Ascendant (3 page)

The tableau was a lie, every bit of it. The real Clothilde Llewelyn had been scarred and dirty, with blood-soaked hands and arms that looked like ragged ropes of muscle. The real Clothilde Llewelyn’s hair had been shaved short so you could see the scar that ran the entire length of her scalp. The sword the mannequin wielded wasn’t even real—I owned Clothilde’s claymore. The real Clothilde had not died in battle with the karkadann Bucephalus; she’d cut a deal with the monster that allowed her to leave her life of hunting, a deal that sent unicorns into hiding for more than a hundred and fifty years.

I brushed my fingers against Cory’s bouncy brown curls. This life wasn’t pretty. If we kept it up, would we end up like Clothilde? Bitter, broken, desperate to find a way out?

“I just wish they were gone,” Cory finished. “I wish I could wipe every last one of them out. If there were no more unicorns, we wouldn’t be in danger. Our families wouldn’t be in danger—no one would ever have to live like me.” She bowed her head. “I was a beacon that called death to my mother’s door.”

“Been working on that chorus a while, huh? “ I asked.

But Cory had stopped listening again. “All I want, all I’ve ever wanted, is to get rid of them. I would kill every last unicorn on earth if I could.” She squeezed her hands open and closed reflexively, a tic I hadn’t seen since we first attuned ourselves as hunters. “And I can’t even do that. I just have to stand by and watch you do it.”

I stiffened. Kill every last unicorn on earth? I stared up at the giant stuffed karkadann that might not even be a karkadann but was certainly not the karkadann Bucephalus, the unicorn warhorse that had marched with Alexander the Great, that had known my great-to-the-fifth grandmother Clothilde … who had, last month, saved my life.

Kill all the unicorns? Drive the entire species to a true extinction? Was that what I had really come here to do?

I
found Phil in the don’s office, stacks of paper piled high on her desk, phone glued to her ear.

“Well, can you take a message, then? Yes, Philippa. One L, two Ps, and then Llewelyn is two Ls and then one L—well, no, the first P is in there, too—look, it doesn’t really matter to me how you spell it, just get him the message. Order of the Lioness. Unicorn hunters, that’s right. Yes, I’m completely serious.”

She hung up the phone, blew out a breath, then smiled at me. “Hey there, Asteroid. Ever have one of those days where you feel like you walked out of
Ghostbusters?”

I plopped down on the chair across from her. “In
Ghost-busters
, didn’t they just capture the ghosts and keep them in a containment unit that ended up exploding all over the city?”

“Okay, can that metaphor.” Phil shifted some of the folders. “How are you doing?”

I shrugged. “Killed four unicorns this weekend.”

Phil grimaced. “I wasn’t looking for a score count, Cuz.”

Of course she wasn’t. Phil had been worried from the beginning about what exactly it meant to protect humanity from the threat of killer unicorns. Where did it end? Meanwhile, I’d been content to rationalize the benefits of killing particular unicorns that were actively endangering people in populated areas. The hunters had taken out a kirin that was terrorizing a farm, a pack of zhi that had been hunting in a suburban schoolyard playground, a re’em that had prowled the streets of Rome. Unicorn hunting had never been meant as a long-term-planning kind of thing, because the people who’d first invented the Order of the Lioness, centuries ago, had no concept of preserving other species—especially not dangerous ones.

And now I realized that the person who’d revived it—Cory Bartoli—didn’t either.

Killing unicorns might be what we did, but we had to plan for the endgame as well. Nowadays, people didn’t
get
to hunt species to extinction. Or they shouldn’t, anyway. And that’s what Phil wanted to make sure of.

“Who was on the phone?” I asked.

Phil rolled her eyes. “The intern to the assistant to the assistant secretary to the Deputy Secretary of the Department of the Interior.”

“So you’re really getting somewhere with this little crusade of yours?”

“It’s better than it sounds, honestly.”

