Rampant (14 page)

Valerija and I broke into a sprint. When we reached the edge of the field, I hopped the low wooden fence and kept running,
hoping the others were behind me, compelled by the lingering vision in my mind’s eye of the unicorn sneaking up behind the slumbering sheep. Lack of sleep had apparently given me a particularly vivid imagination.

Ahead, I saw movement, a mass of sheep swarming in no particular direction, pressing against one another in their terror. Beyond them, moving shadow, a flash of blood. I was right!

I slowed, sliding in the dew. The kirin had an animal impaled on his horn and was tossing it around. Blood spattered over the backs of the stampeding sheep, and they came right toward us.

“Get out of the way!” I heard Phil scream from far away and I jumped aside, shoving into Valerija as the sheep swept past. The ground rumbled beneath us and for a moment, everything was wool and noise and sliding in the muck. We scrambled to our feet once more.

The kirin had disgorged the sheep from its horn by this point. I hoped the animal was dead. I saw it twitch for a moment on the ground, then go still, a fuzzy red lump of flesh.

Valerija made a sound like a curse as the kirin turned in our direction and lowered its head to charge. It was smaller than the one I’d seen before, barely more than a yearling, yet every bit as deadly. I froze, forgetting all Lino’s archery lessons as the monster stared me down with its glowing, golden eyes.

“Back up!” Phil was shouting now. “Get back!”

“What is it?” I heard Lino’s voice. “I see nothing.”

Valerija grabbed my arm and started to pull, and I retreated toward the fence, scattering sheep in my path. Grace flew by as I reached the other hunters, her black hair streaming behind her. I looked over my shoulder and saw her stop dead at less than twenty yards, nock her arrow, draw, and release.

There was an empty, hollow thunk, and the unicorn roared.

Grace shouted in delight and pumped her bow in the air. The unicorn was on two legs now, cloven hooves flying, dark blood spurting from the arrow that lay lodged in its shoulder.

“She hit it!” Lino cried, incredulous, but then recovered. “
Dai
! Quick! Another shot! You must make the fatal wound!”

But Grace was having trouble drawing her bow—from fear or adrenaline, I couldn’t tell. Her hands shook as she nocked her next arrow, and she twice tried to draw the string back and failed. A moment later, she knelt and rested the bow against the ground. The unicorn was tearing at the arrow with its teeth now, now lowering its head and charging.

I ran forward and dragged Grace to her feet. “Run. Now!” But it was like her legs were rubber and she collapsed against me. The kirin moved closer, swinging its head from side to side like its horn was a scimitar. The smell of flames and rot burned in my throat.

Another snap of string on my right and an arrow glanced off the unicorn’s flanks. Ilesha. She drew again, then checked the distance between the unicorn and us and paused. “Get down!” she cried. But it was too late. The kirin was upon us.

Again, time slowed. The kirin’s head, at the far side of its swing, faced us broadside, ready to slice us both down with one giant sweep. I grabbed Grace’s abandoned arrow from the ground and plunged it into the animal’s neck, right under its jawbone. The aluminum bent and broke beneath my hand as the kirin wrenched away, almost ripping my arm from its socket.

We ducked as it reared again, falling hard against the wet ground. Grace regained her faculties and skittered out from
beneath the flailing hooves as the unicorn turned tail and galloped away across the field.

“Where is it?” Lino asked. He was looking around wildly. He had his bow out, but he didn’t even seem to know which way to aim.

“Um, across the field?” Phil said. “Didn’t you see it turn around and run?”

His mouth dropped and he shook his head. “No. It…go away.” He looked so confused. “You all see it? Go get it!”

Not one of us moved. Grace and I were covered in blood, mud, and wet grass. Ilesha had curled into a ball on the ground, head tucked between knees, shoulders shaking as she wept. Phil was staring at us in revulsion, and Cory stood by Lino on the other side of the fence, her face as gray as the dawn while the unicorn’s screams echoed across the field.

“Go!” Lino shouted again.

“No!” Phil said. “Not without a plan.”

I bent down to check out a deep scrape on Grace’s brow, but she pushed me away.

“It heals as we stand here!” Valerija said, gesturing into the field with her knife. “And now it is angry.”

Ilesha sniffled and shook her head.

“Another rogue kirin,” Cory said in wonderment. “They are supposed to travel in herds.”

“Packs,
you mean.” I rubbed my shoulder. “They aren’t deer. They’re wolves.” And wolves had loners, too. Usually adolescent males who hadn’t become dominant enough to form their own pack. That’s what this was, I realized. A young lone unicorn with no pack to teach him to stay the hell away from hunters like us.

