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off, or even a few—people in the military do it. Phil is doing it. But you need to think about your future as well.”
    “For all I know, this is the only future I have.”
    “Don’t say that!” he said, turning back to me. “Astrid, someday this is going to be—over. Somehow. And you’re going to go to med school, just like you wanted.”
    I folded my hands in my lap and studied them. They were strong hands now. Killing hands.
    “That’s still what you want, right?” Giovanni asked.
    I shrugged. “Yeah, but I could also die on a hunt tomorrow.”
    He said nothing for a long time.
    “Tell me again what you saw that day?” I asked him. “In the tombs? What could you see?” Giovanni was one of the few non-hunters who’d witnessed us in action. I wondered what it would be like to stand outside of us, outside of the magic. What was a unicorn to one who couldn’t read its mind or see its speed?
    “Blurs, mostly,” he said. “You move so fast. Like streaks of color, like streaks of light. And behind you, corpses. And screams. And these creatures—animals I’ve never seen, could never imagine.”
    “Some art student you are.”
    He snorted. “Okay. It looks like a nightmare. Like Hieronymus Bosch at his very scariest.” He lifted his eyebrows as if to tease me. “Better?”
    “Much.”
    “And the smell—” He made a face. “But then you stop, Astrid, you snap out of it, and you stand there, covered in wounds and weapons, and you look like a goddess. Like a hero in a comic book. Like a statue in a temple. Athena.”
    “Diana.”
    “Whoever.” When he turned to me, his expression was somber, but his eyes practically shone. “You look breathtaking. Beautiful and terrible all at once.”
    I gave him a skeptical glare. “And you’re attracted to that?”
    “I’m terrified not to be.” He thought for a moment. “I never really saw the little black ones until they were dead.”
    I laughed at the idea of a zebra-sized kirin being called
    “little.”
    “But the big one, I could see it. I saw it try to trample Ursula. It was—Where can something that big hide?”
    Bucephalus
. I often wondered that myself. I hadn’t seen the karkadann since he killed Marten Jaeger and escaped before anyone could kill him in return. If I did see him again, would I be obligated to hunt him? A unicorn? A man-eating killer? No matter that he was the one who had explained my power to me, who had saved my life many times over? No matter that he was thousands of years old, that he’d struck bargains with Alexander the Great and Clothilde Llewelyn and me?
    “I’m losing you again,” Giovanni said.
    “I’m sorry. I’m right here, I just—”
    “I know.” He sighed. “When I first met you, I knew there was something different about you. And the more I saw of Astrid the Warrior, the more amazing I found it all. But don’t get lost in her. You were someone else before you were a hunter, and you’ll be someone else after.”
    I blushed again and looked away. Before was a world away, and after seemed like a fantasy. Even here, on this sunny hillside, with the sound of summer insects in my ear, and Giovanni warm and wonderful beside me, and no trace of unicorns as far as I could sense—the old Astrid was beyond my reach. And the strangest thing of all was that I hadn’t even noticed her slipping away. For a few moments we were quiet, our arms brushing against each other as we watched the tourists scrambling over the ruins.
    He turned back to me. “I have something to tell you.”
    I froze. Like “no offense,” that phrase was rarely followed by anything good. “Okay.”
    “I got into an art program back home.”
    That wasn’t what I’d been expecting. “But I thought you needed to pass your summer course before your college would let you back in.” And he hadn’t passed. He’d been expelled for destroying the van. Or letting unicorns destroy it. For me.
    Expelled again. First from college for fighting