Arcadia Burns (23 page)

“She was hardly in any state to stand on her own feet,” she objected. “Your interrogations didn’t pass over her without a trace,
avvocato
. How could she have run away from men like those bodyguards out there?”

There was genuine surprise in Trevini’s face. “She was in good health when she left here. A little weak, maybe, but in perfectly good health.”

Rosa’s eyes narrowed, and they were no longer the eyes of a snake. She had shifted back without being aware of it, feeling no more than a little tingling and itching. “When Valerie turned up at the palazzo yesterday, she was totally exhausted.”

Now that the spell of her snake gaze was broken, the malicious sparkle that made her so furious returned to Trevini’s smile. “Then either something happened to her on the way, or she’s been acting a part for your benefit.”

“How could she have—” But her words died away, because she already knew the answer. “Iole would never have let Valerie in if she hadn’t been in such poor condition. But as it was…”

“A cunning little thing; I said so. You didn’t simply leave her behind in the palazzo, did you? Maybe even without anyone to guard her?”

Rosa rubbed her face. She took her cell phone out of her pocket. It was switched off, and she had to type in the code. Then she called the number of the palazzo.

Trevini bent his head. “No one answering, I suppose?”

“Keep your mouth shut.”

“Let’s hope nothing has happened…”

Impatiently, she put the phone away again and turned to the steps.

“You’re not going to kill me?” he asked her retreating back, and he sounded genuinely shocked. No longer afraid. Only surprised.

“No.”

“But you can’t help yourself, Rosa. Don’t you feel that? Lamias are not merciful beings. Lamias never forgive. Costanza knew that.”

She went up the stairs, leaving him lying there helpless in the empty pool. “I will also make sure that di Santis doesn’t touch you. You’re not worth the trouble,
avvocato
.”

“Di Santis?” He laughed quietly. “She’s only a peon. Yours or mine, what does that matter? Listen to your nature, Rosa. It’s in your blood. Why resist it? You are what you are. And so you’ll sign my death sentence, if not now then later.”

She climbed up over the edge of the pool. “We’ll see about that.”

Trevini’s voice followed her, and now there was something in it that went beyond bitterness. “Your grandmother collected the skins of Arcadians. Your father—well, we’ve both seen what he’s capable of. And what does that say about you, Rosa?
What does that make you?
”

She closed the door behind her, but his words went on echoing in her mind. So she was glad when her cell phone rang once she was in the white-tiled corridor. With shaking fingers, she took it out. “Iole?”

“It’s me.”

“Alessandro! Thank God.”

“Where are you? I’ve tried calling a thousand times.” He sounded harassed. “Bad news. Michele isn’t in New York anymore. He flew to Italy yesterday.”

She stopped with the cell phone pressed to her ear.

“Michele is here, Rosa—in Sicily.”

A
N HOUR AND A
half later, Rosa was racing through the twilight in the BMW. She was just turning off the expressway when the cell phone on the passenger seat rang.

“I’m at the driveway now,” said Alessandro. The sound of his engine died away in the background.

“Then wait for me there.”

“No sign of the guards at the gate.”

“Shit.”

“I’ll take a closer look.”

“No!” she said firmly. “Too dangerous.”

“What about Iole? She’s alone up there.”

“Your men are there. They’re—”

Alessandro interrupted her. “If Michele’s managed to eliminate the guards at the gate, he may well have dealt with Gianni and the other two in the palazzo as well.”

She turned up the heating in the car. “Do you think Michele’s on his own? Apart from Valerie.”

“She makes him much stronger than any bunch of trigger-happy killers. He has someone on the inside. The others in the palazzo weren’t expecting that. Nor was I.”

She could have kicked herself for failing to lock Valerie in. Suppose Val’s fear of dogs was only another ruse?

“I’m such an idiot,” she whispered, before she realized what he had just said. But before she could ask any more questions, he admitted, “There’s something else.”

“Damn it, Alessandro…”

“I was
not
lying to you when I said I had nothing to do with the murders of Mattia, Carmine, and the others. I swear that’s the truth.” He hesitated for a fraction of a second. “But the attempt on Michele’s life, the killer that Guerrini sent to New York—”

“So Trevini was right.”

“I meant it to fail. I intended for Michele to follow the trail back to me and face me in person, instead of hunting my girlfriend through Central Park. That was a cowardly thing to do.”

“You planned it all? For him to turn up here?”

“Not at the palazzo, but in Sicily, yes. That’s why I wanted Gianni and the others to be with you. I couldn’t know that Valerie was working with Michele. And would still be on his side, even after Mattia’s death…I should have factored that into the equation. What a mess I’ve made.”

She could have shaken him—but despite all reason she was moved. “You should have told me.”

“I didn’t want you to have any more to do with it. So that you could put the whole thing behind you. And I
will
kill Michele, one way or another. I’d have liked to do it on my own terms, that’s all. The bastard foiled me by planting Valerie on you.”

“He isn’t as clever as all that,” she objected. “I think she really did run away from him, or she wouldn’t have stolen his
cell phone. But after she got away from Trevini’s men at the airport, I guess she didn’t know what to do next. She must have called Michele again. And of course he’d have known right away how he could use her.”

