Rampant (19 page)

“Chiama la polizia!”
Zelda yelled. She paused, then picked up a small metal pole lying at the base of a scaffold. I saw one of the riders fumbling in his jacket pocket for a phone. The unicorn pawed at the ground with his hoof, and Zelda approached him, gripping the pole like a baseball bat.

Rosamund was crouched over Ursula, her English deteriorating in proportion to her terror. “
Sie blutet stark. Hilfe! Hilfe
! She bleeds much!” She lifted her hand, soaked in red.

Ilesha had balled up her long skirt and was kneeling in the spreading pool of blood. Over them all, my hunter’s hearing could make out Ursula gulping and weeping, gasping for breath and crying almost inaudibly for her mother.

I swallowed. Immunity to the poison wouldn’t do her much good if she bled out before the wound closed. Should I help her? I probably knew more first aid than either of the other two girls.

The knife hilt felt warm beneath my fingers, and the world narrowed to the form of the unicorn, its enormous, twisting horn shiny with the blood of my friend. I pulled the dagger from my bag and started creeping toward the unicorn from behind. “Phil, get my back.”

“With what?” She held up the tarp, powerless.

“I don’t know, but we have to help Zelda!”

Zelda was standing in front of the bikers now, shouting at them to ride away, but Italian men are too macho for that.

“You’re going to get killed!” she hissed. I wondered if they even understood her.

The unicorn was impossible to mistake, however. Every muscle in its enormous body screamed death and pain and blood. I heard Cory moan on my right, and breathed a tiny sigh of relief that she was at least alive. I nodded at Zelda, who tightened her grip on the pole and raised it higher. What I wouldn’t do for a bow and arrow right about now. He had to know I stood behind him, another hunter. A few feet more and I could jab with my dagger.

Then Dorcas let out a battle cry and catapulted herself onto the animal’s back. The beast lunged and reared, huffing and grunting as Dorcas hung on for dear life and pounded her fist repeatedly against his flanks. I ran forward, too, but couldn’t get close as the animal spun, kicking out with its hooves and tossing its deadly, blood-spattered head.

“Dorcas!” I screamed. “What are you doing!”

“Go for the neck!” Phil shouted from behind me. “The carotid artery!”

And then I saw it. In her hand, Dorcas clutched a pitiful little pocketknife, barely two inches long. Each tiny puncture wound healed as soon as she lifted her fist for another lunge.

The unicorn probably felt nothing more than the pinpricks of an insect.

Zelda found an opening and attacked, slamming the metal pole against one of the creature’s legs. He roared, then stumbled, hopping to regain his balance. As soon as I could, I rushed in from behind, jabbing the knife hard under the beast’s rib cage. A gush of hot blood spilled over my hand; and the animal bucked, dislodging Dorcas at last. She fell softly, like a flower on the
breeze, then crunched against the cobblestones, her arm at an impossible angle.

The beast wrenched away from me and my dagger and charged Zelda, spearing her through the side and scattering the bikers. She screamed as she was lifted on the tip of his horn, then, somehow, braced her feet against his face and kicked free, smashing back to the ground, then scuttling into the shadows, her arm pressed to her bleeding side.

The unicorn faced me, blood dripping down its horn and over its muzzle, its eyes focused on the knife in my hand. Blood still streamed from its side and down its foreleg.

“Hey!” Phil yelled, and the unicorn swiveled toward her. She swung her arms wide, and the tarp went flying out, covering its face. “Now, Astrid!”

I didn’t think, I just leaped. This unicorn had no mane to grab; instead, I gripped ropes of muscle and shoulder blades wider than my head. It bucked beneath me, more massive and rumbling than any kirin, and the tarp whipped around us both, tangling and sliding in a flood of fiery blood.

He still bled. How was that possible? I fisted the dagger and fought for purchase on the creature’s neck.

“Astrid!” Phil was shouting, but I had no idea what she wanted. How could I kill a giant with a dagger? I thought of the statue Giovanni had shown me of David and his sling. How could anyone do such a thing?

The unicorn tossed its head again and the tarp slipped, hanging only from the beast’s horn. I lunged up his neck and grabbed the horn with my free hand, yanking back hard. The unicorn’s face shot skyward, and I reached down and plunged the dagger deep within his throat, angling hard and drawing
the concave edge all the way across. His flesh tore beneath my hand, the muscles convulsed, then released, and the unicorn stumbled down.

