Ascendant (37 page)

And then I laughed at the idea of me
rationalizing
anything. I must be getting better if I’d made it that far.

Armed with a grammar primer and a dictionary, I roamed about the Cloisters, finding inscriptions and graffiti that I happily translated, to the amusement of Phil and the delight of Father Guillermo, who’d taken me on as a pupil. The inscription at the base of the fountain in the courtyard said, “To Honor the Sacrifice of a Sister of the Order of the Lioness,” and dated to the Reign of Terror in France. There was a crude scrawl at the bottom of the chapter house staircase that read, “Death or Flatulence to Dona Maria Therese,” which we all found hilarious.

Today I was in the Cloisters courtyard working on a page Father Guillermo had given me to translate. Now that spring was fully upon us, I tried to spend as much time outdoors as possible. The weather was beautiful, cool and sunny, and there were flowers blooming all over the courtyard.

This translation was especially tricky as I was trying it out without the benefit of either of our house zhi. Their absence always made everything seem just a little more misty, but Dr. Sachetti and Phil believed that it was important for me to wean myself off needing the unicorn magic to concentrate, needing it to think.

“Et
diliges Dominum Deum tuum ex tota corde tuo, et ex tota anima tua, et ex tota mente tua, et ex tota virtute tua,”
I read aloud. I liked reading aloud. It made me feel like I was in a real classroom, instead of all alone inside my broken brain.

Okay, so obviously something from the Bible, what with that
Dominum Deum
stuff. Father Guillermo could be so predictable sometimes.

“And
something
the Lord thy God from the whole of your heart, and from
something something something
…” Okay, that made no sense. If
ex tota corde tuo
was “with all of your heart,” which I was pretty sure it was, and
ex tota mente tua
was “with all of your mind,” and the one with the
virtute
was “with all of your strength” …

“Ex tota anima tua?”
I read again. ‘“With all of your animals?’“

“Soul,” said a voice behind me.
“Anima
means ‘soul.’
Animalis
means ‘animal.’“

I froze, and it seemed my heart stopped in my chest, which was too bad, since my brain needed all the oxygen it could get.

I slowly turned around, and there he was. Giovanni.

Giovanni.

Giovanni
.

G
iovanni stared at me with those steady brown eyes that did all the smiling in his face. Phil tapped him on the shoulder. “I’ll be in my office if you need anything.”

He nodded, but didn’t take those eyes off me.

Giovanni looked different, but who was I to talk? He’d gotten skinnier since last summer, and he’d grown out his hair into dreadlocks several inches long. Some of them were dyed crazy colors. Is this what happened at art school?

“Hi, Astrid,” he said.

“Your hair is longer than mine.” I ran a hand through my prickly, shorn scalp. Phil said it was elfin. I said it was plague victim.

Giovanni chuckled. “Yeah. Weird, huh?”

“Weird,” I repeated. He was still standing halfway across the courtyard. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I’m on spring break,” he said. “Thought I’d come and see my girl.”

I closed my eyes, wishing the fog would come and take me away.
His girl?

Giovanni’s arms wrapped around me. “Astrid,” he whispered. “It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not,” I said, stiff within his embrace. “I haven’t spoken to you in months.”

“Yeah, well, you get a pass on phone duties when you’re in a coma. It’s a rule.”

“I wasn’t in a coma for months.”

“I mean … with … everything you’ve had to deal with.”

Yes, the everything brain damage. Had Phil warned him what to expect? When Phil had said he could come to her if he needed anything, could one of those things be tips on dealing with his brain-damaged girlfriend?

Was I his girlfriend? Can you have a girlfriend you don’t speak to for three months?

Melissende was right. Astrid—his Astrid—the one he’d cared about, the one who’d cheated on him—she’d died up there on the mountainside.

It was amazing that he didn’t recognize that already.

“I wanted to fly over when I heard what happened to you,” he said, his arms dropping to his sides again. “Phil told me not to.”

