“Close call there, wasn’t it, honey?” my mother said to me, looking up from her beat-up monitor as I researched “color drained from eyeballs” and “protruding veins” in our copy of The Merck Manual. I’d already come up blank on “double ring bruises.”
“If that zhi hadn’t come along—” Lilith began, ecstatic.
“That what?”
“Cornelius says that’s the kind of unicorn you saw. A zhi.”
Super. Now there was more than one kind. Speaking of…“Hey, is there any news from the cops about catching it?”
She shook her head. “Don’t be so naïve, Astrid. You think they can catch it?” That’s one of her favorite tidbits: Only unicorn hunters can catch a unicorn, blah, blah, blah. She waved a sheaf of papers in the air. “And what’s more, you think it’s the only one out there? I have over fifty reports. And that’s just in the Americas. They say the problem is much more widespread in Europe and Asia.”
They say? I wondered who they might be.
“Honey, that thing was not an isolated incident. It’s a Reemergence.” She leaned over and stirred the pot of canned soup on our tiny, two-burner stove.
“What happened to them being extinct?” I liked that fantasy so much better. In fact, I liked it better when unicorns were a fantasy, period.
“We’re trying to figure that out.” She smiled. “And that’s where you come in.”
“You want me to research extinction?” I asked hopefully.
“No, baby. I want you to hunt them back into it. Oh wow, we’re so lucky this happened when it did.”
“We are?”
She gave me a look of rebuke. “Think about it: with you out in the woods…with that boy…at night…and a blanket…Who knows? If the zhi hadn’t stopped you, you wouldn’t have been able to hunt!”
My jaw dropped. “I wasn’t going to do—”
“I’m telling Cornelius all about it.”
“Mom! Eww, gross! Can you not share the non-details of my non-sex life with some weirdo you met on the Internet? I’m pretty sure I read an article about how that’s a bad idea.”
“Oh, please, honey. He’s practically family.”
“Yeah, if you go back three thousand years,” I muttered, slammed the book shut, and stormed out of the kitchen. Merck was so not helpful. In the den, my mom had some dusty, leather-bound antique medical guides that discussed alicorn—the “technical” (ick) name for a unicorn horn after it’s been relieved of its unicorn—and the Remedy, but I didn’t buy their quackery. I’d read them when I was about twelve, and they said—among other bits of ridiculousness that had gotten me laughed out of sixth-grade science class—that sperm had tiny men living inside them, that cancer was caused by an imbalance of the “humours,” and that women got their periods due to demonic possession.
Is it any wonder I tried to stay well away from Lilith’s favorite topic? It sounded insane in the twenty-first century. I’m as open to alternative medicine as the next person, but acupuncture and alicorn alchemy aren’t even in the same universe. Of course, after the Mad Goat Incident, I could hardly avoid it. Mom was positively giddy about the prospects. Up until now, all she could do was talk about family history. She could be proud of our heritage, but little more. It was a skill set without a practical, real-world application. We were—dare I say it?—normal.
I think I left normal back in the woods that night. Now, as far as my mom was concerned, I was a hunter in training. Never mind that I didn’t even like squashing bugs.
Maybe I would do some research on animal populations. It was impossible that unicorns could just reappear, wasn’t it? Even if there had been a few specimens that survived extinction in the wilds of Africa or in Tibet, they couldn’t just show up in the woods outside a Seattle suburb. Right? Lilith could never even point to a skeleton of one, despite the claims she made that there were unicorn horns in the treasuries of every monarchy in the world.
There was another huge pile of papers on our coffee table. My mom’s knowledge about unicorns had quadrupled in the last few days. Now I knew, thanks to her endless lectures, that there were five species of unicorns—zhi, kirin, re’em, einhorn, and karkadann—though, according to all these reports, only the first three had “reemerged.” The zhi was apparently the smallest kind. I couldn’t imagine trying to deal with anything bigger. My mother said a karkadann was the size of an elephant.
I stared out the window and across the lawn, to where my aunt and uncle were just sitting down to dinner in the big house. My uncle’s family had a breakfast nook and a formal dining room, but our garage apartment couldn’t fit more than a card table stuffed into the corner, with two mismatched chairs on the accessible sides.
