“Astrid,” he whispered into my skin, and I knew he meant it—meant Astrid, not girl beneath me.
I opened my mouth, but the only word that came to my lips was Actaeon.
I was saved from speaking as he moved his mouth up to mine again. His kisses were harder now and more urgent than ever before. He was shifting on top of me and I could feel he was hard, could feel it pressing against my leg. I slid my hands between us and started tugging on his belt.
He pulled away. “What are you doing?”
I yanked the belt out through the buckle and started unfastening his jeans. “Guess.”
“Stop.”
My hands stilled instantly. “What’s wrong?” I said.
“Nothing.” It was too dark to read his eyes, so I couldn’t tell if he was smiling or not. “But I’m not getting naked on a rusty pool chair.” And he started kissing my neck again.
Rusty or no, I was running out of time. “Come on,” I coaxed, in the most coquettish tone I could muster. “I really want to.”
He raised his head and stared at me until I looked away. And then he said it.
“You’re a virgin, aren’t you?”
I squeezed my eyes shut, and all the heat escaped my body.
“Astrid. Look at me.”
I opened my eyes, and he was still staring at me, but I could read his expression just fine now. Pity.
“Yes.” I could have lied, but I doubted he’d believe it anyway. He could probably smell it on me, like a unicorn could.
“I see.” I felt his weight shift, and then he was sitting beside me. I wanted to curl up in a ball. “Don’t take this the wrong way—”
Oh, God. It was “no offense” all over again!
“But I don’t want to sleep with you.”
I shot up. “Why not?!” All the boys in Rome, and I had to pick the one who didn’t want to have sex? “Because I’m a virgin?”
“Yes. No. A little of both.”
“And you don’t want the responsibility?” I hissed. “I don’t care, I promise. I’m not expecting anything from you if we do it.”
He blinked at me. “That’s…disappointing.”
“Why?” My eyes were burning, and I hoped he hadn’t noticed. “Isn’t that the dream come true? A girl who will sleep with you and then never see you again?”
“No,” he said. “I like you, Astrid.”
“Then why won’t you?” I tried in vain to keep the hitch out of my voice.
He curved his arms around me and held me close. “Well, I make it a point never to have sex with crying women, for one.”
“Stop it!” I shoved out of his embrace. “Don’t condescend to me on top of everything.”
“Fine,” he said, a note of anger finally entering his voice. “Don’t treat me like a piece of meat. ‘Sleep with me and then never see me again.’ What the hell is that?”
My only chance, is what. “I didn’t mean to put it like that,” I said. Maybe I could fix this. “I really like you, too. I want to sleep with you.”
“You just met me. I’m having a great time, but—”
“But what?” I said. “Since I’m a virgin it has to be some big deal? I’m so sick of guys saying that!” Actually, none had said it to me, but I’d heard enough from Dorcas and Phil to know the score.
“So you try to seduce a lot of guys and fail?” Giovanni’s tone was cruel.
I stood up and walked toward the pool. I had been crying, I realized, as the evening air cooled the tears on my face.
I felt him behind me before he spoke. “Astrid,” he said. “Please. I don’t want to ruin anything.”
I did. I wanted him to ruin me. Ruin me for hunting forever.
“But I don’t feel comfortable. Not just because you’re a virgin, but because we don’t know each other all that well. Don’t you want to wait a bit and see where this goes?”
“No,” I snapped. “If we wait, it’ll go nowhere at all.” How many times would I be able to sneak out again before Giovanni went home to Brooklyn and I was stuck being a hunter for good?
“That’s not true. Come on.” He tried to put his hand on my waist, but I shook him off.
“The girls you sleep with,” I said. “Do you love them all?”
“There was only one,” he said. “And, yes, I did love her.” I felt a rush of hate and jealousy for this unknown girl Giovanni had loved and lost his virginity to. I was jealous of Giovanni, too, for not being a virgin, for not being a woman, for not being a descendant of Alexander the Great. For not having this weighing on him at all.