In the distance, the unicorn bellowed.

Lino clearly heard that. “Go now!” Lino said again. “This is an order.”

“Shut up!” Phil screamed at him. “You want this unicorn,
you
go kill it.”

Lino stared at her for a moment, fury raging in his eyes, but said nothing. Phil seemed to grow an inch or two as we stood there, all of us shivering from fear and cold and weariness. She was right; he couldn’t hunt it down. Both Lino and the unicorn, and all the sheep in the field, were at our mercy. If we didn’t obey, there’d be no dead unicorn for Gordian to play with tonight.

Lino turned away from the group for a moment and stared out at the breaking dawn. I wondered what he saw when he looked at the kirin. Giovanni had barely been able to glimpse it in the alley that night. What did non-hunters see? What had Lino witnessed just now? A bunch of girls and sheep sliding around in the muck while a deadly shadow flitted among us?

Grace stood and brushed off the worst of the grass. “I will follow it.” She hefted her bow and checked her quiver. “I drew first blood. This kill is mine.”

She stalked off into the mist, blood still seeping from the cut on her forehead.

“She cannot go alone,” Valerija said.

“Why not?” asked Cory. “
You
killed a kirin alone.” But the other girl had already followed Grace.

I looked at Phil. “Please,” I said. “She’s hurt, and it almost killed us with one swipe. This isn’t some rite of passage.”

Phil gave a big sigh and shouldered her bow. “Fine. Let’s go. But I’m only going to protect Grace. I don’t believe in this.” She
looked at Lino. “You stay here, where it’s safe, and bark more orders. You were so
helpful
last time.”

“Stop it,” I said. “He’s trying to train us as best he knows how.”

Phil bit her lip and cast him a long look. Then she crawled over the fence and joined me. “Don’t get me started on you. For the love of God, Astrid, stop chasing unicorns. For someone who doesn’t want to be here, you’re certainly acting like an obedient little huntress.”

I flicked mud from my pants leg.

“What about Ilesha and me?” Cory called from the fence line.

“Come or don’t,” Phil called back without turning around. She lowered her voice again. “Nothing to say?”

“I’m sorry. I heard the sheep and—” And what? Had a vision of death? That sounded nice and crazy.

“I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about earlier. Why don’t you ever take my side? You say you want things to change, but then you just stand there with a bow and keep your mouth shut whenever I try to make it happen.”

“Tell me what to do to make a difference and I’ll do it,” I said. Cory and Ilesha had clearly opted against following us to the kirin. “So far all I’ve seen is that you argue and they ignore you.”

“Because I’m the only one. But, come on. You’ve seen what emphasis they place on the fact that we’re Llewelyns. If both of us rebelled against the status quo—”

The sound of barking dogs stopped us short, accompanied by bellowing, and then a girl’s scream. We broke into a run.

A hundred yards on, we saw them. Valerija lay facedown
in the grass, motionless. I saw two sheepdogs keeping their distance and barking their heads off, while a third limped around, holding one leg in the air and whimpering. Whatever had happened to the poor thing, it didn’t look like alicorn venom.

Grace and the kirin were facing off. She had her bow raised but not drawn, and he pointed his horn at her chest, pawing the ground and snorting hard. Blood still dripped down the broken arrow protruding from his jaw, dark black blood that blended with his midnight-brindled coat.

“Grace,” Phil called. “Move away. We’ve got your back.”

“Don’t you dare,” she replied, her voice almost toneless. “This is my kill.” Her hands shook as she attempted to draw back the string again.

I sidestepped over to Valerija, and knelt in the grass. “Are you okay?” I rolled her over. There was a puncture wound near her shoulder, perhaps an inch or two deep, from the look of it. I pulled down the edge of the hoodie to see the skin.

“Burns,” she gasped. I remembered that part. But it bled little, and as I watched, the wound seemed to knit together, growing shallower and narrower by the second. Valerija writhed in pain on the ground, but she’d live. Was this what had happened to my arm after I’d been thrown off the kirin? It looked like Brandt’s leg after we’d treated it with the Remedy.

I glanced up at Phil, who held her own bow, nocked arrow at full draw. The unicorn glared at her. Phil had a far better shot. “Grace,” she said again, not taking her eyes off the kirin. “Back off.”

“You back off,” the other girl hissed. “This one is mine.” And then she released.

The unicorn leaped, but not quickly enough, and Grace’s arrow pierced its gut. He screamed again, a horrid, desperate sound, and landed hard on both hooves. Then he charged his attacker.