Apparently, now that they were empty nesters, my aunt and uncle were even eating dinner in the breakfast nook. They looked lonely, and I understood. I missed Phil, too. Before she’d gone off to college, we used to study together in the evenings. Phil’s bedroom was almost as big as our whole apartment, and it had matching furniture and an enormous desk that she hardly ever used. Sometimes I wondered what her parents would say if I asked to study in Phil’s room now.
Lilith hadn’t told my aunt and uncle about the Mad Goat Incident, which was just as well. I’d hate to see Uncle John start giving me the looks he reserved for his sister. He might even tell Phil that I, too, had gone insane.
Twenty minutes later, Lilith skipped into the room, eyes alight. “Honey, I have amazing news. The Cloisters of Ctesias has been reopened.”
“Um, yay? What in the world is a cloister?”
She grabbed my hands and danced me around in a circle. “It’s an ancient training ground in Rome for unicorn hunters. You’re going to be a hunter, baby!”
“No!” I pulled back and crossed my arms.
Lilith’s face turned hard. “What, young lady?”
I backpedaled. “I mean, I can’t.” Think. “I have school. I don’t have a passport. I don’t speak Italian.”
She waved her hand in the air. “Details. We’ll get you a passport, and we can arrange for you to take your exams early. You’re a smart girl—you’ll be fine.”
No. She couldn’t send me away to some crazy unicorn boot camp. She couldn’t enlist me just like that. Didn’t I have any rights? I never wanted to see another unicorn again, and here she was trying to turn me into someone who regularly engaged with them. Killed them.
She grabbed my arms again, this time with a firmer grip. Her eyes were frighteningly lucid and, even more frighteningly, filled with intensity. “Think of it, Astrid! Rome! The Eternal City!” She spun me around again.
I couldn’t think of that. I was too busy trying to decide between fight and flight. Could I run away? But where would that leave me? I was sixteen, without a high school diploma. That was no way to avoid my mother’s fate. Could I throw myself on the mercy of Uncle John? He’d never let her send me away like that. He could fight for custody. He’d do that for me, right?
But as soon as the thought sprung into my head, I pushed it away. Tell authorities about my mom? What would they do to her if I did? Tell them about unicorns? Would it do any good? After all, I’d seen one, and Lilith had all those reports. Maybe everyone knew about the Reemergence, too. Maybe they’d side with her.
Perhaps there was another way. “And who’s going to pay for it?” I asked, struggling to keep my voice as calm as possible. “Not Uncle John, that’s for sure.”
“That’s the best part. It’s all sponsored. It’s all free. An opportunity like this—Astrid, it’s all I’ve ever wanted for you.”
I stopped her from turning me into a human Maypole. “You wanted these monsters to come back?”
She had the decency to look sheepish. “Well, I wanted you to be able to claim your birthright. In a way I never could.”
Poor Lilith. She did want it. All my life, people had thought she was wrong, crazy—even her own daughter. But now I’d seen the truth with my own eyes. Maybe I owed her for those years of de
rision. Maybe I owed her because no matter how much I’d resented the way we lived, I’d always loved her. She was my mother.
And she’d parried every argument I’d made, like always. She was a grown-up. No matter what bad decision she made, I had to live with it. The unicorns had eclipsed every aspect of her life—why wouldn’t they do so to mine as well?
Besides, it wasn’t as if I had some packed social schedule to keep. Or a crazy desire to spend another hour in Current Issues, while my ex-boyfriend and ex–best friend giggled about how I was both crazy and a prude.
Better to hunt the mad goat than to let it attack any more of my boyfriends.
3
WHEREIN ASTRID IS CLOISTERED
LILITH DID ALL THE packing, which made sense, as she’d also done the bulk of the shopping. If I’d been in charge of my Rome wardrobe, it would have included more capri pants and kicky dresses, like Audrey Hepburn wore in Roman Holiday. Lilith, however, packed utilitarian wear—cargo pants made of space-age microfiber that would move the way I did and featured extra loops and pockets for carrying knives, spare bowstrings, sights, and arrow tips. To judge by Lilith’s choices, my duties seemed to involve mostly the skinning of dead animals and setting of traps.
