Arcadia Awakens (39 page)

Above them, a shadow hurried past.

Rosa held her breath and pressed close to the wall. She expected someone to expose them at any moment.

But no one came down into the cellar. Whoever it was had passed by the door to the stairs.

Cautiously, they stole on. Alessandro stuck the flashlight, still switched off, into his waistband, and took out the screwdriver he had used to break open the window. He held it in front of him like a knife. Rosa put the photos between the pages of the notebook, so that she could hold everything with one hand. She took the rubber hammer from Alessandro and hefted it, weighing it in her hand. It wasn’t as good as her stapler, but it was better than nothing.

He cast her a quick glance, but she could hardly see him in the dark. Once again they listened for sounds from above, then cautiously began to climb the stairs.

They would have to walk through several rooms to reach the window through which they had entered the house. Moonlight cast deep black shadows between the bookcases.

There was a clicking sound, like switches being hastily pressed up and down. Someone was working on a fuse box. That must have been why the lights in the cellar had gone out.

Unnoticed, they reached the room with the window that they had broken open. It was just as they had left it. Whoever else was in the house had probably come in another way.

Rosa pulled the window in by its handle. A cool draft of air from the sea came in. She put the papers and the hammer on the sill outside and clambered out, followed by Alessandro.

They heard a voice somewhere in the house. Then a short, dull sound. A second voice swore, saying something about moving shadows.

“Was that a shot?” Rosa groaned.

In the moonlight, Alessandro looked paler than usual. “Come on,” he whispered, ducking low and taking her wrist. It was good to feel his hand: a touch of warmth in the glacial cold that once again had taken hold of her body. But she couldn’t run like that. She moved out of his grasp with a quick shake of her head. Then they both took off, past the palm trees that offered little cover, over the dried-up turf of the lawn.

There were voices behind them again, outside in the open air now.

The bushes on the boundary of the property rustled. There was a barred fence beyond them.

All at once they saw something else there as well. A long, black outline, winding its way through the dry grass like a rivulet of viscous oil.

“A Lamia!” whispered Alessandro.

The sound they had heard in the house was repeated. Twice.

Right in front of them, two fist-size craters were torn into the ground. Grass and dust went swirling into the air.

“Stay where you are!” said a man’s voice.

Rosa spun around and threw the hammer.

T
HE GUNMAN WORE A
black ski mask with slits for his eyes. He must have noticed Rosa’s movement, but it was too dark and the hammer flew through the air too fast for him to avoid it. The hard rubber head hit him in the face—a horrible noise—and threw him backward to the ground. The revolver dropped from his hand; he let out a groan as if half-dazed.

A second man, also masked, swore, fired into the grass in front of Alessandro again, and strode quickly over to the two of them.

“Get away from the girl!” he snapped at Alessandro. “Quickly!”

It was possible that Rosa had smashed the first attacker’s skull with the hammer; at the very least she had broken his nose, yet she felt nothing. None of this fit together: the shadow flowing through the grass, the gun pointed at them.

Alessandro stepped in front of Rosa, protecting her with his body. He made no move to obey the man’s order. “Stay behind me,” he whispered over his shoulder. The panther’s short, dark coat was creeping up the back of his neck.

“What’s that you’re holding?” asked the man.

“Screwdriver,” growled Alessandro.

“Not you—her!”

“Nothing,” said Rosa, hoping he was only bluffing and hadn’t seen anything.

“Hand it over.”

“No.” If she gave up Dallamano’s papers, Iole would die. That was what mattered. Not herself, not Alessandro—only this one, thin thread from which Iole’s life dangled, and which must not break.

On the ground, the injured man felt his face with his hand and screamed again. He was trying to take the ski mask off, but that only made the pain even worse.

The other man was standing about three yards away from Alessandro and Rosa. “Give me those,” he demanded again, “or I’ll shoot your friend in the knee.”

Rosa moved a little way out of the cover Alessandro was giving her and shook her head vigorously when he tried to get in front of her again. “No,” she said.

Behind them, there was a hissing and a rustling among the bushes.

Rosa didn’t look back. She was keeping her eyes on the man with the gun. The slithering sound came again. “Florinda.”

She’d been so stupid. Her aunt had kept her talking so that the cell phone could be located. Easy enough for the telephone company.

“Florinda!” she said again, adding, “I know it’s you. And he won’t shoot me.”

“Not you,” said the man, with an unpleasant smile, “but I’ll shoot young Carnevare if he moves so much as a muscle.”

Rosa moved in front of Alessandro. He was still in human form, but she sensed the coat growing under his clothes, thrusting at his jeans and T-shirt.

She took a step toward the man, carefully staying in the line of fire between him and Alessandro. She calmly held the notebook out to him.

“You won’t do anything to him.”

The man put out his hand to take the documents. Behind him, his companion was getting to his feet with difficulty, both hands to his face. “Bitch,” he muttered in a low voice, and peered through his fingers, trying to find the revolver he had lost.

“You two belong to
my
clan,” she said coolly. “And Florinda won’t always have the last word.”

Impatiently, the man beckoned her closer. Another step.

Behind her, Alessandro let out an animal roar.

The man jumped with surprise, his revolver jerking to one side—and Rosa rushed him.

