by Kai Meyer
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.
THE HEIRESS
ALESSANDRO 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.
She still understood very little of what had happened. Florinda must have spent the afternoon driving to Syracuse with her men. Which left the question of just how much her aunt knew about the Dallamanos and their find on the seafloor. Was there a link between Lamias and Panthera, between Alcantaras and Carnevares, one that both clans desperately wanted to keep secret at any price?
More and more, she was realizing that she could take only one step at a time. The first was Florinda herself. Or alternatively—and it was hard to admit this—Rosa’s own sister. All she had seen was a Lamia, a member of her dynasty. It hadn’t necessarily been Florinda. And yet…
“Something’s burning,” said Alessandro.
Farther up the slope a fire was blazing, hidden every once in a while by the trees, then flaring again.
When they drove into the front courtyard, the basin of the fountain was aflame like a torch or a pyre, the fire bathing the facade of the palazzo in its glowing light, bringing the statues in their niches to life.
Alessandro drove slowly over to the blazing fire. “What is that?”
“Birds’ nests.”
He gave her a sidelong glance. “Who’s burning something here in the middle of the night?”
“Well, who would hate birds enough to have their nests knocked out of the trees?” Florinda was a mystery to her. From the start there had been an invisible wall between them.
The flames blazed high, a crackling signal fire on the dark mountainside. You could probably see it from miles away.
The same thought occurred to both of them. They looked westward over the olive trees, out into the moonlit landscape, but saw only the tiny lights of farms and villages far away.
At the entrance to the inner courtyard, Rosa said, “I’m getting out here. Will you wait for me?”
He pointed to the revolver. “What are you going to do with that?”
She weighed the gun indecisively in her hand, felt awkward, and almost left it in the car. But then she pushed it into the waistband of her jeans. The cold metal pressed uncomfortably against her hipbone.
“I’ll be right back,” she said, climbing out. Sparks flew above the front courtyard, and the air was filled with the smell of burnt branches and leaves.
“Rosa,” he began, and she guessed what was coming next. “I can’t stay here. You saw what happened. You saw me. And there will be others worse than me at this hunt. Cesare is only one of them.” He shook his head. “I have to go there alone.”
She took a deep breath. Wondered how she could stop him, and knew at once that he wouldn’t let her. In his place, she would probably have done the same.
The engine roared as he suddenly stepped on the gas. The door slid away from Rosa’s hand. Dust and pebbles spurted up. The car moved forward in a curve, completed a circuit of the fiery fountain, and raced away toward the drive.
She stood motionless, watching him go. He was driving much too fast.
About fifty yards away the brake lights came on—then the car stopped. Her body tensed. For a moment she thought of following him. But Alessandro was only closing the passenger door from the inside, and he drove away again.
If the zookeeper does know where the next hunt is to take place, then we’ll hear about it, too, first thing tomorrow at the latest, he had told her in Syracuse. But now she wondered if the captain of the yacht hadn’t already told him on the phone. If so, Alessandro must have known all along, and yet he hadn’t mentioned it to her. Because he wanted to protect her, for God’s sake!
Behind her, glowing drifts of sparks rose to the night sky. “You stupid idiot,” she whispered.
The rear lights of the car finally disappeared behind the olive trees. Rosa turned, hurried through the heat of the flames to the gate, and entered the dark inner courtyard.
“Zoe? Florinda?”
There was a melancholy silence in the halls and corridors of the palazzo, as well as the charred smell of the fire. Rosa’s footsteps echoed back from the walls. As she explored the rooms, she didn’t need to switch on any of the chandeliers; it was never entirely dark in this house. Lamps and wall-mounted lights were always on in some corner or other.
There was no one here. The salons and living rooms were deserted. Not a soul up in the bedrooms. Florinda’s study, too, was full of silence and shadows.
Neither Zoe nor Florinda was back from Syracuse. Maybe they were already on their way to the tribunal. Or had that, too, been just a lie to lead her astray?
She checked the bathrooms, the library, even the kitchen with its open range. A draft of air made the hanging pots and pans clink. Rosa jumped, startled not so much by the sound as by herself. Her hand went to the revolver as quickly as if she knew how to use it.