I just shook my head. “Has it occurred to you that this isn’t really on their radar? Right now, they’re concerned with keeping the parks safe. They’re still trying to figure out why they can’t just go out with a rifle and shoot a unicorn that comes into populated areas. They’re not going to put a conservation plan in place until they’ve done studies on the animal they’re hoping to conserve. These things take time.”

Phil smiled, but it wasn’t her usual wide, gorgeous grin. “Well, I’ve got one semester before my volleyball coach replaces me on the varsity team and cancels my scholarship, so it’s pretty much now or never.” Her hands flittered around the desk, rearranging files and shifting papers from one pile to another. The don’s ring glinted on her thumb, its cabochon stone shining like a droplet of fresh blood. “I’ve got four months to save the unicorns.”

I nodded, mouth shut. Perhaps it would be a good idea for Cory and Phil to coordinate. My roommate would probably be a bit unhappy to learn her extermination plans were being undercut by my cousin’s quest for conservation. A quest with long-distance phone bills coming straight out of Cory’s pocket.

“A tall order,” she went on, not quite meeting my eyes. “Even if I were still magic.”

I heard a jingle, then Bonegrinder trotted out from the don’s private wing, gait still stiff from disuse, eyes still half-closed with sleep. The little unicorn yawned, showing her long pink tongue and her sharp white fangs.

“C’mere, Sweetheart!” Phil called to the zhi.

Bonegrinder looked at her, unimpressed, then pranced to my side of the desk and bowed at my feet. I patted her head behind her screw-shaped horn, and she bleated happily. The don’s ring was supposed to keep Bonegrinder docile in the presence of nonhunters like Phil and Neil. But lately, Bonegrinder had been acting more bored with it—and them—than subdued by its allegedly awesome magical unicorn-controlling abilities.

Phil became very busy with her files. “I heard from Neil earlier,” she said. “He’s bringing in two new hunters in the next month.”

“That’s great!” I said as Bonegrinder shoved her face into my lap so I’d scratch underneath her little billy-goatlike chin scruff. Perhaps more useful than training hunters to overcome the unicorn threat would be figuring out what made the ring work and getting it into mass production. Chalk it up as another piece of the magic that nobody understood.

“Yeah, we’ve got to build our numbers back up, right?” Phil shoved a lock of her dirty blond hair behind her ear. “We’re dropping like flies, you know.”

“Phil,” I began.

She caught my eye. “I was
joking
, Asterisk. Please don’t treat me like a china doll. Believe me, I do not miss murdering innocent wild animals who are only responding to their own survival instincts.”

No, she wouldn’t miss that. Bonegrinder put her front hooves up on my thighs, the rough edges digging into my flesh. I pushed her off and she growled, pouted, then lay down beside my chair. I picked fluffy white hairs off my jeans.

Phil pretended not to notice. There’d been some talk about getting my animal-loving cousin a kitten or something, but then we realized that Bonegrinder would probably eat it.

“How do you do both at once?” I asked. “Fight to make unicorn hunting illegal while running an organization that hunts unicorns?”

She laughed. “The irony has struck me, too. But it’s all part of the same goal, right? We want to keep people safe from unicorns. The Order does it in the old-fashioned way: killing them. But we don’t have to go by the old rules anymore. I still think people are more important, and I’m willing to do what it takes to make sure they are safe … for now. But I also think we can find a way to protect people that lets the unicorns survive. Like your pal Clothilde.” She shrugged. “But with the force of law so it sticks this time.”

I regarded her skeptically. Phil was way more optimistic than I was.

“Have you talked to Aunt Lilith recently?” Phil asked.

“Last week,” I said. “She’s been busy.” Since leaving the Cloisters and heading back to the U.S., my mother had launched a new career as a unicorn consultant. Phil might not be able to get the government’s attention, but local television stations were more than thrilled to showcase my pretty, blond, arguably expert mother on their programs. The fact that she tended toward the crazy didn’t faze them, especially since she’d been vindicated about the fact that there actually
were
killer unicorns out there all along.

