Rampant (21 page)

I pressed my hands against my temples and let out a hoarse scream. The images poured on. Relentless, shifting, sliding, until at last they began to make sense.

Daughter of Alexander, danger. The kirin watch. The kirin remember. The Llewelyns decimated the unicorns. The Llewelyns are forbidden.

“Forbidden from what?”

The Cloisters of Ctesias. The chapter house. The Wall of First Kills.

From being hunters? Tell that to—well, everyone. The Bartolis, Marten, and my mother all seemed to think we were the best ones. How could we be
forbidden
from being hunters if it was our destiny?

“Well, it’s a good thing that the kirin don’t decide, isn’t it?”

In my mind’s eye,
Marten watched Phil draw her bow. Her form was perfect, the shot true. Technicians bustled around the body of the kirin yearling. Valerija held aloft the head of the other kirin. The Wall of First Kills shuddered beneath my hands—all but hers.

The karkadann stiffened suddenly and whipped his head to the side. A fresh wave of fumes caught me, and I struggled to stay upright on the bench.

Bonegrinder, frolicking in the courtyard.

I followed its gaze, and indeed, there was a zhi by the gate to
the park. The little unicorn minced forward, and I saw it wasn’t just any zhi. A pink bandanna was tied around its neck.

“Bonegrinder!” I called, and pushed to my feet, wavering slightly.

The karkadann lowered its horn in warning, and I froze. Bonegrinder cocked her head, hesitant, then took a few steps forward, looking from one of us to the other.

How had she gotten loose? Cory said she’d shut her in the catacombs!

Tunnels. Freedom.

Bonegrinder came close enough to sniff at the karkadann’s leg. The karkadann opened its mouth.

“No!” I said. “She’s mine!”

Laughter. Chains. Whips. Prisons. Alexander.

“I don’t understand you. You mean that she’s domesticated?” Hardly, I corrected myself. I’d seen her go after Phil tonight.

Bonegrinder pawed at the karkadann’s enormous hoof, then bowed before it, as it did to me.

Servant.

The karkadann seemed to sneer.

The two kirin lay dead on the hillside, while Marten watched Phil shoot practice arrows.

Bonegrinder rose and looked from me to the karkadann, clearly confused. Well, that made two of us. The karkadann was growling now, a rumbling so low I felt rather than heard it. It resounded through my bones like I was the trophies on the Wall of First Kills. The karkadann was angry. Furious, in fact. Any second now, it would tear us both apart. I fell back against the bench.

Suddenly, Bonegrinder was standing in front of me, facing the
giant unicorn, making her little, high-pitched, bleating growl. Her legs were placed wide, her limbs bent, ready to spring.

Servant! No! Never!

Alexander, riding into battle. The dust of a thousand dead soldiers. Bloody jaws, teeth and skin broken on a copper bit, spears, scars, endless marches through deserts. No water. No food, but for another rotting carcass of a soldier who hadn’t survived, tossed like a scrap to a dog. Alexander marched on.

The kirin on the hillside, and then
…

Marten Jaeger, enormous, shadowed in harsh white light. Pain…so much pain. The sound of Cory crying, “Stop!”

The karkadann quit snarling and straightened, staring at the little zhi.

I stared, too. Was that last one…
her
thought? Bonegrinder’s memory of the time she’d been a lab rat at Gordian?

Bonegrinder kept making angry little yips. Her fluffy white coat stood on end, shaking slightly as she faced off against the monster. The karkadann tilted its head back again, angling its horn away from us both, and she relaxed.

In my mind, I saw tiny Ilesha drawing her bow against the yearling. I saw Dorcas attacking the re’em with a pocketknife. I was getting better at translating.

Brave little thing
.

Bonegrinder stepped forward and sniffed at the karkadann again. When the giant unicorn made no move, she began to frolic again, weaving in and out of the karkadann’s legs.

I wondered if I was the only human ever to witness this interspecies unicorn interaction. Should I be taking notes? But would I even be able to lift a pen, let alone defend myself? My sight was beginning to go black at the edges. I was losing
consciousness, suffocating from the fumes. My hands slipped on the bench until I was resting on my elbows. The karkadann was killing me by inches.

Bonegrinder?

“Yes,” I said. “That’s what we call her.”

She likes it. Not her name, but good.

“What is her name?” I choked out. “She has another?”

A barrage of images, but I had no more screams in me tonight. Finally, they coalesced:

All slaves do
.

I lay gasping for breath on the stone.

