Read Online Ascendant by Diana Peterfreund - Free Book Online Page B

What Phil didn’t know is that the rhythm of our inhalations was not dependent on her instructions. All hunters breathed together in the Cloisters—the entire nunnery respired like a massive iron lung.
    “Now, on the next breath in, sweep your hands up and out at the level of your shoulders. Think of your arms as arrows pointing straight and true.”
    I loved warrior pose. I increased power to my core and looked left over the tips of my fingers, imagining them as arrowheads aimed directly at the heart of a kirin.
    But in my sights I saw instead Cory, bandaged foot elevated against a column, reading a magazine and drinking lemonade. Her side of our room was packed, and she was headed back home to England this week. No amount of arguing with Neil had resulted in a change of heart. As far as he was concerned, the Cloisters was a gravity well of hunter attraction. Neil’s flat in London, however, would be safer.
    “Warrior Two,” Phil was saying as we deepened into the pose with every breath, “is a position of power but also of focus. A Zen archer aims his bow for years before ever releasing an arrow.”
    “Doesn’t kill many unicorns that way, huh?” Melissende said with a snicker. Some of the younger girls laughed.
    Phil lifted her chin and went on. “You are arrows, straight and true. You are spears, strong and focused. You are warriors.”
    Grace ignored her friend, for once, and closed her eyes.
    I, too, turned inward.
    The bones in the masonry sang around me. In the shade of the Cloisters, Bonegrinder sat in watchful stillness, her chain anchoring her to the wall. I felt her presence like a livid pinprick in my mind within the net of buzzing artifacts.
    And beneath that, I felt my fellow hunters. Grace, solid as a rock, her energy radiating outward from her arms like the points on a compass. The other girls, bright or dim depending on the strength of their concentration. Beyond my fingertips, I felt Cory sizzling like a frayed power cord. Farther out were the others: Valerija resting in her room; Dorcas on the computer; Rosamund coming up the stairs from the chapter house into the rotunda.
    I breathed and sank deeper into this new awareness. Inside my head a chord began to ring. I’d heard it before, the music of the Wall of First Kills. I’d only heard it from the other hunters once, just before our battle against the kirin in the necropolis of Cerveteri last month.
    I’m an arrow, I thought to myself.
    You are an arrow
, said Phil’s voice inside my head. But no, it wasn’t Phil. It was Clothilde Llewelyn. The Clothilde who lived inside the memory of the karkadann Bucephalus.
    You are the arrow of God
, said Clothilde,
on a mission to vanquish the savage unicorn
.
    I lost my balance and went careening into Ursula, who knocked into Ilesha, who elbowed Melissende hard in the stomach. We all collapsed to the floor.
    This time, Grace did laugh as she swept up from her pose and smiled smugly at the tangle of hunters at her feet. “Too challenging?”
    “Get off me!” Melissende shoved her younger sister, Ursula, out of the way and blew her black hair out of her eyes. “Yoga is dumb.”
    I put my hands over my eyes trying to clear the dizziness.
    “Asteroid?” Phil said, narrowing her eyes in the glare of the afternoon light. “You okay?”
    “One too many sun salutations today, I think,” I said. I pushed myself to my feet and dusted off my knees. “I’m going to get some water.”
    The last time I’d heard Clothilde’s voice in my head, it was because Bucephalus had put it there. The last time I could feel hunters the way I could feel unicorns—the way I imagined that unicorns could feel us—Bucephalus had been there.
    Inside my head, I called out to the karkadann. But there was no reply.
    Figured. I had no idea what Bucephalus would be doing in Rome, anyway. Despite the city’s network of parks, abandoned, stray-dog-infested ruins, and endless underground catacombs, it was hard for a unicorn