The honest to goodness real as all heck unicorn mare glanced back at me. It was almost as if she understood Daniel's shits rainbows remark and was giving us the stink eye. She momentarily blinked, then looked out toward the house.
...she probably didn't understand. I let out my breath.
In this moment, I realized that her long tail flowed like a waving flag, as did what bit of her mane escaped her helmet, despite the lack of wind. The black-streaked blue hair seemed to contain sparks that had the effect of twinkling stars. When she swished to shoo a fly, I realized it was indeed hair, and a phenomenon far beyond my experience.
The nebulous glow around her horn increased and a branch of the sedge beside the shed flew up to her mouth. She stripped some leaves with her teeth, chewed introspectively, then nodded. She stripped the rest and tossed the branch into the yard beyond. Without a pause, a box flitted out of her left saddle bag.
Daniel said, "A camera?"
The thing had a stubby lens in front and a glass back, so it likely was. She floated it around, snapping photos of the house, the shooting range, the corral, and the yard. Each time, the glowing fog twisted a crank to cock it. The shutter sound couldn't be mistaken.
The camera flew skyward.
Daniel pulled on my sleeve and whispered, "What should we do?"
The guards were between the winged-unicorn and us. "I don't think going through the bubble would be a good idea. No flashlight, for starters."
He laughed weakly. He looked at the guards and they regarded us back with large eyes that showed attention and a bit of nerves.
I added, "I don't think they're going to hurt us."
I thought that I understood horse body language well enough, and what I sensed studying them agreed with that thought, but how could I know that they and earth horses were the same? In any case, it was all too easy to have something unexpected spook a horse, and then all bets were off.
In the brighter light from outside, I noticed that the guards' eyes were slit like a cat's.
I said, "Probably not going to hurt us if we remain calm. They're not letting us go, either."
As if to confirm that, the leader tucked her camera into a saddle bag and noisily dragged the chain and padlock inside before closing the door. Once again, the unicorn brightened her horn enough to see.
Daniel's jangling keys flew from his pocket. Each key probed the padlock until one turned the cylinder. She removed it from the loop, walked over to a metal barrel and shifted it to find it filled with something gritty. The barrel loudly clanged as her glow gouged out a couple pieces of metal. She muttered something and with a click-ka-chunk, the metal pieces transformed into keys, the edges glowing faintly red. She waved them around to cool them, then tried each in the padlock. Though blackened steel, each turned the cylinder. She returned Daniel's key and key ring with a few horse syllables. Probably a thank you.
"Wanna bet the people on the other side of the bubble are more sophisticated than your grandpa counted on?"
"I just hope everybody's okay."
"I hope so, too," I said as the chain rattled and tied itself tautly around handles before the padlock clicked into place.
The leader looked around, noting the imperfect seams and the bullet holes. Her horn brightened and the metal of the shed began to complain and creak. In moments, the seams crimped closed with a metal shriek. For good measure, the bullet holes closed in sequence as if they were holes poked into clay and pinched. With them all sealed, I noted the repairs glowed faintly red in the much more complete darkness. I smelled heated metal as well as burnt paint and dirt.
I muttered, "I get that you're powerful. You don't need to fix things to prove it."
The mare looked at us and blinked.
Daniel shushed me.
"Don't worry. They can't understand us... yet."
"Even a dog could understand that tone."
"Yeah, maybe." Which made me wonder what she was thinking if she did recognize my tone. Moreover, what was I thinking? I had thought about horses being spooky, but it was my skin that alternately cooled and flushed, and my heart that caused my blood to pound loudly in my ears. My emotions jumped quickly between anger, fear, awe, and confusion. What were their equine thoughts about... about monkey-creatures?
Unstable? Aggressive?
The mare had looked from me to him as we spoke. Now that she noticed me watch her watching me, her lips drew back into what had to be a smile. She displayed horse teeth, but, with a short muzzle, they also resembled ours, with obvious canines not much different than our own.
Not horses.
Don't even think they're horses.
I did my best not to begin shaking. I put my fingers in my belt loops to steady my hands.
The spear-carrier caught a tossed key in her lips and the leader put away the other. She pointed with her right fore hoof, indicating the bubble, waving us forward. To wave, her hoof and lower leg rotated and flexed, articulating in an anatomically impossible way.
Impossible for an earth horse.
I swallowed. Daniel seemed unwilling to move, and I had to pull to get him to back up. I went forward, putting the not-earth horses behind me, reaching to touch the bubble.
The "surface" shrank away, but the bubble yielded.
I felt nothing. It was totally an optical distortion very reminiscent of a heat mirage, and further away like looking through curved glass. I was glad the static discharge didn't repeat while we were inside, and, in a dozen steps, we were in the darkness on the opposite side. Our shadows played across what looked like a curved dome. As I looked around in the space of a small house, I saw it was constructed of large blocks of rough hewn rock, some sort of black-speckled white granite that extended to the ground and swept beneath us and under the margins of the bubble.
I saw perfectly fitting seams. Attention to details had to be a thing with her.
I also saw no windows or doors.
The cutlass guard pushed us aside as the leader passed, horn glowing. She approached the wall, examining it and likely admiring the work. She muttered something and a splash of glowing nebulosity caused all the bricks to glow a faint blue-white, as if bathed in moonlight. I reached out to touch the stone—
A sudden flash-bang made me yelp.
The winged unicorn had disappeared.
I jumped back, thinking that she'd somehow exploded, though she had left no flying bits behind, so that couldn't be true.
Then I heard the faint tinkling of wind chimes and saw sparkles like soda bubbles popping all around me in a blue fog. The next instant, the world went completely black.
A cold more bitterly cold than any walk-in Costco refrigerator I'd ever experienced surrounded me. Or any freezer I could imagine. Or laying naked in snow, maybe? Or in the arctic, having been chased off an iceberg into the sea by a polar bear.
And I couldn't breathe.
I reflexively screamed... but failed. The air whooshed out of my lungs because nothingness surrounding me.