Ascendant (14 page)

“What have you been doing for school?” I asked him.

“A better question is what haven’t I been doing?” Brandt spread his arms wide. “I’m living in
France
! Our dinky little high school can eat its heart out.”

How was France supposed to help him on his SATs?

Brandt led me down the terraces, and the moment my feet hit the grass I felt them, the way the taste of salt in the air signals you’ve reached the sea.
Unicorns
. The sense of them bubbled within me, crowding out my thoughts of home and chemistry and even Marten Jaeger’s death gasps. The world warped as we moved forward, and the alicorn knife in my purse seemed to hum against my hip.

Brandt was studying me, not even bothering to conceal his wry grin.

“You’ve got a lot of them in the woods,” I said, surprised by how breathless I sounded. “Can you count them?”

“No. There are too many.” Their thoughts overwhelmed me. Hunger, fear, rage, weariness, despondency, despair. “These are einhorns?”

“‘These.’“
Brandt laughed. “Amazing.”

Not as amazing as what I’d started to touch back when I’d been doing yoga at the Cloisters.

We neared the greenhouse. “What’s in there?” I said, trying to subdue my instincts to sprint toward the forest. It was still possible to have a civilized conversation, unicorn magic and all.

Brandt shrugged. “More of Isabeau’s experiments. Medicinal herbs and stuff. She’s all about finding cures in the natural world.”

As we rounded the back of the glass dome, I saw that the forest itself was ringed with high chainlink fences topped by massive loops of barbed wire. More barbed wire was woven through the links.

“Is this supposed to keep the unicorns in?” I asked skeptically. Steel barbs probably wouldn’t even slow them down.

“No, it keeps the crazy people out.” Brandt pressed a code into the lockbox on a double-row security gate, and a buzzer sounded as we went through to a slim open area beyond the actual start of the trees. Inside the woods, I felt the unicorns stir and come forward. The air was dappled with sunlight as the clouds moved in the sky. Beneath the fire and flood that marked the presence of the animals, I caught the odor of a coming rain. It was the perfect weather for a unicorn attack.

I stepped between Brandt and the approaching monsters. “Um, this is a little unsafe. I’m getting some scary flashbacks to the last time we were in the woods.”

“Really?” Brandt raised his eyebrows suggestively. “Remember what we were doing then?”

Making out on a blanket. I blushed as he stepped around me.

“Here they come!” He pointed. A half dozen einhorns stepped out of the grove.

Just as Isabeau had promised, they were magnificent. Tall and elegant as deer, with slender white limbs and long, curving necks. Their large eyes were black and shiny as obsidian, surrounded by eyelashes as snowy as their fine coats. A graceful spiral horn the length of my arm stood at attention in the center of each of their foreheads. Long white tails like lions’ tails flicked with curiosity behind them.

Around each of their necks lay thick collars supporting chunky black boxes that blinked with green and red lights. My steps faltered.

“Electric collars, see?” Brandt pointed out a line in the dirt in front of us marked with little red flags. “They can’t cross this point.” He moved up almost to the line while I watched the silent unicorns, transfixed.

“How did you do this?” I asked, astounded. Unicorns could not be kept in captivity. At least, that’s what I’d always been told.

“How do you think?” said Brandt. “A hunter caught them for us.”

A hunter? Who? “Where is she now?”

Brandt lifted his shoulders and reached into his paper sack. “Uh, she … got out of the business.”

The unicorns watched him warily, though a few cast their eyes toward me and back to Brandt. Their thoughts seemed alien to me, like a favorite dish cooked by a different chef. It wasn’t the pure, untempered rush of emotion like Bone-grinder’s, nor the flickers of concrete images like the kirin’s. It certainly wasn’t the karkadann’s complicated imagery that could, after a fashion, pass for speech in my head. I struggled to separate the sense of each unicorn into their individual thoughts, a process made all the more difficult as they suddenly united under a single desire.

Food
.

Brandt was holding out a giant steak. He waved it at the unicorns, clucking his tongue. “Brandt!” I said in surprise.

