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understand the Remedy. And they didn’t even explain what that potentia thingy was. It was as if I was still back in the nineteenth century. Wasn’t anyone interested in the scientific aspects of a lost species or a possible medical breakthrough? Sure, the history bits had plenty of stories about Roman hunters and medieval hunters and hunters who rode bareback, naked, armed only with alicorns, against hordes of invading Visigoths, but nothing that explained what it was they’d done to obtain said alicorns. And really, naked horseback riding? What kind of virgins were these gals?
    Plus reading straight through practically induced a coma.
    But the diagrams of three different kinds of bows and five arrowheads rocked. I felt a sort of thrill seeing them, which shocked and repulsed me. Since when had I become all into weaponry? The only bloodletting devices that were supposed to make me happy were sterilized scalpels.
    After a good fourteen hours of travel, of which I slept perhaps five, I arrived in Italy. In the terminal, no one waited with a little sign that read UNICORN HUNTER EXPRESS . Since I no longer had the use of my cell phone—for emergencies or otherwise—I had to track down a pay telephone, and a call to the number listed on the back of the brochure gave me a terse, English-accentedmessage about which train and bus to take to get to the place where the boot camp was being held.
    Bus? Bogus. So these were the responsible parties my mother had entrusted me to? They left a teenager in a foreign airport to fend for herself? I headed outside and somehow managed to find the train, which deposited me in a seedy-looking area of town a half hour later. The bus was a bit more difficult, but eventually I figured it out. I have a sneaking suspicion that it helped immensely that I was blonde. Aboard, I sailed past the Colosseum as well as buildings that looked every bit as ancient—yet were still inhabited. At last, it deposited me in a tiny depression, a valley between the Oppian and Celian hills, that my guidebook told me was one of the most ancient parts of the city, filled with hidden treasures and bits of enigmatic Roman history.
    You think?
    The brochure filled in the rest. Built in the fourteenth century, the Cloisters of Ctesias was a convent of sorts dedicated to training and housing scores of unicorn hunters. From the pictures in the glossy brochure, the Cloisters was a Mediterranean palace, replete with colorful frescoes, marble statues of naked gods and toga-clad saints, and towering columns. So it’s understandable that after I disembarked from the crowded bus, manhandled my rolly bag up a steep hill paved with uneven cobblestones, and turned down the alleyway leading to the Cloisters, I almost missed the place entirely.
    In the brochure, they were very careful not to show the crumbling, poster-plastered wall surrounding the building, the shattered plywood boards covering most of the upstairs windows, the pack of stray dogs sunning themselves on thestoop, and the bum leaning against the wall with a ragged rucksack and a cardboard sign covered in Italian.
    Any lingering hopes I might have had of a wild summer spent in Rome, riding Vespas and eating gelato at midnight in picturesque piazzas, promptly disintegrated.
    I hefted the bag onto my shoulder and maneuvered my way past the slumbering strays. Here goes nothing.
    Beyond the enclosing walls lay a small, oblong courtyard paved in dusty, cracked mosaics and littered with trash. In the center stood a marble fountain featuring a pale stone woman in a flowing stone wrap holding the tip of an alicorn in a small catchment basin. Water cascaded around the horn and spilt over the lip of the basin into the large pool at the woman’s feet.
    I neared the fountain with care, as if the statue might suddenly spring to life and stab me with the weapon in its hand. I leaned close; the alicorn looked harmless from this vantage point. According to the brochure—which I was