Ascendant

by Diana Peterfreund

  “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.”

  The
n, 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.

  He called a few times, but I wouldn’t talk to him or return his messages, and I dared Phil to act disappointed. Luckily, she decided she had bigger fish to fry when it came to the matter of rebuilding my head.

  After Giovanni had gone, life at the Cloisters became more unbearable than ever. I always felt on the outside looking in. Looking in on the hunts, on the classes, on Phil’s ever-accelerating activities, on her secret conversations with Neil. I was even jealous of the bond between Wen and Flayer, of the one between Flayer and Bonegrinder.

  The mist in my mind dissipated more every day, but I was the only one who seemed to notice or believe it. It was as if Phil had encouraged me to a certain level of competence but refused to believe that I could go any further. After sending Giovanni away, I never got another offer of an outing. I’d even asked Father Guillermo if he’d take me for gelato and he’d mumbled something about running it by Phil first. I still wasn’t allowed to hunt. Phil no longer gave me her drafts to decipher.

  And every time I complained, she just said I was experiencing mood swings and the neurologist had warned her that I’d get frustrated when my recovery hit a plateau.

  I was not on a plateau, except in terms of my being allowed out of this prison. Besides, if she wanted to see how I handled myself away from unicorn magic, she ought to let me leave the Cloisters altogether. The entire building was a crutch, with its walls of singing bones.

  Was it any wonder that Lilith thought it was the perfect location for my television debut?

  22

  WHEREIN ASTRID MAKES HER DEBUT

  Lilith arrived at the Cloisters with a truck full of cameramen, journalists, and wardrobe specialists. “She looks much better than last time,” was the first thing my mother said when she saw me.

  “She’s happy to see you, too,” I responded.

  “Ah.” Lilith clapped her hands together. “I see the brain damage hasn’t affected your smart mouth. Excellent.”

  Lilith had come when I’d been in a coma. I knew this because she’d told me on the phone every time I’d spoken to her since the accident. I got proof when she and her agent showed me the footage they’d filmed of her sitting by my bedside and stroking my poor, limp hand.

  My mother was right. I looked way better now.

  They took over the Cloisters, rearranging the courtyard so it looked prettier and “more classical”—their words. As far as we could tell, it involved removing our targets and dragging several large bits of broken columns into their favorite corner.

  “Great,” Cory said, watching as they erected the “set.” “I’ve spent the better part of a year trying to make this place not look like a ruin and they’re strewing masonry all around the garden.”

  “There, there,” said Valerija, placing a hand on her shoulder. She turned to Phil. “The money is worth it, definitely?”

  Phil frowned. “It had better be. No one told me we would lose our practice space.”

  Then came the fittings. I was shoved back into a hunting habit and fitted with a long blond wig.

  “The point of the headscarf is to cover the hair,” Phil drawled from the door. She gave me a sympathetic shake of her head.

  “Eh,” said Lilith with a shrug. “This will look better on TV.”

  “This is a bad idea, Aunt Lilith. I don’t think Astrid is in any position to speak on television.”

  “She doesn’t have to talk. This is my visit to my old stomping grounds, my emergency trip to sit with my poor, injured, unicorn-hunting daughter.” The staff clucked their tongues. I’d already learned that this was an automatic response, done in unison. My mother’s very own Greek chorus.

  Phil rolled her eyes. I would have, too, but the makeup person was jabbing at me with eyeliner. Some emergency. It had taken my mother almost three months to come back.

  “These eyes are going to look kind of off-putting on video,” she said to one of the producers. “Maybe contacts?”

  “If the point is that I’m injured,” I said, “wouldn’t it be better if I was in bed, maybe in my pajamas?”

  Lilith considered this. “No, I don’t think that sells hunter, visually. Besides, we already have bed footage. Trust these people on this, Astrid; they’re experts.”

  Neil joined us at the door to watch the commotion. “This is disgraceful.”

  Phil looked relieved that he’d come out and said it. Donna or no donna, Lilith was still Phil’s aunt.

  Lilith turned to him. “Well, we can always leave, if you don’t think you want our money. But if we do, I’ll also make sure your little campaign isn’t mentioned in the piece. I’m sure eight point five million viewers don’t need to learn about the plight of endangered unicorns, don’t need to see any other side to the story other than the one where they are monsters killing innocent people.”

  Neil shook his head dismissively. “And presenting the tragic story of an injured hunter is going to somehow convince the world at large to show the animals mercy?”

  Lilith shrugged and turned back to me. “That’s your problem, not mine. I think she needs more blush. Astrid, you’re so pale.”

  “Sorry, Mom,” I muttered, shooting a pointed glance at Phil. “I don’t get out much.”

  Phil stuck her tongue out at me. I giggled.

  Downstairs in the courtyard, two cameramen were trying to bait Bonegrinder and Flayer into a fight. Wen and Ilesha stood guard, arms crossed over their chests, vehemently not amused.

  “They’re just lying there,” said one of the cameramen. “Can’t you get them to
wrestle or something?”

  “Yeah,” said another. “There’s so little footage of killer unicorns close up. This is an amazing opportunity, and these guys look like kittens.”

  Ilesha gaped at them.

  Grace stepped in. “Are you all mad? Do you know the lengths to which we’ve gone to make sure these creatures aren’t ripping your throats out right now?”

  As if to punctuate the statement, something caught Bone-grinder’s interest and she began to growl.

  “No!” Grace said sharply, and the unicorn settled down. “The day I came here,” she said, “this zhi almost killed my mother and my little sister. We’ve spent months bringing her to a point where she is calm in the presence of people, with great personal risk to every nonhunter who has entered these walls.”

  The cameramen stepped back, more subdued. Then one said, “Did you get any footage of that attack on your family?”

  Luckily, Grace was unarmed. As it was, Ilesha had to tackle Bonegrinder, who’d gotten a bit excited by Grace’s sudden rage.

  When Phil got word of the incident, she removed the zhi from public viewing. “This isn’t some underground betting ring,” she explained when the producers complained. Lilith had apparently granted them total Cloisters access. “We’re trying to train the pet zhi and make sure they are no danger to the public. But you must remember, they are wild animals.”

  “I resent that,” said Wen. “Flayer is a bottle-fed sweetheart.”

  “But can you make it growl on command?” the cameraman asked.

  The hunters voted to sic a zhi on them. Phil overruled us all.

  I was told that the so-called plot of the piece would revolve around Lilith’s life on the home front—what it was like to advocate for unicorn hunters while her daughter was overseas risking her neck by slaying unicorns.

  “Slaying?” I said blankly. “That makes me sound like some kind of butcher.”

  Lilith trotted out a phrase I knew quite well by this time. “It plays better. Trust the experts.”

  “It’s just really violent,” Phil pointed out. “We’re trying to get to a point where our hunts are targeted eliminations of specific problem unicorns—”