From the safety of air-conditioned television studios and radio stations, my mom expounded on the history and mythology she’d spent half a lifetime reciting only to me. She sounded tough and well-informed and, if “former head instructor of a unicorn hunter training camp” was a bit misleading, well, at least it wasn’t hurting our cause. My most recent phone conversations with my mother were mostly about whether she needed a booking agent to land a national program, and Grace and Melissende liked to get together and snicker—loudly and within earshot—at the online video clips where my mother rhapsodized over her supposed glory days as a hard-core unicorn hunter.

“How about Uncle John?” I added.

“Still leaving messages. Mom says he ‘needs time to process all this’ or something.” Phil shrugged. “I can’t decide if he’s maddest that I lied to him all summer, that I’m training unicorn hunters, or that he wasn’t there to protect me.”

I reached across the desk and laid my hand out, palm up, for her to hold. “I’m guessing it’s the last one.”

She glanced down at my hand, at the bowstring calluses along my fingers, at the blister forming near the base of my thumb, at the curlicue marks of alicorn scarring on my palm, and didn’t let go of her files. “China doll, Astroturf.”

I withdrew. “Right.”

She stood and stretched. “Okay, how about some target practice? Winner buys the loser a gelato.” She glanced down at Bonegrinder, who was still settled at my feet. “And you can’t bring her. That’s cheating.”

Bonegrinder bared her teeth at my cousin.

“Astrid!” Dorcas called up the stairs. “Giovanni’s here!”

I closed the book I’d been reading, grabbed my bag, and headed down to meet my boyfriend. Giovanni had planned the date today, but he hadn’t told me where we were going—just to wear something comfortable. Luckily, I owned sturdy shoes in abundance.

If I knew him, we were probably headed to a museum. He’d already taken me to the Borghese Gallery, the Vatican, and more churches with Michelangelo statues in them than I could count. One of the hazards of dating an art student: there was always more art to be seen, especially in a place like Rome.

Of course, the hazards of dating a unicorn hunter were far more obvious and deadly, so perhaps I shouldn’t complain. I found Giovanni in the front courtyard watching Ursula as she sat in the shade, sketching. The twelve-year-old had only very recently taken up drawing. Melissende, Ursula’s sister, had asked her parents to send pastels and a notebook. Phil thought it was great for her to have an outlet that had nothing to do with hunting.

I wondered what Phil would think of Ursula’s subject. She’d leaned her bow and a quiver of arrows up against the side of the fountain.
Still Life with Weaponry
.

“The water is the hardest part,” Ursula said, shoving her dark hair out of her face and squinting at the fountain. “How do you do the water?”

Giovanni pointed to a spot on the sketchbook. “Think about the reflection. Water is going to reflect everything, especially from this angle. The fletching on the arrows, the edge of the bow, the top of the fountain, the sky …”

“But all squiggly,” Ursula said.

“Yeah,” Giovanni replied. “And if you don’t think it’s squiggly enough, throw a pebble in and draw quick.”

Ursula laughed, then promptly stopped as she saw me standing by the door. Giovanni looked up, and his eyes softened the way they always did when he saw me. I smiled.

Ursula scooted. “Thanks for the advice,” she said stiffly.

Word around the Cloisters was that she’d developed a little bit of a crush on Giovanni after he’d carried her out of Cerveteri last month. She’d been injured during the battle with the kirin, and he’d been the only one with enough energy to pick her up after she’d hurt her leg.

Obviously, I couldn’t blame her for her preference, but I didn’t begrudge her it, either. If Giovanni noticed the way Ursula blushed in his presence, or how she’d mysteriously taken up drawing because she knew he liked art—he didn’t say anything about it. Like Ursula’s sketchbook, her crush on Giovanni was probably good for her. I know he was good for me.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked, coming to meet him. “A picnic,” he announced proudly. Ursula bent her head over her drawing.