I barely had time to flinch before I saw Grace’s body tossed in the air. She flew several feet, then landed in a heap as the unicorn charged again, horn lowered, teeth bared, at the crumpled figure on the ground.

Phil let her arrow fly as the animal quartered away. Another hollow thunk into the unicorn, just behind the left shoulder. But did it go far enough in to pierce the lungs? The beast turned and galloped back toward Phil, who dove out of the way as he careened by.

After it passed, the unicorn turned once more, then dropped to his knees. Grace still wasn’t moving. I grabbed Valerija’s knife and slid it across the wet grass toward my cousin. She grasped it by the handle and stood.

The kirin was grunting now, prostrate on the grass, each labored breath punctuated by wheezing shrieks I’d remember for the rest of my life. His eyes were wide with terror, rolling in his head like yellow pinballs, as Phil slowly approached. He barely moved as she stood above his broken body, breathing every bit as hard as the dying animal. She raised the knife high.

Do it. Oh, God, just do it.
I squeezed my eyes shut.

Squish. Squish. Squish.

When I looked again, it was over, and Philippa Llewelyn was drenched in unicorn blood.

“H
ELLO
, M
OM
?”

“Astrid! It’s two in the morning.”

“I know, I’m sorry. I just…had to call.”

“Are you all right?”

“No.” I was covered in mud and blood, and Grace was getting stitches in her forehead by Gordian technicians in the room next door. “I want to come home.”

There was a long silence on the line.

“Mom, are you there?”

“I’m here, Astrid. I’m just trying to understand. You’re not fighting with the other girls, are you?”

“No.”

“And they are treating you well?”

“Yes.” They weren’t beating me, or anything.

“Then what’s bringing this little episode on?”

“It’s the
hunting
, Mom. I don’t like it.”

“Have you been hurt?”

“No. I’m maybe the only one who wasn’t.”

“Good for you! I’m so proud!”

“No, don’t be proud! I hate it.”

Her voice turned cold. “What do you mean, “you hate it’?”

“Well, the blood…”

“Blood?” Lilith scoffed. “This is the girl who says she wants to be a doctor, and she’s scared of some blood? Astrid, I’m surprised at you.”

I tried to remember how Phil had put it. “I’m just not sure it’s ethical. They’re endangered. There has to be a more humane way to deal with the threat.”

“Humane? Oh, I get it. You’ll get better, honey. You’ll get better at shooting them so they go down quick and don’t suffer so much.”

“That’s not what I mean—”

“Did you kill one today?”

“No. Phil did.”

“Phil. I see.” My mother was quiet for a long moment. “Well, you’re just going to have to tough it out, Astrid. I know you can do it.”

“I don’t
want
to do it, though, Mom! I tried. I put in a real effort, just like you said, but I hate it.” The training, the tree sitting, the death, the magic…“I want to come home.” I waited, but there was no response to my plea. “Mom?”

“Maybe it’s just too early over here, but I really don’t understand where this is coming from. You’re doing well, you’re healthy, you’re getting along with the other hunters…. What’s the real problem here? Is it because Phil’s a better hunter than you are?”

“No! I don’t care about that. Phil doesn’t, either. She doesn’t want to kill anything.”

“And yet she’s out there doing it and you aren’t. Maybe you could learn something from your cousin’s dedication.”

“No! Mom, it’s not about that at all! You don’t understand.”

“Maybe I don’t, but I do understand that you made a commitment, and the second it starts getting hard, you’re calling me to complain.”

“That’s not true.” I took a deep breath. “School’s starting again soon.”

“Oh, right.” My mother sounded distracted. “I meant to discuss that with Cornelius. I’m thinking maybe a tutor, or enrolling you in an American school in Rome. We’d have to see about the cost, though. What are the other girls doing?”

I didn’t know, but I knew that a few of them weren’t in school anymore, and that others—like Dorcas, Cory, and Grace—probably weren’t factoring cost into the decision.

“And it would give you a chance to learn Italian. Have you been picking up much of the language, what with all your training?”

Only what Giovanni had been teaching me. But I could hardly tell my mother about
him
.

“Think of how great studying in Italy is going to look on your college applications, Astrid.”

I tried to imagine a college application essay about what it was like to crouch in a field at dawn and watch my cousin stab a man-eating monster to death. That probably would make quite the impression on an admissions committee.

It certainly had on my mother’s academic counselors.

“Besides, what is there for you back here? Those silly little friends of yours? You remember that boy, Brandt? He ran away from home! What kind of associations are those for you?”

