Dorcas’s parents returned to the Cloisters to take their leave. They swept by us—the husband in a business suit, the wife bejeweled and smelling of expensive perfume—with nary a backward glance, and disappeared into Dorcas’s room. I noted that Ursula’s name was crossed off the sign on her door.
“Apparently,” Phil whispered to me, “she can’t have a roommate.”
“What, like she’s allergic?” Maybe I should have tried that excuse myself.
“No, she can’t have one or she won’t stay, according to Neil.” Phil shrugged. “See what I mean about negotiable?”
To judge from Dorcas’s behavior in the days that followed, it was also negotiable whether or not she would come out of her room to join us. Neil, Cory, Phil, and I worked night and day to get the Cloisters ready for real training. I mucked out ancient, dusty stalls filled with the bones of rats—better than unicorns—and dusted off targets galore. We hauled mattresses and swept closets and helped Cory organize stacks of yellowed diaries and other records.
Cory began to speak to me again, and I studiously avoided any conversation that might touch upon her mother. I worried every time I mentioned my own in her presence. How could I talk about how much I resented Lilith when I knew that every moment Cory would kill to have her mom bossing her around? Had killed.
The next hunters to arrive were Rosamund Belanger, a budding pianist from Vienna, and Zelda Deschamps, a Parisian model Phil swore she recognized from last fall’s Vogue. Zelda was about six feet tall and had the most gorgeous skin I’ve ever seen—smooth and so black it almost looked blue in the half-light of the entrance hall.
Both Rosamund and Zelda seemed skeptical about the displays in the front hall, as well as the existence of Bonegrinder—who acted just as happy to see them as she was to make the acquaintance of all the hunters. Phil had been keeping the zhi in her room, which kept me well out of it. I’d been creeped out by the unicorn before, but now, knowing what it had done, I wanted to be nowhere near the animal.
Cory had said nothing about the new sleeping arrangements. I think she worried that broaching the topic of Bonegrinder with Phil would no doubt lead back to the reason the zhi lived here in the first place.
But I was dying to ask her who had named it.
“You must understand,” Rosamund said in accented English, stroking Bonegrinder’s soft fur with long, slender fingers. “My family knows nothing of our heritage. Cornelius Bartoli told us that we are of the”—she looked at Cory as if for confirmation—“Temerin line.”
“Female descent,” Cory clarified happily, and I wondered if it had been she or Neil who’d been acting as “Cornelius” when talking to Rosamund’s family. “But for all we know, that could make you even stronger. I’m from a bastard line myself—several generations back of course. Great-great-great-grandmother was a governess in a Leandrus household.”
“When did you guys strike it rich?” Phil asked. I frowned. The Bartolis were rich? And Phil knew it?
Cory grinned. “When her hunter daughter saved a son of the noble line of Bartoli from a particularly nasty re’em. Apparently, it was love at first sight.”
“Wait,” I said. “She was a hunter who left the Order to get married? I thought that was verboten.”
“No,” said Cory. “This was around the time of Clothilde and the Last Hunt. She was out of a job.”
Good for her.
Zelda had kept her distance from the zhi during this exchange. “I don’t do animals,” she said.
“That’s going to make this mission of ours a little tough,” said Phil, ruffling Bonegrinder’s floppy ears.
“Not if all I have to do is kill them.”
I heard Cory mutter under her breath, “I like this one.”
Both Rosamund and Zelda were seventeen, and Cory had assigned them to the same room. Early the following morning, though, Zelda was still in bed while Rosamund stood dressed and ready at our door, asking where the music room could be found.
Cory had blinked. “I think there’s a piano or something downstairs in the chapter house. But I would be shocked to discover that it worked after all this time.”
Phil joined us, with Bonegrinder clopping along at her heels. Zelda emerged, sleepy eyed and wearing a silk robe, and even Dorcas deigned to trail along, curiosity clearly getting the better of her determined isolation.