Daughter of Alexander, do not die yet.

“Why not?” I whispered. My eyes watered, my nose ran. The park swam in my field of vision. Bonegrinder whined, nervous, her breath warm and soothing on my raw face. “You like your food live?”

Laughter. No. Not food.

“Then what?”

Giovanni’s voice: “Astrid the Warrior.”

It
was
mocking me. This was all a game. Torture the hunter to death. And not just any hunter: the Llewelyn.

I need you. Freedom.

“From what?” I barely had breath to push the words past my lips. “You a slave, too?”

Once. Never again.

The darkness whirled now, beckoning me closer. Each breath was ragged, flat. My lungs were torn balloons.

And still the karkadann whispered inside my head.

They called me Bucephalus.

M
Y BACK WAS COLD
. My T-shirt kept riding up, exposing my skin to the night breeze. I curled forward more, hugging the warmth deeper into my chest.

The warmth bleated.

I opened my eyes with difficulty, as they seemed glued together by dried, crusty bits of sleep. Gray, watery dawn light filtered in, slightly blurred. The park. The bench. And Bonegrinder in my lap, burrowing her face into my shoulder so that her horn jutted painfully against my arm.

I was alive.

I sat up, careful not to dislodge the sleeping zhi. Alive or not, I wasn’t sure I was up to a chase. I ran a hand over my face, then grimaced when I saw the mess of dried blood and mucus in my palm. I didn’t even want to know what I looked like. Part of this might have been from my crying fit, but I was sure even more was due to—

That hadn’t really happened, had it? I froze, halfway to the fountain across the clearing. My nice little chat with the
karkadann? It was a dream, a nightmare. Perhaps my sore eyes and throat were products of my crying, of my running through the city in the grip of a murderous rage.

But the nosebleed, and Bonegrinder there on the bench…

No. It was a dream, born of too much stress and too many days spent staring at that tableau in the rotunda. Bucephalus! Right. Last night I talked to a twenty-three-hundred-year-old unicorn. Not even trees lived that long.

I rinsed my face off in the fountain, then drank a few mouthfuls from the spring water spigot nearby. Thank God for Rome’s ancient public works. I hesitated for a moment, then plunged my whole head under the faucet, letting the frigid water wake me up and cool my burning skin. My face and neck were sensitive to the touch, the skin on my arms and hands dry and flaky.

A glance back at the bench had me on my feet again in a flash. Bonegrinder was gone! But not far; I found her a few trees away, sniffing the ground, possibly tracking a squirrel. How would I get her home through the streets of Rome without having her attack someone? Especially if she was hungry.

I gathered up the alicorn from where it had rolled under the bench and raided a nearby trash can for supplies. Plastic shopping bags, a bit of shredding twine—Bonegrinder had escaped from steel cages and catacombs. How would any of this hold her?

I heard a chorus of squeaks from the trees. Great. She’d caught breakfast at least. Now, if only I could get her out of here before we ran into any joggers or maintenance men.

Bingo: a bicycle chain. I gathered up my findings and whistled to the zhi. She trotted over, bits of brown tail fluff
still sticking to her fangs. I knelt down and began knotting the plastic bags together into thick ropes. Of course, Bonegrinder could gnaw through steel locks, but maybe that was only if she got her teeth around it. I remember reading once that an alligator can snap its jaws closed with great force, but that you can hold the jaws closed relatively easily, I wondered if that would work for zhi.

I looped the bicycle chain around her snout, and she flinched as the links pinched her skin. Suddenly, I got a flash—a copper bit and muzzle, crusted with dried blood. An image from last night. An image from my nightmare. Bonegrinder looked up at me, her eyes more blue and limpid than ever, and I slid the chain off her face. Maybe the plastic would be a bit gentler. She balked when I tried to slip the carefully knotted loops of plastic around her head, but eventually I got the whole contraption cinched up tight. Her jaws were secured by a rope of plastic bags, which led back to the bandanna around her neck. I used the bicycle chain as a leash, with a secondary restraint made of bags tied around my own waist, and my free hand firmly gripping her horn. I’m sure we looked ridiculous, but since I was about to walk a unicorn through the streets of Rome, whether or not our trashy accessories would be noted as a fashion disaster was at the bottom of my list of things to worry about.

“Now be good,” I warned Bonegrinder. She strained against my hand, trying in vain to free herself from my grip. This was going to suck. We walked, awkwardly, toward the gates of the park, and I began to realize how very impossible a task this would be. I couldn’t leave her here, and I couldn’t contact anyone at the Cloisters to come get us unless I started begging
for spare change on the street corners so I could use a pay phone.

