She couldn’t hear the thunder, but she could sense it in her bones, the way wild beasts knew to flee a tsunami’s wave. Her pulse beat in time with the subsonic rumble, and she was sure there was something unnatural about the coming storm. She stood from her workbench, leaving a half-done pewter vase to be finished later, her steady rhythm upset. The day had begun as beautifully blue as any fine spring day, but there was nothing as depressing as a hard city downpour.  
She could almost feel the rain on her skin. The sensation raised goose bumps along her forearms and she shivered, too-blue blood pounding in her ears. The first drops began to slam into the roof. To her oversensitive ears, it was like golf balls being dropped onto the shingles.
The lights failed. It was not an altogether uncommon occurrence in Baltimore during storms, but the darkness made her feel cold down to her toes. Gwen was still deciding what she should do when the sharp knock, knock, knock of someone banging on her door echoed through the room. That in itself was strange; she ran a jewelry shop, and the store was open, despite the evening hour. Why anyone would knock was a mystery, and one she was loath to solve.
The world was filled with nasty things that were wary of thresholds.
She opened the door anyway.
It wasn’t raining. The sky was dark with angry storm clouds, but the ground was as dry as an abandoned bone.
Outside, without the insulation of workroom walls to distort the sounds, she knew that what she had taken to be thunderclaps and rain thudding on the roof was instead the hoof beats of horses flying over the city. The supernatural rumble in her bones had been the Wild Hunt of the Fae Riders, calling to her like she hadn’t felt in centuries. Awash with shame, Gwen wondered how she could have forgotten so much of her heritage that she had feared the coming of her own people.
The thought froze her. She had lived a very long time by trusting her instincts and now wasn’t the time to stop. Her heart had leapt with hope with the realization that her brethren were setting aside the decrees of their king to join her, but with a cooler head she ruthlessly suppressed the emotion.
There were plenty of reasons for the Faerie Host to be standing on her doorstep, she knew, and not all of them involved pleasant reunions or invitations home. They very well could have been sent to kill her.
Her eyes were still trained on the sky when the man who had knocked cleared his throat. The fine hairs on the back of her neck stood erect at the sound. She had completely forgotten him as bigger concerns – fae were flying above her very head, clearly visible to anyone who cared to look – occupied her mind. Foolish of her, but it was too late to rectify the mistake.
She lowered her gaze. Her eyes widened, showing too much white. He was the first of her kind she’d seen up close in almost three hundred years – who looked like a fey, at least - even counting the mirror. She stared, trying to absorb his appearance, to memorize every detail.
His horn was beautiful. It spiraled out of the center of his forehead, the ivory white bone sharp enough, hard enough, she knew, to rend flesh. It glittered with strength and glowed with power. Though she hadn’t seen one for hundreds of years, she knew a unicorn when she saw one, and she remembered well what they meant. Unicorns, universally and without exception, were fierce, violent, and dangerous – defenders of the innocent. Guardians, they made up the bulk of the royal bodyguard. There were tales of virgins acting as lures and leading them to their deaths, but Gwen knew the truth behind the stories, knew what much of humanity did not.
She had wasted enough time staring. In exile, Gwen wasn’t royal and she hadn’t been innocent for a very long time. She was about to ask, “What is a unicorn doing on my doorstep?” but he spoke first.
“Are you going to stare at me all night, or are you going to invite me in?” he finally asked, after he realized that clearing his throat had merely compounded the problem. His voice reminded her of a rosebush; both thorny and unbearably soft – ultimately beautiful. He spoke an ancient tongue, and its melodic syllables sent her back even farther into memory than the sight of him.
She took a step backwards, unblocking the doorway to allow him the space to enter the shop. She felt vulnerable and deeply under-informed – she didn’t like the feeling, and, off-balance, she chose more sarcastic words than she might have otherwise. Her tone was less than friendly when she demanded, in the same tongue, “What are you doing here?” but she wished desperately, breathlessly, to know.
The corners of his eyes crinkled as he sensed her desire. “The King sent me.”
Her eyes narrowed – even before she’d spent three hundred years in exile, she hadn’t given much of a damn about the High King, and she certainly didn’t owe him any favors. “What does he want with me?”
“He wants you to come home.”
She sucked in a breath. A moment ago, that invitation had been among her highest, most unlikely, hopes. Once offered, the ideal tarnished. Any home she’d once had in the sidh was too long abandoned for her to feel any bond stronger than mere nostalgia. “Is that an order?” she asked with her eyes still narrowed.
He hesitated, knowing as well as she that the wants and wishes of a fae king were considered by the court to have all the force of divine mandate, but knowing as well as she that he couldn’t lie about it when directly challenged. “No,” he finally admitted. “But you should consider it.”
“Why?”
His cautious expression faded into an anticipatory grin. “By the king’s order, if you don’t return to court, I’m to remain with you to ensure your safety.”
It would be a disaster either way, she suspected. “That he sent you instead of a herald says he suspected I would not fall all over myself to return to Ireland and Beyond,” she commented. “That he did not order my return tells me all I need to know about the depth of his desire to see me once again walking the sidh.” Traditionally, exiles were forbidden contact with anyone under the King’s command. If the King of the fae was willing to assign a guardian to an exile, something must have prompted him other than the three-hundred year anniversary of his decree - but this, she thought and did not say.
“I suspect he feared that you would not obey.”
She leveled a flat, unbelieving stare at the unicorn. “You could have compelled me.”
“I suspect that if I tried to compel you to do anything, milady Gwendolyn, one of us would have returned to Eire a cripple.”
Gwen pointed to the Faerie Host, still riding their horses astride the sky. The ruby rings on her fingers glittered in the dim lamplight that flowed in from the street. “Don’t be a fool – and don’t take me for one.”
He flinched as if slapped, but before he could say anything further, they were no longer alone.