Rampant (16 page)

“Yeah.”

“And your mother is forcing you to quit school and do this?”

“Yeah.”

He laughed. “I agree, Astrid. You need to get out of there.
That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”

And I hadn’t even gotten to the nutty part yet. The part about the unicorns and the magic and the panacea that would cure everything if we only found out how to make it. I mean, if Gordian found out. We were Wildlife Control Nuns sponsored by a drug company. It got weirder by the second.

Giovanni kissed me then, and I pushed those other thoughts away. I couldn’t tell him the truly crazy stuff. And every time I started talking he stopped kissing me and listened. Who wanted
that
?

He pressed into the tree and me, and my hair tangled against the bark, but I didn’t care at all. I was barely standing on my own, supported in his arms and against the thigh he’d somehow wedged between my legs. Heavenly, butterfly-light touches of his fingertips on the skin of my stomach battled with heavy, hard kisses. He was holding himself back, but my heart was beating so fast, I thought my veins might pop. “More,” I whispered, and he sighed, a near moan.

“Astrid.” He rested his forehead against mine, breathing hard.
“Ti voglio bene.”

I caught his hand against my heart. “No fair using Italian I don’t know. What does that mean?”

He shook his head. “I’ll never tell.” But from the expression in his eyes, I got a pretty good idea. My skin turned to fire under his gaze, and every hair on my body stood at attention when he kissed me again. Our hands were still clasped between us, through my shirt, but then his slid from my grasp and pressed, palm flat against my sternum, fingers splayed wide across my breasts.

Giovanni didn’t even cop a feel like other boys. I couldn’t catch my breath, couldn’t think. I sensed everything too
much—the whispers of the leaves, Giovanni’s heartbeat, the sound of our cloth-covered thighs rubbing against each other, the soft touch of his mouth on mine, each infinitesimal shift of his hand as his fingertips slipped beneath the edge of my bra. My blood seemed to vibrate with a strange and terrible chord. This rush, this careening, amazing feeling. I loved it. I loved it all—

No.

I stilled within his arms. This hyperawareness, I knew it. It wasn’t me and Giovanni. It was a unicorn.

“No,” I said aloud, and he pulled away. I bit my lip to keep from crying out, half from loss, half from fear. Several unicorns. Here. Close. And me without a weapon. Without backup. Could Phil sense them? Where was she?

“Astrid?” Giovanni said. “You okay?”

No, I wasn’t. Because something else, something new, had started, as if some accelerant in my blood had ignited. It burned, it stung. My eyes watered and my nostrils and throat clogged. I stared down at my arms, almost expecting to see the skin crack and peel. What was this? I tried to list the symptoms, but my mind was too focused on the position of the unicorns.

“Damn!” Giovanni rubbed his eyes. “What the—it’s like mace. Let’s get out of here.” He started pulling me back the way we came, but I shook my head.

“No. Not…that way.” Just opposite the unicorns. They were moving fast.

We stumbled on, deeper into the park, and then we saw Phil and Seth. The latter seemed to be having trouble breathing. Both were disheveled. I noted that Phil’s shirt was on backwards and inside out.

“Did you see them?” Phil asked.

I shook my head. “You?”

“No. What was that—”

“Burning?” I finished. “No idea. Is Seth all right?”

“I think he got a big lungful of whatever it was,” Giovanni said. Seth was sitting with his back to a tree. I hoped he’d be able to run if he had to. The unicorns were fading now, but the burning lingered.

“Should we follow?” Phil asked.

“I think we should run. We’re not prepared.”

Giovanni was watching both of us. “Ladies, we should get Seth back to the restaurant. He’s having some kind of allergic reaction.”

“Won’t they come for us, though?” Phil asked.

“That yearling didn’t, but he was outnumbered.” The unicorns were nearly gone, and I could breathe clearly again. “I think they decided against it.”

Seth had started coughing, a phlegm-filled hacking that clearly gave Phil the willies. Giovanni helped him to his feet, and I tugged on the shirt tag underneath Phil’s chin.

“Who needs a chaperone now?” I asked.

She brushed me off. “It’s not what it looks like.”

“Better not be. Two unarmed hunters alone in the woods is bad enough. But one?”

“I wouldn’t abandon you, Asteroid.” She squeezed my hand, then went to help Seth.

Giovanni joined me on the path back out. “I got pepper-sprayed once in high school. A canister went off in this girl’s purse in the middle of math class. This felt like that.”

“Really.” I looked around but could see little in the dark. Of
course, who needed eyes when you could
sense
the unicorns?

