Ascendant (30 page)

I yawned. “It’s just winter. Gray weather will make anyone tired. Trust me, I grew up in Washington.”

“How are your classes?” she asked.

“Fine.” I gulped down a cup of too-strong, too-bitter coffee and made for the door. She stepped in front of me.

“I’m sure the unicorns are fine. Talk to me for a moment.”

I slumped. It had been four hours since I’d seen Angel, and the scent of chamomile and coffee lingered thick in the air, masking my magic. Was the baby okay? Did it need me?

“You’ve been so withdrawn lately. Ever since your friends visited. I am worried you are homesick for them?”

“No, I—” I tried to sidle around her, but for such a petite woman, Isabeau could certainly fill a space. Okay, then. “Well, maybe a little, with the holidays coming up.” Perhaps now she’d let me be.

Apparently not. “And you spend so much time with the unicorns. All night, every night? Astrid, I told you there was no reason to sleep out there.”

“How do you know—”

She looked amused. “The lockbox on the gate, Astrid. It keeps a log of every time the code is pressed. How else could we handle the enclosure’s security?”

I pursed my lips. “And what other movements of mine are you monitoring?”

Isabeau took a little half step back, looking surprised. “None at all. Why? Should I be spying on you,
ma chère?
Is there anything you are doing of which I would not approve?” When I didn’t answer, she went on, “Of course we keep an eye on the lockbox, Astrid. After the sabotage … Isn’t that why you’ve been going out there at night? Same as you did the night the boundary was shut down?”

“Yes,” I lied. “I don’t trust the protesters.” But I didn’t fear them or
for
them, either. Things had grown scattered and sparse at their camp ever since the night of the break-in, partially given the police interrogation that had followed the situation and partially because the weather had become too unpleasant for any but the most die-hard animal lovers to stay outside all night.

I suppose I now fell into that group myself.

“There are other ways to deal with them than risking your health,” Isabeau said. “I appreciate your dedication, but not at such a great personal risk.”

“Everything I do is at a great personal risk,” I grumbled as I walked by her. Even if I wasn’t taking my life in my hands every time I tried to hold off a hungry unicorn, I was risking my future by concealing Angel’s presence from Isabeau and Gordian. If I got fired and sent back to the Cloisters, what would happen to my education?

And she thought I was afraid of catching cold?

I zipped through my rounds that morning, taking quick stock of the perimeter while reaching my mental feelers into the woods to sense Fats and Angel, together and asleep. As I neared the side of the enclosure closest to the protesters’ camp, I paused. Standing by the fence was the same tall black man, and as usual, he was watching me. I kept moving.

“Hello,” he said, and put his hands on the link. “Hello there. You are American?”
“Oui.”
I kept going.

“I know what you are,” he said.
“Vous êtes un chasseur de licornes.” You are a unicorn hunter
. Give the man a prize.

“You walk among them. You command them.”

And this guy stood there and watched.

“So I ask you,” he called, raising his voice as my circuit began to take me away from him, “why it is that you can bear to see them like this? They are wild creatures! You must know this is torture for them. A torture much greater than they can suffer, even within the terrible laboratories! Please! Listen to me!”

I stopped now and turned back to face him, but I said nothing. How could I? Yes, the einhorns were suffering here in the enclosure; I knew that better than anyone, just as he’d surmised. And yet, if we could find the secret to the Remedy through their pain and captivity, well, then, wouldn’t it be worth it? We weren’t making cosmetics here. We were trying to save the world.

Besides, what was the alternative? Let them out? Hardly.

“What is your name?” he asked softly.

“Astrid,” I said.
“Comment vous appellez-vous?”

“René. It is very nice to know you, Astrid.”

“You don’t know me,” I said.

“But I do. I watched you for many days and nights. I watched you heal the unicorn you cut—in the leg, no less. You are a very poor hunter, I think.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Oh, is that what you think? Should I start listing my more impressive kills?”

“No, I also watched your skill with a bow. I know how talented you are. You are a very poor hunter,” he repeated, “because your heart is not in the kill.”

“Shooting fish in a barrel,” I snapped, approaching him. Who was he to observe something like that? That was my own private business. “I wasn’t put here to kill any of these animals. Believe me, when I should kill, I kill.” I crossed the electric boundary and came near the fence.