Back into the bowels of the Cloisters, down to the chapter house, with its Wall of First Kills, its darkness and its grimacing skulls. Even if the piano worked, I didn’t know how Rosamund planned to play it in the dark, with all those dead things watching her.
We all took lanterns this time, so at least there was a little more light. In fact, well lit, and facing away from the Wall of First Kills, the room was almost cozy. Perhaps the horror factor was entirely due to the decor. Walls of bones might have been the height of interior design fashion in the sixteenth century, but I’d take a chair rail and a still life with fruit over that any day.
The vaulted ceiling was high and practically airy, like a giant cavern or even a cathedral. Phil pulled the muslin covers from the furniture, revealing chairs, tables, even couches. She moved across the vast space, shoving aside dustcovers and lighting sconces as she went, and I realized that not all the room looked like a student lounge.
On the far side of the chapter house, another wall was hung with rows upon rows of weaponry. Axes, spears, bayonets, long bows and crossbows, a katana engraved with golden lions, and small round copper shields showing dents and puncture marks all through their colorful emblems and embellishments. Arrow tips of alicorn and swords whose grips and pommels were set with shavings of the same. There was indeed a piano, with legs that swirled upward like mahogany alicorn and keys not made of ivory, but of bone; as well as a harp that seemed constructed of a giant, curved horn like an elephant tusk, carved with fanciful beasts and resting on a base of golden lions.
Was everything in this room made of unicorn?
“Wow, look at this.” Phil pulled off another cover. Smack-dab in the center of the room sat the largest relic of all, an enormous throne, resting against the base of the composite column that supported the vault of the ceiling. Every inch of this throne was constructed of alicorn, from the enormous arcing horns that made up the frame, to the twisting maze of many-sized alicorns that crossed and recrossed the back, sides, seat, and base. From a distance, the horns seemed to twist around one another like snakes, endlessly writhing within the prison of the throne, patterns forming and dissolving in each flicker of lamplight. Every time I blinked, I saw something different—a crescent moon, a lion digging its claws into a unicorn’s back, a vast field of battle, a temple afire.
I hated it. It made the hair on the back of my neck, my arms, everything, stand on end. I swayed on my feet, fighting back waves of nausea, dizziness that had erupted the moment Phil had uncovered the throne. I stayed back, choosing to hug the formerly terrifying Wall of First Kills.
Cory stared at it, agog. “Unreal,” she said. “There’s no mention of an artifact this intricate in the records I’ve seen.”
“Maybe they wanted to keep it a secret,” Phil said, “if horns are as valuable as you say.”
Cory looked at Zelda. “You’re from the Hornafius line—the craftsmen. Could they have made this?”
Why was she so insistent that we carried on the same specializations as our distant ancestors? Despite the trials by zhi, I still wasn’t sure there was anything to the claims of Alexander the Great’s DNA being responsible for our abilities. I certainly didn’t feel like I had anything in common with a Macedonian warlord. Genetics didn’t work like that, anyway.
But my roommate never let a little thing like science get in the way of her quest to eradicate an entire species of mammal. She confronted Zelda. “Does your family have anything—”
Zelda threw back her head and laughed. “My grandparents disowned my mother when she took up with my father. I’m afraid I won’t be much assistance on the family histo
ry front.”
“But,” Cory argued, “now that you have adopted your family birthright…”
“They’re racist pigs, more interested in the purity of their family legacy than the reality of their actual family.” She shook her head. “I want nothing to do with the Hornafii.”
Rosamund wandered toward the wall, then stopped short. “Do you hear that?” she said.
We all glanced at each other. “What?”
“The wall. It hums.” She leaned in. “This note.” She sang a single note, high and clear.
Cory shook her head. “I hear nothing.” Philippa, Zelda, and Dorcas concurred, but I stood there, frozen.
I didn’t hear anything…not exactly, but when she’d sung, I felt…I don’t know. I felt the same sharp pain the wall always caused. “Sounds are vibrations, right?” I asked. “I feel…vibrations, near these bones.”