Finally she thought of looking in the locked cellars. But even as she stood indecisively in the first-floor corridor, fighting down rising panic, she heard a buzzing sound behind her.
The vibrating alarm of a cell phone.
“You?”
It was only the outline of a figure, but she recognized him at once. Not until he moved into the light cast by a table lamp did she also see his eye patch, and the white ponytail hanging over his left shoulder like a bunch of cobwebs.
Salvatore Pantaleone, the boss of bosses, head of the Sicilian Mafia. He gestured to her to be patient. Instead of addressing her, he spoke to the cell phone. “Did you recognize him?… No, go ahead, do just as he says … but make a note of the number… Yes, of course, the number!”
He ended the call, put the cell phone away, and smiled.
“I thought you didn’t use technological stuff,” she said.
“The circumstances leave me no choice. At the moment everything has to move very fast.”
The way she took the safety catch off the revolver must have told him how unfamiliar she was with guns.
“Rosa, Rosa, Rosa,” he said softly. “You walk into this house with a weapon, but you don’t keep it ready to use. You search all the rooms and corridors, but you never look in the corners properly. And you come here all by yourself, although you know what Florinda has done, and that she wants to make Zoe her heiress and dispense with you.”
He went over to an armchair, an antique with gilded wooden feet and red velvet cushions, and dropped into it. Then his one eye examined her with its keen gaze.
“Florinda and Zoe aren’t here,” he continued. “They went to Syracuse yesterday. From there they’ll be driving on to the place where the tribunal is to be held.”
Ah, she thought, both of them?
“You made it easy for them,” he went on. “Florinda is cunning; you should have worked that out by now. And Zoe, well, poor Zoe is putty in your aunt’s hands. Florinda enticed her to Sicily with promises of wealth and luxury, and even now that she knows it all, she still hopes the money can make her happy. That’s the most tragic part of it, don’t you think? Florinda is obsessed, just like her mother, your grandmother. But Zoe, credulous, malleable, ever-exploited Zoe—she just chases her dream of happiness.” The supercilious note gave his remarks a caustic undertone. “Florinda has promised your sister that she will succeed her. But Zoe has never understood what it means to be head of a
Mafia clan and of an Arcadian dynasty. She’s a pretty girl, she’s not stupid, but she’s very naive.”
“What do you want from me?” asked Rosa.
“First, your confidence.”
“And you think lying in wait for me in the dark and saying horrible things about my sister is the best way to get it?”
“Those horrible things, as you call them—you know yourself that they’re the truth. You saw through Zoe long ago, her weaknesses, her volatility. If anyone knows that she’d never make an even halfway good clan leader, it’s you. Zoe, among all the other capi of the families? Come off it, Rosa, you might as well throw her into a pool full of sharks and see what’s left when they’ve finished with her.”
“Does Florinda know that you’re against her plans?”
“Why, of course! She’s still devoted to me, but she is also full of arrogance. She refuses to admit that she’s wrong. She thinks she has plenty of time to make something of Zoe—to turn your sister into something she will never be. You, on the other hand, Rosa, have exactly what it takes.”
She laughed bitterly.
“You are not afraid. You’ve known the dark side of fate, and it didn’t break your spirit, it made you grow. You are perfect, Rosa. There’s still a lot for you to learn, but the prerequisites are all there. You’re much more like your father than Zoe is, and that may be what Florinda dislikes so much. She has never forgiven him for turning his back on the clan for your mother. Maybe she’s afraid you might do something similar.”
Her mouth was dry, her gums as raw as sandpaper. She felt sick, exhausted. And here he was talking drivel about growth and perfection. “You’re crazy.”
Quick as lightning, he was out of the chair, and a few steps brought him right up to her. She was still holding the gun, but they both knew she wasn’t going to fire it. At their first meeting in the forest, he had hit her, but he didn’t try that this time. He simply looked at her with his one bright, watchful eye.
“Oh, I don’t mind if you call me names. Zoe never did. You have a will of your own, you’re a fighter. You’ll learn to show respect, and you’ll learn much else as well. You’ll find that I’m a good teacher.”
