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breathe. “I’m so proud of you, sweetheart. I’m so excited for you,” she whisperedinto my hair. “Go to Rome and train to be a hunter, Astrid. You just might save the world.”
    Lilith—my mother—believes in magic. She believes in unicorns and panaceas and destiny. She’s held that belief despite every bit of ridicule she’s had to endure, despite every consequence she’s suffered. It’s as if she willed these monsters into existence.
    But now I’m the one paying the price.
     
    I spent the first of three flights memorizing entries in an Italian phrase book and the second trying to psych myself up about this adventure. Kaitlyn and the others could snub me as much as they wanted; they weren’t about to go live in Italy! Land of midnight cappuccinos in candlelit piazzas, of gorgeous young Italian guys swooping around on little Vespa motorbikes offering rides and fruity gelatos, of swank beach resorts and sprawling vineyards. I’d put in my hours doing unicorn target practice and dedicate every spare second to living la dolce vita. All this Brandt stuff was just so… high school . A girl who summers in Rome could hardly be concerned with such minutiae, right?
    But my pep talk didn’t work, partially because my mother had packed away a little brochure for me to read to help me “acclimate” to life at the Cloisters. On the third flight, bored by language studies and tired of calculating my risk of deep-vein thrombosis from sitting in the cramped plane seats, I decided to take a peek.
    “So, you want to be a unicorn hunter,” I mumbled, and opened the brochure. The businessman seated beside me gave me an odd look, and I ducked my head as far behind the pages as it could go. He shook out his paper and went back to reading. There wasan article on the front page about a mysterious massacre at a campground in the Adirondacks in upstate New York. Twenty deaths. No one could tell whether it was the work of human hands or some sort of wildlife attack. Mysterious toxicology reports showed some sort of heretofore unknown venom.
    You saw this kind of thing a lot of late. Word of the Reemergence was spreading, though most reports blamed exploding wolf populations, bioterrorism, or both. But unicorn sightings were becoming more common as well, even in the mainstream media, though they were generally written off as crackpot stories or even hoaxes. No one was connecting the sightings to the attacks, partly because if an attack occurred, there were no survivors to say what they’d seen. Naturally, authorities had yet to catch or kill one of the unicorns, since only a unicorn hunter could do it, and none of us knew the first thing about how.
    The brochure covered history, politics, cryptozoology, and a frustratingly minuscule smattering of pharmaceutical biochemistry that left out any relevant information about what they already knew about the Remedy. That was annoying. Instead, I learned that—at last count in the mid-nineteenth century—there were twelve hunter families, all of which could trace their lineage back to Alexander the Great. I also knew all about the five types of unicorns, each larger and more deadly than the last. Finally, I read about the supposed powers we hunters possessed: increased speed and agility—my PE teacher would have something to say about that—immunity to the alicorn poison, better aim and vision, and something called a potentia illicere that they didn’t deign to translate. Since the only Latin I know comes from an anatomy book, I was clueless.Something “potential,” maybe?
    No index, of course. I flipped to the back hoping to find a listing for “Virginity, why?” but no dice. In fact, the whole package was surprisingly light on exactly what it meant to be a unicorn hunter, or why they figured that a bunch of teenage girls would be better at the job than a few military snipers or an old-fashioned hand grenade. They didn’t understand the immunity the same way they didn’t