Rampant (29 page)

Then she screamed.

“No!” Phil shouted. “Astrid, help her, stop it!”

What had I done? Now I was experimenting on people, following the nutty theories of a half-mad unicorn who thought he was an ancient war hero? Watching her writhe in pain was more than I could stand.

I grabbed Valerija’s hand to try to pull her off the throne, but she shook me away and gripped the armrests tightly. She began to shudder, and her screams died off into a whimper as her eyes rolled back into her head. An endless minute passed, and half the girls in the room were hiding their faces or peeking through their fingers with horrified eyes. Then, almost inaudibly, Valerija whispered, “The battle. The blood. So many dead. There is one of mine. A Vasilunas. She looks like me.” She blinked several times. “It is gone. The pain. Now, only the visions.”

She stood up and rubbed her arms as if cold. Every hair on her body seemed to stand on end, and her skin almost glowed. She was breathless, exhilarated.

“I feel…strong.”

“Scheiβe! Nein!”
Melissende shouted, standing up.
“Ich glaube das nicht.
This doesn’t prove anything. You are not a better hunter because you sit on a chair.”

“Yes,” Grace said. “How shall we prove it? Take turns shooting
Bonegrinder and see who kills her faster?”

We all looked over at the zhi we’d chained to the wall in the corner.

She wasn’t there.

“Damn escape artist!” Cory shouted. “She must be in the Cloisters still.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “There was a time the other week when we locked her in the catacombs and she escaped. With the door to the chapter house unsecured—”

“When?” Cory asked me.

“It was the night that Phil—” I gave Cory a look of apology. “I’m sorry. So much was going on, I forgot to tell you.”

Phil furrowed her brow at me. “Was that the morning you went out and came back smelling like garbage?”

“Was that the morning after the night you swore you’d kill Seth?” Cory snapped, clearly unhappy at being left out of the loop.

“Excuse me?” Dorcas said. “Shouldn’t we be looking for Bonegrinder?”

“See?” Melissende said. “What kind of super hunters are you if you can’t even keep a baby zhi captive?”

We adjourned back to the stairwell, taking a quick left into the entrance of the catacombs. As the hunters spread out through the uneven, dirt-covered space, skirting the empty wall niches where the bones of ancient hunters had once rested, I paused and looked at Valerija. She was also frozen in place, head lifted, focusing on something that no one else could see or hear.

Bonegrinder was drinking from the fountain in the front courtyard.

I saw it clearly, felt her choke as she slurped up a fly floating
on the water, felt a sneeze building up inside her muzzle when she drank too fast. Valerija’s eyes met my own. She saw it, too, I knew it. She raised her eyebrows at me. I nodded, and she turned around and took the stairs.

This was the power, this was the sensitivity that we’d so imperfectly understood. This was how I’d known there’d been a zhi in the Myersons’ backyard, a kirin hiding among the potsherds, a yearling hunting sheep. This was how I knew there’d been a pack of kirin lying in wait for the hunters to attack. Our native abilities could tell if there was a unicorn near—and once attuned, we could pinpoint them exactly. See through their eyes, understand their thoughts. Know where they would move before they knew themselves.

I felt Valerija’s hands close around the zhi’s torso, felt Bonegrinder’s disappointment and frustration at being captive yet again. “Val’s found her,” I announced, and smiled at the disbelieving faces around me. “So, who’s next for the throne?”

I’m not going to say the evening was a pretty one. Grace was the next volunteer for the throne, and the process took its toll on her. She leaped up from the chair involuntarily several times, and in the end begged Melissende to hold her down until the pain became more bearable. Ursula went next, and, as I’d suspected, had an easier go of it, given her increased exposure to the alicorn venom. Ditto for Zelda. Dorcas flatly refused to try. Rosamund threw up the second she sat down on the throne, then bowed out and retreated to her piano, where she played simple scales until her hands stopped shaking.

“I’ll try again later,” she said.