I rolled off his back to the ground, and let his blood wash over me like a river.

P
HILIPPA SHOOK ME AWAKE
as the ambulance arrived. I insisted I wasn’t hurt, but between our lack of Italian and the blood on my body, it was quicker to let them take me away. The body of the re’em still sat in the middle of the street, and as they shut the doors of the ambulance, I saw a small knot of priests emerge from the crowd and circle it.

I recognized at least one from the church next door to the Cloisters.

We were all rushed to the Ospedale San Giovanni. Ursula was taken directly into surgery. I’d just finished showing the nurses that none of the blood was my own when Melissende sprinted into the emergency room, face white as any statue’s, panting like she’d run all the way up the hill from the Cloisters. She probably had.

I stopped her at the door. “She’s lost a lot of blood, but it’s an alicorn wound.”

“Understood,” Melissende snapped. “Let me see her. Let me see my sister.”

“I don’t know what will happen if they give her a transfusion of regular blood.”

Melissende slumped against the wall. “Maybe it won’t heal?”

“I have no idea.” Cory was still unconscious. Phil, fielding regular phone calls from Neil, told me they’d tried to call Marten and Gordian three times apiece, but there had been no answer.

“Will they let me give her my blood?” she asked. “Just in case?”

I doubted the hospital would countenance a direct blood transfusion without a good reason, like a rare blood type that only Melissende and her sister shared. “I don’t know, but—”

Melissende shoved past me and into surgery.

Zelda had escaped with what, by the time the ambulances arrived, looked like relatively minor wounds to her torso. She’d also gone to the hospital, but they released her soon after with a neat line of stitches up her abdomen, like a McBurney’s appendix incision on the wrong side.

“My mother will kill me if this scars,” Zelda said, holding her shirt up to examine the stitching.

She was a lucky one. Dorcas had broken her arm in two places, while Cory had a three-inch gash on her head. They’d had to shave off a hunk of her hair to sew it up. Neil arrived and remained at the hospital, watching over his niece. According to him, the clergy and laymen of the church next door had overseen the transport of the re’em into our building. Apparently, the locals were not as ignorant of the purpose of the Order of the Lioness as I’d assumed. Finally, the uninjured and the ambulatory hitched a ride with a nurse finishing her shift back down the hill to the Cloisters. In the east, the sky
was already growing light.

The corpse of the re’em lay, exsanguinated, in the center of the rotunda. As we entered, Valerija and Grace were examining it, their expressions filled with wonder and confusion. They looked up, their faces fresh scrubbed and innocent next to our battered, bloodstained bodies. Every inch of me crackled and flaked as I walked.

“Is Ursula going to be all right?” Grace asked.

“We don’t know yet,” Phil said. The younger girl bit her lip, nodded stiffly, then turned around and left the room.

Valerija seemed at a similar loss. “I’ll put on the kettle.” She also vanished.

I almost asked her to share her pill supply. We all needed something that would take us away right now. Six hunters stared wordlessly at the massive body of the re’em, then Ilesha flew forward and started punching it.

“You bastard!” she screamed, slamming her fists down like a child in a tantrum. “You bastard!”

Rosamund drew her away, clucking softly. “Come now. Come.”

“Why did they bring it here?” Zelda asked. “Doesn’t Gordian want it?”

“We can’t get in touch with Gordian,” Phil said. “Marten either.”

Dorcas wavered on her feet. “I think I need to sit down.”

Valerija returned from the kitchen. “Yes. Neil told Grace and me to make beds. Downstairs. In case—” She gestured weakly at Zelda and Dorcas.

“Thank you,” Zelda said. “The doctors said not to climb stairs for a few days.”

Phil put her arms around Dorcas. “I’ll help put you to bed.” She looked at me. “You okay, Asteroid?”

I nodded, still transfixed by the sight of the re’em. His short, pale coat was caked with dried blood. The wound at his ribs looked wider than I remembered, though it was nothing to the jagged, gaping maw at his throat.

The others left, and I barely noticed. We stood there alone, hunter and corpse, beneath the statues of Clothilde and Bucephalus, all silent, all still. Like the kirin yearling, the re’em seemed smaller in death. I walked around the body, taking in every detail that I’d missed during the fight. The tail was tufted like a lion’s. His head was broader than it was long; with wide, flaring nostrils; rounded ears; a mouthful of fangs; and a short, curly beard about three inches long and slightly gray in color.