Watching my mother drool at the windows of various gun and sporting-goods stores gave me the creeps, but I didn’t really start getting scared until I learned that the unicorn hunting scholarship only provided ticket money for the hunter herself, not for the hunter’s mother. I would be leaving the country on my own. Lilith’s reaction moved swiftly from devastated to determined. All I could think about was every news story I’d ever heard about kidnappers. Was it possible that these people were using my mom’s obsession as a way to get me in their clutches?
I threatened to tell Uncle John about this Roman scheme. “I can’t go there alone. We don’t know anything about these people!”
“Don’t you dare, Astrid,” my mom said, folding up another top and placing it in my suitcase. I was perched on the edge of the coffee table and my mom was standing over the pull-out couch where I slept. “I raised you to be independent and self-reliant. You’re certainly old enough to get on a plane by yourself.”
“And put myself in the hands of total strangers?”
She snapped the lid shut. “What do you take me for? Of course I checked out their stories. I am a researcher, you know. They are who they say they are, and their stories are verifiable. You have nothing to fear. I wouldn’t put my daughter in any danger.”
“Any danger!” I cried. “What do you call hunting unicorns? Big, sharp horns; fangs…” And those were just the goat-sized ones.
“I call it your birthright.” Lilith stood tall. “Honey, I know you’ve been down ever since that stupid boy broke up with you, but this is about more than a prom date. Don’t you realize that? You have a destiny. Most people would kill for something like that.”
If Lilith and this Cornelius guy had their way with me at this boot camp, I was going to kill.
“Six generations ago, our ancestor Clothilde gave her life to protect people from the karkadann. Now you have a chance to—”
“Do the same?” I crossed my arms. “Forgive me if enforced lifelong celibacy and possible death by dismemberment and poisoning don’t exactly get me excited.”
“How about being part of something ancient and important, something that belongs only to you?”
And whatever other abnormally unsexed young women they find with the proper bloodlines. “I’m not a hunter, mom. I’m not a killer.”
“I know that, sweetie,” she said, “but you are a healer.” Her eyes practically glowed. “You want to be a doctor, Astrid? Well, think about this: you could help find the secret to the Remedy. You could help cure every disease the world has ever known.”
I wanted to shout back that the Remedy was a myth, but how could I? I’d seen what happened to Brandt with my own eyes. Whatever that stuff was, it cured alicorn poisoning at the very least.
Alicorn poisoning was real, too. It was a nightmare come true. “But do I have to hunt to do that? Isn’t there, like, a research wing?”
She put her hands on her hips and stared me down. “You have a role to play in this. A vital role. Are you going to shirk it, just because you’d rather have a desk job?”
I swallowed but couldn’t think of an answer. Lilith stepped forward and folded me in her arms. I buried my face in her sweater and breathed deeply. She smelled like mothballs and lavender, like the damp that always permeated our apartment, like chicken broth and wool and old books and home. I’d never been away from her for more than a night. And now she wanted me to go halfway across the world.
Her embrace tightened so that I could hardly breathe. “I’m so proud of you, sweetheart. I’m so excited for you,” she whispered into my hair. “Go to Rome and train to be a hunter, Astrid. You just might save the world.”
Lilith—my mother—believes in magic. She believes in unicorns and panaceas and destiny. She’s held that belief despite every bit of ridicule she’s had to endure, despite every consequence she’s suffered. It’s as if she willed these monsters into existence.
But now I’m the one paying the price.
I spent the first of three flights memorizing entries in an Italian phrase book and the second trying to psych myself up about this adventure. Kaitlyn and the others could snub me as much as they wanted; they weren’t about to go live in Italy! Land of midnight cappuccinos in candlelit piazzas, of gorgeous young Italian guys swooping around on little Vespa motorbikes offering rides and fruity gelatos, of swank beach resorts and sprawling vineyards. I’d put in my hours doing unicorn target practice and dedicate every spare second to living la dolce vita. All this Brandt stuff was just so…high school. A girl who summers in Rome could hardly be concerned with such minutiae, right?
