by Kai Meyer
“They’ll be glad to hear that,” said Alessandro, with a smile. She had spoken her thought aloud.
“Then they’ll know it comes from the heart.”
“I’m sure it was only about the wedding. Nothing else bothers them. So long as we don’t set ourselves up as objects of worship in temples, they’re not interested in us.”
“Suppose Sigismondis was right?”
“Right about what?”
“Suppose the idea really was to keep Lamias and Panthera from having children together? He thought it could be something physical. Something that the gods wanted to prevent.”
“Cats with scales on their skin?”
“You know what I mean.”
He tightened his arm around her and gave her a long kiss. “Is this the moment you tell me you’re pregnant?”
“No!” she cried indignantly.
He grinned. “These things happen.”
“Not to me anymore.”
“That’s not very romantic.”
“You weren’t buying a pig in a poke.”
He was laughing quietly. “I know you so much better than you know yourself.”
Now it was her turn to press her lips to his, because sometimes, just sometimes, he was a little bit right. Not very right. Just a little bit.
She leaned back, threw her head back, and gazed up at the sky. No aircraft in sight. No birds.
“Sometimes,” she said, “two people pass each other by, look into each other’s eyes for a moment, and all that’s left is a wish. A dream of what might have been. And then they move away from each other with every step, and away from all their dreams.”
He stroked her hair. “That could have happened to us. Back at the airport in New York. I saw you, but you took no notice of me.”
Everything could have turned out differently if he hadn’t happened to be sitting behind her on the plane. If the man beside her hadn’t called the flight attendant to complain about her. If Alessandro hadn’t intervened.
A year before that, they had even been together in the same room, in Greenwich Village, New York. So many people, so many faces, they hadn’t even looked at each other. Suppose that had been all? Suppose one of them had gone another way in the months after that, not the wrong way, just another way?
“So much could have gone wrong,” she said. “And I don’t mean the really bad things. Only little ones. I could have missed my flight. Or you could have missed yours. Sheer chance. That’s what it is, right? We’re together only by chance.”
“Do you really think that?”
“What I think is that in the old days, people held their gods responsible for what happened by chance. And if that’s the reason we met—”
Smiling, he put a finger on her lips. “That way you can find connections between anything, and you end up believing in the good Lord or a great world conspiracy.”
“Or TABULA.”
“Yes, TABULA too.”
“Maybe they saw to it that you had the seat behind mine in the plane. Or that my baggage was lost, and I had trouble with the flight attendant. Or that you—”
“Hey,” he interrupted her quietly. “It makes no difference now. None at all.”
She took a deep breath and calmed down. The wind helped, the sight of the sea, most of all Alessandro. Simply because he was with her. His body so close to hers.
Drowsily, she closed her eyes and a little later felt him kissing their lids. He did that sometimes to make sure she had sweet dreams. She lay in his arms, feeling very supple, even in human form.
The yacht made her way through the waves, westward through an avalanche of spray.
Don’t look back.
No, certainly not. Not anymore.
Then she awakened. Everything was as it had been. He was there, holding her. They were lying under the throw, in the warm, gentle sea breeze. The engines hummed deep in the hull. The sky might have been swept clear. All was well.
“I was dreaming,” he said.
“Me too.”
She had plans for her dreams. And his.
“One day,” she said. And fell silent again.
Sometime she would tell him about them.
Not today. Not tomorrow.
But one day, yes.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KAI MEYER is one of Germany’s most successful authors, with millions of books sold worldwide. His novels have been translated into thirty languages. The British edition of The Flowing Queen (published in the U.S. as The Water Mirror) won the 2007 Marsh Award for Best Children’s Book in Translation, and his historical novel The Vow was turned into a movie by celebrated German director Dominik Graf. Kai lives in Germany. You can visit him online at www.kaimeyer.com.
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BOOKS BY KAI MEYER
Arcadia Burns
Arcadia Awakens
CREDITS
Cover art © 2014 by Hendrik Jaques Lombard
Cover design by Michelle Taormina
COPYRIGHT
Balzer + Bray is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
ARCADIA FALLS
Copyright © 2011 by Kai Meyer
Translation copyright © 2014 by HarperCollins Publishers
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Meyer, Kai.
[Arkadien fällt. English]
Arcadia falls / Kai Meyer; translated from the German by Anthea Bell. — First U.S. edition.
pagescm
“Originally published in Germany in 2011 by Carlsen Verlag”—Copyright page.
Sequel to: Arcadia burns.
Summary: “Rosa and Alessandro go on the run from killers”—Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-06-200610-3 (hardcover bdg.)
[1. Organized crime—Fiction. 2. Supernatural—Fiction. 3. Shape-shifting—Fiction. 4. Vendetta—Fiction. 5. Love—Fiction. 6. Sicily (Italy)—Fiction. 7. Italy—Fiction.] I. Bell, Anthea, translator. II. Title.
PZ7.M57171113As 20142013014512
[Fic]—dc23CIP
AC
* * *
EPub Edition © JANUARY 2014 ISBN: 9780062092984
14 15 16 17 18 LP/RRDH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First U.S. Edition, 2014
Originally published in Germany in 2011 by Carlsen Verlag.
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Kai Meyer, Arcadia Falls