Brandt had left home? Weird. Then again, I understood the urge to escape your parents. I tried to push my hair back, but the matted strands were crusted to my face. “Mommy,” I whispered. “Please.”

I don’t think she even heard me.

“What you should be focusing on, Astrid, is training even harder. Killing more quickly, more humanely. I know you probably think Phil’s a natural at this, because of all her athletic experience, but think about who your ancestors were. You have the same abilities. You even have more. You should be doing better than your cousin.”

“How do I have more abilities than Phil?” I asked.

“I know you can do it! I’m so proud of you, honey. It’s a dream come true, knowing that you’re over there fulfilling the family destiny. I should let you go now. I love you, Astrid.”

“I love you, too, Mom.”

I hung up the phone and bit my lip. The glaring fluorescent light in the empty Gordian office made my hunting clothes look even more stained and dingy. I’d probably contaminated the plastic chair just by sitting on it. I’d washed my hands twice, practically scoured off the skin the second time, but the sticky feeling of dark kirin blood lingered. I couldn’t sit. My blood seemed to buzz in my veins, a thousand times harder than caffeine or even adrenaline. I hugged my arms to my chest and bounced on my heels. The others didn’t seem to feel this. Maybe it was because they’d been injured. Their energy was focused on healing their wounds. Mine just brimmed inside me with no outlet.

I stood at the doorway to the next room, a lounge where the other hunters were resting, icing sore body parts or flicking bits
of mud off their clothes. A television was bolted to the ceiling, showing a boisterous Italian game show. Grace sat on a long bench, a row of neat stitches glistening on her forehead. She held an ice bag to the back of her head and refused to look anyone in the eye. They’d said she had a concussion and a sprained ankle on top of her cuts and bruises, but miraculously, no skull fractures or other broken bones.

Still, it was like staring into the waiting room at my old hospital.

Ilesha was curled up in an armchair, sleeping. Poor girl. She’d apparently spent the entire time we were chasing the kirin being sick in the field. She was a decent shot, but if she fainted at the first sign of violence, she wouldn’t be much good to the Order.

Valerija took a small case out of her coat pocket and removed a pill. She offered the case to Cory, who reeled back, disgusted. Valerija shrugged, popped the pill, then readjusted her headphones and closed her eyes. She’d refused to let any of the doctors touch her, but I could imagine the kind of pain she was feeling, even if the puncture wound had mostly healed by the time we’d gotten to Gordian. She wasn’t even wearing a bandage now. Valerija had also been limping pretty badly when we walked off that field. I’d have offered to help, but Phil and I had been carrying an unconscious Grace.

Maybe whatever she’d taken now was an attempt at self-medication. Maybe I should find out what it was. Perhaps it stopped this feeling, like I was speeding out of control, even when I was standing still.

Cory shook her head and came over to me. “We really need to do something about her.”

“Do your books talk about an official Cloisters drug policy?” I snapped. “By my count, she did more damage today than you did.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them.

Something flashed across Cory’s face, but she recovered quickly. “And she almost died, too, didn’t she? A few inches down and that kirin would have pierced her heart.”

True. I didn’t want to know how many of us had been close to death today.

Cory sighed. “Let’s not bicker over this.”

“Agreed. I’m…sorry for what I said.”

“I don’t blame you. You were out there and I was not.” She nodded at Phil. “Is she all right?”

Phil sat splayed on a chair in the corner, watching the incomprehensible television show, looking as strung out as if she’d taken one of Valerija’s pills. She hadn’t spoken to me since we’d left that field. I sat down by her now.

“Hey.”

She nodded but kept her eyes on the screen. If she was buzzing like me, there was no sign of it.

“Just got off the phone with my mom.”

“Yeah?”

“I told her about your kill.”

Phil said nothing for a moment. Then, “Wasn’t mine. A mercy kill by that point. If Grace wants the honor, she can have it.”

Grace sniffed from the corner. “No, thank you. When I get my first kill, I’ll do it without anyone’s help.”

Phil didn’t respond. I tried again.

“I asked her if I could come home.”

“Are you going?”

“No.”

Phil pursed her lips and nodded, but said nothing more. I was too afraid to ask if she was planning to leave herself. What would I do if Phil left me here alone? I imagined Lilith would be thrilled. No other Llewelyn to steal my thunder. But I dreaded the very idea.

“We’ll be heading back to Rome now,” I said in as bright a tone as I could muster. “Maybe you should call Seth and see if we can get together with the boys tonight.” Nothing. “Or tomorrow. Give the bruises a chance to fade.”