“Forget it,” I said, and started walking back to the road. Maybe I could still catch a bus back to the Colosseum in time to get home by ten. And maybe tomorrow I’d wake up in my bed back home and unicorns would still be imaginary.
He grabbed my arm. “Forget it? Forget me? Hey, don’t run off like that—we aren’t done!”
I whirled on him. “We’re done,” I said, “because I’m going into that convent of mine and I’m not coming out. You were my only chance.”
“That’s not true,” he said. “You have a choice. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”
“You have no idea what I’m dealing with.”
“Really,” he said. “Well, I certainly know what it’s like to feel pressured, don’t I? It sucks, to be honest.” He cocked his head back at the lounge. “Fine. If it makes you happy, let’s go back to that chair and I’ll have sex with you.”
I jerked out of his grip. “No.”
“See? You don’t want to.” His voice grew soft. “Astrid, you don’t.”
And then I was in his arms, and my face was pressed against his chest, and there was nothing sexual about it. It was just the two of us in the dark courtyard, wrapped around each other so tightly I could hardly even feel the breeze.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Maybe when—”
“It’s okay.” I kissed him before he could finish that thought. I didn’t want a rule, or a guideline, or a timetable. I didn’t want anything to make me forget that the guy in my arms wasn’t Actaeon at all. He was Giovanni Cole.
He rode the bus back into the city with me. We were mostly silent, but Giovanni held my hand and rubbed his thumb against my knuckles the whole way home.
He walked me to the Cloisters entrance and pointed at a spot on the cobblestones. “There,” he said. “That’s where I thought I saw the unicorn.”
I nodded. “Well, there are no unicorns out tonight.” It was true. I could tell.
I could still tell.
We kissed again, and then he left, and I entered the courtyard alone. It was well after ten. I hoped that Phil hadn’t gotten in trouble for coming home without me.
A low, oblique light shone from the stair into the rotunda, illuminating Clothilde and Bucephalus, as well as the three smaller figures seated at the base of the tableau. Cory and Phil sat with Bonegrinder between them, their hands firmly clenched around her collar.
“Am I in trouble?” I said.
“Hush,” Cory replied. “Don’t wake Neil.”
Phil stood and Bonegrinder trotted along beside her. When they came close, the zhi turned to me and sniffed. Her tail wagged, and she swept into a bow.
“Thank heavens,” said Phil. “I was so worried.”
13
WHEREIN ASTRID DRAWS A BOW AND A CONCLUSION
PHIL AND LINO WERE arguing. Again.
It’s not that I minded these almost daily debates about environmental issues and animal rights. I just preferred that they didn’t happen at dawn while I was shackled to a tree stand twenty feet off the ground.
It had been two weeks since I’d utterly failed to seduce Giovanni. We’d never talked about that night again, but every time he touched me, or even looked at me for a second too long, all I could think of was how I’d offered him my body and he’d turned me down.
Not that I’d seen him much. My days had been filled with lessons in bow stringing, arrow cutting, and hours
of archery practice that left my back, chest, and shoulders in so much agony that I wanted nothing more than to sink into oblivion in my bed every night.
Those were the days. Four nights in a tree stand had made me nostalgic for even the Cloisters.
Below me, Valerija was sitting cross-legged on the ground with her back against the trunk. Her eyes were closed, but she wasn’t sleeping. Twin white wires ran from her ears into the pocket of her jacket, the only detail that stood out from her dark hair and clothing. I couldn’t believe she was listening to music while on the hunt!
I looked up and met Cory’s eyes. Another stringer, she was also cooling her heels in a nearby tree. The theory, as far as I could tell, was that Valerija was supposed to be the decoy, our traditional virgin bait that would lure the unicorns in. Apparently, this was a common role for a member of the Vasilunas family. Because she had experience in on-the-ground knife fights but had sucked at every archery trial, Valerija was given blade duty while the rest of us were sent up into the trees so we could launch a surprise attack on the unicorns when they showed.
If they showed.
But I’d been here for five hours and I hadn’t sensed them once.
