by Kai Meyer
“Sorry to turn up like this. I’m au pairing in Millbrook. They gave me three days off, and I thought I’d—”
“Visit your family in this city.”
She smiled. “I really wanted to buy some shoes.”
He looked down at her steel-toed boots.
“Oh, not these!” she added in pretended indignation. “My new ones are at my hotel.”
“Where are you staying?”
“The Parker Meridien.” She knew the place because the best burgers in town were sold in the restaurant in the lobby.
“Good address. Not cheap.”
“The family’s paying for everything.”
“Who’s your father?”
“Corrado Carnevare.” A name that Alessandro had once mentioned.
“Never met him.”
“Cesare’s cousin.” She batted her eyelashes in the direction of the doorman. “I thought we were a little more closely related than it seems we are. Sorry about that.”
He was still inspecting her, but she had an uncomfortable feeling that he trusted his instinct more than what he saw before him: a pale girl with glacier-blue eyes, a mane of blond hair, and the gleam of nervous sweat on her forehead.
“So how can I help you?” he inquired. Help her. If that was his idea of her, okay. “You didn’t come here just to say hello.”
She looked around as if to locate the source of the noise in the club. “It’s so loud in here,” she shouted against the beat.
“Michele,” said the bouncer, turning the microphone of his headset aside to speak to his boss, “we’ll have to leave in half an hour. The others are there. Everything’s almost ready.” He listened to a voice in his earphone again, then whispered something to Michele. Michele’s expression didn’t change; he simply nodded.
Rosa waited until he turned to her again and then said, “Can you give me five minutes?”
Michele Carnevare smiled. “Come with me.”
She followed him behind the bar and down a narrow staff corridor. At the end of it, a flight of steps led up to a gallery of wrought-iron latticework just under the layer of mist. It was closed to the public. Apart from the two of them, there were only a few security guards up here, black-clad and also wearing headsets. They were watching what went on down below.
Rosa’s glance fell on Danai Thanassis moving toward the exit on the other side of the hall under the protection of her bodyguard. “She’s beautiful,” she said, impressed.
“So everyone here thinks.” He didn’t say whether that included him. “She lives on a cruise ship belonging to her father. Whenever the Stabat Mater docks in New York, she comes here. Every evening for a week or so, then she’s gone again for a few months.”
“The Stabat Mater?”
He shrugged his shoulders and changed the subject. “Well then, Lilia Carnevare. What exactly can I do for you?”
“I’m looking for a girlfriend,” she said. “More of an online friendship, really. She told me to visit when I was in Manhattan, said that we’d, well, go out together.”
He nodded as gravely as if she had just been explaining his taxes to him.
“And now she doesn’t answer when I call her.” Rosa hoped she wasn’t laying the naiveté on too thick.
“So?”
“I think it’s mean of her.”
“And what’s that to do with me?” His tone of voice was still calm.
“She and I are friends. Or I thought so, anyway. And now she’s just disappeared on me. There I am in my stupid expensive hotel, going on tours around the city instead of hanging out with her.”
He sighed quietly. “Look, you’re cute and all that, but I’m in a hurry. A club like this doesn’t run itself. If I can help you, then—”
“She works here, she said. But that was quite a while ago.”
“If she works here, then she has her hands full right now.”
“I just want a quick word with her. I won’t take her away from her job.”
He was still looking at her intently, not offensively, as she had half expected, but with curiosity. As if the way she was taking up his time with trivialities intrigued him.
“What’s her name?”
“Valerie.”
“And what else?”
“Valerie Paige.”
If this was a name that he linked with anything more than a paycheck, he didn’t show it. “Yes, she worked here two or three years ago. Not since then.”
“Fuck.”
“I’m afraid I can’t help you any further.”
She looked at her shoes. “Sorry. You’re in a hurry, and I’ve been wasting your time with this garbage.”
He touched the tip of her nose with his finger and smiled. He was alarmingly attractive, and for the first time she really did see a resemblance to Alessandro. “But after all, we’re blood relations, right?”
She cleared her throat and tore her eyes away from his face. The layer of mist hovered just above their heads. Here and there dream catchers hung down through the swathes of vapor.
“What do those do?” she asked.
“They catch the dreams of everyone dancing down there and then throw them back down, arranged and sorted. Better than any drug.”
Now she did turn back to him, to see whether he was making fun of her. But his smile and his nut-brown eyes still seemed perfectly honest.
Naively she asked, “What, right now?”
Michele leaned on the balustrade of the gallery. Even his damn hands looked good. “Anyone who comes to the Dream Room sees things you don’t see anywhere else. Or that are invisible anywhere else.”
“You should put that in your ads.”
“We do.”
“Oops.” She smiled. “Looks like you know how to run your business.”
It was the dimples. They were just like Alessandro’s. They were there even when he wasn’t smiling. Blood relations, yes—only the relationship wasn’t with her.
She leaned over and dropped a light kiss on his cheek. “Thanks,” she said. “And again, I’m sorry to have been a nuisance.” He smelled of aftershave.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Eighteen.”
