do that. The faeries of Tír na nÓg were back and it had something to do with the unicorn stallion she had locked in the coal shed.

She listened as the clock in the sitting room begin to strike the hour and sat bolt upright in horror as she counted the chimes. Ten o'clock! How had she slept so long? She threw back the duvet and scrambled into her clothes, combing her fingers through her tangled brown hair.

She looked around her room as she stuffed her feet into her trainers, waggling them from side to side to push past the straining laces, knots forced so tight now only long fingernails could pick them apart. Her grandparents had made an effort to make the spare room feel more like her own since she had come to live with them, but that hideous wedding-wrapping-paper wallpaper was everywhere and so far she had failed to persuade Granda to take it down. Granny liked it too
much and Granda wanted his money's worth out of it before he got rid of it. Her eyes rested for a moment on the picture of her parents, dead eighteen months now in a car crash in Donegal, and her lips thinned with the dull pain it still brought her.

‘Why did you let me sleep so long?' she asked Granny as she walked out of her bedroom.

‘And good morning to you too,' said Granny. ‘I was just about to wake you up so you saved me the bother. Sit down there and eat your breakfast. We have to leave for Mass in half an hour.'

Maddy thought of the unicorn in the shed, who was probably wondering where his breakfast was. ‘I just …'

‘You just nothing,' said Granny, with a do-not-mess-with-me look on her face. ‘Breakfast, make yourself presentable, Mass. You have time for nothing else.'

Maddy looked down at her crumpled jeans and scuffed trainers. ‘What's wrong with the way I look?'

Granny rolled her eyes up to the ceiling. ‘What am I rearing?' she sighed.

Sunday was the day Maddy's hideous Aunt Fionnula and her revolting brood paid a duty visit to Granny and Granda. Maddy couldn't stand any of her cousins, apart from Roisin and Danny. They had risked their lives with her last year trying to get Stephen back and she couldn't
forget that. They might not be best friends but they had a bond no one else could share and it made Maddy just a little less lonely in Blarney.

As soon as Aunt Fionnula launched into one of her monologues (Aunt Fionnula never had what you would call a proper conversation, where the other person talked back), Maddy herded Roisin and Danny into the kitchen.

‘I am going to show you something I don't want anyone else to see, so just stay calm,' she whispered.

‘I don't like the sound of this,' said Roisin as they snuck out the back door and over to the coal shed. Maddy threw open the door and Roisin and Danny's jaws dropped as they stared at the unicorn. The animal was so white he was almost blue and he shone ghostly in the dark and dusty coal shed. His horn scraped against the roof as he turned his head to look at them with an anguished expression in his sapphire-blue eyes.

‘Oh no,' said Danny, who had gone almost as white as the unicorn.