“Relax.” He chuckled. “They know they can’t go past the line.”

He must be right, for though I could feel their hunger, shimmering like the mottled sunlight through my head, none of the unicorns stepped forward, despite Brandt’s persistent teasing.

“What?” he cooed to them. “No one wants a nice raw steak? Yummy.”

And then, from behind the others, I saw a unicorn move forward. A juvenile male. Mangy, with raw patches and scabs showing through his white coat, and so skinny I could count his ribs. I’d never seen a unicorn with wounds like that. Had he been gnawing on his own skin, then? Or were his regenerative powers failing? The unicorn’s black eyes trained on the steak as he hobbled forward.

For a moment, his thoughts bubbled up above the others.
Starving. Hadn’t eaten in days. Smaller than the others. They got to food first. They stole it from him
.

“Brandt,” I warned.

“Yummy bloody meat,” said Brandt, and drew his arm back as if to toss it to the unicorn.

The unicorn lunged at the barrier and Brandt jumped backward.

I heard a pop and a sizzle, and the unicorn stumbled.

“Crap!” Brandt cried, turning my way. “Did you see him go? He almost got me!”

Behind the barrier, the unicorn was shaking his head, dazed, and getting back to his feet. He began to growl, lips pulling back to reveal sharp white fangs.

I reached for my purse as the unicorn started forward again. This time it broke right past the barrier and galloped toward the steak still in Brandt’s hand.

My ex-boyfriend turned around just as the unicorn reached him. It lunged at the steak, spearing right into Brandt’s hand. Brandt cried out.

The unicorn collapsed, the vibrating hilt of my alicorn knife buried deep in its throat. Blood pooled around the steak still clenched between its jaws. The other unicorns scattered, terrified. I rushed forward, watching Brandt’s expression dissolve into pain as he struggled to pull the horn out of his hand.

Too late, too late! And this time, there’d be no ancient vial of the Remedy to save him. What an idiot, to wave a piece of meat at a starving unicorn! If only I’d pulled out my knife the second I saw them come out of the woods. If only I hadn’t wanted to see the einhorns up close.

“Man, that stings,” said Brandt. He shook his hand free and looked up at my stricken face. Then he smiled. “You okay, Astrid? Aww, that wasn’t your first time, was it?”

I froze as he calmly held out his punctured hand. The wound knit together before my eyes, leaving behind nothing but a small, helix-shaped scar.

“Y
ou’re—” I stammered. “You’re immune.”

“Yeah,” Brandt said. “You gave me the Remedy.”

“I mean … you’re immune like a unicorn hunter. You heal instantly from alicorn wounds.”

“Yeah,” Brandt repeated like I’d lost my mind. “You
gave me the Remedy”
He pulled the alicorn knife out of the dead unicorn’s neck and examined it. “This is really nice. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

And I’d never seen a boy heal like a hunter. What was some alicorn carving compared to that?

He handed me the knife. The surviving unicorns cowered deeper in the woods. The acrid smell of fresh blood mixed with the scent of fire and flood. “You’ve got killer aim, Astrid. For a second I thought that knife was going to go right through my arm.”

“But you’d have healed from that, too?” I asked. “It’s alicorn.”

“Yeah. All alicorn, just like you.” Brandt nudged the corpse of the unicorn with his toe. The steak slid from between the creature’s death-slacked jaws. “We’re going to have to get someone to come by and clean this up. What a mess. Poor guy.” He looked up at me. “Hey, you all right? How many
have
you killed?”

“Dozens.” I turned away from the corpse on the ground.

“Well, don’t worry about it,” said Brandt. “We’ve got plenty here, and that one was attacking me. You were well within bounds to put it down.”

I studied the blood staining the knife in my hands. Not dark like kirin blood, but a bright crimson. Lighter than human blood, thicker than zhi’s. “I knew the Remedy healed the poison. I didn’t know it made you immune. I didn’t know it made you like me.”

