Ascendant (18 page)

My mother was even less approving. “I don’t like this, Astrid,” she stated from across the ocean. “You’ll be wasting your talents. Doing what? Playing security guard for some corporation? That’s no way to distinguish yourself as a hunter.”

“I’m not interested in distinguishing myself as a hunter.” Not half so interested as I was in, say, finishing high school. “And the money they’re paying me will be supporting the Cloisters.”

“I told you, once the book deal comes through, I’ll have plenty of money for the Cloisters.” My mother sighed. “Unicorns are so hot right now. And you could be at the forefront of that, too, if you’d just—This is such a waste, Astrid. Can’t one of the lesser hunters do this instead?”

“For the last time, Mom, I
am
one of the lesser hunters.” Plus, Gordian could offer me school and science and safety, which I needed far more than any of the dubious glories of unicorn hunting in Italy.

“That’s ridiculous,” Lilith said. “You, whose first kill was to single-handedly take down a re’em—”

“Hardly single-handedly,” I said. Dorcas and Phil had helped, and the unicorn in question had been very distracted at the time, intent on killing Ursula and Zelda.

“Who survived an attack from an entire pack of kirin—”

No thanks to Lilith. She’d been the one to send us up against that pack.
“Barely
survived,” I corrected. Even then, my survival had been thanks to the timely intervention of Bucephalus.

“And the only living human to face down a karkadann—”

Is
that
what she’d been telling the people on the networks? No wonder they thought I was some sort of unicorn-hunting wunderkind.

“You’ve got such a compelling story, Astrid. And now, to give it all up and live in obscurity—”

“You’ve got that right,” I countered. “I want to
live
in obscurity, Mom. Not die a unicorn-hunting celebrity. These battles are not fodder for the nightly news. These girls are taking their lives in their hands every time they go after a unicorn, and—”

“And you’ve left them to do it alone, without your significant skill set and experience.” Lilith clucked her tongue at me. “Not very responsible of you, Astrid. And to think you once wanted to be a doctor, to save people’s lives.”

I always found it very difficult to speak to my mother. Now that our conversations pertained to actual life and death situations, it had become nearly impossible. I
had
saved people’s lives. What had she ever done but put them in danger and profit from it?

Finally, I called Giovanni. We hadn’t spoken since before I’d left the Cloisters.

“After everything that happened with Gordian?” he asked, suspicious. He, too, had been taken in by Marten Jaeger last summer. “How can you trust them?”

“This is different.” I explained Isabeau’s position and summarized her offer. “There are so many benefits to my being here. School, and a more regular schedule, and less danger. And I can keep an eye out for Seth.”

“I say let the police handle that,” said Giovanni. “And as for less danger, it’s you alone with a whole herd of unicorns. How is that less dangerous?”

Giovanni had an especially difficult time imagining unicorns as anything other than the bloodthirsty kirin. I decided to change the subject.

“Also, I can ditch the habits.”

“But you promised to send me a picture of you wearing one!”

“Over my dead body.”

“Darn.” Giovanni laughed. “You know, I’ve got a reputation for being straightlaced around here, what with the whole dating-a-nun meme that’s made its way around campus.”

Quite a change from the hard-partying reputation that had gotten him kicked out of his last school. “Yeah, I heard something about that when I called the other day. About me really being a nun. Though you’d think that would make you sound like even more of a bad boy.”

“You mean because I’m stealing you away from your religious vows?”

“Something like that.” Though it turned out I didn’t need Giovanni to play actaeon. There
were
alternatives to life in the Order.

“I’m still worried about this,” he said. “How do you know they’re going to keep their word this time?”

“Well, it seems to be working out well for Brandt.”

“Brandt?”

Oh, right. I explained, as briefly as possible. “Wait, you’re living in France with your ex-boyfriend?”

“That sounds a lot worse than it is,” I admitted. “Very un-nunlike behavior,” Giovanni agreed. “Should I be worried?”

“Of course not.” I rolled over. “He’s just another person in the house.”

“A boy person.”

“Yes.”

“That you used to date.”

“The very same.”

“Who is not three thousand miles away.”

I smiled. “You jealous, Giovanni?”

