Ascendant (7 page)

I decided instantly that Peru was where I wanted to live when I grew up. “I’m serious, though. It’s a false rumor, about the Llewelyns. At least it is with me. I’m certainly not the best hunter here. Grace has killed way more than me.”

“I see.” Father Guillermo said, smiling slightly. “My family does not believe that I have lived up to the potential of our name, either. They are all businessmen. I became a priest. And not a parish priest but a policy maker. I am in business for my God.”

Okay, then. I nodded and returned to my sword, and the priest spoke to the back of my head.

“You see, Señorita Llewelyn, sometimes what our family thinks we should be good at is correct. But not in the way they think.”

I turned to look up at him, but he was still giving me that same impenetrable smile. Did he somehow know about my tête-à-têtes with the karkadann? But how could he? I doubted Phil or Neil would have told him something like that. It made us sound nuts.

Then again, Father Guillermo wasn’t one of the wildlife or biology experts Phil was contacting for help. He was a Church official. He believed we had magic powers—that our gifts were from God. Saint Joan of Arc had been a warrior who experienced divine visions—why should a member of the Order of the Lioness be any different?

“Do you know what it says?” he asked me, pointing at the sword.

“No,” I replied. “This is my ancestor’s sword. A Llewelyn sword.”

He lifted it from me and turned the blade over in his hands. “It is an incantation. Like the Paternoster, what you call ‘Our Father.’ It is a prayer, carved into the sword to sanctify the weapon to the glory of God.
Domitare unicorne indomitum
. It means, ‘To Vanquish the Savage Unicorn.’“

Dear Giovanni
,

I’d send you an e-mail, but wouldn’t you know, they don’t have Internet in this tree stand. So instead I scribble on this paper, back to the trunk and feet dangling out over the forest floor … and hope that nothing happens to make what I say irrelevant by the time I get home and have time to type this in
.

You know, like me dying during the hunt. Or breaking my neck
.

I’ve been out here since three
A.M
. and there’s no sign of unicorns. The sun will be coming up soon, though, and that’s usually our best hunting time. Have I ever told you that?

Of course. You saw it for yourself in Cerveteri when they tried to turn your van into a coffin. That morning seems like so long ago now. Back then, I felt like all this was almost over—like all we had to do was show one herd of kirin that we meant business and they’d go back where they came from, that we’d never have to deal with unicorns again
.

Now, I can never imagine this being over
.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to remember that they’re animals, that when they kill, they do it for the same reasons as a shark or a grizzly bear. They’re hungry or they’re protecting themselves. It’s so much worse for me to do what I do when I think of that. It’s easier to believe they’re evil, that they really have it in for these cows sleeping in their paddock in the farm below
.

And if it’s hard for me to remember that, it’s got to be nearly impossible for Cory
.

I looked up from the paper, peering through the leaves at Cory, stationed a half-dozen trees to the north. Her eyes roved the ground, her body taut and clearly straining for the slightest sense of unicorn. There wasn’t any.

Who am I kidding? I will never send this to you. I’ll get home, wash the blood off, and realize that these foxhole tree-stand ramblings of mine are only going to bore you, or scare you, or turn you off. And that’s before I describe to you, in detail, the seventeen yards of ultra-flattering camouflage polyester they’ve wrapped me up in. Sexy, right?

I hope you’re doing well. I wish you called more often. Phil says they make international phone cards that are only like seven cents a minute from New York to Italy. Can you look into getting one of those?

I worry that I disappointed you with the school thing. I promise I tried, but all the schools here wanted me to apply like six months ago. Father Guillermo is seeing about getting us tutors, though. Apparently there are lots of nuns that are
teachers, so that’s cool. I can be a Catholic schoolgirl and a unicorn hunter
.

And take the PSATs and start thinking about college applications and hope that the next unicorn I meet doesn’t put its horn through my heart
.

I stopped writing and looked down the page. My handwriting wandered helter-skelter over the paper, but what could one expect from writing in the dark? I tore the page into bits and let them flitter to the forest floor. Later, I’d gather them up and burn them along with the corpses of any unicorns I managed to kill.

Violet fingers of light began to creep through the trees, signaling the arrival of dawn. According to the farmers’ reports, we weren’t dealing with kirin this morning, but information beyond that had been pretty scarce. There were monsters. They were eating the livestock. They had horns.

Looked like a job for the Order of the Lioness.

I touched the blade of the alicorn knife strapped to my hip, lifted my bow, and readied an arrow. The air smelled damp, with a tinge of forest and beyond that, the scent of farm animals, straw, and manure. No unicorns yet. Across the boughs, Cory scanned the area for any sign of the beasts. I narrowed my eyes. Couldn’t she tell? How much was she attempting to compensate for her decreased hunterly attunement? Perhaps we should have taken this into account before letting her go on this trip.

The acrid scent of fire wafted past my nose, and with it, a touch of cloyingly sweet rot. The unicorns had arrived.

I closed my eyes and nocked an arrow on the string. Magic rushed through my system, and with it, the consciousness of the unicorns below. There were five of them in the pack: three adults and two juveniles. They were picking their way east through the forest, drawn in equal parts to their livestock food source and a strange new sense they couldn’t understand but were attracted to anyway.
Us
. They pushed forward, unafraid, unconcerned that their deaths awaited them in the trees above their heads.

I trained my sights on the spot where they’d break through the clearing, opened my eyes, and waited. Ten seconds. Now five. They were moving faster, getting ready to break out of the woods and run for the paddock. I drew back the string. Now I could hear them, though their passage through the undergrowth was almost soundless. The world slowed.

Five zhis rushed out of the woods, each as white and woolly as Bonegrinder. I froze.

