Rampant Read online

  Rampant

  Diana Peterfreund

  For Dan. For Everything.

  Unicorns are in the world again.

  —PETER S. BEAGLE,

  The Last Unicorn

  Note: The unicorns in this book are real; they populate the legends, histories, and religious texts of Europe and Asia.

  Contents

  Epigraph

  1

  Wherein Astrid Is Thrice Tested

  2

  Wherein Astrid Is Called to Duty

  3

  Wherein Astrid Is Cloistered

  4

  Wherein Astrid Feels the Rush

  5

  Wherein Astrid Gains an Ally

  6

  Wherein Astrid Makes the Leap

  7

  Wherein Astrid Draws First Blood

  8

  Wherein Astrid Welcomes the Hunters

  9

  Wherein Astrid Offers a Challenge

  10

  Wherein Astrid Shoots and Scores

  11

  Wherein Astrid Devises a Strategy

  12

  Wherein Astrid Takes Action

  13

  Wherein Astrid Draws a Bow and a Conclusion

  14

  Wherein Astrid Recovers

  15

  Wherein Astrid Strikes a Chord

  16

  Wherein Astrid Revels in the Night

  17

  Wherein Astrid Lies Low

  18

  Wherein Astrid Meets a Monster

  19

  Wherein Astrid Awakens

  20

  Wherein Astrid Uncovers the Enemy

  21

  Wherein Astrid Clashes with Her Elders

  22

  Wherein Astrid Puts the Pieces Together

  23

  Wherein Astrid Chooses Death and Life

  24

  Wherein Astrid Faces Her Family

  25

  Wherein Astrid Attunes the Hunters

  26

  Wherein Astrid Prepares for Battle

  27

  Wherein Astrid Leads an Army

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  WHEREIN ASTRID IS THRICE TESTED

  “‘I WILL NEVER REALLY LEAVE,’ said the unicorn. Diamond sparkles floated from the tip of its glittering silver horn. ‘I will always live in your heart.’”

  I swallowed the bile rising in my throat and forced myself to continue reading.

  “Then the unicorn turned and galloped away, its fluffy pink tail swinging merrily as it spread its iridescent wings to the morning sunshine.”

  Oh, no. Not wings, too.

  “Every time the unicorn’s lavender hooves touched the earth, a tinkling like the chime of a thousand fairy bells floated back toward the children.”

  Shuddering, I raised my head from the picture book to look at the rapt, upturned faces of my charges. Bethany Myerson, aged six, was holding back tears as the unicorn bid good-bye to its new friends. Brittany Myerson, aged four, was chewing on the tail of her stuffed poodle.

  And I, Astrid Llewelyn, aged sixteen, just wanted the brats to go to sleep. “I think that’s enough for tonight, huh, girls?”

  “No!” They shrieked in unison.

  I sighed and returned to the saccharine story. I usually like babysitting, but taking care of the Myerson girls is intolerable. Always with the unicorns in this house. Each kid has a half dozen plush or plastic horned beasts lying piled on her bed, and Bethany’s bedroom is even ringed with a wallpaper border of unicorn heads with shimmering eyes and horns that glow in the dark.

  I could hear Lilith now: Well, kiddo, at least it means they’ve been decapitated.

  My friend Kaitlyn has a mortal fear of clowns. Her mom took her to Ringling Brothers circus in her formative years, and this white-painted thing with a huge blue wig and a bulbous, blinking red light for a nose scared the crap out of her. She won’t even go to the state fair, and we’re in high school. Parents can really scar a kid with stunts like that.

  Sometimes I wondered if my mother, Lilith, understood the kind of damage she was inflicting on me with all her delusional stories about bloodthirsty unicorns. When I was six, and all my friends wanted to play unicorns and run around the playground on imaginary horned mounts named Rainbow and Starlight and Moonbeam, do you think I was the most popular kid in school?

  I briefly considered giving the Myerson kids the same lecture I’d given the other first graders on the playground:

  Unicorns are man-eating monsters. They don’t have wings, they aren’t lavender or sparkly, and you could never catch one to ride without its goring you through the sternum. And even if it somehow managed to miss your major arteries—and it never misses—you’d still die from the deadly poison in its horn. But don’t worry. My great-great-great-great-great-aunt Clothilde killed the last one a hundred and fifty years ago.

  Except now I guessed it would be more like a hundred and sixty. How time doth fly in a unicorn-free world. Also, now I no longer believed my mom’s horror stories.

  After several more pages of cotton-candy torture, the book ended and I firmly tucked Bethany and Brittany into bed. At last. Lulled into soporific splendor by the lackluster adventures of Sparkle the Unicorn and his merry band of Ritalin dependents, the girls soon drifted into the Land of Nod.

  Good riddance.

  I wished I could forget my early indoctrination and act sanguine about these namby-pamby unicorn stories. But one-horned beasts of any stripe still gave me the willies.

  My mother considers herself a militant purist. She believes that this so-called revisionist unicorn history is a disgrace to the sacrifice of our ancestors. That we should be honoring their memories by promoting the truth about these vicious beasts.