“You didn’t call.”

“I did,” he said. “I called once. I don’t think you remember. It was … early on. Phil said maybe wait a bit. So I waited. But I knew I was coming out here for spring break. I was determined to see you.”

I didn’t say anything, just stared at my hands, tracing the alicorn scar on one with the fingers of the other.

“I … came as soon as I could,” he offered. “I swear to you I did.”

“Of course you did,” I said at last. “How’s school?”

Giovanni quite obviously did not want to talk about school. He’d come to Rome to see if I was normal or stupid. He’d come to Rome to see if I was pretty or monstrous. He’d come to see what he was going to do about me.

I wasn’t sure what he was deciding.

So he told me vague stories about classes and activities and roommates, and I did my best to follow along and not act idiotic or foggy or outrageous, but I kind of wished Bonegrinder were around. It would make this all so much easier. It would make it more obvious to him that the old Astrid was still in my head somewhere and that I was reconstructing more pathways for her to get out on every day.

But then I remembered what the old Astrid had done to him, and how she’d never told him, because she’d cracked her head open on a mountainside before she’d gotten up the courage to confess.

I watched him carefully for signs. I watched his surprise when he looked into my eyes, which never had gone back to being normal. They’d freak you out if you weren’t expecting them. They freaked me out every time I looked in the mirror, and I knew they were there.

I watched the way his brows knit in concern whenever he caught a good look at the scar side of my head. I listened to his nervous chuckle every time he made a joke I didn’t get, every time I laughed at something that wasn’t, it turned out, a joke at all.

“And what have you been up to?” he asked me. “Other than … you know.”

“Smooth,” I said. “Other than rebuilding my brain, you mean?”

He nodded, half relieved that I could joke about it, half worried that I wasn’t actually joking. I wondered what the conversation had been like with his roommates.
Hey, you know my girlfriend, the magical nun? Well, turns out she’s now a magical retarded nun. A magical, bald, ugly, retarded nun. But hey, you guys go out with the gorgeous, witty models you meet every day on the street in New York City. I only have eyes for my bald, stupid nun. The one who lives across an ocean
.

And they said
I
was the irrational one? What was Giovanni even
doing
here? “Well, you might have heard we have a new hunter,” I said, keeping up the appearances that made everyone feel so much more comfortable around me nowadays. “One. Singular. She came with a zhi. Wouldn’t come without it, actually. They had to ship them both over in some sort of phenomenally sketchy cargo arrangement. No one has ever tried to transport a unicorn overseas like that before.”

Eight hunters left at the Cloisters: Melissende, Grace, Ilesha, Dorcas, Valerija, Zelda, and now Wen. Ursula still counted, I supposed, locked away in her room. Cory and I were on permanent hiatus, though.

Ironic, given that now I probably
could
be the best hunter. It was the only thing I was any good at anymore.

“And Phil’s working her hardest to make that illegal!” Giovanni exclaimed, and shook his head. “You know, it’s amazing what she’s been able to accomplish in such a short time. I know I don’t have any right to be, but I’m so proud of her. Every time the whole unicorn issue pops up on the news, I think about how she set this all in motion.”

“She’s pretty amazing,” I agreed. All that work on behalf of unicorns and still had time to spoon-feed me ice cream whenever I got confused.

He hopped up and held out his hands for mine, then pulled me to my feet. “And she’s agreed to let me spring you for the evening. So what’ll it be, milady? Spanish Steps and people watching? Dinner and fine art? A stroll around the Colosseum and a picture with a super cheesy gladiator?”

Old Astrid would have loved that. Every bit of it. Even if she didn’t deserve it from him. I drew back. “None of the above.”

Giovanni’s brow furrowed. “Come on, Astrid. Phil said you’ve been dying to get out of here.”

“I can’t.” I crossed my arms, hugging myself tight to keep from capitulating. I didn’t know if I’d even like art anymore. After all, I didn’t like math so much lately.