I looked at Cory, whose expression showed equal parts terror
and determination. “Hold my hand?” she asked me.

“Absolutely.”

Rosamund segued into an unfamiliar piece while Cory and I joined each other in front of the throne. This tune was mournful yet frenetic, like the battle in the visions. The trophies on the wall behind us hummed along, and Cory squeezed my hand so hard the bones crunched together.

“It’s going to be okay,” I whispered. “I promise; it’s better than a hole in the back.”

“True,” she said, and drew a deep breath. “For my mum.”

I nodded. Then she sat.

Unlike the others, Cory did not scream, but she gasped, and her eyes bulged. Phil, who’d looked on the verge of tears all night, hid her face in her hands. Cory wrenched my arm almost out of its socket, and every muscle in her body seemed to tense.

“You can do it, Cory,” I said. “Concentrate on the music.”

“I’m fine,” she hissed. “I do what it takes.” And she always had.

Rosamund, across the room, paused, mid-melody. “Do you want me to stop?”

“No!” Cory shouted, and began to writhe. Rosamund, taken aback, played on.

A minute later, it was done, and I helped a shaky Cory out of the chair and onto the floor, while Phil rushed over with soda and crackers.

“That was horrid,” Cory said, when she’d recovered somewhat. “What a barbaric idea.”

“How do you feel now?” Phil asked.

“Like the others,” Cory said. “For instance, even now, Bonegrinder is plotting how to attack you despite the ring. It
may become a problem. She thinks your calves look delicious.”

Phil’s mouth dropped open. Cory laughed.

Melissende jumped up and strode over to the throne. “My turn.”

After all the hunters but Dorcas had been attuned, Melissende insisted on giving their newfound abilities a test run. I was nervous about the endeavor, but Phil agreed and tapped Melissende to lead the hunt. I had a sneaking suspicion that my cousin would end up being a very diplomatic donna.

Melissende took with her the seven freshly attuned hunters—Dorcas’s bum arm and my still-healing back kept us both out of commission—and together with Phil, we two left-behinds raided the Cloisters’ larder and played a game that Phil called What Will Bonegrinder Eat?

“So that’s a no on broccoli rabe, eggplant, garlic bread, and honeydew,” Dorcas said, reading the list.

“And a yes on prosciutto, sausage, salami, ham, raw minced lamb, anchovies, and dried calamari,” Phil said. “As well as the wrappers of all the above. And, apparently, my calves.”

“I think Cory was kidding,” I lied. Phil had nice, toned calves, and Bonegrinder was a connoisseur.

Of course, all the fun and games were merely to distract ourselves from the paralyzing fear that I’d made a horrible mistake. What if there was another ambush? What if the chair didn’t really give us extra sensitivity when it came to hunting? What if I’d just sent seven girls to their deaths? What if I’d convinced each one of them that they could take on a pack of kirin apiece and they were, even now, bleeding to death in the streets and cursing me with their very last breaths—

Bonegrinder lifted her head, cocking her ears forward.

“They’re back!” Phil said. The four of us ran from the kitchen and into the rotunda, each filled with trepidation and anticipation.

Seven hunters stood lined up on the mosaic floor, battle worn, covered in cuts and scrapes. Their clothing was torn and dirty, spattered with blood and gore. They looked exhausted and exhilarated.

“Well?” asked Phil.

One by one, they each held out an alicorn and smiled.

F
IVE DAYS LATER
, I sat in the courtyard in the darkness before dawn, waiting to speak to the two most important males in my life. In the last week, my experiment had proved valid under every test. Zelda single-handedly, with only one wasted arrow, brought down a pack of five zhi who’d been wreaking havoc in a local schoolyard. Melissende and Grace had successfully stalked and killed a lone re’em with nothing more than a sword and an ax.