I looked up to see Bonegrinder standing in the doorway, her head cocked. She minced into the room, looking fearfully from the body on the floor to me.

“It’s okay,” I said.

Bonegrinder sniffed at the corpse, then shied. She approached me, hesitant, suspicious, then knelt and bowed before me.

I dropped to my knees.

I had to do it. I had to. Just like Phil did, with the kirin yearling. It would have killed us all. I reached out with a shaking hand and touched its coat. Cold. So cold.

Bonegrinder butted against me and licked my bloody palm, and I lowered my head, wishing I could weep.

“—very height of irresponsibility!”

“But we were ambushed!”

“And you knew that was a likelihood!”

The angry voices echoed through the emptied dormitory floor. I woke up and tiptoed to the door. Bonegrinder, curled up near my bed, followed. I didn’t remember letting her in. I looked down at my arms, at the fresh set of pajamas and carefully combed out, slightly damp hair. I barely remembered anything after I’d washed that blood off.

A flash of memory. Me slumped against the shower wall.
Shhh, Astrid, you can’t lie there in your towel
…Phil. Of course. And now she was shouting at Neil in the courtyard. I opened the door and went into the hall. The overcast sky made it impossible to tell the time.

Valerija stood against the parapet, her finger on her lips.

“So we just stay indoors for all eternity? Hide away in here? Is that your solution?” Phil was saying now.

Neil whirled on her. “If that’s what it takes to keep them safe, yes.”

“That’s bull.”

Bonegrinder jumped up and rested her front hooves on the edge of the parapet.

Phil went on. “If we’re not safe because we’re hunters, then we shouldn’t be hunters anymore. That’s the part that’s dangerous. Whether we’re walking down the street or going on a mission, it’s being a unicorn hunter that puts us in the line of fire.”

“Being hunters saved several of their lives this evening.”

“But it also caused our lives to be in danger.” A new voice, Cory’s, coming from under the aisle. “That was no random attack. Just like it wasn’t random when they came for my mother and me.”

“And so your suggestion is that we hole up in here for
what? Forever?” Phil asked.

“At least it’s safe,” was Cory’s reply.

“I can’t live like that,” Phil said. “I won’t. And neither will a lot of those girls—” She gestured toward the dormitory, then stopped when she saw us standing by the parapet. “Astrid. You’re awake.”

I hurried down the stairs, Bonegrinder clopping at my heels. A moment later, I was in the courtyard, the stones cool against my bare feet. Morning. Had I slept all day and all night?

I went first to Cory. Her curly hair lay in stringy, flat mats around her face, and there was white gauze wrapped around the crown of her head. “Are you all right?”

“Concussion.”

“Contusion,” Neil corrected.

She waved her hand at him. “I’m a little fuzzy.”

“And the others?” I turned to Neil and Phil.

“Resting, mostly,” Phil said. “Grace and Melissende are still at the hospital with Ursula. She came through the surgery all right, but she lost one of her kidneys.”

I sat on the steps. “Oh, no.”

Phil glanced at Neil. “The real problem is that the healing…it slowed down after she had a blood transfusion.”

This is what I’d feared. “She didn’t start to react to the venom, did she?”

“No. But Zelda is completely healed now. We cut the stitches out of her today so they wouldn’t get lost in her new skin. With Ursula, it’s like any other injury.”

“And it was an especially serious one,” Cory said. “She’s still in the woods.”

“Some of the hunters went to the hospital today to give blood,”
Valerija said. “For Ursula. We think, maybe she gets more hunter blood, she starts to heal again.”

“What does Gordian say?”

Neil’s mouth was set in a thin line. “We’ve been unable to contact anyone from Marten’s staff. Marten himself has gone away on business. I regret not having in place some sort of procedure for emergencies—some sort of all-hour hotline to Marten. I never thought we’d have an unplanned battle. We never intended to put hunters in play unless Gordian staff were on call. I’m going to drive up to Tuscany tomorrow and try to get hold of someone in person. At the very least, we cannot leave that corpse in the rotunda to rot.”

“I don’t want it going to them,” I said abruptly. “I don’t want them to have it.” If they couldn’t be bothered to answer our calls, why should we keep our end of the bargain?

