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.

Purplish, predawn light had started to filter through the tree branches. Another night wasted. Mist lay heavy on the field beyond the grove, glimmering in a soft, silvery lavender, punctuated here and there by the larger, lumpy shapes of sleeping sheep.

Even the livestock had better living arrangements. Below me, Valerija’s head was nodding forward. Cory’s bow rested across her knees. Phil had scooted until she faced away from Lino, and had her arms crossed and her chin held high. Ilesha was picking at her split ends. Grace was meditating in full lotus.

At once, we all snapped to attention. A unicorn.

“What?” Lino hissed. He looked through his binoculars, but it was too light now for the night vision setting to work well.

Phil motioned him to silence with her hand. The creature wasn’t visible yet, but we could all feel it. I realized now that I had probably felt the zhi that night when I was babysitting, too—I just hadn’t known what the sensation meant at the time. My senses aflame, I forced my limbs to stay still, forced myself to keep from leaping off my perch and stalking the animal down. Phil could argue against the morality of the hunt until her voice was hoarse, but this fire didn’t burn only in my veins. The treetops shivered as their occupants narrowed their focus on the presence in the woods beyond.

Minutes passed. If we could all feel it, could it feel us? Could it feel how many of us there were? Would that spook the unicorn or draw it in?

With aching slowness, I crept into a crouch and lifted my bow. The unicorn was coming from the north, from behind the trees where Phil, Lino, and Grace sat. It was still too dark to see much farther than the next tree over. I strained to peer through the branches. Even if it was closer to them, they wouldn’t get a good shot from their side. Then again, the angle would be bad for me as well. The unicorn would approach me from below. Its head and neck might block a clean shot into its torso.

The sensation was stronger than ever now, but I still saw nothing, not even the telltale shifting of shadow that had tipped me off to the presence of a kirin that first night with Giovanni. As my companions silently scanned the forest floor, I closed my eyes and listened. Last time, I could hear it breathe. Last time, I could smell it. If it was a kirin, in the dappled forest night, we’d never be able to see it. Perhaps it had already passed.

And as soon as I thought it, I knew it was true. It had passed. It was probably even now in the pasture, picking out its prey. I unhooked my harness from the trunk restraint and half-climbed, half dropped to the ground.

Valerija, earphones still in place, jumped as I landed in the moss at her side.

“It’s in the field,” I whispered in a voice little more than a breath. It had ignored the hunters entirely in search of more sheep. Perhaps it knew the sheep wouldn’t fight back if it decided on mutton for breakfast.

I motioned to the hunters still in the trees, who were peeking over their platforms in confusion. A moment later, we all heard it, the muffled, bleating cry.

Valerija and I broke into a sprint. When we reached the edge of the field, I hopped the low wooden fence and kept running, hoping the others were behind me, compelled by the lingering vision in my mind’s eye of the unicorn sneaking up behind the slumbering sheep. Lack of sleep had apparently given me a particularly vivid imagination.

Ahead, I saw movement, a mass of sheep swarming in no particular direction, pressing against one another in their terror. Beyond them, moving shadow, a flash of blood. I was right!

I slowed, sliding in the dew. The kirin had an animal impaled on his horn and was tossing it around. Blood spattered over the backs of the stampeding sheep, and they came right toward us.

“Get out of the way!” I heard Phil scream from far away and I jumped aside, shoving into Valerija as the sheep swept past. The ground rumbled beneath us and for a moment, everything was wool and noise and sliding in the muck. We scrambled to our feet once more.

The kirin had disgorged the sheep from its horn by this point. I hoped the animal was dead. I saw it twitch for a moment on the ground, then go still, a fuzzy red lump of flesh.

Valerija made a sound like a curse as the kirin turned in our direction and lowered its head to charge. It was smaller than the one I’d seen before, barely more than a yearling, yet every bit as deadly. I froze, forgetting all Lino’s archery lessons as the monster stared me down with its glowing, golden eyes.

“Back up!” Phil was shouting now. “Get back!”

“What is it?” I heard Lino’s voice. “I see nothing.”

Valerija grabbed my arm and started to pull, and I retreated toward the fence, scattering sheep in my path. Grace flew by as I reached the other hunters, her black hair streaming behind her. I looked over my shoulder and saw her stop dead at less than twenty yards, nock her arrow, draw, and release.

