Free Ascendant by Diana Peterfreund Page B

severely injured the first time she’d sent us out against a group of kirin, she’d flipped out and tried to close the place down. Phil and I had risen up against her and sent her packing back to the States.
    From a few thousand miles away, though, I guess the gory reality of unicorn hunting seemed a tad more rosy. I guess she forgot what it was like when I almost died. Maybe her concern was related to proximity, and now that she lived across an ocean, she’d gone back to buying the hype she spewed on television about our “glorious destiny.”
    Maybe things with Giovanni would go the same way: out of sight, out of mind.
    Time to change the subject before I got too angry to speak. “I need to ask you a few questions about my father.”
    “This again?”
    “This again?”
    “You found him once, Mom. Don’t you think we owe it to whatever family he has to try to find him again?”
    “For someone who dislikes hunting so much, you are terribly eager to consign your potential half sisters to the lifestyle.”
    I clenched my jaw. My potential half sisters would be sitting ducks unless they were informed of their power to attract killer unicorns.
    “You have to make up your mind,” I growled into the phone. “Either you want me to come home and be safe or you want me to be your unicorn-hunting rock star of a daughter.”
    For that was the real reason my mother refused to hand over information about the other half of my gene pool. If there were other descendants of Clothilde out there, then they might be the ones to possess the super cool, descendant-of-Clothilde-lewelyn unicorn-hunting skills that had, so far, failed to manifest themselves in me.
    It was so ironic. The people at the Cloisters thought I was supposed to be the best hunter because I was a Llewelyn. My mother thought I was supposed to be the best hunter because I was descended from Clothilde Llewelyn, in particular. The Llewelyn who had killed the karkadann. Even the karkadann had come to me instead of to one of the other hunters, because he held a similarly misguided belief about Clothilde’s legacy that if he could talk to her as easily as he’d once talked to Alexander the Great, he could talk to me as well. And he
could
talk to me—but I think he could talk to the other hunters, too, if they tried.
    What did I believe? That it was all a lie. The facts were incontrovertible: I was
not
the best hunter in the Order. Why was it that the only people who seemed to recognize this besides me were Melissende and Grace? Grace was the best hunter here. Ilesha was a close second. I liked my place farther down the list.
    My mother sighed into the phone. “Sweetie, you made your position quite clear before I left Rome. It’s
you
who wants this now, not me. And
you
who reserves the right to whine about it, too. I gave you the chance to come home. You gave me a long-suffering speech about duty. You’ve caught a fine case of holier-than-thou from these priest friends of yours.”
    How was it that she could do this to me? How did she always manage to turn everything around like that? Her dismissal of Father Guillermo and his support of the Cloisters almost had me on the priest’s side, camouflage habits and all.
    “Oh yeah?” I said. “And what would you say if I told you I wanted to come home now?”
    “Whatever you want, dear,” my mother lied, her tone both blithe and bored. She knew I was bluffing. I wouldn’t come home because of my duty, and if I did, she wouldn’t like it because of the supposed glory involved.
    “Fine,” I said. “Book me a ticket. Or I’ll book it. Give me your credit card number.”
    My mother hesitated. She wasn’t the only one who knew how to call a bluff. “Certainly. Of course, you know you can’t come here as a hunter. The danger aspect would cause far too many complications. You’d need to give up your … eligibility.”
    I swallowed. “Fine. I’ll … do that, too. I’ll stop by … New York on my way