I rinsed my face off in the fountain, then drank a few mouthfuls from the spring water spigot nearby. Thank God for Rome’s ancient public works. I hesitated for a moment, then plunged my whole head under the faucet, letting the frigid water wake me up and cool my burning skin. My face and neck were sensitive to the touch, the skin on my arms and hands dry and flaky.
A glance back at the bench had me on my feet again in a flash. Bonegrinder was gone! But not far; I found her a few trees away, sniffing the ground, possibly tracking a squirrel. How would I get her home through the streets of Rome without having her attack someone? Especially if she was hungry.
I gathered up the alicorn from where it had rolled under the bench and raided a nearby trash can for supplies. Plastic shopping bags, a bit of shredding twine—Bonegrinder had escaped from steel cages and catacombs. How would any of this hold her?
I heard a chorus of squeaks from the trees. Great. She’d caught breakfast at least. Now, if only I could get her out of here before we ran into any joggers or maintenance men.
Bingo: a bicycle chain. I gathered up my findings and whistled to the zhi. She trotted over, bits of brown tail fluff still sticking to her fangs. I knelt down and began knotting the plastic bags together into thick ropes. Of course, Bonegrinder could gnaw through steel locks, but maybe that was only if she got her teeth around it. I remember reading once that an alligator can snap its jaws closed with great force, but that you can hold the jaws closed relatively easily, I wondered if that would work for zhi.
I looped the bicycle chain around her snout, and she flinched as the links pinched her skin. Suddenly, I got a flash—a copper bit and muzzle, crusted with dried blood. An image from last night. An image from my nightmare. Bonegrinder looked up at me, her eyes more blue and limpid than ever, and I slid the chain off her face. Maybe the plastic would be a bit gentler. She balked when I tried to slip the carefully knotted loops of plastic around her head, but eventually I got the whole contraption cinched up tight. Her jaws were secured by a rope of plastic bags, which led back to the bandanna around her neck. I used the bicycle chain as a leash, with a secondary restraint made of bags tied around my own waist, and my free hand firmly gripping her horn. I’m sure we looked ridiculous, but since I was about to walk a unicorn through the streets of Rome, whether or not our trashy accessories would be noted as a fashion disaster was at the bottom of my list of things to worry about.
“Now be good,” I warned Bonegrinder. She strained against my hand, trying in vain to free herself from my grip. This was going to suck. We walked, awkwardly, toward the gates of the park, and I began to realize how very impossible a task this would be. I couldn’t leave her here, and I couldn’t contact anyone at the Cloisters to come get us unless I started begging for spare change on the street corners so I could use a pay phone.
Bonegrinder stiffened, and her fur bristled. Oh no. I tightened my grip on both leash and horn as she began to growl. Was it a jogger? A janitorial crew? A pastry cart?
And then she took off, and I began to sprint to keep hold of her. We flew down the street, and in the midst of my weird, hunter time warp, I saw the solution. We’d run.
And I’d steer.
Miraculously, we reached the door of the Cloisters without mishap, and in record time, too. I wasn’t even out of breath, though I hadn’t been able to run half that distance the previous evening, and that was before my lungs had been ravaged by—
No. I’d decided that was a dream. Or at the very least, I’d decided I wasn’t going to think about it until I’d gotten Bonegrinder safely back to the Cloisters. Which I had, so maybe now it was time to examine my memories of last night a little more closely.
They called me Bucephalus.
Yeah, that had to have been a dream.
Inside the rotunda, the re’em had begun to grow a tad ripe. Even Bonegrinder crinkled up her nose at the stench. We walked past the tableau, and I shuddered, expecting any second for the karkadann on the dais to move, to breathe, as the one in the park had. Terrifying as the stuffed version was, nothing could compare to the real thing.
I mean, the one in my dream.
Now, where to put Bonegrinder that would be safe and secure? How often had she been escaping from the Cloisters to go romping through the streets of Rome? We hadn’t been keeping that close an eye on her, and she usually slept with Phil.
Never again. My chest began to ache.