“You look younger.”
“A lot of people say that.”
“I’m sure those guys at the entrance asked to see your ID.” Now he sounded almost sorry about something. But the dimples were still there. “If not, I’ll have to fire them.”
She was boiling hot all of a sudden. “Oh,” she said quietly.
“Don’t let it bother you. You couldn’t have known who owned this place.”
“They saw my name.”
“They recognized it. And they have their instructions. Some names mean trouble for us here. Obama. Bin Laden.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Alcantara.”
She didn’t have to look around to know that she wasn’t going to get back down from this gallery. He was standing in her way, and here came his security men. She heard footsteps on the iron latticework. Very close.
“That was a lie,” she whispered. “You’re not in any hurry.”
“Oh, but I am.”
“Then why didn’t you say right away that—”
“I wanted to find out what it is that Alessandro likes about you.” That charming smile again. “Apart from the obvious.”
She tried to spin around, but a powerful arm grabbed her from behind and held her. She heard distorted voices from a headset very close to her ear.
The worst of it was that she couldn’t avoid his eyes anymore.
“Shit,” she murmured.
With his fingertip, he touched his cheek where her lips had touched it. “I know what you did.”
RETRIBUTION
THEY GAGGED ROSA, BOUND her hands and feet, and threw her into the back of a delivery van. When the metal door was bolted behind her, she lay there alone in the dark, doing her best to rouse the reptile within her.
It didn’t work.
She tried to do it by
concentrating hard, but that was hopeless in her present situation. Then by dwelling on her fury with Michele. No chance.
The van began to move uphill. Rosa rolled over the floor, groaning, and collided with the rear door. The noise of the nighttime streets grew louder. They were climbing the ramp of an underground garage, and now they joined the traffic. She heard the muffled voices of two men in the front seat but couldn’t make out the words.
Now she was lying on her side, with her knees drawn up, her tights torn, her hands tied behind her back, and her feet painfully lashed together. The cables cut into her skin and wouldn’t work looser by even a fraction of an inch. There was a rubber ball in her mouth, held there by a strap buckled tightly behind her head. With the tip of her tongue, she could feel someone else’s tooth marks in it. She wasn’t the first to go through this ordeal.
The floor of the van was sandy. God knows what they usually carried around in it. When the tires bumped over manhole covers and potholes, she was tossed around, grazing her skin. Once, the back of her head hit the side wall of the van, and for a moment she saw swirling lights in the darkness.
The more desperately she tried to force herself to shift shape, the more impossible it seemed. She felt not a rising chill but waves of heat as her fear got the upper hand. Her clothes were drenched in sweat; her hair stuck to her forehead.
They hadn’t even given her an injection, like Cesare had that time when he’d wanted to make sure she didn’t get away from him in her snake form. Michele Carnevare didn’t need second sight to guess at her lack of experience. She had known for only four months what she was, and what she had inherited. An Arcadian first shifted shape on the verge of adulthood, seldom before the age of seventeen. Merely by counting on his fingers, Michele could tell that the hormonal turmoil of adolescence had only recently given way to something much worse.
All the same—it ought to be possible. Several times, she’d seen Alessandro change into a panther at will. Yet something or other kept her from doing it. No self-control, probably.
And then she knew what it was. She literally couldn’t change her spots, like the proverbial leopard. While Alessandro was able to put his own interests to the back of his mind when he had to do something he didn’t like, to achieve his one great aim, she couldn’t do the same. For her, changing shape at will was about as realistic an idea as jumping across the East River. She was always herself, and anyone could see what she was thinking from a mile away. The whole show she put on of being head of her clan was a farce. She didn’t want it; she wasn’t able to do it.
It was the same with changing into the snake. The harder she tried to force the transformation, the more useless it was. Her body wasn’t interested in the least—it just wanted to crouch there in a heap and wait for the danger to pass.
When Salvatore Pantaleone, the former capo dei capi, had attacked her at the top of the Sicilian ravine, she had turned into a snake within seconds. Maybe if Michele or one of the others went for her…But could she wait that long? And wouldn’t Michele foresee that very thing? He was no fool—he might even be counting on her transformation.
He had something planned for her, and it seemed to be only part of a larger scheme. That was why they were in such a hurry. Everything was almost ready, the security man had said. Ready for what? They hadn’t been expecting Rosa, but there was obviously room for her, too, in whatever net they had cast.
Bitter gall rose in her throat. In disgust, she swallowed it down. With the rubber ball in her mouth, she’d choke on her own vomit.
She had shifted shape twice when the lives of others were at stake. The first time out of love for Alessandro, in a cellar near the Gibellina monument while Cesare’s henchmen were coming to kill him. And the second time beside her dying sister, when her hatred for Pantaleone blotted out everything else.
But how about her own life? Would the snake show up to save itself?
She had to lie there and wait. The men in the front seat were laughing. The sound of the honking horn and the engine noise came in through the vents of the van, and once there was music, like a gigantic carnival. Maybe they were in Times Square.