Still nothing. Not even a chuckle. From
Phil
. I bit my lip, wanting more than anything for both of us to be back in Uncle John’s yard, where we were more in danger of getting bitten by mosquitoes than being gored by unicorns.

Giving up, I rested my head against the back of my chair and tried not to think about all the parasites and other nasties on my mud-soaked pants. At least, I hoped it was mud. There were a lot of sheep in that field.
Calm down
. My feet started tapping against the floor.

“I’m going for a walk,” I said. I couldn’t bear it another moment, sitting in there among the injured hunters, wondering how long it was going to take until Phil started acting like herself again. I wanted to sprint a marathon. I wanted to run and run until I left this all behind. My feet began to pound against the linoleum.

But the hall dead-ended in a room furnished with a slab. And on the slab lay the corpse of the kirin.

Technicians in white lab coats clustered around the body, drawing blood here, taking skin and hair samples there. I wondered when they’d start the autopsy and how they’d
manage it if they couldn’t keep cuts open.

I watched in silence as they clamped sensors from various machines to the corpse, finished collecting their specimens, and bustled out a side door. The machines whirred and beeped. From the door, I could see that one was measuring body temperature and another, horn temperature, which seemed to still be in the low forties. Celsius. That was awfully hot, for a corpse.

I tiptoed into the room to get a closer look at the sensors. Funny, the kirin didn’t look as big now, draped and still like that, its mouth slack and tongue lolling out from between its fanged jaws. Its wounds, fatal and otherwise, had all but vanished now, leaving dark, shiny striations of scar tissue on its hide. Strange—unicorn flesh regenerated even after death. I reached two tentative fingers out to touch the skin.

“Astrid?” I jumped and knocked the unicorn’s hoof off the slab, and it clunked hard against the side. Marten Jaeger stood at the door, watching me. “You don’t belong here.”

“I—”

He seemed to catch himself. “I mean, I would have thought you’d want to be with the other hunters, relaxing.” He beckoned to me.

“I can’t seem to chill out,” I admitted.

He nodded, though there was a confused look on his face. “Is it too warm for you?”

“No. Sorry, it’s just a saying. I can’t relax.”

“Oh. I see. That is very common, after something so exciting.” He closed the distance and stepped between me and the display screens. “Did you…enjoy the hunt?”

“No,” I said, too frazzled to lie. “I hated it.”

“I see.”

“Maybe, since Cory doesn’t want to be here anymore, I can stay here, help you out in the lab—”

“No,” Marten said. “That wouldn’t work, I’m afraid.”

“But you need a hunter around if you’re going to keep specimens from—”

“I don’t think so, Astrid.” He shook his head. “I’m very sorry. It seems like you have a natural curiosity for the type of work we do here. I find it quite unusual, in fact. If I had your abilities, I’d be far more interested in those.”

“Want to trade?”

He said nothing, just watched me with his strange, pale eyes.

“Maybe,” I said at last, “we could renovate the scriptorium. I could make a little lab right in the Cloisters. It wouldn’t interfere with my hunting, I swear!”

He raised his eyebrows. “No, the scriptorium has…structural problems. I don’t want any of the hunters going in there. It’s too dangerous. Perhaps later, we’ll be able to look into restoring that part of the building, along with the other wing…”

He kept talking about future plans, but it all blended into the rush of blood in my ears. The dead kirin stared up at me with glassy yellow eyes. To Marten, to my mother, to all of them I was just a girl with a bow. An assassin, good only for what she could kill.

And I wasn’t even particularly good at that.

“I hate to discourage you, Astrid. Really I do. After all, your most recent theory about the connection between the Remedy and the hunter’s own immunity was one my own lab saw fit to test…several months ago.”

Test and dismiss. Boy, had I felt sheepish when I shared my
observation about the way Valerija’s alicorn wound had healed with the people from Gordian. They’d merely grunted, and then ignored me. Later, Cory had explained that everyone was well aware that hunters healed from alicorn puncture wounds with supernatural quickness. They’d even tested her once by making a regular incision then dripping alicorn venom into the wound. Nothing happened, and the wound healed normally.

Marten had filled in the rest. Apparently, they’d done extensive testing on whether or not hunter blood was a possible ingredient in creating the Remedy. No luck yet. However if I wanted to donate some blood to keep testing with, they’d be happy to accept it. Then all the hunters had given blood samples.

I was nothing more than a tool, like this unicorn on the slab.

Someone cleared his throat. I turned to see Lino, looking as battle weary as the rest of us. He began speaking to Marten in Italian. I made out little more than our names before the conversation turned to an argument too fast and furious for me to follow. Marten’s tone made it clear he was issuing orders, though.