“I’ve heard muggers sometimes use them to disarm their victims. Do you think someone was trying to rob us?”

Frankly, muggers had been the least of my concerns. Losing another purse would be nothing compared to a unicorn attack. That was it: no more making out with boys in the woods. It always ended badly.

“Astrid,
guardami.”
He took me by the shoulders. “Look at me. Are you all right?”

His expression was full of concern, but I saw it only for a moment. For beyond him, at the edge of the woods, lay a pile of bodies.

At least, they may have been bodies. Kirin, once, from the look of the mangled bits of bone and hide that lay strewn around. My eyes burned again, looking at them.

“Oh, God,” I whispered.

He turned around. “What the hell?”

One lay slit from tail to throat, guts spilling out over the grass. Another was in pieces, a thick coating of dark blood obscuring its brindled coat. If I hadn’t spent time staring at a kirin corpse recently, I never would have recognized the species.

Before I could stop myself, I was standing in the middle of the massacre, circling the bodies in disgust and fascination.

Phil appeared beside me. “Who could have done this?” Her voice trembled. “No one at the Cloisters…”

The burning. I knew it. It was alicorn venom. I looked down at the drained white irises of the kirin corpse at my feet. “The third unicorn,” I said, softly enough so the boys couldn’t hear. “There was a third.” We needed to call someone. We
needed to figure this out. “Hunters are the only
people
who can kill a unicorn.”

I raised my head to the path. Giovanni stared back at me, and there was nothing in his eyes but horror.

“But they can also kill each other.”

T
HE SOUND OF METAL
against stone resounded through the Cloisters, adding to the vibrations emanating from the wall and increasing my budding migraine. I’d begun building up my resistance to the chapter house, but this situation with the metal spikes and the sledgehammer was not ideal.

Neil gave the metal spike on the right another wallop, then lowered the hammer and stepped back. “Philippa,” he said, practically bowing out of the way.

My cousin stepped forward, a kirin horn cradled in her hands, and laid it across the two protruding spikes in the wall. In the side of the alicorn, she’d carved her name in crude, triangular letters.

PHILIPPA LLEWELYN

“Is it fair,” Cory said at my side, “that I have nothing on the Wall of First Kills?”

“If you’d like,” I replied, “I can clean out Bonegrinder’s grooming brush and you can hang up one of her hairballs. You’ve killed her plenty of times.”

Cory snorted, Phil curtseyed and grinned, and even Neil failed to hide his smile. When Phil noticed that, she twirled her arms in the air and presented the horn again like she was a game show host. Grace whispered something I’m pretty sure was snide to Melissende, who took everything in and didn’t change her expression at all. Rosamund looked longingly at the piano.

Another day at the Cloisters.

It had taken more than two weeks for Gordian to return the horn of the kirin to us so that Phil could post her entry on the Wall of First Kills. I still didn’t know what kind of tests they did on the animals, but there was some part of me glad that they’d switched their focus to corpses rather than live specimens like Bonegrinder.

I’d called Gordian about the killing in the park on Monte Mario, and they sent out a team to collect the remains, but the alicorn venom was too overwhelming for non-hunters to approach, and in the end, they just torched the entire area and called it a fire. This was the story that we heard on the news the following day—a fire. No dead unicorns at all. I didn’t know what the benefit was of keeping the situation under wraps, but when I tried to bring up the subject with Cory, she seemed mostly interested in the idea of fire. She wondered if napalm might be an effective weapon against unicorns.

I wondered why unicorns would turn on each other like that.

After the ceremony at the wall, such as it was, we were granted a bit of downtime. Melissende and Grace were icing their bowstring arms after a grueling day spent at the targets—the former was determined to join the hunter ranks on our next
outing, and the latter was still in major guilt mode for her failed shots. They huddled in the corner by the weapons, heads bent close together, gossiping.

Ilesha and Ursula, who had actually hit it off, decided to play chess on the chapter house’s board, which was, as you may have guessed, made of unicorn. In the chess board’s case, it was white re’em and dark kirin bones carved into playing pieces and inlaid in squares on the board.

I plopped down on the couch farthest from the Chair and the Wall of First Kills, and debated whether it would be worth it to go upstairs for a cool cloth to put over my eyes. How could the others stand it in here? Rosamund spent half her time in this gloomy, cavernous space, plonking away at the piano keys, totally ignoring the ambient vibrations in the wall, which I’m sure clashed terribly with whatever piece she was trying to play.

Cory went back to Neil’s office, no doubt armed with yet another sheaf of yellowed archives, trying to track down more hapless victims of Alexander the Great’s promiscuity to bring into our hunting fold. Maybe I’d join her in a bit and try to find some more information about unicorn behavior.

