I stood where the sand met the trees and looked across the expanse of white hot earth.  I could feel the heat radiating upward, pushing toward the cooler shade of the trees.  My hooves are still delicate and I’m not looking forward to sprinting across the blistering sands.  I pull my one good horn free of the tree branches that seem determined to hold me back.  It’s more annoying than expected, but then, most of the things happening now are more annoying than expected.  

If this were a movie, it’s the moment we’d live out one of my favorite tropes.  The one with the freeze frame and record scratch, before I tell you how we got here.  Sadly, it’s not a movie, so freezing everything is generally out of my control.  You’re going to have to assume, though, that since I’m telling you the story, I must succeed in whatever ridiculous quest I’ve begun.  That’s still up in the air, but we have a plan that probably won’t fail, if, like, seventeen things move the way we want them to.  The Universe is a fickle mistress, though, and Luck is rarely a lady when she’s with me.

“Are you sure this is going to work?” I hear from behind me.  One of my oldest friends, Mac, is crouched down beside me, the hot wind blowing grains of sand against her cheeks.  We’d remembered protective eyewear, this time, though, so at least she wasn’t going to get sand in her eyes.

“Oh sure,” I said, knowing how unconvincing I sound.  “We’re going to get there this time.  No problems.  Senza problemi.  Yep.  This is definitely going to work.”

“You only use Italian when you’re lying,” I heard from my other shoulder.  Cassie, Mac’s wife and my other oldest friend, is crouching with us.  A hundred yards behind us, fully protected from sight by the forest, the rest of our coven is waiting.  They are bandaging wounds and trying to organize our few supplies into something actually helpful instead of lots of little pieces of magic that don’t want to play nicely.  

“Non é vero, Cas.  I use Italian when I want to look cool.  Besides, the only reason Dos is winning is because she believes she can’t be beaten,” I tell them.  “If we believe we are going to win, we’ll have an edge.”

“You keep saying that,” Mac mumbles, “but we keep getting our butts kicked all the way back across the border.”  She gestures to the trees around us, the cool safety of the shadows surrounding us.

It all started with dreams.  Not the good kind, like the late Dr. King had. No, these dreams were terrifying and painful and more realistic than any of us could have guessed at the time.

Six months earlier

The main difference between horns and antlers is that animals who grow antlers lose them at regular intervals, whereas horns are forever.  If a horn is broken, it will bleed like any flesh wound, and can grow infected, possibly killing the animal.  Antlers regrow every year, so damaging one isn’t as big of a deal, though I’m sure it’s still painful for any animal.  Tearing a fingernail stings like a bitch, after all.  But it’s having horns that’s really causing me problems.

The cuffs tightened around the base of my horns are holding my head in place.  When I first woke up, I tried to look around, but found that my head had been effectively immobilized.  My mouth is filled with a gag which, on top of making it hard to breathe, is hurting my jaws by keeping my mouth open too far.  My arms and legs have also been bound so I can’t move them, my arms out to my sides, being pulled slightly too far for comfort.  A secondary cuff has been placed just above my elbow, so even if I somehow managed to pull my hands free, I still won’t be able to move my arms in any meaningful way.  I am thankful my legs are straight down, not spread apart.  Even though I can tell I’m naked, covered only by a sheet, I don’t feel terribly exposed.  I’ve lived through worse.  The shackles are placed just above my hooves and ankles, so I can wiggle my feet a little, but have no leverage to get free.

Aside from the spotlight illuminating me, the room is cold and dark, which is not really surprising.  I’ve been here before.  When I hear footsteps echoing through the empty space, I know whose face I’ll see next.  A man, wearing a mask and glasses, leans over me.  I can’t make out any of his features, but I know he is not my friend.  The operating room light that has been placed directly over my face blazes brighter, turning him into a living shadow of a nightmare.  His blue-gloved hand strokes the side of my face, caressing me in a way that, in other circumstances could have been seen as romantic, but here just seems possessive and nauseating.

“What have they done to you, my beauty?” he asks, his voice oily and cloying.  “They have turned you into a beast.  Well, no matter.  I will turn you back.”  He picks something up from somewhere just outside my peripheral vision, what I imagine is an instrument table, and lifts it up for me to see.  The large clippers, tree pruners, really, open and close in his hands.  I feel my eyes widen and fear makes my legs go watery.  I feel my bladder give way, and the scent of my own urine and terror fills my nose.  Tears run down my cheeks and into my ears and I can do nothing to stop them.  Again, he strokes my face, wiping the tears from one cheek.  He rubs his fingers together, as if deciding if this specimen should be collected for later study, but seems to dismiss the tears as if they mean nothing.

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“I would tell you this won’t hurt a bit,” he says, snugging the blades around the base of one horn, “but I’ve never lied to you before.  In fact, this is going to hurt quite a lot.” I watch him move his hands to the ends of the handles and feel the sharp blades begin to bite into the bone.  I want to scream, but the gag blocks most of the sound.  The pain shoots down my spine, forcing my body to arch against the table, but I’ve been bound too securely and all my body can do is contract against its bonds.  The pain is overwhelming and I know I’m going to vomit.  I feel it rising in my throat….