“Too much?” he asked. “Okay, we can start small. We’ll take a walk down the street and get some gelato. That’ll be nice.”

“No,” I said. “I can’t. I don’t want to be out there alone.” If Giovanni couldn’t figure it out, I’d have to tell him. The girl he loved was gone. She was gone even before her brains had been bashed out.

He forced a laugh. “But you won’t be alone. You’ll be with me.” And then he smiled, which Giovanni
never
did, and I, who had spent the last year staring at racks of bones and unicorn innards, thought it was the most macabre thing I’d ever seen.

It had to end. “Well, either you’ll leave me to find my way home alone, which is a really scary prospect, or we’ll have this incredibly awkward walk back after our fight. I don’t want to deal with that, either.”

“Our fight?” Giovanni raised his eyebrows. “Why would we fight?”

“Because I cheated on you,” I said before I lost my nerve. The patronizing mask Giovanni had been wearing this whole time slipped right off his face. “When I was in France.”

He stared at me in open shock.

“Oh, not much,” I said. “I mean, I’m still here, aren’t I? Still a hunter. But yeah, I did.”

I heard him breathe in and out. Saw him tamp down his urge to shout. I saw him get angry, the kind of angry I knew he could get, the kind of angry that had gotten him kicked out of school, but I wasn’t scared. This was the right thing to do.

“I kissed Brandt. Almost in the pool. Almost at the club. And definitely the night of the party, when he gave me champagne and told me he loved me.” The words came faster now, in a rush so hot they broke right through the mist that always lingered in the corners of my mind when the unicorns weren’t around.

Giovanni made a choking sound in his throat.

“I felt terrible,” I said. “Right away I felt so terrible. I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid to tell you. And then
this
happened, and I never got a chance to.”

Then, most horribly of all, I saw him shove his rage away. After all, I was broken now. He couldn’t blame
me
for what the other Astrid had done. But he needed to. Her for the cheating, me for not being her.

My eyes burned and my throat closed, and the microscopic part of me that still held out hope for my old life couldn’t help but go on, to offer this elegy for something that could never, ever be. “If I’d called you then,” I said, desolate, “I would have begged for your forgiveness. I would have told you that kissing some other guy was the worst mistake I’d ever made, that I have always loved only you, and that I would do anything to make it up to you.”

There. I caught my breath. My heart was pounding like I’d just come off a hunt. But my mind was totally clear.

I’d told him I loved him. I’d said it now, when it was worthless. All those months of pouring my shapeless longing into the phone, I’d never said it, saving it up for the moment when I could look him in the eyes.

I couldn’t read his eyes.

“But now?” Giovanni asked quietly. Dangerously. For a long moment, we just stared at each other, and I wondered if he saw me. Did he see past the crescents, the bizarre heterochromia that marked me as a descendant of Alexander much more clearly than my invisible magic? Could he see that right now I
was
Astrid? Astrid the Warrior. Astrid the Traitor. Astrid the Broken Doll. And no matter which one I was, I could never, ever have him.

“Now,” I said, and cocked my head to examine him, “I think it just means that you don’t have to feel guilty when you walk away.”

I will give Giovanni credit: after that, he didn’t walk away. He practically ran. Without another word, another look, he turned on his heel and marched straight out of the courtyard. I needed no telepathic link to realize he was swimming in fury.

Good. I needed him to drown out the pity.

I hoped he wasn’t alone tonight. I didn’t want my mistake, my stupidity, to get him into any trouble. As for me, I sat around and sifted through my brain for every memory I could grasp of him. I recalled our first kiss, at the museum, and the way he’d held me after we decided not to sleep together. I remembered how he’d saved me after the kirin had run me through, how he’d put his hand on my scar and called me a warrior. I savored the memory of him running up to me in the City of the Dead and pulling me into his arms. I thought about the morning he’d met me at dawn and told me that no distance would ever come between us. Well, he’d been wrong. That was all.