There was an empty, hollow thunk, and the unicorn roared.

Grace shouted in delight and pumped her bow in the air. The unicorn was on two legs now, cloven hooves flying, dark blood spurting from the arrow that lay lodged in its shoulder.

“She hit it!” Lino cried, incredulous, but then recovered. “Dai! Quick! Another shot! You must make the fatal wound!”

But Grace was having trouble drawing her bow—from fear or adrenaline, I couldn’t tell. Her hands shook as she nocked her next arrow, and she twice tried to draw the string back and failed. A moment later, she knelt and rested the bow against the ground. The unicorn was tearing at the arrow with its teeth now, now lowering its head and charging.

I ran forward and dragged Grace to her feet. “Run. Now!” But it was like her legs were rubber and she collapsed against me. The kirin moved closer, swinging its head from side to side like its horn was a scimitar. The smell of flames and rot burned in my throat.

Another snap of string on my right and an arrow glanced off the unicorn’s flanks. Ilesha. She drew again, then checked the distance between the unicorn and us and paused. “Get down!” she cried. But it was too late. The kirin was upon us.

Again, time slowed. The kirin’s head, at the far side of its swing, faced us broadside, ready to slice us both down with one giant sweep. I grabbed Grace’s abandoned arrow from the ground and plunged it into the animal’s neck, right under its jawbone. The aluminum bent and broke beneath my hand as the kirin wrenched away, almost ripping my arm from its socket.

We ducked as it reared again, falling hard against the wet ground. Grace regained her faculties and skittered out from beneath the flailing hooves as the unicorn turned tail and galloped away across the field.

“Where is it?” Lino asked. He was looking around wildly. He had his bow out, but he didn’t even seem to know which way to aim.

“Um, across the field?” Phil said. “Didn’t you see it turn around and run?”

His mouth dropped and he shook his head. “No. It…go away.” He looked so confused. “You all see it? Go get it!”

Not one of us moved. Grace and I were covered in blood, mud, and wet grass. Ilesha had curled into a ball on the ground, head tucked between knees, shoulders shaking as she wept. Phil was staring at us in revulsion, and Cory stood by Lino on the other side of the fence, her face as gray as the dawn while the unicorn’s screams echoed across the field.

“Go!” Lino shouted again.

“No!” Phil said. “Not without a plan.”

I bent down to check out a deep scrape on Grace’s brow, but she pushed me away.

“It heals as we stand here!” Valerija said, gesturing into the field with her knife. “And now it is angry.”

Ilesha sniffled and shook her head.

“Another rogue kirin,” Cory said in wonderment. “They are supposed to travel in herds.”

“Packs, you mean.” I rubbed my shoulder. “They aren’t deer. They’re wolves.” And wolves had loners, too. Usually adolescent males who hadn’t become dominant enough to form their own pack. That’s what this was, I realized. A young lone unicorn with no pack to teach him to stay the hell away from hunters like us.

In the distance, the unicorn bellowed.

Lino clearly heard that. “Go now!” Lino said again. “This is an order.”

“Shut up!” Phil screamed at him. “You want this unicorn, you go kill it.”

Lino stared at her for a moment, fury raging in his eyes, but said nothing. Phil seemed to grow an inch or two as we stood there, all of us shivering from fear and cold and weariness. She was right; he couldn’t hunt it down. Both Lino and the unicorn, and all the sheep in the field, were at our mercy. If we didn’t obey, there’d be no dead unicorn for Gordian to play with tonight.

Lino turned away from the group for a moment and stared out at the breaking dawn. I wondered what he saw when he looked at the kirin. Giovanni had barely been able to glimpse it in the alley that night. What did non-hunters see? What had Lino witnessed just now? A bunch of girls and sheep sliding around in the muck while a deadly shadow flitted among us?

Grace stood and brushed off the worst of the grass. “I will follow it.” She hefted her bow and checked her quiver. “I drew first blood. This kill is mine.”

She stalked off into the mist, blood still seeping from the cut on her forehead.

“She cannot go alone,” Valerija said.

“Why not?” asked Cory. “You killed a kirin alone.” But the other girl had already followed Grace.

I looked at Phil. “Please,” I said. “She’s hurt, and it almost killed us with one swipe. This isn’t some rite of passage.”