And my back had completely healed, leaving only a raised magenta starburst scar in the center of my spine. It didn’t even twinge anymore. Last night I’d been sparring in the practice courtyard with Grace, and I couldn’t feel it, even when I lifted the claymore that was fast becoming my close-range weapon of choice. Every time I touched it, I felt a little closer to Clothilde.

Daughter of Alexander.

Of course
he
would come first. I supposed it was better this way. Giovanni might pass out if he got near the karkadann. I cast a glance over my shoulder at the Cloisters. The others were
still asleep, getting as much rest as they could before the big day. Could they hear the karkadann as I could? Was he even now invading their dreams?

I stepped out of the courtyard and into the street, since Bucephalus was too big to squeeze through the archway. Somehow, the night made him seem more massive and yet more ethereal. I wondered how he navigated the streets of Rome without being noticed. I wondered if people saw him and attributed their vision to too much grappa. He stared at me through giant, half-lowered eyes, and tilted his horn away from me, a courtesy I no longer required but appreciated nonetheless.

“You know what I’m doing?”

Yes. You confront the kirin.

I unfolded the map. “Can you read this? Do you know where we are going?”

He snorted and stamped his foot.
Foolish girl. I have conquered half of Asia. And I know the kirin. I know where they hide.

“Then why didn’t you tell me?”

You did not say you would help until now. I will not beg a human. Ever!
The karkadann growled, and the stones rumbled beneath my feet.

“But you’ve been watching me. You knew what we’ve been planning.”

And you watch me, too.

It was true. I’d been searching for him ever since we made this plan, calling out to him the only way I knew how. I’d spent the last week terrified that he would refuse to aid us after I’d rebuffed him last time. Or worse, that one of the scouting parties would happen upon him before I did and try to kill him
before I’d had a chance to explain.

It is a strange alliance.

“Is that what this is? An alliance?”

I felt the karkadann riffling through my mind.
I see your fear. I submit. I will not kill a hunter. I will protect them, as I have protected you.

“That’s all I wanted to know.” I breathed a sigh of relief. The safety of the hunters was my first duty. His vengeance against the rebel kirin was his. We had very different goals in mind, Bucephalus and I. But now, today, they were aligned enough so we could work together. After he’d ended the association between the kirin and Gordian, he didn’t care about the other unicorns, had no opinion about the Reemergence at all.

I
had
to have an opinion. It was my role in life. I just wasn’t sure yet what that opinion was. Hunt these endangered creatures? Capture them and send them into exile again? What would Bucephalus say if I suggested that?

The karkadann shook his head, turned, and galloped away.

Fight hard today, Daughter of Alexander, and I will slaughter by your side.

That gruesome image was still knocking around in my head when the headlights of Giovanni’s van turned up the street.

I climbed into the passenger side. “Hi.”

“Where’s your bow?” Giovanni said with a nervous laugh. “How can you hunt anything without a weapon?”

I pulled the alicorn knife from its sheath on my belt loop. Valerija had saved it for me, retrieving it from the spot she’d seen me last while they’d spent time searching in vain for my body.

“Here,” I said, my tone matter-of-fact. “I’ll load up the rest in a minute.”

Giovanni’s eyes went wide. Oh, he’d been making a joke. I’d clearly spent too much time recently dealing with the practicalities of carrying as many large weapons as possible without hampering movement or speed. I doubted it was anything his other girlfriends had ever thought about. I also doubted any of his other girlfriends had ever whipped out a giant knife from the next seat over.

“The others will be along soon, but I wanted a few minutes alone.” I said. He gave me a hopeful look, but I wasn’t angling for a predawn make-out session. “Are you sure this is still okay? Me tapping you as driver? We’re without a car now.”

“Sure,” he said, patting the steering wheel. “I’ve always wanted to see Cerveteri.”

“This isn’t a tourist trip,” I said. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you before we started. We need some ground rules.”

“No sex. Got it.” He winked at me.