Bonegrinder stiffened, and her fur bristled. Oh no. I tightened my grip on both leash and horn as she began to growl. Was it a jogger? A janitorial crew? A pastry cart?

And then she took off, and I began to sprint to keep hold of her. We flew down the street, and in the midst of my weird, hunter time warp, I saw the solution. We’d run.

And I’d steer.

Miraculously, we reached the door of the Cloisters without mishap, and in record time, too. I wasn’t even out of breath, though I hadn’t been able to run half that distance the previous evening, and that was before my lungs had been ravaged by—

No. I’d decided that was a dream. Or at the very least, I’d decided I wasn’t going to think about it until I’d gotten Bonegrinder safely back to the Cloisters. Which I had, so maybe now it was time to examine my memories of last night a little more closely.

They called me Bucephalus.

Yeah, that had to have been a dream.

Inside the rotunda, the re’em had begun to grow a tad ripe. Even Bonegrinder crinkled up her nose at the stench. We walked past the tableau, and I shuddered, expecting any second for the karkadann on the dais to move, to breathe, as the one in the park had. Terrifying as the stuffed version was, nothing could compare to the real thing.

I mean, the one in my dream.

Now, where to put Bonegrinder that would be safe and
secure? How often had she been escaping from the Cloisters to go romping through the streets of Rome? We hadn’t been keeping that close an eye on her, and she usually slept with Phil.

Never again. My chest began to ache.

But last night, she’d remained safe in my lap the entire time I’d been unconscious. Perhaps the solution would be to keep her close until we could find a more permanent place to put her. A more permanent place to put Phil.

I wondered how my cousin was doing, but after last night, I didn’t know if I could face her. I cast a glance at the staircase to the dormitory floor. If she was upstairs, asleep, I couldn’t risk bringing Bonegrinder past her door on the way to my room. The zhi might go ballistic again.

So instead I went down to the chapter house. Today, the vibrations from the wall didn’t seem as grating. Maybe I’d grown used to them, or, more likely, in light of everything else that I’d been dealing with in the past few days, the buzzing was nothing more than a slight annoyance. It was almost soothing, in fact, like a white noise machine.

There was a collar and chain sunk into the masonry in the wall, and I secured Bonegrinder, then let her join me on the couch. I threw a hand over my face, curled my body around the zhi, and let my eyes drift shut once more.

It may have been only minutes later when I heard a soft voice in my ear.

“Asteroid.”

I jolted awake. “No, Phil! Bonegr
-scmunnnnf
.” She pressed me to her chest.

“Honey, why do you smell like garbage?” She pulled away, her nose wrinkled.

“Long story.” Bonegrinder was near the wall, eyeing Phil warily. I looked back at my cousin, and she waved her hand at me. Neil’s ring glinted from one of her fingers.

“I’ll be fine with this on,” Phil said. “He thought I should have it. Thought I should have a lot of things, really. Like a physical at the hospital and a nice chat with the police and the American consulate.” She sighed and looked down at her hands.

“Oh, God, Phil, I’m so sorry.”

“Me, too.”

My sore lungs felt like they were being crushed anew. “This is all my fault. Are you hurt? Are you going to be—”

“Whoa. All your fault? Say that again and I’ll slap your face.” She stood now and wandered away.

“But if I hadn’t let you go out alone…” I began from my position on the couch.

“I’m out alone plenty. And when I’m out with you I still manage to get in private time with my dates. You had nothing to do with this.” She trailed a tentative finger along the armrest of the alicorn throne. “Huh. Watch this.” She plopped down in it. “Comfy.”

I was momentarily stunned into silence.

“I feel like a queen,” Phil said, lifting her chin. I said nothing, and after another moment, she slumped. “Please, Astrid. Don’t you be weird, too.”

Don’t be weird meaning don’t talk about what happened? Don’t be weird meaning don’t run around Rome, then roll around in garbage, then go to sleep in the one spot I’ve been trying to avoid up until last night? Don’t be weird meaning don’t
have long, involved conversations with imaginary, thousands-of-years-old monsters?

Too late, Phil.

“I’m really sorry for throwing you out of my room last night,” she said at last. “I wished you were there so many times. Just to hold my hand. Anything. Neil is nice, but it’s not the…same.”

“Phil.” I rushed toward her, then stopped just in time. My thigh brushed against the throne, sending shockwaves of pain rippling up and down my leg.