“Just in terms of alicorn wounds,” Brandt said, walking toward the exit. I caught up to him by the doors, still holding the knife awkwardly in my hands. “Which we basically discovered by accident. This isn’t the first—or rather the second—time I’ve been gored.” He held the chainlink gate open for me. “Remember how scared I was the first time? I totally flipped out.”

“What else has it given you?” I asked as we passed back onto the château’s lawns. “I mean, I know the whole idea of the Remedy is that it can cure poisons or diseases or wounds other than the kind made by unicorns—but so far, that’s all I’ve seen.”

“Well, I haven’t been sick once since your mom doused me,” Brandt said. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Gotten a couple cuts and scrapes falling off my bike, though, and those heal normally. The truth is we don’t know. Isabeau doesn’t believe it’s a panacea, by the way. Not like her husband did. She doesn’t think it can cure everything there ever was. But if it can neutralize poisons—any poisons, which is what the legends say—it would revolutionize a lot of medical treatments. The way they talk … it sounds pretty cool, actually. Like a cancer therapy where you could flood the patient’s entire body with really powerful chemo then shoot them up with the Remedy before the drugs could attack healthy cells.”

And that was only the beginning. “So that’s why you have these einhorns? For testing?”

“Yep. Historically, they were the best source of the Remedy. Gordian’s still trying to figure out why. Or how.”

“And you?” I asked him as we went up the terraces to the patio. “They’re still testing you?”

“I’m still on the payroll.” Brandt opened the door to the house. “Look, I don’t know a lot of this science stuff. I didn’t even get a C on that chemistry test you whined about back home. And I bet Isabeau’s off the phone by now. You can probably talk to her as much as you want.”

Yeah, right.
Hi, Isabeau. You know how you didn’t seem to mind that I let your husband die? Well, how do you feel about the fact that I just went out into your backyard and stabbed one of your pet unicorns in the throat?

Brandt paused in the tiny entrance foyer and I almost ran into him. He braced his hand against the door to the main hall and smiled down at me. “It’s really good to see you again, Astrid. And just now, to get a taste of what you’re able to do—it’s amazing.”

There was no place for me to back away, nowhere to put my hands except to clutch even tighter the hilt of the bloody alicorn knife. “Thank you.”

“I’m so sorry I never appreciated you when we were together.”

My mind raced alongside my heart, but I couldn’t blame it on unicorn magic. “It’s fine,” I said, head bowed. “I don’t even think about it anymore.”

“Don’t you?”

Suddenly, his nose brushed mine, and I stumbled back, gulping. “What are you doing!”

Brandt held up his hands in defense and stepped back. “Sorry. I thought—”

“I have a boyfriend.” And even if I didn’t …

His mouth fell open. “A
boyfriend?”

“Yes, Brandt,” I snapped. “Is that so difficult to believe for a freak like me?”

Hurt bloomed in his blue eyes. “Hey, I apologized for that. I was wrong, and it was a jerk thing to say.” He sighed. “The way I broke up with you was a huge mistake. Breaking up with you in general was an even bigger one.”

Today was the day to listen to people tell me things I’d never expected to hear. “Thank you,” I said softly. “Your apology is accepted. But, um, I still have a boyfriend.”

“I’m surprised to hear that,” he said. “Not because of yow, Astrid. But I thought the Order of the Lioness—”

“It’s kind of on the down low,” I explained. “I’m not supposed to be with Giovanni, but no one’s ever told me explicitly to stop.” At least, not recently. Not since he’d devoted his school’s van and his enrollment at said school to help us defeat the kirin.

“Giovanni?” Brandt cocked his head at me. “An Italian?”

“American,” I said. “But his mom’s Italian, and he was there studying last summer. He’s at college in New York City now.”

A knowing look came into Brandt’s blue eyes. “Ah, a college boy. Nicely done.”

I rolled my eyes, bracing for his assumptions.
And he doesn’t mind that you don’t put out?
Gah, what was I doing here, talking to Brandt Ellison? I had a criminal to track down. I had Cory to protect. I had answers to get out of Isabeau Jaeger before I left this château and Gordian behind forever.