“Some ground rules for the battle,” I clarified, though I felt my entire body flush. “As I told you, the unicorns are drawn to the hunters. It’s part of the gig. I don’t know how soon they’ll know we’re there. We may have to park pretty far away from their actual hideout.”

“Understood.”

“And whatever happens—whatever you see, whatever you hear—do
not
leave the van. If they come at you, get away from the windows, keep the doors locked, duck down as far as possible.”

“Aye, aye, captain.” He gave me a mock salute.

“Giovanni, this isn’t a joke. I can’t have you as a liability. I know you. I know you like to get involved. You can’t in this situation. I need you to stay somewhere safe.”

He was quiet for a moment. “Would it be easier if I just gave you the keys and got out of here, General? Because I certainly wouldn’t want to do anything that would be construed as getting in your way. Or, you know,
saving you.
I know how much you’ve hated it when I’ve done that in the past.”

“Don’t,” I said in a low tone.

“Don’t what?”

“Cast that in my face.” I closed my eyes for a moment, taking stock like a hunter of the whole situation, collecting every bit of data. We were both nervous, and neither of us knew what would come next. “You know I couldn’t do without you. I wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for you. And I appreciate it all, more than I can say.” I opened my eyes and turned to him. “I need you.”

For a moment, he stared at me without saying anything, examined my face, searched my eyes until I almost ducked my head. What did he see when he looked at me now? Was I still the girl in the towel on the bed? Or had the knife scared that image right out of his head? “I know all that,” he said at last. “I’m just worried about you. About the fact that there’s absolutely nothing I can do.”

I pulled him close and kissed him. “You’re doing it already. I promise.” I looked at the empty seats behind us. “By the way, how did you convince them to let you borrow the van again?”

“It’s four
A.M
.,” he said, and popped the trunk. “They don’t know I have it, just like last time.”

The door to the Cloisters opened, and eight figures stepped out into the courtyard. All carried weapons—bows and crossbows, swords and knives, axes and arrows—all culled
from the weapons wall in the chapter house. Phil brought up the rear with two bags, one stuffed with first aid supplies, the other with food and drink.

“Whoa,” Giovanni said, slipping out and around the back as the hunters began loading the van. “This stuff is hard-core.” He picked up the claymore. “Can you guys even lift this sword?”

Phil bit her lip to suppress a grin. “That one’s Astrid’s.”

Giovanni dropped it on the pile. “Oh.”

The hunters laughed, which didn’t help the situation at all.

As everyone climbed into the van, I turned to Phil. “Sure you don’t want to come?”

“To what end?” she asked bitterly. “Either I stay out of the way, and I’m nothing but deadweight, or I forget myself, get involved, and end up being one more helpless person for you to worry about.”

“I worry about everyone,” I said. Didn’t matter if they were helpless or not.

“Exactly,” Phil replied. “And I worry about that most of all. Besides, I need to watch over Dorcas and Ilesha.” She gave me a hug. “You be careful, Asteroid. No new piercings, okay?”

“Got it.”

She glanced over my shoulder at Giovanni, waiting in the driver’s seat. “Is he cool?”

I nodded. “He’s doing his best. It’s really hard to understand from the outside.”

“I know.” Phil scanned the horizon. “You better take off.”

In the rearview mirror, I noticed that she watched us all the way to the end of the street.

“How is she doing?” Giovanni asked me, as we drove. “With…everything?”

“Still really pissed at your friend,” I said, looking out the window.

“I’m really pissed at him, too.”

“And as for the rest, I don’t know how long she’ll end up staying here. She was doing great in college. She has a volleyball scholarship, you know. I think she should go back after…after this is over.”

“Aren’t
you
going to go back after this is over?”

I risked a glance at Giovanni, who was staring intently at the road out of town. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

He nodded, but didn’t take his eyes off the road. At least his driving was on a more even keel than it had been last time. The other girls were chattering softly in the back, but I wasn’t fooling myself that this was a private conversation. Cory, at least, had to be listening.