A shot was fired. The notebook and photographs fluttered through the air. Rosa went for the man’s face with her nails, knocking him backward with the sheer force of her impact. At the same time she rammed one knee between his legs.

None of it would have worked if he had really intended to shoot her. But for that he needed explicit orders. He doubled over, howling with rage and pain. Rosa let go of him and brought her knee up a second time, this time under his chin. Not with any particular accuracy, but hard enough to make him cry out as it struck his jawbone.

Alessandro swept past her, still human, but covered with black fur—including his face—and threw himself on the second man. Out of the corner of her eye, Rosa saw him bring Alessandro down with him as he fell. At the same moment, however, her own adversary struggled up, swung his arm back—and hit her so hard on the temple that everything went black before her eyes.

When she was conscious again, just a few seconds later, she was lying on the ground while the man in front of her gathered up the notebook and the scattered photos. She couldn’t see Alessandro, and tried to sit up, but her head hurt like hell. She heard the sounds of fighting, and then that hissing and slithering again, getting louder, coming closer and closer.

Alessandro cried out in alarm, and Rosa forced herself into a crouch. The man with the gun had collected all the photos now. He put them back inside the notebook, turned, and ran.

“No!” she cried. Reptilian cold filled her from head to foot, but it still wasn’t enough to change her, damn it.

Then her eyes fell on the revolver that had been carried by the first man, who was now lying helpless on his back. Alessandro was kneeling over him, half human, half panther, his head flung back, his mouth wide-open—too wide, full of too many sharp teeth—to sink his fangs into his victim’s throat.

Rosa called out his name as she crawled forward on all fours, and managed to grasp the revolver. The sight of his prey’s blood seemed to enrage Alessandro even more. She saw his T-shirt split down the back.

“Alessandro, don’t!”

She wasn’t sure why she wanted to stop him. The men had threatened them and shot at him. Killing them both seemed only right, even more so as the cold of the snake inside her took over her mind as well, forcing out all ideas of morality. She crouched there on her knees, the revolver lying heavy in her hands, and now she aimed it at the man with the papers. In the moonlight, she saw him running for the bushes and the fence, right in front of her weapon. Its barrel and muzzle were heavily encased in a silencer.

Rosa’s finger quivered on the trigger. The cold was driving out her scruples, but a last remnant of reason still told her that it was wrong to shoot anyone in the back.

But she
wanted
to kill him. To save Iole, and because of what he had done. The blow he had struck her, her pain. What he had wanted to do to Alessandro. And most of all because she
could
kill him, while the person she was really angry with was gliding invisibly through the shadows in the form of a snake.

And then, once again, she registered the rustling of the dry grass over which something was moving toward her, and she realized that only two or three seconds had passed, and the snake was coming closer.

She abruptly turned around, held the gun out in front of her—and aimed it between the amber eyes of the snake’s huge head.

Time stood still. Her body felt frozen; her blood was ice water. The gun did not move a fraction of an inch. Even her trigger finger stopped shaking.

The snake stared at her out of sparkling slits of eyes. The split tongue touched the muzzle of the revolver, licked along it and all the way around it, and Rosa thought: I can do it. I can do it now, and then everything will be different.

But out of the corner of her eye, she saw something else.

Alessandro tore the larynx out of the injured man with his teeth, held it triumphantly between his panther jaws. Finally he flung his trophy away from him, uttering a deafening victory roar.

Rosa’s hatred disappeared instantly. She lowered the gun. The snake shot away across the grass, following the second man, and merged into the shadows.

Rosa crouched on the ground, the revolver in her lap, her head bent, unable to think straight. Minutes passed as she stared at the gun in her white fingers, waiting for warmth to come back into her—waiting for what she had rejected for so long, her plain, vulnerable humanity.

He came up behind her and gently touched her shoulder. When she looked up, she expected to see his panther’s jaws smeared with blood. Instead, she met his green eyes, full of guilt and very sad. Once again she shivered, but not with cold, only with fear, and misgivings, and helplessness. He was himself again, his T-shirt torn, his lips bleeding.

“They’ve gone,” he said as he knelt down, put his arms tightly around her, and drew her head down to his shoulder. “They took it all with them.”

She wept into his torn T-shirt, feeling the hot tears between her cheeks and his skin. Listening to the pulsing of his veins, feeling his racing heartbeat.

A
LESSANDRO TURNED INTO THE
driveway of the Palazzo Alcantara. The two guards at the gate looked at him suspiciously when they saw Rosa. She was huddled in the passenger seat of the car, her hair untidy and her face dirty, while her throbbing forehead was bruised where the man had struck her. Rosa indicated to them that everything was all right.

The revolver still lay in her lap. Its weight gave her a distressing sense of security—distressing because it reminded her that soon she had to make a decision. She had to get the stolen photographs back. But how far would she go to do it? Would she pull the trigger? She could have shot the huge snake, and she hadn’t. But if what happened last year had taught her one thing, it was that she couldn’t make the same mistake twice.

They did not talk during the last mile or so to the palazzo. The car headlights lit up the rows of trees lining the road; darkness covered everything beyond them.

Rosa didn’t know what the next hour might bring. Or the next day. She didn’t even know what she was going to say to Alessandro when they reached the front courtyard outside the house: how she could ask him to let her go in alone.