“Watch it,” she said flatly. “You’re still a live wire.”

“Now I’m going to slap
you
.” I sat on the floor. “Talk to me. Tell me what happened.”

“I had sex with Seth.”

“He forced you.”

She looked away. “This is as bad as the police.”

I touched her knee. “I want to understand.”

She was silent for a long time. “Me, too, Astrid. Me, too. I want to understand why I didn’t stop him. It was all so quick, I don’t even know. One second, we were fooling around, and the next…he was…
inside
.”

I clenched my jaw and my fists. “Did he hurt you?”

She shook her head miserably. “Physically, but nothing compared to how much we’ve been smacked around while hunting. As soon as I felt him, I tried to push him away, but…”

“But what?” I asked.

Phil practically hissed and flew up from the chair, sweeping past me and over to the other side of the room. I rose, too. Perhaps I shouldn’t be pushing her.

“This is the problem!” she said. “You all keep saying stuff like ‘rape’ and ‘force’ and ‘hurt’ and ‘fight,’ and it makes me wonder…if I
didn’t
fight, maybe it
wasn’t
force. If he didn’t hold me down, if he didn’t smack me around…”

“No, Phil—they’re just—the words I know. I don’t think—”

She faced the wall of weapons. “Like maybe it was all some horrible mistake. Like he didn’t mean to. Because I really liked him. And he liked me. So I don’t…think he wanted to hurt me.” She leaned her hands, palms flat against the wall, but I knew she felt no vibrations from the weaponry, no humming from the bones. “I pushed him and said stop, but it was…over. He was done. That was it.”

I swallowed past the lump in my throat. It was nothing like I had been imagining last night in the grip of my murderous rage.

She took her hands from the wall and stared at them. “But that was enough. For whoever decides these things. Alexander. Or Diana. Or Bonegrinder. Who knows?”

I stared at her, incapable of putting my thoughts into words, terrified that speaking at all would clam her up for good. If it hadn’t been for the hunting, for the eligibility, for the trial by zhi, would she have told us at all?

“So what do you think of that?” she asked abruptly, and turned to look at me. “I like him. I still really like him. What do you think of that?” Her tone was a dare.

“What does it matter what I think?” I asked. “The only thing I care about is you. What you think. What you feel. I’m glad you aren’t hurt—”

“I
am
hurt,” she snapped. “Incredibly hurt. Just not the way…people think I should be. No bruises. No blood.”

I bit my lip.

“Because here’s the part you’re gonna love,” she said after a minute. “I didn’t want to. You know that. I wanted to stay here, with you, with Neil, with the others. So of course I wasn’t going to have sex. And he knew it, too, because we talked about it. The other night, at the concert, he wanted to, kept asking, over and over, and I kept saying no. And he backed off. That’s what you do, right? You make a choice, together. And until you both make it clear you’ve changed your mind about having sex, the matter is closed.”

I nodded. I’d taken the same classes in school as Phil.

“So as much as I’d like to think he just made a mistake last night, wasn’t thinking in the heat of the moment, hadn’t realized that I didn’t change my mind…” She took a deep breath. “I know the truth. He didn’t make a mistake. He planned it. Because when he pulled out…” She grimaced. “He was wearing a condom, Astrid. Had been wearing one the whole time, I guess, because I sure as hell didn’t notice him putting it on!”

She laughed now, but there was no humor in it at all. I could only imagine the response she must have gotten at the hospital, at the police station. Safe sex rape? Right.

“And
that’s
when I got really mad. Would you believe it? When I saw that. Before that, I’d been angry at myself, sad, scared…. But now I was furious at
him
. Not happy that I wasn’t going to get pregnant, that I was protected—all that. Because it meant he knew exactly where it was all headed. No matter what I’d said, no matter that I’d told him I didn’t want to sleep with him. He knew what he was going to do. And I’d been thinking such generous thoughts—like he was all out of
control or something, and it just
happened
. What kind of crap is that? And maybe, because I was thinking that when he was doing it, maybe that’s why I didn’t fight? Maybe I could have stopped him?”

“No,” I said. “Don’t think that.”

“What’s the alternative? That I’ve been seeing this horrible, violent guy for all this time? That I’ve been dating a monster?”

“What did you do?” I whispered from my place across the room.

“Hit him.” Her mouth became a thin line, as straight as her spine. “Wish there’d been a unicorn nearby, I could have really whaled on him. Or not, I guess. At that point.”