And I woke up, drenched in sweat.  I heaved my guts onto the floor beside the bed.  I’ve pissed the sheets again, but at least I remembered to use the mattress protector this time.  It takes me a few minutes of retching and crying to get myself together enough to turn on the light.  I concentrate on taking even breaths, holding my head in my hands, rocking slightly. After fifteen minutes, I’ve managed to pull myself together enough to check the floor.  The trashcan I placed there seems to have caught most of my vomit.  I swung my legs off the side of the bed and took a moment before trying my legs.  The first time I had this dream I ended up falling over and laying on the floor for over an hour before I could get my legs to hold me.

The dream had been following me for six weeks now and I was no closer to figuring out why I was having it than I had been when it started.  At least now I was somewhat able to handle it.  I pushed myself to my wobbly legs and walked into the bathroom.  I went straight into the shower, scrubbing the urine and fear off my skin.  I rinsed my mouth with the hot water a few times, spitting the taste of bile down the drain.  When I was clean and convinced of my human body once again (no horns or hooves here), I turned off the water and dried off.  Hanging my towel on the rack, I went into the bedroom to deal with the mess.  First, dump the vomit and scrub the basin.  I checked the floor around it but saw I’d finally found just the right place for it.  No floor cleaning tonight.  I dried it and put it back on the floor in the same place.  I didn’t usually have the dream more than once a week, but I wanted to be prepared in case it decided to make a surprise encore.  Next, I pulled all the sheets off the bed.  I’d stopped sleeping in my pajamas by the third time I had this kind of dream.  No reason to make more laundry than I had to.  As it was, I’d had to shell out money for multiple sets of sheets and mattress protectors.  I’d had to buy a new mattress after the first month, and didn’t want to take on that expense again anytime soon.  So now I piled all the sheets into the washer and started it.  I’d put everything in the dryer in the morning.  

I remade the bed with my favorite purple sheets and climbed back into my bed.  My head still ached, a phantom of the pain of having my horns removed.  Horns I had never had.  I picked up my phone and opened my journal.  The second time I had the dream, I started a record of everything I could think of to see if there was a pattern or trigger that made my brain and body betray me.  I allowed the head of my coven to see, and one or two other women in my group, hoping someone could help me figure out what has been causing this torture, but so far we hadn’t found anything.  

I noted the time I went to bed, where I was in my menstrual cycle, when I woke up, and any changes to the dream.  I could feel my brain trying to turn to mush, but kept listing details.  I compared the last few entries to tonight’s.  The dream was always the same.  The same fear and pain and general discomfort.  The same inability to see the man’s face.  His glasses were dark, his mask covered his mouth, and the gloves made it impossible to tell if he was black, white, or some kind of damn alien.  The dream felt too real to be a metaphor but there was no way it could be prophetic.  At least not as far as I could see.  

I saved my notes and snuggled further under the blankets.  A few minutes later my phone rang.

“You ok, Al?” Cassie’s gruff voice asked.  

“Do you ever sleep?” I asked my coven leader.

“Of course,” she said, yawning loud enough to make me join in.  “I have alarms set to let me know when my girls have problems.  Now answer my question: are you ok?”

“I’m fine,” I sighed.  “I’m just about over this, though.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said, “me, too.  But we’ll get through this.”

“The only up-side is that my bedroom has never been cleaner.”

“Cleaning up after yourself will do that,” she said.  “Ok, so Mac is looking into astrological similarities to see if some planet or star or something is setting you off.  Ava is checking the weather and the almanac.  So far, we have nothing to go on.  You’re sure you’ve been tracking your cycle correctly?”

“Cass,” I said, glowering at the wall across from my bed, “I’m not an idiot.  I know how to take my temperature.  I even know how to write it down like a big girl.”

“I know,” she said.  “You want me to come over?”

“Nah, I’m good.”

“You still sleeping naked?” she asked, teasingly.

“Nobody around here to appreciate good lingerie,” I smirked.

“You just say the word,” she said.  I could practically hear her wiggling her eyebrows at me suggestively.  We both laughed.

“You are at the shop tomorrow?” I asked, rolling onto my side and turning off the light.

“More than likely,” she said.  I could hear her blankets shuffling in the background.

“See you there, then,” I told her.  “I’ll be there in the afternoon.  Ava’s opening, thank the gods.  I don’t know what I’d do if I had to handle the morning crowd on no sleep.”

“You’d handle it, babe.  You always do.  Peaceful sleep,”

“Peaceful sleep,” I said back.  And we both hung up our phones.  I plugged the charging cable into my phone, turned on my white noise app, and set my phone face down on my nightstand.  I hated the ambient light it put out when I left it screen up.  It made the room too bright and it blinked, which annoyed me.  Thankfully solving that nitpicky problem had only taken a second.  This dream was about to be the death of me if we didn’t figure out how to predict it. Once we knew that, getting rid of it would be easy.  At least in theory.  Then, as with every post-nightmare night, I fell

 into a blissfully dreamless sleep.