Liquid Silver

"Oh! That," Destrey waved her brother's concerns away. "Any creature that can gore you to death is hardly defenceless. It's an old wive's tale. Besides, a cursed life is better than no life at all. You're an Ashcroft, Shylock, use your brain why don't you?"

"Is that why you've told Monroe all about this little plan of yours?" Shylock asked snidely, though he still held his silver potions knife ready for the kill. "I don't even know how you think you'll lure it out. You're not exactly the kind of girl unicorns like."

Destrey simply gave him a withering look.

"Not that it's any of your business, but unicorns love me," she said.

She changed direction, turning towards a whinny that sounded in the distance.

"Come on, we need to find a clearing. Or somewhere clearer than this."

The clearing was under a stand of beeches.

Right away Destrey found herself branch large enough to perch upon and dragged it to the centre of the clearing. Meanwhile, Shylock had to make do with crouching among the bushes.

"I think you're supposed to sing," he reminded her. "That's what all the maidens in the stories do. They sing and brush their hair."

Destrey gave her brother another of her patented looks. He was such a nerd.

"Because the maidens in those stories are proving they're so pure that they can catch and hold a unicorn with a single strand of hair," she explained. "It's an allegory, Shylock.

Besides, I don't want to catch a unicorn, I want to kill it. That's where you come in. And if you decide not to come in, it will die a lot more slowly than if you had."

The unicorn, when it finally turned up (Destrey's arse was starting to feel kinda sore) was a timid creature.

Maybe she really ought to have sung, but Destrey wasn't going to give Shylock the satisfaction of being right. Or maybe they could have borrowed some oats from the Care of Magical Creatures paddock. That might have lured it closer more quickly.

Eventually, however, the unicorn did was it was supposed to do. It made its way across the clearing and laid its head in Destrey's lap.

For a moment, it was an idyllic scene and if the rest of the school had been present, at least half of them would have said it was a miracle. Up until the unicorn began to panic.

It was on its knees, so it couldn't get up, especially not with Destrey holding it down so her brother could slip his potions knife into its eye socket, deep into its brain.

"There," he said. "And you barely spill any blood this way. You can drain it later. Well, not too much later. You know what I mean."

He began to tie a rope about the carcass' hind-legs so they could hang it where no wild animals would get to it.