Ascendant (32 page)

I
was sent to my room. I don’t know what happened to Brandt. After twenty minutes, Isabeau came to my door.

“It goes without saying,” she said, staring at a spot above my bed, “that I am disappointed with your behavior. This is not some nightclub where one overlooks or ignores such crude activities in dark corners.”

I hung my head.

“I expect better from my guests, and better from my employees.” Now she looked me in the eye. “And on top of that, Astrid, what did you think you were doing? Have I not told you about Brandt?”

I opened my mouth to speak.

“And what about your Giovanni? Don’t you care about him?”

My words broke on a sob.
Giovanni
. This was so much worse than that time in the pool. I’d actually cheated on him. I’d made out with my ex-boyfriend. I’d let Brandt ply me with champagne, and tell me he loved me, and weave such a gorgeous spell that I’d forgotten everything that Giovanni and I had been through together. I was horrible.

Isabeau’s face softened. “Oh,
ma petite
. Do not cry. You aren’t the first woman in the world to be taken in, to be told pretty lies by a man.”

“He wasn’t lying,” I muttered.

“Did he tell you he loved you?” She crossed her arms. “Trust me, he lies. Brandt is like an addict. He has a taste of power, and constantly lusts for more. I am just thankful I found you two before any damage was done.”

“Damage?”
I snapped. “Damage like me giving my virginity to him, you mean? Certainly couldn’t have that! Is that what really bothers you about my being with him? It’s okay for me to have a boyfriend, but only if he’s safely overseas? Maybe Brandt’s right and I am your pet. Can’t have him
damaging
your precious unicorn hunter!”

Isabeau held my gaze for a moment longer, then walked to my desk. She picked up one of my course books and studied the spine. “I hate that term,” she said. “The language is all wrong.”

“What?”

“A man
taking
a woman’s virginity. A woman
giving
it to him. It’s inaccurate. The truth is there’s nothing to actually possess, whether it’s gift or theft. The act destroys the item.”

“Virginity doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “Not unless someone makes it mean something. Not unless some stupid goddess decided it did thousands of years ago—or whatever it is that makes us work like we do.” I sniffled, then cleared my throat, willing the sobs back into my chest. “Not unless you’re a hunter, and then, yes, it destroys the magic.”

“And you want that, Astrid?”

I thought of Angel huddled against Fats for protection from the storm. “No,” I said. “Not at the moment.”

“Good answer.” She set down the book. “You hunters, you have a word for those men, do you not?”

I nodded. “An actaeon.”

“Yes. The man who watched the goddess in her bath. The men who risk their lives to steal the hunters’ most valuable possession.”

I swallowed. “They weren’t stealing it,” I said. “Those hunters, the ones that utilized an actaeon—they wanted out of the business. Like that hunter who worked for you before me. She found one, didn’t she? I mean, they don’t call them that anymore, but that’s what she did. She gave some guy her virginity. She got out.”

“No, we don’t call them that anymore,” Isabeau agreed. “But that is not the point. And there is no giving. An actaeon can seek to possess the power of a hunter, but he never will. All he can do is erase it.”

I snorted. “A minute ago you called it stealing. So what is it, Isabeau? What are they stealing, and who are they stealing from? You?”

She looked me in the eye, a slight smile playing about her lips. “No, Astrid. No one ever steals from me.”

The following day, I was instructed to bring Angel to the Gordian laboratories. Instead, I tendered my resignation.

“How did you know?” I asked her as I packed. Isabeau sat at my desk, Gog and Magog lounging on either side of her, and ruffled the fur around their ears. I supposed that now I was no longer an employee, I couldn’t begrudge her right to have her dogs in my bedroom.

“What,
chère
? Oh, someone saw the baby unicorn. Such a sweet thing. I wish you’d mentioned it to me earlier.” She shook her head sadly. “Won’t you reconsider? I’ve already called the Cloisters for another hunter, but they say they’d like to debrief you first. Something about you leaving under ‘mysterious circumstances.’ I tried to tell them it was nonsense, but—”

Nonsense!
Phil had been on my side from the word go. Guarding the lab rats was one thing, turning over a baby unicorn to who knows what kind of experiments—that was another.