“And what if what you should do is something else?” Up close, he was younger than I’d thought, maybe only a few years older than Neil. Figured. It’s not like anyone old enough to have real responsibilities could take off months from work to go camp out in a pasture and watch a bunch of captive unicorns. Of that I was sure.

René was very handsome, with strong, chiseled features, dark skin, darker eyes, and a clean-shaven head. He was dressed in a pair of black slacks, hiking boots, and a forest green sweater under a black slicker. He didn’t look like the militant environmentalist type, the ones who didn’t wash or bathe, who tied themselves to trees or disabled lockboxes or committed acts of ecoterrorism. More like a graduate student on holiday.

“I’d get away from the fence, if I were you,” I said. “The monsters can smell your blood from all the way in the forest.”

His eyes widened, but his hands dropped from the links and he stepped back.

“Your presence here puts them in a constant state of agitation, do you know that?” I said.

“But you are here to soothe them.”

“They belong to Gordian.”

“They belong to themselves and to the Earth,” he replied. “You know that, else you would not sleep out here as they do.”

Did everyone in the world know where I was spending my nights? I gritted my teeth. “Can’t you see how important this work is? Do you know how many people we can cure if we continue to experiment on these animals?”

“Yes,” he said. “But even if it were a million, or ten million, is it worth the destruction of this species? Are there even a million unicorns? Are there a thousand? Do you know?”

“No,” I said without thinking.

René stared at me. “Do you know how many you’ve killed?” I whispered, “No.”

He nodded slowly and shrugged. “Perhaps you should.”

“Perhaps I should have counted how many lives I’ve saved with the unicorns I’ve killed,” I said. I could start with every hunter in the Cloisters. “Perhaps I should count the lives of every person in your camp.”

“René!” He turned to look at a man in the camp. The second man scowled. He was white, older, larger, and wore a scuffed leather jacket. Some animal-rights activist. “What are you doing talking to her?” the man shouted in French. “She’s one of them.”

I rolled my eyes.

René turned back to me, a smile playing about his lips. “You are not one of them,” he said to me in French. “Are you? I think, Astrid, that you are one of us.”

The bellow of a unicorn broke the morning stillness. Instantly, every other animal in the enclosure was awake and on alert. I spun on my heel and sprinted into the woods, my conversation with René utterly forgotten. Disorder reigned in the minds of the monsters, with a ribbon of violence spreading through like a sickness. I quickened my pace, beelining for the epicenter of the excitement.

By the time I arrived, it was to find Stretch and the angry unicorn facing off against each other, legs spread, heads lowered, horns glancing blows as each einhorn tested its limits against the other. Nearby lay the body of a third unicorn—dead.

Neither einhorn noticed me as I came closer, struggling to project calming thoughts. They clashed, then withdrew, but any time either attempted to approach the corpse, the other attacked again. I wished I’d thought to bring my bow—there was no way I could hold off two unicorns with only my little alicorn knife.

The angry one charged at Stretch, causing him to gallop off into the brush. Then, before I could stop him, he rushed back to the corpse and fastened his fangs around a spindly leg, dragging the body away. Upon closer inspection, I could see that the dead unicorn was Tongue. I ran forward, knife drawn.

“Drop it!” I cried. The unicorn looked at me and growled, teeth still firmly clamped around the corpse.

I could feel Stretch returning, and suddenly, he was upon us, and had grabbed up another of Tongue’s limp legs. A tug-of-war ensued in which the minds of both unicorns were so firmly fixed on their prize that all the calming thoughts in the world were having no effect at all. I felt like a child stamping my foot in frustration. And yet, I kept my knife at my side. They weren’t threatening people, nor Angel, merely each other. They were acting like animals in the wild, fighting over food. Horrible, macabre food, yes, but food nonetheless. There were many animals that turned to cannibalism in starvation situations. I’d read stories of polar bears attacking cubs.

I detected no injuries on the dead Tongue, which both soothed and worried me. It was good to know that the unicorns weren’t killing one another, but if Tongue had died of some sort of illness, I probably shouldn’t let them eat the body, lest they fall ill as well. I’d always wondered if Tongue might be sick, but hadn’t given it much thought after Fats gave birth. After all, I thought she’d been sick as well, and I’d been utterly wrong about that one.