He was quiet for a moment, taking the question far more seriously than I’d meant it. “No,” he said at last. “I mean, not like I don’t trust you. But of him, yes, I’m jealous. I want what he has. I want to be near you.”

I smiled, though I knew he couldn’t see it. I wanted that, too, but for now, I’d take this. A job, a chance, Giovanni on the phone saying he missed me. For now, it would be enough.

Under these inauspicious circumstances, my tenure as an employee of Gordian Pharmaceuticals began. Isabeau sent into the city for my belongings, and when they arrived, her mouth dropped open.

“Rags,” was her verdict, wrinkling her nose at my pile of faded T-shirts and cargo pants. “And summer clothes. I can’t have you traipsing about the grounds in these.”

I looked over my meager wardrobe. “Things get ruined when I hunt in them,” I said. “I don’t want anything too nice.”

“You’re not a nun here, Astrid,” Isabeau argued. “And if you do your job right—protecting the people around here from unicorns and vice versa—there’ll be very little to worry about in terms of bloodstains, either. Besides, you’ll need winter coats, school clothes. I absolutely refuse to let an employee of mine look like a hobo. We can go to Limoges this afternoon and visit the shops.”

She took in my stricken expression.

“Unless you’d prefer to travel to Paris for your clothes.”

I choked. “I can’t afford—”

She waved me off. “Naturally, Gordian will finance your wardrobe, Astrid. Just like your room and board. Don’t even think of it.”

“Thank you, but I really can’t let you—”

“You let the Catholic Church give you these horrid green things, oui?” She gingerly poked at the corner of my hunting habit.

“Well, yes, but—”

“I refuse to be upstaged by the Pope,
chère.”
Isabeau laughed. “Particularly when it comes to fashion.”

I drew the line at Paris, though Zelda would probably have struck me dead if she knew.

Isabeau dragged me to half the shops in Limoges. We bought wool pants and belted raincoats, cashmere sweater sets and silk tops, and a new pair of hiking boots to hunt in. We bought skirts “for school” and knee-high boots in both black and tan with leather satchels to match—”only get the kind with pockets large enough for your hunting knife,
chère
“—and fingerless leather gloves in case I had to shoot something after it got cold. Isabeau wanted us to consider party clothes, but I took one look at a rack of low-cut, sleeveless dresses and backed away slowly.

Even in the highly unlikely scenario that I’d attend some sort of formal event, I’d never wear an outfit that so clearly revealed my hunting scars.

“How silly,” Isabeau had said. She’d laid hands on my shoulders in the latest shop’s open-plan dressing room and faced my bare back toward the mirror. “Your scars are a part of you, Astrid. They mark you as a survivor.”

Her hand hovered, fingers splayed wide, over the scar that spread out like a starburst from the center of my back.

“You do not deny that these things happened to you, do you? You fought with a unicorn; you emerged victorious. Did this not happen?”

“Yes.” I looked away from my reflection. “But it’s so ugly.”

“No.” She lowered her hand and turned back to me. “What happened to you was ugly. It was painful, horrible, terrifying. And that’s what you see when you look at these scars. You see being attacked. But what you should see is the strength of your own spirit. You survived—something almost no one else would.” She put a hand on the scar near my elbow. “And you saved a life.” She pointed at the scar beneath my ribs. “You were brave and strong, and you persevered where many people would not.” Her eyes met mine. “Your scars are beautiful, Astrid, because they reveal the beauty of the woman who lives inside your skin.
Tu te sens bien dans ta peau.”

And then she made me buy some new camisoles, lingerie, a silk robe, and a bathing suit.

After shopping, we stopped for coffee and snacks at a café, and Isabeau mapped out my work schedule. Keeping the unicorns pacified would be paramount, and she explained how they’d discovered with their last resident hunter—whose name and family origin she still refused to divulge—that the einhorns’ wildest behavior tended to coincide with the hunter’s periods of absence from the château.

This took a period of discovery? It seemed blindingly obvious to me.

“And yet,” Isabeau said, “it is not practical or advisable for you to be constantly on call—or even on site. How can we go shopping if that is the case?” She smiled at me. “How can we enroll you in classes at the university? No, it will never do. So we’ve learned a few tricks that can, for a short time, delude the creatures that you are still nearby.”

