Born At Midnight

"Yeah, proof would be good," Kylie said, unable to keep the sarcasm from her voice. "But now you are going to tel me that you can't give me that, right? You're going to tel me some little speech about how I have to believe in it anyway, right?"

"No, actual y, I planned on giving you the proof." Holiday's voice held an odd kind of calm that made Kylie take a deep breath. It also scared the bejeebies out of her. What if Holiday was tel ing the truth? What if ... Kylie recal ed how cold the pale girl was on the bus. No way. She was not going to believe in this. Vampires and werewolves existed in fiction, not in real life.

The woman pul ed a cel phone from her jeans and made a cal . "Can you send Perry into the office classroom? Thanks."

She placed the cel back in her pocket. "Now, al of you are welcome to stay and see this. Or if you'd like to go on out, each of you have a mentor waiting out front. They are here to answer your questions."

Kylie watched them look among themselves and they al agreed to stay. It made her feel better knowing she wasn't the only one having doubts about any of this.

After a few minutes, long minutes during which silence penetrated the room like a fog, she heard the sound of footsteps in the front of the cabin. The door opened, and the blond boy from her bus, the one with weird eyes, walked into the room.

"Hi, Perry. It's good to see you again," Holiday said with sincerity.

"It's good to be back." His gaze met Kylie's and her breath caught when she found herself staring at eyes so dark that they didn't appear human. Right then, his creepiness level moved up in leaps and bounds.

"It would make me very happy if you'd do the honor of showing us your special gift."

Those non-human eyes didn't shift from Kylie. Perry grinned. "So you have some non-believers, do you?" Turning his head, he focused on Holiday. "What would you like to see?"

"Why don't we let Kylie decide?" Holiday looked at her. "Kylie, this is Perry Gomez, he's a very gifted shape-shifter, one of the most powerful ones there are. He can probably become anything you can imagine. So why don't you tel him what you'd like to see him become?"

Kylie kept moving her gaze between Holiday and Perry. Realizing they waited for her to say something, she forced herself speak. "A ... unicorn."

"Unicorns don't exist," Perry said, his expression seeming to say he felt insulted by her choice.

"They used to," Holiday added, as if coming to Kylie's defense.

"No shit?" Perry asked. "They real y existed?"

"No shit," Holiday repeated. "But we should work on our language." She smiled. "Just think of a horse with a horn. I know you can do it."

He nodded, then he pressed his palms together and Kylie saw his black eyes rol back into his head. The air in the room suddenly felt weak, as if something had sucked the oxygen out of it. Kylie stared at Perry even when everything inside her said not to. Right then her curiosity, her need to know evaporated into the not-so-breathable air. She'd never understood that saying, "Ignorance is bliss," until this moment. She wanted to remain ignorant. She didn't want to see, didn't want to believe.

But she did see.

She saw sparkles forming around his body-sparkles as if a bucket of floating glitter had been spil ed around him, as if a thousand lights came on and reflected each miniscule piece of glitter. The hundreds of diamond-shaped twinkles swirled around him. Slowly the sparkles fel to the floor and left standing where Perry had once stood was a huge honking white unicorn with a pink horn in the middle of its forehead.