The growling grew in both volume and intensity.

“Drop it!” I cried. “Drop it, drop it, drop it!”

They paid me no mind. And what could I do? Kill them both? I wouldn’t be able to get Tongue’s corpse out of the woods on my own anyway, even if I wasn’t forced to hold off hungry unicorns—hungry unicorns used to me feeding them meat—while doing so. And with the einhorns in such an agitated state, I couldn’t risk bringing a nonhunter into the enclosure to retrieve the body.

A better argument for backup I’d be unlikely to find.

But instead I just stood there and watched them tear Tongue to pieces.

Later, I collected what little of the corpse I could find, drew blood from both unicorns, and the lab tested it all for known diseases, but found nothing. Still, there might be illnesses, pests, and parasites somehow specific to unicorns. Who knew how many other species the creatures had brought with them in their Reemergence? From what Phil had told me of her research, every animal had the potential of being its own mini-ecosystem. Saving a flagship species, be it the polar bear or the Brazilian tree monkey or the killer unicorn, introduced the possibility of saving a dozen far less adorable but no less worthy species that depended on the other for survival.

Including parasites. The potential was mind-boggling, since whatever had ailed Tongue was
resistant
to the unicorns’ natural self-healing properties. That had to be one hell of a disease. Perhaps it even had something to do with Cory’s illness, as her doctors had suggested. Maybe the reason they couldn’t identify it was because it was a virus that started with unicorns. I wondered if Phil would take that into account in her proposals to various conservation groups. If it turned out that the unicorns had brought superbugs back with them from wherever they’d disappeared to, it was doubtful society would want anything more than to eradicate them and their possible pandemics from the planet for good this time.

More disturbingly, the possibility of a unicorn-specific disease led to all kinds of speculations on who, exactly, was susceptible. Perhaps Cory was right and it was a disease that vectored only to hunters.

Isabeau confirmed these fears. “Remember cowpox and the milkmaid, which led to a vaccine for smallpox?” she asked me. “It first required the maid to grow sick with cowpox. She got it from the cow.” We asked Cory to send more tissue samples to the Gordian labs to test against Tongue’s.

I also convinced Isabeau to dose the einhorns’ feed with antibiotics, lest whatever had killed Tongue spread to the rest of the unicorn population. Officially, sixteen unicorns remained in the enclosure. Sixteen … and Angel.

Whether it was a simmering malaise, a side effect of the antibiotics, or the coming winter, the unicorns seemed to settle down. More often than not, I found them sleeping in dens they’d carved out at the roots of the trees. I wished again that one of the ancient hunters had done some sort of behavioral study on the animals. Did einhorns hibernate like bears? How long would it take for Angel to mature into an adult? When would Phil and her environmentalist allies be able to get a study like this off the ground?

Though it never got quite cold enough to snow, the nights neared freezing, and I finally gave up my vigil over the baby unicorn. More and more of the protesters vanished from their campsite, probably similarly disillusioned by the gloomy winter weather. Even René seemed to have given up—at least, I never spoke to him again.

And Brandt remained nowhere to be seen. I’d never bothered getting his cell phone number, and after Isabeau’s warnings, I couldn’t bring myself to ask her for it. But I hadn’t spoken to him since the night we’d spent in Limoges, and as his absence stretched longer and Isabeau continued to leave him out of all conversations, I began to worry that she’d sent him away for good.

In contrast to the silent woods, the château itself bustled with activity. Isabeau explained that, for all her life, her mother had thrown a massive soirée on the solstice, and it was a tradition that Isabeau had retained over the years, rolling the Gordian holiday party into the event and turning the night into one of the finest galas in the region.

I’d never been to anything that could be construed as a gala. Birthday parties, yes. I’d even attended Uncle John’s office Christmas party one year, for which he rented out the entire back room of a nice Italian restaurant back home. But watching the preparation for Isabeau’s solstice party was witnessing event planning on an entirely new level. The château crawled with maids, florists, lighting designers, caterers, sommeliers, decorators, and all manner of staff.