The thing that was most infuriating was how Isabeau was so calm. I was seething, and she was acting like this whole thing—my life upended, my future uncertain—was nothing more than a minor inconvenience.

“And we won’t be able to move the colt until we have a new hunter in place. Who knows what might happen to it all alone out there?”

I looked up from my suitcase, jaw set. Isabeau was playing dirty pool. “That’s kind of the reason I’m quitting, isn’t it? So you
can’t
move it?”

Isabeau looked baffled. “But that’s such an empty gesture. The colt—Angel, as you call it—is ours to do with as we’d like, just like all the other animals in the enclosure. I thought you had accepted this.”

“Well, I’ve un-accepted it.”

“That won’t matter,” she said, her voice mild. “It is ours whether or not you are with us. There is no other option for it, anyway. You know it can’t be released into the wild, and it would never survive without its mother. All you are doing with this stance of yours is delaying our eventual possession of this creature, and possibly putting it in extreme danger by abandoning it to the others without a hunter guardian. It’s very foolish.” She watched me picking through my wardrobe. “Do take the silk scarf, Astrid. It looks so lovely with your winter coat.”

I sighed. I wouldn’t need half these clothes back at the Cloisters, but I hated to leave them. “This would be so much easier if you
acted
angry with me.”

“But I’m not angry with you,
ma chère
!” Isabeau exclaimed. Her dogs stared at me, echoing her amusement. “We have a difference of opinion; that is all. I don’t want to see you leaving over it, but I am respecting your decision. And hoping,” she added, “that in time you’ll change your mind. I hate to see you give up your studies.”

“There are tutors at the Cloisters now,” I said.

“Not
private
tutors,” she argued. “Not laboratory sessions at the university.”

I clenched my teeth and kept on packing.

“Truly, you won’t find a better position than this one!”

“If it’s so great,” I said, folding up the last of my sweaters and stuffing it into my overfull suitcase, “then I’m sure you’ll have dozens of hunters lined up to take my place.” I bet Grace or Melissende would come in an instant. They’d have no compunction whatsoever about turning Angel over to be vivisected or whatever other gruesome thing the scientists had planned.

And I wasn’t convinced that this whole thing wasn’t a punishment for making out with Brandt. Had Isabeau known about Angel all along, and had she been indulging me until I’d disobeyed her? I was sure Brandt would agree with that hypothesis—crazy as it sounded—and yet, I hadn’t seen Brandt since he’d been yanked out of my arms, and I didn’t know his phone number or how to contact him, either.

Speaking of people I hadn’t contacted: Giovanni. Once I did, I’d have to tell him about my infidelity, and I could bear only one major upset in my life at a time, thank you very much.

I struggled to zip up my suitcase, sitting on it to squeeze the edges together.

Isabeau sighed and went over to my closet, where the blue gown still hung from a hanger on the back of my door. “You aren’t taking this?” she asked, running her hand along the gorgeous, shimmery fabric.

“No room,” I mumbled. “It’d get crushed if I tried to shove it in my suitcase, and what do I need a party dress for at a nunnery?”

She cast me a glance over her shoulder. “Please change your mind. You aren’t doing anything but making us wait a few days. You aren’t helping the unicorn.”

“I know.” I swallowed until I could breathe again. “But I’ll sleep better at night knowing it wasn’t me who handed him over.”

Another sigh, and she returned to the bed. Gog and Magog tracked her every move with their big white heads. “Consider this, then. Here you have it easy, months and months where you are never asked to kill a unicorn. That is not the case at the Cloisters. Remain here, Astrid. You seem to have lost your taste for unicorn hunting.”

I bristled, because she was right. Just like René. They were all right. Still, at least at the Cloisters, I’d never been asked to kill a defenseless unicorn. The ones I’d put down were the source of imminent danger. “Then maybe I’ll get out of the business entirely.”

“No, you won’t,” Isabeau said, quite confident.

No, I wouldn’t. Dammit. For a moment, I might have even mistaken her smug tone for my mother’s. “Well, I guess I’m done. I suppose you won’t let me into the enclosure to say goodbye to them?”

Her voice was as brisk and businesslike as ever. “You know perfectly well why I cannot do that. But I’d be happy to drive you into Limoges.” She laid a hand on my shoulder. “Last time,
ma chère
. Do not do this. Yes, I can have another hunter, and yes, the delay is a small annoyance, but it is nothing to the thought of losing you. We have been so happy here. And it feels so right, to employ you over all other hunters. We are Llewelyns, remember?”