I leaned in, interested. “A unicorn-hunting decoy?”

“Exactly,” she said. “Or more correctly, a scarecrow. Clothes you’ve worn work well, as does varying your schedule so that they never know when it’s you and when it is simply your essence, left behind as a reminder.”

“But unicorns don’t use scent or time to sense my presence,” I replied. “They do it just as I do—through magic.”

Isabeau cocked her head at me. “Is that so? I have always understood that hunters interact with the unicorns using every sense. A hunter can see and smell things we cannot.”

“Yes, but those are the—” I paused, searching for the right words. The ones that would make me sound at least
marginally
sane. There was a definite distinction between believing in the magic, as Isabeau did, and listening impassively to a hunter describe how she doesn’t really
look
at the unicorns she shoots anymore, just pinpoints their location on the massive, magical radar in her mind.

“Those are the native powers—the ones all hunters are born with, regardless of training. If we work at it, we’ve got so much more. It’s almost as if they’re part of our own bodies. I know where unicorns are and how they move just like I know where my own hand is.”

“Hmm. So now, you never bother to use your other senses? Those ‘native’ ones?”

I supposed not. In the Cloisters, the buzz of the trophies and the ever-present odor of unicorns had grown so commonplace—too ubiquitous to, say, pinpoint Bonegrinder’s location without tapping in to her thoughts. “My unicorn senses are more general—are they there or aren’t they?—and not nearly as perceptive for the purpose of hunting as the magic I started using once I was attuned.”

“There are machines,” said Isabeau, “that can calibrate a change in temperature down to the tiniest fraction of a degree.” She took a sip from her cup and grimaced. “But I do not need them to tell me when my coffee has gone cold.”

And as she gestured to the server, I marveled that Isabeau was the only person I’d spoken to in months who wasn’t the slightest bit impressed by descriptions of my magic.

“The unicorns in the enclosure,” I said. “Are they … healthy?”

Isabeau nodded, her expression somber. “You have noticed their rashes, perhaps?”

Rashes? “Yes, and they seem … hungry.”

“We feed them plenty,” she replied. “But they are natural predators. It is not the same. We do the best we can for them, but it is impossible to re-create their environment as if they are still in the wild.” She shrugged. “You are familiar with the legend that a unicorn cannot be captured?”

“Of course.” Bonegrinder was a refutation of that.

“The real trick, Astrid, is keeping one alive in captivity.”

Next, we visited the university, where Isabeau showed me the botany building that had been named for her mother and introduced me to the head of the chemistry department, a Middle Eastern man who was so clearly charmed by Isabeau that, for a moment, I thought he was going to offer to tutor me himself.

Later, as we drove back to the château, I felt my head spinning. This was all happening so fast. Twenty-four hours earlier, I’d been a de facto nun and a high school dropout living in a ruined church made of unicorn bones. Now I had bags and bags of fashionable French clothes, had enrolled in a remedial yet collegelevel chemistry seminar, and was relaxing on the buttery leather seats of a BMW on my way back to my gorgeous suite at a beautiful château in the French countryside.

I stared out the window at said countryside and stretched my senses out as far as I could, searching for any sign of unicorn. A taste of the monsters now would help me focus. But I felt nothing as we zoomed along.

One of the things that had so frustrated me—and Phil—at the Cloisters was the way the Bartolis were willing to accept the old ways at face value, even despite our limited knowledge of what exactly those old ways were. Cory truly believed in the idea of family castes: that different unicorn-hunting families were inherently better equipped to handle certain unicorn-hunting tasks. As a Llewelyn, I was supposed to be one of the best hunters there, despite facts to the contrary. And yes, maybe we knew what an actaeon was or who every don of the Cloisters had been back to the Order’s founding, but we had a terrible time understanding even the basics of unicorn behavior, or the smallest part of our training. As it had been a mystery passed down from hunter to hunter, that kind of thing had never been written down in the records. We’d never known that the unicorn-encrusted walls of our nunnery had been built to help attune us, that there was magic in our ancient weapons that outstripped any of the advances and conveniences afforded by modern bows and arrows.