But last night, she’d remained safe in my lap the entire time I’d been unconscious. Perhaps the solution would be to keep her close until we could find a more permanent place to put her. A more permanent place to put Phil.
I wondered how my cousin was doing, but after last night, I didn’t know if I could face her. I cast a glance at the staircase to the dormitory floor. If she was upstairs, asleep, I couldn’t risk bringing Bonegrinder past her door on the way to my room. The zhi might go ballistic again.
So instead I went down to the chapter house. Today, the vibrations from the wall didn’t seem as grating. Maybe I’d grown used to them, or, more likely, in light of everything else that I’d been dealing with in the past few days, the buzzing was nothing more than a slight annoyance. It was almost soothing, in fact, like a white noise machine.
There was a collar and chain sunk into the masonry in the wall, and I secured Bonegrinder, then let her join me on the couch. I threw a hand over my face, curled my body around the zhi, and let my eyes drift shut once more.
It may have been only minutes later when I heard a soft voice in my ear.
“Asteroid.”
I jolted awake. “No, Phil! Bonegr-scmunnnnf.” She pressed me to her chest.
“Honey, why do you smell like garbage?” She pulled away, her nose wrinkled.
“Long story.” Bonegrinder was near the wall, eyeing Phil warily. I looked back at my cousin, and she waved her hand at me. Neil’s ring glinted from one of her fingers.
“I’ll be fine with this on,” Phil said. “He thought I should have it. Thought I should have a lot of things, really. Like a physical at the hospital and a nice chat with the police and the American consulate.” She sighed and looked down at her hands.
“Oh, God, Phil, I’m so sorry.”
“Me, too.”
My sore lungs felt like they were being crushed anew. “This is all my fault. Are you hurt? Are you going to be—”
“Whoa. All your fault? Say that again and I’ll slap your face.” She stood now and wandered away.
“But if I hadn’t let you go out alone…” I began from my position on the couch.
“I’m out alone plenty. And when I’m out with you I still manage to get in private time with my dates. You had nothing to do with this.” She trailed a tentative finger along the armrest of the alicorn throne. “Huh. Watch this.” She plopped down in it. “Comfy.”
I was momentarily stunned into silence.
“I feel like a queen,” Phil said, lifting her chin. I said nothing, and after another moment, she slumped. “Please, Astrid. Don’t you be weird, too.”
Don’t be weird meaning don’t talk about what happened? Don’t be weird meaning don’t run around Rome, then roll around in garbage, then go to sleep in the one spot I’ve been trying to avoid up until last night? Don’t be weird meaning don’t have long, involved conversations with imaginary, thousands-of-years-old monsters?
Too late, Phil.
“I’m really sorry for throwing you out of my room last night,” she said at last. “I wished you were there so many times. Just to hold my hand. Anything. Neil is nice, but it’s not the…same.”
“Phil.” I rushed toward her, then stopped just in time. My thigh brushed against the throne, sending shockwaves of pain rippling up and down my leg.
“Watch it,” she said flatly. “You’re still a live wire.”
“Now I’m going to slap you.” I sat on the floor. “Talk to me. Tell me what happened.”
“I had sex with Seth.”
“He forced you.”<
br />
She looked away. “This is as bad as the police.”
I touched her knee. “I want to understand.”
She was silent for a long time. “Me, too, Astrid. Me, too. I want to understand why I didn’t stop him. It was all so quick, I don’t even know. One second, we were fooling around, and the next…he was…inside.”
I clenched my jaw and my fists. “Did he hurt you?”
She shook her head miserably. “Physically, but nothing compared to how much we’ve been smacked around while hunting. As soon as I felt him, I tried to push him away, but…”
“But what?” I asked.
Phil practically hissed and flew up from the chair, sweeping past me and over to the other side of the room. I rose, too. Perhaps I shouldn’t be pushing her.