Valerija was sitting in a chair, staring into the middle distance. Dorcas was parked on the other couch, braiding Zelda’s hair. Rosamund played on. Her choice today reminded me of springtime and dancing, like the painting Giovanni had shown me of Diana and her huntresses, laughing and gathered together to celebrate a successful hunt.

Maybe in earlier times, the huntresses here were like that. I tried to picture the girls around me partying post hunt. Nothing.

Of course, it didn’t help that Ursula and Melissende had
started squabbling about Melissende’s archery stance. I couldn’t really make out much of the German, but judging by body language the younger girl had a problem with the way her older sister was placing her feet. Since Ursula had been the one hitting all her marks of late, it would probably behoove Melissende to listen, but I doubted that would happen. Ursula, in between moving her rooks and pawns, was calling out suggestions to her sister, and Melissende was shouting back something I didn’t need to understand the language to know was
shut up
.

I laid my head against the armrest of the couch and tried to concentrate on Rosamund’s music—the clear, frosty high notes and rumbling lows—but I couldn’t get the image of that painting out of my head. Diana stared, stern and triumphant, from the backs of my eyelids. The men in the bushes awaited their doom. The hunter beckoned, smug and knowing. I lay here, trapped under the earth in a cage of unicorn bones.

Couldn’t Rosamund play something else? I couldn’t take it anymore. The longer I listened, the more the music seemed to blend with the way the walls rang. That awful chord echoed in my skull, even sharper now, as if the addition of Phil’s horn had added to the clamor.

I opened my eyes and looked at the wall. How strange was that? I’d noticed nothing last month, when they added Valerija’s horn. I stood and walked over to the wall, cringing slightly as I got closer. I traced my hand over femurs and jawbones, ribs, and pelvises, each resounding with the same vibration. I closed my fingers around the kirin’s horn with Phil’s name. All the same. I let my fingers trail further, and closed my hand over Valerija’s trophy.

And felt nothing. Dead space. I lifted it from the spikes on
the wall and examined it, turning it over in my hands. This one made no noise, no vibrations, either on the wall or off. I returned to Phil’s horn and weighed them both in my hands.

Odd. I looked up and caught Valerija staring at me. I waved and quickly replaced both horns. Why were they different? Was there some process the old hunters had performed on the horns that Gordian might have inadvertently stumbled upon? If only I knew what kind of tests they were doing.

Was I the only one who noticed it? Phil had unhooked Bonegrinder from the chain that attached her to the masonry hook in the wall, and they had departed for points unknown. I longed to kidnap the horn to show her, but Valerija was still watching me, suspicion flaring in her eyes. Fine, have your stupid horn. There would be time later.

Instead, I wandered up to the courtyard to find Phil grooming Bonegrinder. The zhi was currently in her equivalent of heaven, pressed close to Phil’s side, while tiny tufts of unicorn coat fell from the brush and drifted across the courtyard like little white tumbleweeds. I sat down nearby.

“So,” Phil said brightly, “I’m an official unicorn hunter now.” She cocked her head. “Feels…pretty much the same.” She resumed brushing the zhi. “Which I guess is good. That I don’t feel like a murderer or anything.”

“How much longer do you think you’ll stay here?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t like hunting, you don’t like the philosophy, you don’t like sharing your room with Valerija…”

“How long will
you
stay?”

“I’m out of here the moment I turn eighteen,” I said with surety. “Or sooner if I can get your dad to sue for custody.”

“Yeah, but you’d ruin all the fun for both me and your mom. My dad would flip if he knew either of us was here,” Phil said. She pulled hard at a snarl in Bonegrinder’s coat, and the zhi bleated in protest. “I don’t hate everything about hunting. I could do without the part where we actually kill the unicorns. But this little monster isn’t so bad. And, to be honest, I like when we chase them. I like how that feels.”

“You like the powers, then.”

“You like them, too, Astrid. Don’t lie.”

I couldn’t deny that. Since arriving at the Cloisters, it had almost become second nature to sense the unicorns. In the park with Giovanni, I wasn’t sure what he was making me feel and what were my hunter powers springing to life. I loved that snapping-band feeling, right as everything slowed down. I loved how strong I felt whenever I chased a unicorn. I even loved how Bonegrinder bowed before me if I gave her half a chance. I could, however, live without attracting the monsters to me. I could live without the vibrations in the chapter house walls.

I changed tactics. “I bet Seth wouldn’t like to see you flirting with Neil like you do.”