I
had
been happy here. I looked around my lovely little room with all its luxuries. My wide desk, my school notes. My golden marble bathroom, my beautiful wardrobe. The bouquet of chamomile on my bedside table, the books that Isabeau had lent me. I thought of how well I’d come to know the einhorns; of my simple, self-set schedule; of the evenings I’d spent talking to Isabeau about science and medicine and the history we shared.

And then I thought about Angel, of the miracle I’d witnessed the night of the unicorn’s birth. I thought of what I’d done to Jumps, of the horror I’d felt when he just wouldn’t die. I thought of the way the einhorns had stood in a circle and bowed to me, of how hungry they always were, a yearning that no amount of butchered meat could hope to satisfy.

I thought of Clothilde, and how she couldn’t live with the destiny that had been chosen for her, and what she was willing to sacrifice to follow her convictions and escape.

“Yes,” I said, lifting my chin, “we are Llewelyns. And so you know perfectly well why I cannot allow myself to do this any longer.”

Fire and flood assaulted my brain the second I walked through the front door of the Cloisters, lugging my suitcase behind me. Everything looked exactly the same: the cracked cobblestones in the outer court, the weathered bronze doors with their basrelief carvings of hunters and unicorns, the dimly lit rotunda with its dusty statues and its enormous tableau of Clothilde and Bucephalus—and me dragging a suitcase. It might as well have been eight months ago and my first visit to the place.

Except there stood Phil, looking staid and somber in a conservative navy skirt and a high-necked white blouse, her hair pulled into a bun at the nape of her neck, and a large golden ring with a ruby red stone dangling from a chain around her throat. Bonegrinder stood obediently by her side, then swept into a bow as I approached.

“Asteroid!” Phil cried, and ran forward. “It’s so good to have you home!”

Home
. I supposed this was the closest I could come. I no longer had a home in Washington, my mother having months ago abandoned the rooms over Uncle John’s garage for a more upscale loft in LA—the better to be convenient to her booking agent. And my room at the château was no longer mine, either. All I had left was this nunnery.

But here, in the circle of Phil’s arms, that didn’t seem so bad.

She didn’t lead me up to the dorm rooms as I’d expected, but into the don’s quarters, Bonegrinder trotting along behind us and snapping at the wheels of my suitcase. “There’s been some musical chairs going on with the room assignments,” she said. “Obviously, no one wanted to keep sharing once you, Cory, and Valerija left two empty rooms, so they spread out a little. Your choice right now is to stay with me or move in with Melissende.”

“You, please,” I said.

“Thought so.” She grinned. “Of course, this could just be a temporary arrangement. Zelda is leaving, you know, and then you can have her—”

“Zelda is leaving?” I repeated. “How? Is she sick, too?”

Phil blinked at me. “No, she’s just … quitting. You know.”

“Did she get an actaeon?”

Phil giggled. “She got a boyfriend. Some guy she’s known for years apparently realized how much he really felt for her when it became clear she was risking her life with this gig. She’s going back to France—”

“Back to modeling?”

“No,” said Phil. “University. I’m thrilled for her, actually, even if it does mean we’re down another hunter.” She started counting off on her fingers. “Ilesha can’t hunt until her stitches close up, and Ursula’s out until the cast comes off. Cory’s still hunting blind, which makes her more of a liability than anything else, but that doesn’t matter because she and Valerija and Grace got it in their clearly genius heads the other day to have an offal eat-off—”

“A what?”

“Brains. Tripe. Gross stuff that, really, no one should ever have to smell, let alone put in their mouths. Anyway, they are still in bed with food poisoning. Which is all we need right now! You certainly returned at the right time.”

I did the math. That left us with … four hunters? Including me? Yikes. “How is recruitment going?”

Phil’s expression turned dark. “Sore subject. Don’t bring it up to Neil when you see him, okay? We’ve been having some terrible luck recently.”

“Why, what’s going on?” I sat down on the edge of her bed. Bonegrinder leaped up beside me and nuzzled until I scratched her at the base of her horn. “I know he didn’t get that girl from America a few months ago—”