“This is the problem!” she said. “You all keep saying stuff like ‘rape’ and ‘force’ and ‘hurt’ and ‘fight,’ and it makes me wonder…if I didn’t fight, maybe it wasn’t force. If he didn’t hold me down, if he didn’t smack me around…”
“No, Phil—they’re just—the words I know. I don’t think—”
She faced the wall of weapons. “Like maybe it was all some horrible mistake. Like he didn’t mean to. Because I really liked him. And he liked me. So I don’t…think he wanted to hurt me.” She leaned her hands, palms flat against the wall, but I knew she felt no vibrations from the weaponry, no humming from the bones. “I pushed him and said stop, but it was…over. He was done. That was it.”
I swallowed past the lump in my throat. It was nothing like I had been imagining last night in the grip of my murderous rage.
She took her hands from the wall and stared at them. “But that was enough. For whoever decides these things. Alexander. Or Diana. Or Bonegrinder. Who knows?”
I stared at her, incapable of putting my thoughts into words, terrified that speaking at all would clam her up for good. If it hadn’t been for the hunting, for the eligibility, for the trial by zhi, would she have told us at all?
“So what do you think of that?” she asked abruptly, and turned to look at me. “I like him. I still really like him. What do you think of that?” Her tone was a dare.
“What does it matter what I think?” I asked. “The only thing I care about is you. What you think. What you feel. I’m glad you aren’t hurt—”
“I am hurt,” she snapped. “Incredibly hurt. Just not the way…people think I should be. No bruises. No blood.”
I bit my lip.
“Because here’s the part you’re gonna love,” she said after a minute. “I didn’t want to. You know that. I wanted to stay here, with you, with Neil, with the others. So of course I wasn’t going to have sex. And he knew it, too, because we talked about it. The other night, at the concert, he wanted to, kept asking, over and over, and I kept saying no. And he backed off. That’s what you do, right? You make a choice, together. And until you both make it clear you’ve changed your mind about having sex, the matter is closed.”
I nodded. I’d taken the same classes in school as Phil.
“So as much as I’d like to think he just made a mistake last night, wasn’t thinking in the heat of the moment, hadn’t realized that I didn’t change my mind…” She took a deep breath. “I know the truth. He didn’t make a mistake. He planned it. Because when he pulled out…” She grimaced. “He was wearing a condom, Astrid. Had been wearing one the whole time, I guess, because I sure as hell didn’t notice him putting it on!”
She laughed now, but there was no humor in it at all. I could only imagine the response she must have gotten at the hospital, at the police station. Safe sex rape? Right.
“And that’s when I got really mad. Would you believe it? When I saw that. Before that, I’d been angry at myself, sad, scared…. But now I was furious at him. Not happy that I wasn’t going to get pregnant, that I was protected—all that. Because it meant he knew exactly where it was all headed. No matter what I’d said, no matter that I’d told him I didn’t want to sleep with him. He knew what he was going to do. And I’d been thinking such generous thoughts—like he was all out of control or something, and it just happened. What kind of crap is that? And maybe, because I was thinking that when he was doing it, maybe that’s why I didn’t fight? Maybe I could have stopped him?”
“No,” I said. “Don’t think that.”
“What’s the alternative? That I’ve been seeing this horrible, violent guy for all this time? That I’ve been dating a monster?”
“What did you do?” I whispered from my place across the room.
“Hit him.” Her mouth became a thin line, as straight as her spine. “Wish there’d been a unicorn nearby, I could have really whaled on him. Or not, I guess. At that point.”
“What did he do?”
“Called me a bitch and walked away.” She shook her head. “Like he was done. Like he had what he wanted.” Her voice caught. “And you know, that’s the one thing I never wanted. This whole time, I wasn’t waiting for something in particular. Just someone who wanted me. Not sex. But me.”
My feet propelled me toward my cousin, my arms enfolded her. And she wasn’t so much bigger at all. She smelled sweet, like a dozen bars of soap, and her eyes were as red as mine, and she buried her face in my shoulder and her body shuddered against my chest, like she couldn’t breathe at all.
“So tell me, Astrid. Do you call that rape?”
I squeezed her tighter. Did I? Hell yeah. Would the police? Would the courts in Italy? Would Seth? But then I realized I didn’t care what anyone else called it. Phil hadn’t made the choice—and Seth knew it. He knew it, and so he took her choice away from her.