Now and then, when they stopped, Rosa kicked both feet against the side wall of the van with all her might. Again and again, until her tights were hanging around her calves in scraps and the skin underneath wasn’t in much better shape. But nothing she did in here would attract any attention outside. This was Manhattan. No one was going to notice a clattering sound in a delivery van driving by.
In her helplessness, she bit on the rubber ball until her jaws ached. Her pulse was racing, but the Lamia in her was not impressed. It might have been putting Rosa to the test.
Her ability to change shape could have been a gift. Instead it just confirmed what Rosa already knew. She was different. Not like ordinary people, not like the other Arcadians. Her head was simply too messed up.
She stretched out full length on her back, swallowed sour saliva, breathed more slowly, and waited to see what would happen.
At last the van stopped, and this time she heard the doors of the driver’s cab being opened. More voices joined those of the first two men. They were expected.
It was bitterly cold in the back of the van.
Footsteps crunched in the snow outside. The street noises had died down a good deal. They weren’t in the middle of city traffic anymore. Maybe this was someone’s yard.
When the rear door was opened, she saw the men’s outlines, with gnarled branches behind them. Leafless trees, made visible in the darkness by the red back lights of the van. A park. Maybe the park.
One of the men climbed into the back while another leveled a shotgun at her. They knew about it. They were making doubly sure.
“Same as before,” said the man in the van. “Only a girl.”
Her stapler was in her jacket back in the club, and they had taken her cell phone away from her.
She heard Michele’s voice outside. “Then give her the injection now.”
She screamed in spite of the rubber ball when the man rolled her roughly over on her stomach, raised her skirt, and dug a needle into one buttock. Then they were holding her. The hands of strange men on her skin. She had no memory of the events of sixteen months ago, but her body recognized the situation at once. She began kicking and struggling, hit the man on the chin with her elbow, defended herself as best she could.
It made no difference. He hauled her out into the open air and set her on her feet in the snow. Someone undid the strap at the back of her head and took the ball out of her mouth.
“Assholes!” she spat.
There were four men, including Michele Carnevare and the bouncer, obviously now promoted to bodyguard. Behind them in the snow stood a black jeep with mirrored windows. Both vehicles had stopped beside a wide pathway through the park, near empty benches and overflowing trash cans. There was light behind a nearby avenue of trees, as if searchlights had been set up there. Indistinct voices came from that direction; figures were moving around. Was there any point in screaming to draw attention to herself? But Michele would never have made her get out in this spot if the people over there hadn’t been in his pay.
“What do you want with me?” she asked him, ignoring the other three.
“And what do you want with Valerie?” he replied. “I wasn’t lying when I said she’d disappeared. I’d very much like to know where she is myself.”
“So?”
“Did she have anything to do with the murders?”
“What murders?”
He gave her face a resounding slap. Her head flew to one side, her cheek burning. When she looked at him again, all she saw was his dimples. Alessandro’s dimples.
“What murders?” she asked again.
This time it was the bouncer who moved to hit her. Michele held his arm back. “That’ll do.”
She laughed at the bald-headed man. “Go fuck yourself.” She could taste blood in her mouth, but she held his angry gaze until Michele
sent him back to the jeep. Only then did he turn to her again.
“The serum will keep you from shifting shape for the next quarter of an hour. You know how it works, I assume. It’s very effective. Tano got the stuff—you knew him as well, right? One hears this and that. For instance, that you’re to blame for his death.”
Did he expect a reply to that? She said nothing.
“I wasn’t expecting you,” he went on. “Or any other Alcantara. This was to be just a party, a bit of fun in the snow for members of the family.”
The lights beyond the trees. The shadowy movements. She began to guess what was going on here. She felt sick to her stomach, and everything about her hurt—her face, her bruised legs; even her butt felt as if the needle were still in her flesh.
“You’re going to hunt human beings? Here in Central Park?” By now she had recognized the nocturnal skyline above the trees; in the distance to the left, she thought she saw the roof of the Dakota building. West Drive couldn’t be far away. They were probably somewhere near Seventy-Fifth or Seventy-Sixth Street, maybe a little farther south.
“The murders,” he repeated. “Don’t tell me you haven’t heard about them. Are you trying to say that you just happen to be here in New York by chance? Now, of all times? Does Alessandro know you’re here?”
“Who’s been murdered?” she asked. “Some of the Carnevares?”
Once again he took a menacing step toward her, and this time she saw that he could barely restrain himself. He had enviable powers of self-control, but below the surface he was seething.
“My brother Carmine is dead. Two of my cousins, Tony and Lucio, were gunned down in the street when they were taking their kids to school. A third cousin has a bullet in the back of his neck, and no one can say how much longer he’ll live. His name is Gino.” His eyes were focused intently on hers now, as if he were trying to read the truth there.
“I don’t know anything about that,” she said.
He took a deep breath, and only when he retreated again did she realize that he had picked up the scent of her sweating terror. He didn’t believe a word of what she said, but obviously he was in no mood to interrogate her. She could sense the excitement that had hold of him now. Sheer bloodlust.