“Astrid,” Neil said, “this is part of our arrangement. They’re allowed to claim all of the kills—”

“I don’t care. We had a major emergency and they can’t be bothered to deal with us? Marten fires our trainer, then drags his feet getting us a new one? They take our kills and never tell us anything—”

“It’s not your decision to make,” Cory said. “Marten’s been wonderful to us.”

Valerija snorted but said nothing.

Cory got back on topic. “I firmly believe that, given this tragedy, we need to take more precautions. No hunters wandering around without adequate weaponry and backup. I think what this attack shows is that any unicorns hiding in the city are aware of our concentration in the Cloisters. That an attack can occur a few blocks from here, on a busy city
street…” she trailed off.

“She’s right,” Neil said, as Cory struggled to collect more thoughts in her addled brain. “That re’em had been hiding out in the adjacent park. We cannot let hunters outside anymore.”

“What about the ones visiting the hospital?” I asked.

“When they decide to leave, they’ll call and we’ll make sure they are safely escorted home.”

“And how will you ensure that?” Phil said. “Crossbows or cars?”

“Both, if that’s what it takes,” said Cory.

Phil turned to Neil. “And you’re okay with this? Go out and gather up more and more young women to stash away in here, cut off from the whole world, so they’ll be
safe
?”

“What are our options, Pippa?”

There were none. Not if we were hunters. We were in the middle of the city, and we were still attracting wild animals. We all knew it. But Phil and I were the people the new rules would most affect. We were the ones always sneaking out.

Of course, if Giovanni had dumped me, it didn’t matter as much. I’d barely thought of him since the attack. Amazing how being bathed in arterial blood can wash out any lingering romantic disappointments. Extraordinary how seeing a friend gored before your eyes can make you forget all about your dating life.

I rested my head in my hands, and the argument went on above me.

Later that afternoon, when Phil and I were alone in my room, she held up her cell phone. “Twenty messages from Seth. Voice mails, texts, everything.”

“Did he apologize?” I was lying on my bed, combing grass seeds from Bonegrinder’s coat, while Phil wore grooves in the floor with her pacing. Strange, I’d never been one to cuddle the zhi much before. That had always been Phil’s job. But feeling her warm little body curled close to mine was somehow comforting now.

“A million times.”

“A million times in twenty messages? Wow. Must be long messages.” I smiled ruefully. “Have you called him back? Told him what happened?” But these questions weren’t the ones I really wanted to know the answer to. Twenty messages from Seth. Did any of them mention Giovanni? Did Giovanni mention me? Didn’t he care enough to admit that he’d been acting like a jerk, too? Would he do the same, if I had my own phone?

She shook her head. “He wants to meet.”

I sat up, dislodging Bonegrinder, who bleated in protest. “Are you looking for me to give you permission?”

“No!”

“To come with you, then.”

Phil pressed fists to her temples. “No! Astrid, I thought you’d understand.” She sat down beside me and laid her head on top of Bonegrinder’s tummy. The zhi was in heaven, sandwiched between us. “I need to get out of here. This past day and a half, it’s been torture. Nothing to do but sit here and think about all the things I could have done to prevent this—”

“There’s nothing you could have done,” I said. “It was an ambush, like you said. We barely knew that re’em was there until he was on top of us.”

“I need to get away from the Cloisters for a little while. Clear my head.”

“Maybe you can go with Neil when he takes his trip up to Gordian.”

She turned her face into Bonegrinder’s hair, so her response was muffled. “Nnoo. Mmeed to leaf somva here to watch you gguys.”

“I think Cory and I can hold down the fort.” Contusion or no.

“An adult.” She lifted her head. “Besides, I bet Gordian will call back today and it won’t be necessary for him to leave the Cloisters at all. It won’t be necessary for any of us to leave, ever again.” She stroked her fingers through Bonegrinder’s coat, and the zhi beamed at her in adoration. “And I can’t wait that long. I’ll go mad if I have to stay here another hour. Don’t you feel it?”

Usually, but I was still wiped from my fight with the re’em. I understood now why Phil had been so out of it after she killed the kirin yearling. “I don’t like it. It’s dangerous.”

“Asteroid,” Phil groaned. “You sound like one of
them
.”

“Sorry. But it’s true. I don’t want you hurt. I couldn’t bear that.” I remembered Melissende’s face in the hospital. Frantic, horrified. She and her sister may not have gotten along, but she still loved Ursula.