This, it seemed, formed the bulk of the current debate.
“You be quiet,” Lino said, “or they won’t come.”
“Talking or not,” Phil snapped back, “they know we’re here. That’s the whole point. That’s not some sow unicorn in heat down there”—Phil was, perhaps, lucky that Valerija had headphones on—“it’s a hunter. If they’re drawn to us like the legends say, a little talking isn’t going to make a difference.”
Poor Lino. He’d had his hands full dealing with us. Problem was, everything he knew about bowhunting—which was quite a lot—paled in the face of the magic. I’d listened to his lessons on scent marking and stalking and tree standing and string jumping and ten thousand other things that were important to the average game hunter. But most of the rules didn’t apply when it came to trapping and killing unicorns. Lino spent half an hour one day explaining to us how to shoot, wait, then follow a blood trail to our carcass before he understood how useless such advice would be to unicorn hunters. You couldn’t wait for a wounded unicorn to die. First of all, most unicorns would charge, not flee, before you could get in a second shot. Additionally, if the arrow passed through the animal, or was torn out, the wound would heal. That meant that once you drew blood, you needed to press your advantage and take the monster down.
Thus, backups in the trees. And thus, the rather large knife strapped to Valerija’s thigh. Lino was also in a tree, safely away from horns’ reach, to offer coaching, moral support, and an extra pair of eyes. Cory insisted that the last bit wasn’t needed. That if a unicorn came into range, we hunters would be able to sense it long before Lino could see it, night-vision binoculars or no. It was true. Nowadays, I knew Bonegrinder was at the door before she even started head-butting it.
Still, I found it refreshing to work with someone who talked in scientific terms: the ratio of draw poundage to kinetic energy and how it affected arrow velocity; where to aim to do the quickest and most damage (behind the animal’s shoulder, where the arrow would be more likely to pierce both lungs and heart); and why the chances of a nonfatal shot increased unless the animal was broadside to the bow instead of facing us or quartering away. For all that Marten Jaeger ran a pharmaceutical company, he seemed just as fascinated with the magical potential of unicorns and the hunters as the Bartolis did. Though he had given me some papers about the tests they were running at Gordian, it was obvious that unless I had a bow in my hands, he wasn’t interested.
I heard night creatures skittering in the branches above me and shuddered. Tonight, we were stationed in a grove that bordered a farm. The farmers were friends of Lino and in the past month, they’d lost a bunch of sheep, a horse, and three herding dogs. Though there were known to be wolves in the area, the remains showed distinct signs of alicorn poisoning. Lino wanted us to do our first official hunt before the monsters got their horns through a rancher. He tapped Phil, Cory, Valerija, Ilesha, Grace, and me based on our experience and performances during archery training. His pride had been wounded by his inability to catch one of the animals himself. To judge from his behavior the last few days, it was bag-this-unicornor-bust time.
We were nearing our fourth day in Tuscany—my fourth night spent in a tree—and the wonder of the Italian countryside was beginning to wear thin. Phil was frustrated by the lack of phone reception and the fact that a week spent without sneaking out to see Seth was a week that he could be finding new companionship. Phil was a big believer in the “out of sight, out of mind” philosophy when it came to boys.
But Giovanni was never very far from my mind. I remembered every kiss, every conversation…and every humiliation. Phil had correctly assumed the worst when Giovanni and I had broken off from her and Seth after the museum trip, but she seemed to think that he was trying to take advantage of me. She’d kept a careful eye on the two of us ever since, and I was too embarrassed to explain that her attempts at playing chaperone were unnecessary. I have no idea what she’d told Cory to keep her from tattling to Neil about our extracurricular activities, but the two of them had almost become friends after that night.
At least Cory had stopped making snide remarks about my cousin in my presence.
Part of the change may have been due to the fact that the newcomers to the Cloisters proved far more aggravating to my roommate than Phil ever had. Cory’s boasting rights had centered on her two zhi kills and her vast store of unicorn hunting lore. But Valerija’s splashy kirin decapitation had quickly usurped Cory’s spot as a hunter of note, and Melissende’s arrival had introduced an entirely new perspective on the history of the Order of the Lioness.
