Ascendant (5 page)

T
he night before Giovanni left, an unseasonable storm blew in from the sea. I stood on the parapet overlooking the Cloisters courtyard and watched the clouds moving over the terra-cotta rooftops of Rome.

Maybe his flight would be canceled.

Wasn’t it just the way of things? There was one guy in the world who didn’t care about me being a hunter, and he had to move to New York City. Last I heard, the island of Manhattan was still, blissfully, unicorn-free. What possible reason would I ever have to go there?

I watched the hunters in the courtyard scatter as the rain began, and Cory joined me at the parapet, shaking droplets of water out of her curls.

“All right?”

“Not really.”

Cory braced her hands on the stone balcony and rocked back on her heels. “Maybe this is for the best?” She turned to me. “You know I like Giovanni, but your relationship had to end sometime. You can’t be with someone and be a unicorn hunter.”

“Um, I have been. All summer.”

Cory sighed. “This is hard for all of us, you know. You aren’t the only one who has had to give things up.”

“Have you left a boyfriend back home?” It’d be the first I’d heard of it. I only knew she missed her pet dog.

“No.” Cory watched the storm. “I’ve never had a boyfriend.”

“Then don’t try to imagine what it feels like,” I said, my tone clipped.

“You think I don’t know loss?” Her clipped tone tore mine to shreds.

I swallowed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply—”

Cory’s anger dissipated. “And I didn’t mean to be insensitive. Of course you’re upset about Giovanni. I don’t see it your way, but it’s obvious he’s quite important to you.”

My lip quirked. Is this what passed for comfort from Cory? I supposed it would have to do. “Thanks. You know, outside Giovanni, meeting you is one of the only good things about coming to Rome.”

“What’s another?”

I considered. “Gelato.”

She snorted. “I’m happy to rank higher than ice cream, then.”

“I didn’t say
higher,”
I corrected, and she laughed. For a few seconds, we stood there looking out over the storm. Then she spoke.

“I care about you a lot, Astrid. I hope you realize that.”

“I do.” Of course I did. We’d saved each other’s lives, over and over. Sisters at war.

She took a deep breath. “And if Giovanni is who you love, then I’m sorry you’re being parted from him. I’m sorry when anything happens to make you sad.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that except to say, “Thank you.”

Cory stood silent beside me, staring down at her hands against the stone. Presently, she lifted her head. “Want to raid the refectory for some of that gelato you like so much more than me?”

I smiled. “Sure.”

In the dream, Bucephalus called to me in the voice of Marten Jaeger. The karkadann could speak to me only through the telepathic link unicorns shared with all hunters. When it came to the lesser unicorns, the link allowed us to feel their emotions, intentions, movements—allowed us to predict better where they were and how to kill them. But the ancient karkadann had somehow developed the ability to
put
thoughts inside my head—to dredge from my memory images and voices that, with time and very painful practice, I’d learned to translate into a rough form of communication.

Somehow, with the sort of logic that made sense only in a dream, I knew it was Bucephalus who spoke, though it sounded like poor dead Marten. I was searching for him, stumbling through a tangled wood, my feet catching on roots and vines determined to stand in my way.

I hadn’t seen the unicorn since the battle at Cerveteri. He’d vanished, clearly fearing our partnership would dissolve once we’d dealt with the threat of the rogue kirin. Though I’d scoured reports of unicorn attacks and sightings for any description of an elephant-sized monster, I’d found none. Bucephalus remained in hiding.

The wood in the dream suddenly gave way to a clearing bathed in moonlight, and I stopped short in recognition. It was the garden outside the Borghese museum, the spot where I’d first kissed Giovanni. The place where I’d first met the karkadann.

Bucephalus was there, as massive and deadly as always. In the voice of Marten Jaeger, he spoke.
The price has been paid
.

What price? my dream self asked. Bucephalus was in no debt to me, if a creature such as him could think in terms of debt and repayments. If he could ever imagine himself owing anything to us. Even hunters, we were powerless before him. He’d almost killed Ursula. He’d killed Marten, though I’d begged him not to. I couldn’t stop it, or him. Giant, three-thousand-year-old monsters could do as they pleased.

The karkadann stepped aside, and there, on the ground near his hooves, lay the body of a young man, his face bathed in blood.

It was Giovanni.

“Astrid!”

I sat up in bed at the sound of my name. It wasn’t quite dawn; the rooftops beyond the window were dark and indistinct beneath purple clouds and lingering rain. In the bed across the room, Cory remained unconscious.

“Astrid!” The voice was a distant cry, and for a moment, I wasn’t sure if it was inside my head or beyond it. The karka-dann? At the edge of my mind, I sensed Bonegrinder wake, her instinctive fascination with hunters rousing as I did. My new cell phone lay dead on my desk—it never kept a charge within the Cloisters walls.

“Astrid!” At the third cry, my brain clicked into recognition. Giovanni, shouting to me from the street. I shot out of bed, even as I felt Bonegrinder slamming against the walls of her cage down in the don’s office.

Great. She’d wake the whole nunnery if her growing interest in our visitor turned to out-and-out bloodlust. I bolted down the stairs in bare feet and pajamas, sprinted across the mosaic tiles of the entrance hall, and opened the bronze doors as silently as I could.

Giovanni stood in the street just beyond the courtyard. A car sat idling behind him, a very amused Italian in the driver’s seat.

“There you are!” he cried.

“Shush!” I reached the gate. “What are you doing here? You’re going to wake everyone up. You’re lucky we finally got a cage Bonegrinder can’t chew through.” Yet.

“I tried to call.” His shirt was wet. He wore no jacket and carried no umbrella to protect him from the rain. It looked very sexy on him. I shuddered to think what it looked like on me. Water was already soaking through my tank top and cotton pajama pants.