It was rape. It was horrible.
And on top of all that, I’d lost her. Who made these rules? Who decided what virginity was? Had it been Diana? Stupid ancient goddesses and their warped, patriarchal ideals. Nothing about Phil had changed. She was the same as ever. It wasn’t fair.
“Tell me,” she mumbled into my shirt. “Tell me what to do now. Tell me how to stop thinking he’s an okay guy anyway. Tell me that Neil is right, and he’s the worst bastard ever born. Tell me what I do when Neil gets back from Gordian and there’s only one ring. Tell me how I’m going to sit here and watch you play with Bonegrinder, watch you shoot bull’s-eye after bull’s-eye. Tell me how I’m going to handle going home and never feeling that power again.”
More shuddering, and then we stood there and wept together, arms wrapped so tightly around each other that I thought for a moment that we were the same person, that any second, my power would flow into her and we’d both be whole.
But all the magic in the world, all the magic in that room, wouldn’t make things work that way.
Eventually, she pulled away and wiped her hands against her tear-streaked face. “Sorry,” she said. “But you really do kind of stink.”
I gave her a weak smile. “It was necessary, trust me. Bonegrinder got loose last night, and I had to raid a trash bin to tie her up and get her home safe.”
“You went out alone?” Phil’s brows furrowed.
I bit my lip. “Yeah. I…it’s a long story.”
“Did you see anything?”
Yes. I saw a karkadann. He poisoned me from afar, to within an inch of my life. And then he left me unconscious on the park bench. Oh, and I think we might have had a conversation. Me and the unicorn.
“No,” I said. Phil had more than enough to deal with.
We headed upstairs together. Apparently, while I’d been asleep, Lucia had arranged to have the re’em moved from the rotunda to the catacombs until the people from Gordian came to retrieve the body. The only sign it had ever been in the rotunda at all was a few smears of blood on the mosaic floor.
I took a shower that was all too short, and had just finished combing my hair and changing into a fresh set of clothes when Phil came bursting into my bedroom, holding her cell phone and shaking from head to foot.
“It’s him,” she said. The readout on the phone’s display sho
wed a half dozen missed calls. “All while I was downstairs talking to you. What do I do? What if he comes here?”
I took the phone from her and clicked it off. “You’re not to speak to him. Nobody here will let him in. We’ll call the police and it will be fine.”
And for a while, I thought it could be. Phil sat down and started braiding my hair in that cool, backward French braid she knew, and we talked about the time she set up a volleyball court in the backyard and ruined her parents’ new sod. That went on for about fifteen minutes. Then there was a knock at the door.
Grace came in. “Excuse me, Phil? There’s a boy downstairs in the outer court who wants to see you. He says it’s extremely important. Neil’s still out. What do you want to do?”
Phil’s hands froze on my head. I grabbed the elastic band off the coverlet, wrapped it around the base of the braid, and stood up. I may not be armed with an alicorn, but I could still take that jerk if necessary. How dare he come here?
“You stay,” I said. “I’ll handle it.”
Back down the stairs I went and through the rotunda, where a whole knot of hunters had gathered, waiting. “Is he outside?” Ilesha asked as I marched past.
“Not for long,” I growled.
I pulled open the bronze doors and stopped dead. There, on the threshold, stood Giovanni.
“Astrid,” he said. “You have to help me.”
I started to close the door.
“Wait!” He shoved against the bas-relief. “Please. It’s Seth. He’s missing. Left his cell phone, everything behind. I’ve been calling Phil on it all day, and she’s not answering either. I need to find him.”
“And why is that?” I asked with a sneer.
“Because the police are looking for him.”
Go figure. “Maybe he did something wrong.” I went back to trying to push the door closed.
Giovanni shook his head and wedged his foot against the base. “Please. He’s in trouble! Do you have any idea what that’s like?”
I froze for a moment. Giovanni certainly had. But this wasn’t the same. Not nearly.
Giovanni stopped pushing against the door, taking my hesitation for acceptance. “Do you know when Phil last saw him?”
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