Shopping isn’t as easy as it looks—especially when magic is involved. Continue Savannah’s story with the fourth chapter of the Paragons episode The Magic Emporium.

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A handcrafted wooden sign hung over the door. Miss Christie’s Magical Curiosities, it read in thick, carved letters. Finally, we’d made it.

Bright yellow flowers grew beneath the display windows, and to the entrance, a puppy dressed in a pink tutu lay on a fluffy mat. At least the shop looked cozy and friendly.

“Come on. Let’s slay this Quest!” Kylie said, pumping her fist in the air.

She was first to the door. She pulled it open and stepped into the shop. The rest of us weren’t far behind her.

As soon as I was inside, I tallied up how many other people were here and exactly where they were standing. Just in case there were any thieves lurking around. Ok, so maybe those bandits at the mall had left me a little paranoid. And very rattled.

Keeping my eyes and ears open for signs of movement, I joined my teammates. They were browsing the shelves for the ingredients on our shopping list. Eris stood back, observing us in silence.

My team quickly found the everlasting flame, the vial of Crimson Coast sand, and the dandelion dust. But we were still missing the unicorn hair.

“I don’t see it anywhere on the shelves,” Bronte said.

Neither did I. So I decided to try my luck at the front counter.

“Miss Christie?” I asked the young man standing behind it.

“Funny.” But he didn’t look amused. “Miss Christie is my aunt.”

I blushed. Well, in my defense, magic could make people look like different people. So that man could have been Miss Christie in disguise.

“Do you have any unicorn hair?” I asked the shopkeeper.

He glanced over his glasses at the ingredients my teammates had deposited on the counter. “An everlasting flame, sand from the Crimson Coast, dandelion dust…and a unicorn hair.” His gaze snapped up to meet my eyes. “Do you know what that recipe makes?”

“A bath bomb.”

The words burst out of my mouth before I knew what I was saying. I had no idea where they’d come from, but somehow I knew they were true.

“That’s right,” he replied, his lips tight. “A bath bomb. A bubbly, sweet-smelling, magical bath bomb that you drop into the water to relax your muscles. What an epic waste of magic.”

The Knights had sent us on an errand to buy bath supplies? I almost laughed. But given how annoyed the man already looked, I decided to hold back the chuckles.

“You can get the unicorn hair out back.” He handed me a very tiny wax paper bag.

I blinked at it. “I suppose that means we’ll be fletching the unicorn hair ourselves.”

“How astute of you,” he said drily.

“I once visited a shop where you had to pick your own flowers,” Bronte commented. “I guess this is the magical equivalent.”

Somehow picking flowers sounded easier than extracting a hair from a living unicorn.

“Unicorn hair needs to be fresh,” the shopkeeper told me.

“Right. It loses its potency within an hour of being plucked or cut from the unicorn,” I blurted out. Again, I had no idea where that knowledge had come from. Probably from one of the many books Mom had gotten me.

“Then you’d best not dawdle.” The shopkeeper held out his hand, palm up, the universal sign for ‘pay me’.

I looked at Bronte, who handed me the money pouch. I retrieved the two marbles from the pouch and handed them to the shopkeeper. He deposited them into two of the tubes in the very large, very ancient-looking pipe organ behind him. The organ tooted two happy notes.

The shopkeeper tucked our purchases into a cloth shopping bag, then bowed to me. “Thank you. Please come again.”

I moved toward the shop’s back door, giving the white-and-gold pipe organ a curious look as I passed by. So that’s what a magic cash register looked like. But I forgot all about the cash register the moment I stepped outside and saw the unicorns.

There were six of the beautiful creatures behind the shop. The area shouldn’t have been larger than a narrow back alleyway between buildings, but somehow it was. It was a full-scale farm. The farm included a large, fenced-off field with enough grassy space to keep the six unicorns happy. I wasn’t sure how someone had managed to fit a farm into an alley, but I had no doubt that magic had been involved.

Frustrated customers chased the unicorns across the field, each one trying to collect their strand of hair. Most of the people had dirty faces, scraped knees, and bruised arms. The unicorns, on the other hand, were sparkly clean. Their bodies shone like fresh snow lit up by a ray of sunshine.

I felt a forceful nudge from behind. I glanced back to watch my teammates retreating to a bench below the building’s back window.

“They’re just unicorns!” I said in exasperation as all four of them sat down. It seemed they’d volunteered me for this task.

“Then it should be no problem for you, Winters.” Asher winked at me.

The others nodded in agreement.

Fine. I’d show them how it was done. I wasn’t scared of a bunch of pretty, sparkly unicorns. Even if everyone else here was. Seriously, they were unicorns. How hard could this be?

I walked over to the only one of the six unicorns that didn’t already have a hopeful customer chasing it. One of the nameplates nailed to the fence told me she was a one-year-old filly named Sweet Escape. She looked smaller and friendlier than the other unicorns, but I reminded myself that there had to be a reason the other customers were giving her a wide berth, even though she was the only unicorn standing perfectly still.

“Hi, I’m Savannah.”

The unicorn whinnied at me.

“Nice to meet you, Sweet Escape.” I took a cautious step toward her.

She made a run for it. Moving lightning-fast, she nearly bowled me right over. I only barely managed to jump out of the way in time, and I nearly tripped over another customer in the process.

“Sorry,” I muttered to the woman, then turned toward my unicorn.

Sweet Escape wasn’t running anymore. No, she was standing there, calm and content, happily munching on a patch of clovers like she didn’t have a care in the world.