  These vicious, extinct beasts, I reminded her whenever I was feeling particularly cheeky. Usually, I didn’t deign to answer at all. I’d long ago learned that indulging her fantasies meant chaining myself to her lifestyle.

  I set up my trusty baby monitor, closed the bedroom door, and called Brandt on the cell phone Lilith finally got me last winter. “They’re asleep. You can come over now, but I have to meet you outside.”

  This was more for my protection than out of consideration for the slumbering children. First of all, I don’t know how much more I could take of the unicorn-inspired decor. Their toys were all over the house. Second, Brandt and a couch—or worse, an empty master bedroom—were a very bad combo. He morphed from vaguely risqué fling to bad-boy octopus man whenever he was in the vicinity of any marginally promising flat surface.

  I was far less interested in protecting my virtue than I was in not giving it up to a boy who couldn’t pass intermediate French.

  But despite his problems with the Gallic tongue, Brandt was not lacking in other characteristics prized by that culture. Like the kissing kind. A few minutes later, I was sitting on the front porch of the Myersons’ house, waiting for him to arrive and wondering what would happen when he did. The forest smelled wet and moldy tonight, and someone in the neighborhood must have had a fireplace going. In the gloom beyond the oblong bit of lawn illuminated by the house lights, I watched the trees swaying in the night breeze. They flashed the white undersides of leaves at me, then the dark tops, moving in a strange, solemn rhythm beyond my comprehension. I stared at them for a while, hypnotized, then suddenly shivered. When you sit in the only lighted spot in an area, you can’t help but think something is watching you—trees, little night critters, ravenous insects swarming just beyond the reach of your eyes.

  The hairs rose on the back of my neck. Something was watching me. I glanced
up at the bedroom window, half expecting the pale face of one of the Myerson girls to be pressed up against the glass, despite the lack of noises coming from the baby monitor. But no one was there. Still, the fear didn’t dissipate. I turned my attention to the fringe of woods, as if I’d be able to see little cartoon eyes blinking out at me from the darkness.

  Silly Astrid. No more unicorn stories before bedtime, I thought in my best impression of Lilith. She was probably at home reading up on unicorns in one of her many rotting old bestiaries. It’s her favorite hobby, but she considers it serious research.

  In the eyes of her family and the university discipline department that pulled her academic funding around the time she got knocked up with me, my mom is…eccentric. Unbalanced. They mean nuts. By the time I was born, it was bye-bye Ph.D., hello career of short-lived stints in every field from medical transcription to window washing. My uncle—her brother—always said my mom had so much potential. Too bad about the crazy.

  Was my mom really bitter that she hadn’t hunted unicorns, or was it just that she was a single mom in a series of dead-end jobs whose biggest hobby was studying a field of cryptozoology that even the biggest Loch Ness Monster nuts wouldn’t consider valid?

  Extinct, venomous, killer unicorns. As eccentricities go, it was rather disappointing. A pathology that she’d—I don’t know, dated Elvis—would have been far more bragworthy and less likely to get weird looks at cocktail parties. Not much glory involved in spouting off about great hunts of the past generation or bragging about how you could trace your ancestors back to pre-Christian military overlords. If you’re going to imagine that unicorns are real, wouldn’t it be better if they were also still around?

  One could make the argument that the reason she’d decided her unicorns were extinct was so she wouldn’t be saddled with the burden of actually producing one and proving she’s right. I know I’m much happier that she believes in extinct unicorns instead of in live ones. As it was, most of our extended family ignored her. As Uncle John says, as long as she doesn’t actually see unicorns, keeps her job, and never puts her only child in bodily danger, it doesn’t count as psychosis. And he would know, since he’s a doctor. Well, an orthodontist, but it counts.

  I shivered again. All these unicorn thoughts were doing nothing to put me at ease.

  A few moments later, Brandt showed up and I shook it off. He ambled up the walk, his arms full of a ratty tartan blanket he’d retrieved from the backseat of his car. “Hey, ya,” he called. “I thought we could go sit in the woods.”

  Sit? I wondered if he’d washed the spread since breaking up with his last girlfriend, with whom, rumor had it, he did things that are illegal in fourteen states. “How about we just hang out on the porch? We shouldn’t get too far from the house.” I said by way of an excuse, “What if the girls wake up?”

  “We won’t go far. Besides, you’ve got that walkie-talkie thing.” He slung his arm around my shoulders and steered me toward the backyard, which, like most of the homes in the development, abutted one corner of a state park. The trees flashed white and dark in greeting. “Come on—I’ll protect you from the monsters.”

  I rolled my eyes. Yeah, but who would protect me from Brandt? Tall, with killer blue eyes and sandy blond hair, Brandt Ellison had half the girls in my class swooning. And about a month and a half ago, he’d turned that devastating grin of his in my direction. It would have been social suicide to turn down an opportunity like that. I’d have been forever branded a frigid snob or a lesbian—neither of which was a label I had any strong desire to bear. So I went out with him. Current count held Brandt and me at three trips to Starbucks, fifteen shared cafeteria lunches, a movie, a party, and one pizza and video night.