But my pep talk didn’t work, partially because my mother had packed away a little brochure for me to read to help me “acclimate” to life at the Cloisters. On the third flight, bored by language studies and tired of calculating my risk of deep-vein thrombosis from sitting in the cramped plane seats, I decided to take a peek.
“So, you want to be a unicorn hunter,” I mumbled, and opened the brochure. The businessman seated beside me gave me an odd look, and I ducked my head as far behind the pages as it could go. He shook out his paper and went back to reading. There was an article on the front page about a mysterious massacre at a campground in the Adirondacks in upstate New York. Twenty deaths. No one could tell whether it was the work of human hands or some sort of wildlife attack. Mysterious toxicology reports showed some sort of heretofore unknown venom.
You saw this kind of thing a lot of late. Word of the Reemergence was spreading, though most reports blamed exploding wolf populations, bioterrorism, or both. But unicorn sightings were becoming more common as well, even in the mainstream media, though they were generally written off as crackpot stories or even hoaxes. No one was connecting the sightings to the attacks, partly because if an attack occurred, there were no survivors to say what they’d seen. Naturally, authorities had yet to catch or kill one of the unicorns, since only a unicorn hunter could do it, and none of us knew the first thing about how.
The brochure covered history, politics, cryptozoology, and a frustratingly minuscule smattering of pharmaceutical biochemistry that left out any relevant information about what they already knew about the Remedy. That was annoying. Instead, I learned that—at last count in the mid-nineteenth century—there were twelve hunter families, all of which could trace their lineage back to Alexander the Great. I also knew all about the five types of unicorns, each larger and more deadly than the last. Finally, I read about the supposed powers we hunters possessed: increased speed and agility—my PE teacher would have something to say about that—immunity to the alicorn poison, better aim and vision, and something called a potentia illicere that they didn’t deign to translate. Since the only Latin I know comes from an anatomy book, I was clueless. Someth
ing “potential,” maybe?
No index, of course. I flipped to the back hoping to find a listing for “Virginity, why?” but no dice. In fact, the whole package was surprisingly light on exactly what it meant to be a unicorn hunter, or why they figured that a bunch of teenage girls would be better at the job than a few military snipers or an old-fashioned hand grenade. They didn’t understand the immunity the same way they didn’t understand the Remedy. And they didn’t even explain what that potentia thingy was. It was as if I was still back in the nineteenth century. Wasn’t anyone interested in the scientific aspects of a lost species or a possible medical breakthrough? Sure, the history bits had plenty of stories about Roman hunters and medieval hunters and hunters who rode bareback, naked, armed only with alicorns, against hordes of invading Visigoths, but nothing that explained what it was they’d done to obtain said alicorns. And really, naked horseback riding? What kind of virgins were these gals?
Plus reading straight through practically induced a coma.
But the diagrams of three different kinds of bows and five arrowheads rocked. I felt a sort of thrill seeing them, which shocked and repulsed me. Since when had I become all into weaponry? The only bloodletting devices that were supposed to make me happy were sterilized scalpels.
After a good fourteen hours of travel, of which I slept perhaps five, I arrived in Italy. In the terminal, no one waited with a little sign that read UNICORN HUNTER EXPRESS. Since I no longer had the use of my cell phone—for emergencies or otherwise—I had to track down a pay telephone, and a call to the number listed on the back of the brochure gave me a terse, English-accented message about which train and bus to take to get to the place where the boot camp was being held.
Bus? Bogus. So these were the responsible parties my mother had entrusted me to? They left a teenager in a foreign airport to fend for herself? I headed outside and somehow managed to find the train, which deposited me in a seedy-looking area of town a half hour later. The bus was a bit more difficult, but eventually I figured it out. I have a sneaking suspicion that it helped immensely that I was blonde. Aboard, I sailed past the Colosseum as well as buildings that looked every bit as ancient—yet were still inhabited. At last, it deposited me in a tiny depression, a valley between the Oppian and Celian hills, that my guidebook told me was one of the most ancient parts of the city, filled with hidden treasures and bits of enigmatic Roman history.
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