I sauntered toward her, trying to move as silently as I could. I didn’t make it two steps before she started running again. And this time she actually knocked me over.

I peeled myself off the muddy ground. The unicorn hadn’t run far. She was only steps away from me. I bet she was having too much fun. She looked at me, and I could have sworn her lips curled upward into a smirk.

Yep, she was having fun all right—at my expense. I totally needed to rethink my strategy.

An idea popped into my head.

“Sweet Escape.”

The unicorn perked up when I spoke her name.

“I wonder if your name is a clue.” I thrust my hand into my pocket. “My escape from this problem is something very sweet.” I reached out to her, palm open and turned up.

She sniffed the air.

“Come on.” I showed her the tiny cookies in my hand. “You know you want them.”

She tossed her white mane in defiance, but she didn’t run away.

“I’ll make you a deal.” I made it another step closer. “You give me one of your hairs, and I’ll give you all of these delicious cookies.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“They’re really tasty. I promise.”

She swooshed her tail.

“Here.” I tossed one of the cookies at her feet. “Taste for yourself.”

She lowered her head and gave the cookie a tentative sniff.

“Yum,” I told her, making a big show of rubbing my tummy.

She opened her mouth and scooped it up. Then came lots of chewing, along with lots of happy unicorn noises. When she was done eating the cookie, she lifted her head and gave me an expectant look.

“First, give me a strand of your hair,” I countered. “Then you can have the rest of the cookies.”

She thumped one of her hooves against the ground.

“That’s the deal. Take it or leave it. Throwing a tantrum won’t get you more cookies.”

She took a step toward me. Then another. And another. She was right in front of me now, so close that I could have reached out and touched her.

“Do we have a deal?”

She flicked her head.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” I kept my left hand out, showing her the cookies, as I used my right to pluck a hair from her mane.

I’d no sooner taken the hair than her tongue brushed across my open palm, scooping up the rest of the cookies like a vacuum cleaner.

“How did you do that?” one of the other customers asked.

Everyone was staring at me.

“No one has ever been able to get a hair off that stubborn horse’s head.”

“You just have to know how to talk to her.” I gave Sweet Escape an affectionate pat.

Now that she wasn’t trying to bowl me over, she really was a sweet unicorn.

She nudged my hand.

“Sorry, I don’t have any more cookies. But I’ll bring some the next time I come around.”

She winked at me.

“You have a gift.”

I turned toward the voice. A woman stood on the other side of the fence, watching me. She looked young, not more than a few years older than I was. But she held herself with a regal grace far beyond her years. And her queenly attire certainly didn’t hurt either. She wore a jewel-encrusted riding jacket and knee-high leather boots over skin-tight leggings. And she had the prettiest pair of gloves I’d ever seen; they glowed like they’d been woven from magic.

“A gift?” I shrugged, walking toward her. “Not really. I just tried to figure out what she wanted.”

“That is the gift, young one.” She swung open the gate for me. “Most people don’t even try to listen. They don’t respect other intelligent creatures. They don’t care about what they want. They care only for what they themselves want. What they can take.” She gestured toward the customers still struggling to get their unicorn hairs. “And that is why they failed where you succeeded.”

“Mostly I succeeded because Sweet Escape is a sweetheart.”

The young unicorn whinnied from the other side of the gate.

I blew her a kiss, then snapped my attention back to the mysterious woman. “Unicorns seem like reasonable creatures.”

She nodded. “They are the most reasonable of all magical creatures. Your cookies would not have worked on a dragon.”

I gulped. “What works on dragons?”

“Oh, it depends entirely on the dragon. But rest assured, not all of them relish in burning people to a crisp,” she said lightly.

“Uh, thanks for the tip.” I folded my hands together to keep myself from fidgeting. “I’ll remember that.”

“Who are you talking to?”

I jumped at the sound of Bronte’s voice, so close to me. I hadn’t seen her approach.

“Savannah?” Her brows drew together. “Are you all right?”

“Fine. It’s just all this talk of dragons that’s gotten me jumpy, I guess.”

“Dragons?”

“Yeah, that woman in green was about to tell me all about them.”

“What woman?”

“The one standing right…” I stopped when I didn’t find the woman. “Huh, weird. She was right here just a few moments ago.”

“Savannah.” Bronte set her hands on my shoulders, meeting my gaze. “There was no woman in green.”

I laughed. “Oh, come on. You must have seen her.” My gaze cut past Bronte, to the rest of my teammates. “Someone must have seen her.”

No one said a thing.

“I’m not crazy.” I struggled to keep my voice level.

Eris peeled out of the shadows. “No one’s saying you are, Savannah.” She lifted her hands, wiggling her fingers in the air. “I believe you. I can feel it. Something was here. Magic. It feels kind of familiar—and yet it’s not familiar.” She shook her head. “I can’t describe it better than that.”

I cleared my throat. “Well, I guess we should get back to the Castle before the unicorn hair loses its magic.” I added the unicorn hair to the shopping bag dangled over my shoulder.

Eris and the team walked back toward the shop, but I stayed for a moment longer, eyes closed, trying to understand that familiar, unfamiliar feeling in the air that Eris had described. I’d felt it too. And I didn’t know what it was either. But…

“It reminds me of what I felt at the Spirit Tree,” I said quietly to myself.

I shook my head, unable to figure out what that told me. So I hurried to catch up to my teammates.

Dizziness suddenly overwhelmed me, and I stumbled. A ring of glowing magic burst out of the ground like blue fire, swallowing me whole.