I crossed my arms over my chest. “You’re supposed to be on a plane.”

“I couldn’t leave it like this,” he said as I opened the gate. “Astrid, we’re not breaking up.”

I almost slammed the gate shut again. “Says who?” He could not hit me with that before dawn. A killer unicorn I could handle. But not Giovanni on my doorstep, wet through and begging for … for what, exactly? I remained on the threshold of the Cloisters, my hand on the gate. “Are you staying here?” That stopped him short. “No, I—”

“Then we can’t. We talked about this.” We’d laid out several very well-reasoned and dispassionate arguments as to why longdistance relationships never worked and were far more hurtful in the long run to the people who tried to have them. The fact that Giovanni could go off free and clear and I was staying in my
nunnery
didn’t help.

“We can talk until our lungs give out,” he said, “and it doesn’t make a difference.” He laid his fist against his chest. The water had rendered his white shirt translucent and sticky, and the darkness of his skin shone through. “I can’t talk myself out of the way I feel. Don’t you know that by now? Don’t you know how hard I tried, all summer long?”

I hugged my arms tight around myself and buried my chin in my chest. “Stop.”

“I couldn’t give you up when there were rules and family and deadly mythical monsters standing between us, Astrid. What kind of person would I be if I let something as stupid as an ocean succeed?”

I squeezed my eyes shut.

“And not even a big ocean, like the Pacific,” he added. “The Atlantic? It’s a puddle.”

I flatly refused to smile. The rain pattered down all around us. The cracks in the cobblestones filled with water, washing away the dust of two thousand years. How many people had died on this street? How many lovers had stood here, just like us, and said their final farewells? Giovanni was a fool to think it couldn’t happen to us, too. “Astrid,” he said. “Please.”

I couldn’t. Losing him now was hard enough. Later, I’d only care more; it would only hurt more. I was already teetering at the edge. How could I risk it? “I’m afraid,” I whispered in a breath softer than the rain.

But he heard it, nonetheless. “You?” he said, and I heard the smile in his voice, and when I lifted my face into the rain, I could see the smile in his eyes. “But you’re the bravest person I know. I’m not giving you up, Astrid the Warrior. I can’t.”

And I knew at that moment that I couldn’t, either. Even if it would be easier. Even if it would be the rational, practical, non-magical thing to do. The old Astrid could have been so dispassionate. But if I wanted to hang on to any shred of her, I had to believe in this—even if it made no sense.

“We’ll make it work,” Giovanni promised. “We’ll e-mail, we’ll call, we’ll write. I’ll see you at Christmas. I’ll come here for spring break.”

“And what will I do?” I asked. The rain poured down around us, but his skin was hot against mine as we flowed into each other’s arms.

“You,” he said softly into my damp hair, “will make me a promise. Survive.”

A week after Giovanni’s departure, we were repairing our weaponry in the shade of the Cloisters courtyard and trying to avoid the worst heat of the day. Bonegrinder, chained to the wall, lay panting on her side with her little pink tongue thrust between her fangs and watched us with sleepy blue eyes.

After discovering last month that arrowheads and knives made with unicorn horn worked better against the creatures than alloy blades, we’d turned away from our more modern equipment to the weapons from the walls of the chapter house. But, unicorn magic or no, they were still a century and a half old.

In our last big battle with the kirin, we’d broken four standard bows, a sword, two crossbows, and countless arrows. We’d lost even more in the month since, and Grace, who possessed a natural affinity for weaponry, had taken it upon herself to learn to make new weapons and repair the slim store that remained. Though Cory had offered to lend her the records we had of the ancient hunters’ weapon-making techniques, Grace had brushed her off and turned to the Internet. Though so far she’d had little success at creating new arrowheads, the repaired ancient tips on new fiberglass shafts were both sturdier and more accurate than our old warped arrows.

I was polishing the claymore that had once belonged to Clothilde Llewelyn. Like the alicorn knife I believed was made from her first kill trophy, I preferred to use this weapon at close range. As I ran a soft cloth over the blade, I wondered why we had Clothilde’s knife and sword but not her bow. Had it, perhaps, been broken or lost in the fight that had supposedly claimed her life?

Rosamund sat a few feet away, repairing an arrow tip and singing snatches of what she called “weaving songs”: short, repetitive songs designed to help groups work in unison. Ursula and Ilesha leaned against a double alicorn-spiral column, their heads bent close together as they giggled. Zelda and Dorcas had long since abandoned their weapons to pore over fashion magazines, and Valerija sat in a corner, earbuds in place, and concentrated on sharpening one of her many knives. Melissende and Grace were working on a new method of knapping arrowheads off a smooth kirin horn, and Cory was making her way across the bright courtyard, her arms filled with ancient books.

Bonegrinder lifted her head and growled. All the hunters, including Cory, stopped and stared at the little zhi, who was baring her teeth in Cory’s direction.

“Hey!” I swatted Bonegrinder on the nose. “No growl. Bad girl.”

Cory shook her head and continued over to our side. “What’s going on?” She knelt and set down the books, and Bonegrinder sniffed at her and thwapped her tail against the paving stones. “What is happening to me?”

“Do you have something to tell us?” Melissende asked, wagging her eyebrows at Cory. “Hiding a little boyfriend somewhere?”

Cory blushed as most of the other girls tittered.

“Of course not!” she snapped. “I know the rules—” She cast me a guilty glance. “I am not dating anyone, no.”

This only made them laugh harder. Valerija looked up from her knives, shook her head in disdain, and returned to her work.

“The rules?” I asked Cory wryly.

“You know I don’t approve of you dating Giovanni,” she said. “We’re hunters. We’re supposed to be celibate.”

“I am celibate.” My hands tightened on the hilt of my sword. “You can date someone without having sex with him.”