Phil tossed her head and looked at Bonegrinder. “Seth and I aren’t all that serious.”

I practically choked on my own tongue. No denial? No
I wasn’t flirting with Neil?
I’d been half joking before, but now I was in shock.

“Does Seth know that?” I asked, even as I was wondering what Neil knew.

Now she looked at me. “Does Giovanni think this is serious?” she asked. “Can it be, if you’re going to stay in the Order for another two years?”

“He’s going back to college in a few months, anyway.”

“Well, so’s Seth.”

“And you?” I pressed.

Bonegrinder squirmed as Phil started tugging on a particularly stubborn knot. The zhi nipped at Phil’s fingertips, and she swatted the unicorn’s muzzle. “No bite!”

Bonegrinder’s limpid blue eyes were filled with contrition and adoration, and Phil melted. “Monster,” she said with a chuckle. The zhi’s coat glistened in the sunlight. No wonder people had been fascinated with these creatures for millennia. They were so beautiful and so terrible all at once. Such an amazing source of strength but capable of such horror.

Like the virgin hunters themselves.

“Phil,” I said, “I noticed something downstairs on the Wall of First Kills.” I told her briefly about Valerija’s alicorn.

“Weird,” Phil said. “Let’s go check it out.” She brushed zhi hair off her pant legs, looped Bonegrinder’s chain around a column, and accompanied me inside and back down the stairs.

We stopped dead on the threshold. Grace had Ilesha pinned to the weapon wall, holding a giant sword pointed at her throat, while Melissende was backing Ursula ever closer to the alicorn throne.

“Stop it!” Phil shouted.

“Or what?” Grace said. “You’ll tattle to Neil? I’m trembling.” Actually, she was, for she could barely keep the sword upright. Ilesha whimpered. I swallowed hard and started to edge toward the two of them.

“Go on,” Melissende coaxed the younger girl in a voice as cold as ice. “You aren’t afraid to just sit down, are you? Aren’t you as brave and strong as your friend Ilesha over there? Don’t
you both have dozens of trophies on that wall? Just do it. Stop being a baby.” She took another step forward. Ursula flinched, stumbled back, and put her hand on the armrest, then yelped and leaped away as if burned.

“Guess you
are
a baby,” Melissende said. In English, no less. Humiliating her sister in front of everyone, showing off for Grace.

“Get away from them,” Phil said, rounding the couch and closing in on Melissende.

Melissende didn’t even turn around. “Why? She’s my sister, and she thinks she’s hot stuff as a hunter. So I asked her to prove it.”

Ilesha began to slide down the wall as Grace’s arms wavered. The sword was clearly too big for her. It was practically taller than she was. Grace seemed to be having trouble holding it aloft, and lowered the point to the floor as she turned her attention to Phil. I sidled over to the Wall of First Kills and grabbed the nearest alicorn off its stand.

In the corner, Rosamund wrung her hands, flummoxed, but there was no time to be freaked out. Grace had pulled a sword on another girl. If she took another step toward my cousin, I’d pull the alicorn on her.

Valerija stared impassively at the scene, apparently too strung out to even notice what was going on. Dorcas and Zelda were nowhere to be seen.

“Get away
now,
” Phil repeated.

“Make me,” Melissende said.

Phil grabbed her arm and swung her away, placing herself between the two Holtz girls. “Don’t get near her again, or you’ll deal with me.”

“Tough words from the don’s pet. How sweet.” Melissende rubbed her arm. Phil glared at her.

But I was still watching Grace, who’d narrowed her focus to Phil’s back. The tip of the sword dragged on the ground. “Phil,” I warned.

Grace looked at me and gave a tiny shake of her head. Apparently, I was no threat. My fist tightened around the horn, but I knew I’d never be able to use it. Grace was right.

Phil turned toward Grace. “Mighty big sword for a little thing like you,” she said softly. “Really think you can wield it?”

Grace sneered. “It’s the claymore of Clothilde Llewelyn.” She struggled to lift it again. “Do you think
you
can?”

Phil shook her head. “Don’t you get it? This isn’t a competition.”

Grace laughed. “Of course it’s not. After all, you’re winning.” She took a deep breath and began to lift the claymore. My hesitation shattered.

I rushed at her and slammed my foot down on the blade. The hilt was torn from Grace’s grasp and clattered against the stones. Grace staggered backward, and even Valerija seemed to shake out of her stupor as the metallic din echoed from wall to wall, caught and magnified by every bone in the chamber. All the girls stared.

“If this was Clothilde’s,” I said, “I doubt she’d want it aimed at one of her own.”