It was a perspective, I must admit, that scared the daylights out of me. Melissende’s Cloisters histories sounded more like the Inquisition. I understood now what Cory meant when she described the Temerins as bloodthirsty and sadistic. Wasn’t it enough that I spent half my days listening to Lino describe the best way to garrote a carnivorous bovid? Did I really have to relax in the evening to arguments between Cory and Melissende about which Cloisters don or donna had best protected the virtue of his or her charges—regardless of whether or not said charges survived the protection?
Still, at least I had a soft bed back in Rome. Here I had little more than a square meter of sitting space and the spiderwebby tree trunk to lean on.
The arguments continued.
“Signorina,” Lino said wearily, “this is to be talked about with Signors Bartoli and Jaeger, yes? I do not choose.”
“No, no, Lino,” Phil said. “I understand that. But we’re here now. With you. So you could say that we are currently under your direction. Neil doesn’t have the same knowledge of animal husbandry as you do. And Mr. Jaeger has his own…agenda.”
“Signorina, if there is anything I learn after these weeks it is I do not know many things about liocornos.”
“But they are endangered. Yes, I don’t think they should be eating these poor guys’ livestock. But killing an endangered species? Shouldn’t that be illegal? Why can’t we work on trapping them and relocating them to a more wilderness-oriented environment? That’s what they do with endangered animals back in the States.”
“As far as I know,” Cory muttered, “there’s no official ruling on whether or not unicorns are endangered. They are not protected under the law of any nation or any international treaty.” I’m sure Cory liked it that way.
“That’s a problem!” Phil exclaimed. From the corner of my eye, I saw Valerija look up at them, shake her head, then stick her hand in the pocket of her jacket, no doubt dialing up her volume control. “We should be educating the public about these creatures. We should be fighting to get these laws on the books.”
“We’re supposedly the only ones who can kill them,” I said. “If that’s true, then I’d say with our current track record, they have no fear of
being wiped out again.”
“All I’m saying—” Phil began.
“All she’s been saying for hours,” Cory grumbled.
“Is that we’ve spent ages training to hunt and kill, but no time at all studying the behavior of these creatures, trying to understand why they’ve Reemerged now; where the population is coming from and how it is breeding; and how it might be feasible, in this day and age, to capture them, reintroduce them into wilderness areas where they will be no threat to humans, do whatever we can other than kill them.”
It’s not that I didn’t agree with Phil’s points. I did. But she’d been arguing them for weeks now, and nothing had changed. No one seemed to have any information on unicorn behavior, other than the ever-increasing stream of stories we’d found outlining attacks on livestock and occasionally people. Cory’s books had a scant few mentions of how zhis lived in family groups, kirins hunted in herds, and karkadanns were solitary creatures; but other than that, we knew nothing about the life cycle of any unicorn. How long was the life span of each species? How long was gestation? Apparently, there was no hunter family whose specialty was zoology. Stupid nineteenth century. Hadn’t they ever heard of Darwin?
So for all Phil’s posturing and debating, we were still tasked with killing the unicorns, not subduing them until such time that they could be relocated to the Black Forest or the Kenyan savannah or the farthest reaches of Tibet. That we remained in line with a centuries-old policy that had previously resulted in what we thought of as the extinction of these animals did not seem to bother the good people of Gordian, and the Bartolis tended to do as instructed by either the history books or Marten Jaeger.
What Phil didn’t seem to understand, despite strong hints from both Neil and now Lino, was that the person paying the bills called the shots. Right now, that was Marten and Gordian. They wanted specimens, and we weren’t going to be allowed to go home until we’d handed them a unicorn. I comprehended that much. If I was forced to go to Rome to train to be a hunter, why couldn’t I also be forced to actually kill unicorns in Tuscany? It was all part of the same gig. Phil, who had chosen to come here of her own free will, didn’t see it that way. She wanted to influence policy.
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