  And now, approaching day forty of the Brandt-and-Astrid Watch, my friends had changed their interrogation script from “Have you done it yet?” to “Aren’t you ever going to do it?” Kaitlyn told me that I should just get it over with. That my lingering chastity was hampering all kinds of upward mobility. That if I didn’t pop my cherry soon, people would start to think I was saving it for something.

  Which I wasn’t. There was nothing to save it for—not anymore. As previously noted, unicorns are extinct. I wondered if that line would work on my mom, whose discussion of “my virtue” could get downright medieval. Most people are aware of the mystical connection between virgins and unicorns. It’s been a popular subject in tapestries and paintings for thousands of years.

  My mother, though, refers to these as “historical documents.” For all I knew, maybe she had an antique chastity belt hiding in her collection of historical volumes and other doodads. Our itsy-bitsy apartment over Uncle John’s garage was filled with her ancient junk.

  I didn’t necessarily believe Kaitlyn, by the way. My cousin, Philippa, had been one of the most popular girls in our high school, and we’d pinky sworn when we were kids that we’d tell each other every base we passed. Phil graduated last year and headed off to college on her plush athletic scholarship without any kind of horizontal action having taken place. Last I spoke to her, the count still put me at second base, Phil flirting with light third.

  Phil never worried that she was weird for not having sex or for laughing at boys who asked her to. Of course, she paddled in the non-batty end of the Llewelyn family gene pool. Phil was also a dentist’s daughter and a big volleyball star, so naturally she ranked higher on the popularity scale than an impoverished sophomore whose major accomplishment to date was racking up the most hospital volunteer hours per semester for two years running.

  Brandt spread the blanket on a bed of leaves a few tree rows away from the backyard—far enough in to provide decent cover but close enough to the Myersons’ that the yellow porch lights filtered in through the limbs. “There.” He plopped down and patted the spot beside him. “Still within screaming distance.”

  I smiled uneasily, hoping he referred to the possibility of Bethany or Brittany having nightmares, and joined him. Within thirty seconds, he was kissing me. Open mouth. With tongue.

  Okay, that sounds bad. But it’s not like that, really. I wouldn’t say Brandt was actively pressuring me. Whenever we were making out and I removed his hand from the inside of the waistband of my panties, he kept it removed for the duration of the session, and he never made any of those Come on baby, it will feel so good or you know you want it or but all the other kids are doing it noises like the guys in those date rape videos they had us watch in Current Issues, which was PC-speak for Sex Ed. However, he always carried condoms in his pocket—another trick from Current Issues—and I knew, I just knew, that in about eight minutes he was going to try to undo the buttons on my jeans.

  Again, Brandt surprised me, crossing that barrier in under five. “Stop it,” I said gently, moving his hand to a safer zone. Usually, if I distract him by letting him get to second base, he forgets all about areas south of my belly button.

  But it didn’t work this time. He backed off. “No offense,” he said, not meeting my eyes, “but exactly how long is this going to take?”

  I don’t know if it’s possible to follow “no offense” with something that doesn’t offend. “How long is this going to take?’ What do you mean by this?” I snapped.

  He turned away, not that I could see his face very well in the dark, and ran his hand through his hair in frustration. “That’s not what I mean, Astrid. I like you a lot.”

  “And I like you,” I replied, reaching for his hand. “I’m just not ready for that.”

  “How do you know unless you let me touch you?”

  “I mean, I’m not ready for—that—even.”

  He let out a sound halfway between a groan and a snort and fell back against the ground. This was the point in the videos where the boys talked about how much pain they were in because the girls were saying no. This was the point where Kaitlyn says that if a girl doesn’t put out, she should at least give the guy a hand job.

  But I didn’t offer and Brandt wasn’t complaining, j
ust lying there playing with the end of my blond braid, which was long enough to brush the blanket when I was propped up on my elbows.

  What did I really know about him? I knew he wanted to get a swimming scholarship to college and that he had three older brothers and that his favorite pizza topping was barbecued chicken and that he didn’t read books, not even Harry Potter.

  (Lilith wouldn’t let me read Harry Potter because there was a whole thing in there about drinking unicorn blood that she said was inappropriate. I sneaked Kaitlyn’s copy and the unicorn bit is maybe a paragraph or so of the entire novel. Whatever.)

  Were these the sort of things that I wanted to base an intimate relationship on? Barbecued chicken pizza and the butterfly stroke? He’d never even asked me why I spent so many hours at the hospital. Never asked me what I wanted to do in college.

  On the other hand, the prom was a month from now, and if Brandt took me, I’d be one of the few sophomores at the dance. I could deal with that variety of abnormal. Going to prom would be…something. Maybe something worth letting him put his hands inside my pants for.

  In the woods, the darkness shifted.

  “Did you see that?” I asked, sitting up straight. I knew there’d been something out there.

  The braid popped out of Brandt’s fingertips. “No. What?” “There’s something moving in there.” I could see it. I could…feel it. Like earlier, on the porch, only more so. So much more so. “What do you think it is?”

  He shrugged. “A deer.”

  Of course. It was just the size for a deer, too. So then why was I standing up and striding off the blanket and into the trees? I’d seen plenty of deer.