The other four looked at me in shock, and then, one by one, came closer to the wall and placed their palms against it. I gritted my teeth and joined them, and Rosamund did the same.
And then, at once, we heard it. A chord, wild and triumphant, stark and cold. And then, again, stronger than ever, I tasted the same scent I had encountered the first time I’d entered the Cloisters. Fire and fungus, oldness and ozone.
We took our hands away and the chord stopped. Rosamund crossed to the piano and sat down on a small stool, brushing her red hair away from her face as she placed her hands on the yellowed keys. “This chord…it was this chord.” She played something, and the strings vibrated that same wild sound.
Zelda shook her head. “I know little of music. What does that mean?”
Cory watched Rosamund intently. “I can’t believe it…I’ve been here for weeks, and I never heard.”
I lifted my hands. “Okay, while we’re talking about weird things we’re sensing around here, does anyone else notice that smell?”
Zelda looked at me. “I thought it was mold.”
Dorcas shook her head and spoke for the first time. “No, it smells like wood burn. That’s what I thought it was.”
Cory looked clueless and bit her lip as all the other hunters concurred. “I smelled it,” she protested finally. “At first. I just…haven’t in a while. I’ve been here so long, I guess I just got used to it. I’m going to do more research into these vibrations,” she added quickly, then turned away from the wall.
“Great!” Phil said, plopping down on the throne. “Now maybe we can hear Rosamund play—” Her words dissolved into a scream and she leaped up as if burnt.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, rushing forward. Phil’s arms shook, and she seemed to have trouble standing.
“It…shocked me,” she whispered, then choked, as if retching. Everyone backed away from the throne, and I helped Phil to another chair. “It hurts.”
Phil felt better after a minute or two, and in the end, Cory and Neil roped off the chair until we’d looked into the situation. According to the records we found later, the throne had been a gift to the Order from the people of Denmark, following a particularly bloody battle in the fourteenth century. Phil went around touching every bit of bone in the building, but she said nothing shocked her the way that throne did. I suggested that maybe it had been a fluke of static electricity, but then Dorcas dared me to go near it, and I’d hardly gotten my hand on the armrest before I felt arrows of pain shooting up to my elbow.
Between the alicorn throne and the hum from the Wall of First Kills, Rosamund was the only one who was willing to spend any amount of time down in the chapter house, banging away at the piano, which, miraculously, had lost neither strings nor tune in the centuries since it had last been played.
I wondered if the instrument employed unicorn gut instead of cat.
Phil and I were the only representatives at the Cloisters from our family line. The next to arrive, sixteen-year-old Melissende Holtz, was, like Rosamund, another descendant of the Temerins. They were a family, Cory informed me in hushed tones, that accounted for some of the most ferocious and bloodthirsty hunters in all of her records. Personally, I wondered how far back their common ancestor was located, for I’d never seen two more dissimilar girls. Rosamund was a tall, elegant redhead who’d bonded instantly with Zelda and Phil and whose clear, well-trained soprano had been echoing through the stone residence halls since her arrival. Melissende had black hair, gray eyes, and a permanently sullen expression on her face. She seemed to like it here as little as I did, but, if asked, would only say in her gruff smoker’s voice how thrilled she was to get out of Bavaria. Her parents had been aware of their unicorn hunting heritage, and when reports started to leak into the media about the Reemergence, they contacted us.
Melissende also completely ignored her kid sister, Ursula, to the point that the younger girl had been in the Cloisters for almost a full day before I realized they were related. Ursula, twelve, had been intended as fourteen-year-old Dorcas’s roommate, and at first Cory was worried that Ursula would feel isolated without someone closer to her age around. Luckily, around that time, Neil received reports of a twelve-year-old outside Delhi who had been keeping a zhi as a pet, and we added Ilesha Araki to our roster and to Ursula’s room.
We did not, however, add her zhi, as Bonegrinder more than kept our hands full. Ilesha was reportedly heartbroken at leaving him behind. Cory wondered why they hadn’t put the beast out of its misery then and there.