Phil gave a big sigh and shouldered her bow. “Fine. Let’s go. But I’m only going to protect Grace. I don’t believe in this.” She looked at Lino. “You stay here, where it’s safe, and bark more orders. You were so helpful last time.”

“Stop it,” I said. “He’s trying to train us as best he knows how.”

Phil bit her lip and cast him a long look. Then she crawled over the fence and joined me. “Don’t get me started on you. For the love of God, Astrid, stop chasing unicorns. For someone who doesn’t want to be here, you’re certainly acting like an obedient little huntress.”

I flicked mud from my pants leg.

“What about Ilesha and me?” Cory called from the fence line.

“Come or don’t,” Phil called back without turning around. She lowered her voice again. “Nothing to say?”

“I’m sorry. I heard the sheep and—” And what? Had a vision of death? That sounded nice and crazy.

“I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about earlier. Why don’t you ever take my side? You say you want things to change, but then you just stand there with a bow and keep your mouth shut whenever I try to make it happen.”

“Tell me what to do to make a difference and I’ll do it,” I said. Cory and Ilesha had clearly opted against following us to the kirin. “So far all I’ve seen is that you argue and they ignore you.”

“Because I’m the only one. But, come on. You’ve seen what emphasis they place on the fact that we’re Llewelyns. If both of us rebelled against the status quo—”

The sound of barking dogs stopped us short, accompanied by bellowing, and then a girl’s scream. We broke into a run.

A hundred yards on, we saw them. Valerija lay facedown in the grass, motionless. I saw two sheepdogs keeping their distance and barking their heads off, while a third limped around, holding one leg in the air and whimpering. Whatever had happened to the poor thing, it didn’t look like alicorn venom.

Grace and the kirin were facing off. She had her bow raised but not drawn, and he pointed his horn at her chest, pawing the ground and snorting hard. Blood still dripped down the broken arrow protruding from his jaw, dark black blood that blended with his midnight-brindled coat.

“Grace,” Phil called. “Move away. We’ve got your back.”

“Don’t you dare,” she replied, her voice almost toneless. “This is my kill.” Her hands shook as she attempted to draw back the string again.

I sidestepped over to Valerija, and knelt in the grass. “Are you okay?” I rolled her over. There was a puncture wound near her shoulder, perhaps an inch or two deep, from the look of it. I pulled down the edge of the hoodie to see the skin.

“Burns,” she gasped. I remembered that part. But it bled little, and as I watched, the wound seemed to knit together, growing shallower and narrower by the second. Valerija writhed in pain on the ground, but she’d live. Was this what had happened to my arm after I’d been thrown off the kirin? It looked like Brandt’s leg after we’d treated it with the Remedy.

I glanced up at Phil, who held her own bow, nocked arrow at full draw. The unicorn glared at her. Phil had a far better shot. “Grace,” she said again, not taking her eyes off the kirin. “Back off.”

“You back off,” the other girl hissed. “This one is mine.” And then she released.

The unicorn leaped, but not quickly enough, and Grace’s arrow pierced its gut. He screamed again, a horrid, desperate sound, and landed hard on both hooves. Then he charged his attacker.

I barely had time to flinch before I saw Grace’s body tossed in the air. She flew several feet, then landed in a heap as the unicorn charged again, horn lowered, teeth bared, at the crumpled figure on the ground.

Phil let her arrow fly as the animal quartered away. Another hollow thunk into the unicorn, just behind the left shoulder. But did it go far enough in to pierce the lungs? The beast turned and galloped back toward Phil, who dove out of the way as he careened by.

After it passed, the unicorn turned once more, then dropped to his knees. Grace still wasn’t moving. I grabbed Valerija’s knife and slid it across the wet grass toward my cousin. She grasped it by the handle and stood.

The kirin was grunting now, prostrate on the grass, each labored breath punctuated by wheezing shrieks I’d remember for the rest of my life. His eyes were wide with terror, rolling in his head like yellow pinballs, as Phil slowly approached. He barely moved as she stood above his broken body, breathing every bit as hard as the dying animal. She raised the knife high.

Do it. Oh, God, just do it. I squeezed my eyes shut.

Squish. Squish. Squish.

When I looked again, it was over, and Philippa Llewelyn was drenched in unicorn blood.