“I’m going back,” he said softly.

“To where?” Melissende asked from the front-most bench seat. She was always ready to make an awkward moment worse. Giovanni cursed under his breath.

“Mind your own business!” I hissed at her, twisting in my seat.

She grinned and lit a cigarette.

“Oh, there’s no smoking in the van,” Giovanni said, but Melissende merely laughed and puffed in his direction.

“Condemned prisoners get last cigarettes,” she said. “I might die this morning.”

No one felt like talking much after that.

The roadways remained clear at this early hour, save the occasional garbage or delivery truck, and cabs or Vespas transporting their occupants to and from late-night trysts. I
wasn’t sure if the other hunters were trying to sleep or going over fighting strategies in their mind—or praying. Valerija, in particular, looked like she might be sick. This concerned me more than anything, as she alone had seen the gathering of unicorns we were facing this morning. I knew there’d be a lot. How many, though, no one was quite sure. It was possible we were headed to a massacre.

According to Valerija, the compound she’d been staying at was located in the village of Cerveteri, a quaint town less than an hour northwest of Rome in a lush, green countryside surrounded by farms and vineyards. Jaeger had kept her in a large villa outside town. It was surrounded by a tall fence topped with barbed wire. The kirin, she said, hid underground.

“Like, in a bunker?” Phil had asked at the time, but Valerija didn’t know.

Fortunately, the standard tourist guidebooks did. Apparently, Cerveteri’s one claim to fame was the giant network of underground Etruscan tombs honeycombing the bedrock of the entire area. In ancient times, well before the Romans settled in Italy, the ruling Etruscans had built a vast city of the dead in Cerveteri—a necropolis. There were acres and acres of unexplored tombs beneath the fields and pastures, but the ones that had been excavated were giant, beehive-shaped mounds carved directly from the earth, their chambers replete with columns and shelves and even beds and furniture, all hollowed out from the tuffa in a single piece inside these massive hills. From what I could tell, it was a bit like the pyramids in Egypt, had they been built someplace where grass, trees, and time could burrow in and bury the tombs under eons of history, until no one knew any longer who’d been laid to rest there or why.

How close had the hunters come to sharing the Etruscans’ fate? Those nameless hunters whose lives had been taken by the monsters whose horns now made up the throne, even the hunters who had carved their names into the trophies on the wall—we modern hunters knew so little about any of them! And the world knew so little about us.

My mother had done her part to keep the legends alive, but few people knew we’d ever existed. Even now, in the wake of increasing reports, sightings, and attacks, almost no one understood the true nature of unicorns. To most of the world, they were the fluffy, innocent magical creatures of myth and bedtime stories.

To us…I shifted in my seat, feeling the tug of scar tissue along my back. To us, they were something else entirely.

Cory leaned forward and grasped the back of my seat with both hands. Her knuckles were split and bruised from the fights of the past few days. “Do you feel that?”

I nodded. On our right, in the shadows of the road’s shoulder, there’d been traces of a unicorn. It had found a hitchhiker on the edge of the road—a young woman. “Two hours ago?” I asked. Venom still mixed with her blood on the road.

“Think so,” she replied through clenched teeth.

I covered her hand with mine. “We’ll get them. I promise.”

Giovanni flashed me a look. “You’re freaking me out.”

Cory sat back in her seat. I wondered what part scared him more—that a person had been torn to bits and eaten on the side of the road, or that we could tell, hours later, exactly what had happened.

Soon, all the hunters were noting the traces of unicorn in the fields around us. And Giovanni saw the destruction himself.
Slaughtered remains of dogs, sheep, and other farm animals gathered flies and carrion birds all over the pastures. That would be an interesting study when all this was over. How long did the venom linger after death? Were crows and vultures immune as well, or did unicorn leftovers result in the kind of death piles common in other instances of animal poisonings? In other words, if a vulture ate the poisoned remains of a unicorn’s prey, would it die, too?