“We’re supposed to kill the bastards, not feed them,” she argued, knee-deep in a vain search to trace Ilesha’s ancestry. “Am I the only one around here to remember that?”
“Neil says she’s got a little sister who promised to take care of it.” I was helping Cory, mostly because Neil’s office was one of the few places in the Cloisters that didn’t make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I found the hum of his computer rather soothing, but it was the complete lack of unicorn carcasses that really pulled the room together.
Cory switched to her Latin dictionary. “That little sister would be far better served coming here and learning how to kill unicorns than staying home and caring for one. Ten is more than old enough to be away from home, in my opinion. What was my uncle thinking?”
Perhaps that he didn’t want to pay for two tickets from Delhi if the kid would wimp out within the week.
Then came Grace and Mika Bo, of the Singaporean family Bo. According to Neil, the Bos had been highly discriminated against in the previous incarnation of the Order of the Lioness because, back then, the European families considered them “Oriental savages.” It had apparently taken a Herculean effort by Neil and the influence of Marten Jaeger to get the family to agree to come to Rome at all.
The hunters had taken to gathering in the rotunda to witness the trial by zhi, and as we formed our customary shield around Mr. and Mrs. Bo, all I could think was that the father seemed quite happy with the proceedings, while the mother looked ready to cry.
“There’s nothing to fear, ma,” the older girl, Grace, said over her shoulder as she brushed past our shield. “Ugh, what is that smell?”
The younger girl sniffed at the air. “What? I can’t smell anything.”
“Because you’re a snot nose.” Grace yanked her younger sister by the hand. “Come, Mika.”
Her father glared at her. “Gentle with your sister.” Grace rolled her eyes.
Phil was standing across the rotunda, restraining the zhi with a hand on the bright blue bandanna she’d foolishly tied around the monster’s neck, and Bonegrinder practically hanged herself on it in her eagerness to get at the newcomers. The Bo girls took their place before the shield, hands joined, and Bonegrinder began to yip in short, breathy gasps.
“Oh, do strangle yourself,” Cory whispered.
Behind me, Mrs. Bo sobbed softly. On either side of me, Cory and Rosamund were exchanging glances of uncertainty. But I felt it, too. Something was wrong. Together, we glanced back at Bonegrinder as Phil released her hold on the bandanna.
There was bloodlust in t
he zhi’s eyes.
“No!” Mrs. Bo cried, breaking out from between Cory and me. “Take me!” She slid to her knees in front of the body of her youngest as Bonegrinder barreled toward them, her horn aimed directly at the woman’s heart.
9
WHEREIN ASTRID OFFERS A CHALLENGE
NOT AGAIN. I STOOD, frozen, as the unicorn galloped toward the girls. In my mind’s eye, I saw Brandt’s face, purple and poisoned, but I could not will my feet to move. The scent of death filled my nostrils, blood roared in my ears. And yet, even through my fear, I could feel myself—my innate hunter instinct—gauging the distance between my body and the unicorn’s. The world slowed, just like the last time I’d chased her, just like the time I’d gone after the kirin. My thigh muscles tensed as if to spring. And yet I didn’t move. I couldn’t make it in time. It was too late.
Grace Bo put out her hand and grabbed Bonegrinder by the horn as she flew by. She swung the beast roughly around, and Bonegrinder’s hooves knocked Mrs. Bo to the floor. Mika Bo cried. Everyone screamed.
The other hunters hastened to re-form the shield around Mika and her mother, as Grace, with Phil’s help, wrestled the unicorn to the ground.
Mr. Bo’s face had turned purple. “What is the meaning of this?”
Mrs. Bo lowered her head and clutched her daughter to her chest, but did not respond.
Grace pushed her long black hair out of her face and stood, leaving Phil to wrangle Bonegrinder. “Ba ba,” she said to her father, bouncing on her toes. “Did you see me? Did you see me take the unicorn?”
He brushed her aside, pushed into the shield, grabbed his wife roughly by the elbow, and pulled her to her feet. “Who has been messing with my daughter?” he seethed.
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