I’d never killed a zhi. Some of the others had—in fact, I think Zelda had once demolished a pack this big all by herself. But I’d never faced down something that looked just like Bonegrinder and put an arrow through its heart. My drawing hand shook, and I softened the tension on the string.

The pack passed into Cory’s line of sight, and she fired. The arrow thunked into a tree trunk and the zhis scattered, their silent thoughts broken in a cacophony of panicked, growling cries.

“Astrid!” Cory shouted as she swung herself down from her stand. “Hurry!”

I drew back again and blinked to clear my head of the image of Bonegrinder frolicking in the courtyard, a pink bandanna tied around her neck. Below me, an adolescent female zhi herded the two youngest away from danger. The babies were weaving in and out of her legs, and her panic radiated out to me as all three crowded and cowered in a small hollow beneath my tree’s roots. Were they drawn to this tree because a hunter was inside it? If I dropped down before them, would they flee, attack … or bow? After all, they were zhis. The wild zhi I’d met in the woods back home had submitted to me only moments before tearing a hole in my ex-boyfriend Brandt’s leg. Zhis never attacked hunters.

“Astrid!” Cory cried. “What are you doing? Shoot them!”

I pointed my arrow down at the hole. Three zhis blinked up at me with wide blue eyes.
Three little Bonegrinders all in a row; I move fast and they move slow
.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Cory slashing with her knife. One of the adult unicorns screamed and went down, hooves flailing. My string hand began to ache with the tension of keeping the bow drawn. Inside the heads of the unicorns below me, I felt panic, terror, and underneath that, awe.

A hunter, a hunter …

They’d follow me anywhere. Back to the Cloisters, to be chained and confined like Bonegrinder, or over to Cory, where they’d bow in turn and offer her their necks for slaughter.

“Astrid!” Cory yelled for the third time. “What are you waiting—” And then she cut off as the second zhi tackled her from behind.

All five zhis were shrieking inside my head—the three little ones in horror, the older male in the midst of its death throes, and the female—the female in fury. And over it all, in my actual ears, I heard Cory’s screams. I leaped to the ground and sprinted toward her. The zhi was stomping and biting as Cory covered her face with her arms and tried to shove it away.

“Stop it!” she screamed as the zhi clamped its fangs into her side. “Stop!”

I closed my hand around the zhi’s horn, yanked backward, and slit its throat. The unicorn bucked once, then twitched and gurgled as I threw it aside and knelt by Cory’s knees.

“You okay?”

Cory’s eyes were wide and she panted, clutching her torso with two bloody hands. I saw the scratches of the zhi’s alicorn close and vanish on her forearms, but the wound in her side had been inflicted by teeth, not horn. It was a problem.

“Let me see,” I said as the unicorn behind us died. The male was fading fast, and at the edge of my consciousness, I could sense the young ones making a break for it. Smart move. I pried Cory’s hands away from her tummy and blood spurted forth.

I unzipped my waist pack and pulled out a length of gauze bandage. “Here, hold this against your wound.”

“The others …” She gasped.

“The others are gone,” I told her, distracted. The others had never felt the slightest compunction to attack. Would the female zhi have done so if Cory hadn’t stabbed her mate? Aggressive zhis were unheard of. “I’m going to run and get the farmers. You need medical attention.”

“You have to kill the others,” Cory persisted as the male near us breathed his last. My head cleared a fraction more.

“You’re not thinking straight,” I said, wrapping another length of bandage around her waist to hold the bunched gauze in place. The unicorns were almost out of the range of my thoughts now, and they were still running. “They’re juveniles. They’re terrified.”

“They’ll come for me.”

I blew out an exasperated breath. “And what?” I asked. “Bow? They’re zhi. You’ll be fine.” I stood. “Stay here and try not to move. I’ll be back with a truck as soon as—”

She leaned forward and grabbed my leg with a bloodstained hand. “Astrid! They’ll kill me! I don’t … I can’t …” She grimaced, her eyes squeezed shut. “I’m … broken.”

“You’re wounded is what you are,” I said. And how wily of the zhi to have used her teeth and not her horn. I hadn’t seen that before from a unicorn, not even the devious kirin. “And badly. I have to get you help
now.”

Her eyes bored into mine, wide and filled with panic.
“Do not leave me here alone to die.”

At once I understood. Sybil Bartoli had died just like this, as an untrained Cory had tried valiantly to hold off a family of zhis with nothing but her hands. I handed her Clothilde’s knife.

“You’ll die for sure if I don’t get you some help.” And then I ran.

They rushed Cory into the surgery room of the tiny country clinic, leaving me standing in the drab, prefab waiting room, blood still staining the knees of my pants and drying in strange patterns on my arms and hands. It would take almost four hours for Phil and Neil to get up here. Four hours of me standing outside the door to the clinic, wringing my hands and wondering if I should be back out there in the woods, chasing down those juveniles and breaking their necks. After all, they were unicorns, and they needed to eat
something
. Any human in the woods was still in danger. All those animals on the farm were still at risk.

Or maybe I could just convince the farmers to leave the occasional ham hock out in the woods as tribute. Bonegrinder loved pork.

Bonegrinder looked so much like that unicorn I’d just killed. I drew my legs up to my chest in the hard clinic chair, pressed my eyeballs against my kneecaps, and rocked.

“Asteroid,” came Phil’s soft voice. I felt her hand on my shoulder and flew out of my seat, blinking in the afternoon sun that streamed through the windows.

“I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Phil. She was dressed in her regulation Cloisters uniform: loafers, a simple, dark blue skirt that fell halfway past her knees, and a starched, white, high-necked blouse. Her hair was in a low ponytail, though she wore no scarf. “You were up half the night in a tree stand. I know how this works.”