Alessandro sighed. “I’m sorry, Rosa.”

In spite of everything her longing for him, for his touch, was like a physical pain. “Val fooled us both.”

“I’m going to put an end to this now. Tonight.”

“I’ll be with you in half an hour. We’ll go up there together.”

But his car door was already closing. She heard his footsteps crunch on the gravel.

“Alessandro!”

“There’s another car here at the gate,” he said. “A green Panda. With one of those cards lying on the dashboard that doctors display so that they can leave their vehicles in no-parking areas.”

“It must belong to the doctor I called for Valerie.”

There was a metallic click.

“Do you know him?” asked Alessandro.

“Not well. He comes from Piazza Armerina. He’s kind of…a friend of the family, you might say.”

“He’s lying in the trunk of his car, shot dead. Michele must have stopped him on the way. Wait a minute…”

“What is it?”

“I’m just looking around. There are at least two trails of blood here leading into the bushes beyond the gateway. The gate itself is open…the control box has been destroyed. And there are bullet holes.”

The dry, hilly landscape was racing past her windows in the dim light. It would be a few miles before she saw more trees. Now and then headlights came toward her, and she was dazzled by another pair in her rearview mirror. Her eyes were reacting more sensitively to bright light than usual.

“Okay,” said Alessandro. “I think I know what happened now.”

“Are the men dead?”

“Yes. He hauled their bodies behind the bushes. When they realized that the man in the car wasn’t a doctor they must have tried to lock the gate again, and someone destroyed the control box.”

“The gate wouldn’t have kept anyone out! And there isn’t even fencing on both sides of it.”

“There’s a slope, though. And trees. Like it or not, Michele must have had to go a mile up to the palazzo on foot. And I’ll have to do the same.”

“Wait until I get there, and we’ll go together.”

“No, this is my fault, and I’m not letting Michele do anything else to you.”

“Our chances are much better if there are two of us.”

“Rosa, listen to me very carefully. Stay exactly where you are now, and wait until I call you again.”

“Oh, sure!” she said. “You bet I will.”

“Michele wants to take his revenge on me. That’s why he means to kill you first.”

“He’d better start a club with the Hungry Man: the Kill Rosa to Punish Alessandro Club.” She was making a great
effort to hide the unsteadiness in her voice. “There should be twelve of my guards somewhere around the place. What about them?”

“Can’t see anyone.”

“But Michele can’t have eliminated them all on his own.”

“The Hundinga have stopped howling.”

“Maybe they left.”

“Maybe.”

Her hands clutched the steering wheel. “But they didn’t, did they?”

“No,” he said. “They’re sure to be roaming around here somewhere. And if they’re on their way to the palazzo, or there already, then your people won’t—” He let out a low curse.

“What?” she called into her phone, in too much mental confusion to get out a complete sentence. Her fears for him were growing by the minute.

There was a sharp explosion in the background.

“Are those
shots
?” She tasted iron on the tip of her tongue.

“Farther up the slope,” he said. “Near the palazzo, I think.”

“I’ll call the judge. Quattrini can send reinforcements and—”

“The police? How long do you think it will take them to get here? An hour? Two hours? Forget it. And when this is over, you’ll be glad there were no police here turning the whole palazzo upside down.”

“I don’t care whether—”

“Yes, you do. Well, you should. We’re
capi
. People like us have no choice but to take charge ourselves.”

“If any harm comes to Iole—”

“The police couldn’t do anything about that if it would take them forever to get here.”

“Men from Piazza Armerina? A couple of calls and I could summon twenty or thirty of them.”

“It’d all take far too long. Anyway, I’m already on my way up to the house.”

She felt choked by her helplessness and fear. “Stupid idiot,” she whispered, but he knew what she meant.

“Love you, too.”

“Take care of yourself.”

“So will you stop somewhere and wait?” he asked. The climb through the olive groves was beginning to make him sound breathless.

“Okay.”

“Really?”

“Of course not!” she said.

“Then I’ll have to make sure all this is over before you get here.”

“Twenty minutes max. And don’t do anything silly.”

“Twenty minutes against the rest of our lives. Sounds like a good bargain to me.”

“The rest of our lives,” she repeated softly, and stared into the gathering night. The outlines of the landscape blurred before her eyes.

“Promise?”

She ended the call and threw her cell phone onto the passenger seat.

“Promise,” she swore to the darkness.

A
LESSANDRO HAD LEFT HIS
Ferrari at the side of the road next to the iron gate. The doctor’s Panda stood a few feet away. Its trunk was closed.

Rosa stopped, letting the beam of the BMW’s headlights illuminate the undergrowth on both sides of the gate. The gate itself stood ajar, just as Alessandro had said.

She slipped out of her car, while the alarm inside it beeped because she’d left the lights on. Hastily, she closed the door and went over to the Ferrari. She felt a pang at the thought that Alessandro had been here so recently. And now he was gone, was somewhere up there in the dark.

She opened the driver’s door and touched the leather of the seat with her fingertips. It was a kind of compulsion. She wanted to feel Alessandro, and this was the best she could do.

Then she slammed the door, much too loud, and wondered whether she owed it to the dead man to look inside the trunk of the Panda. He was dead because she had called him.

Better get used to that kind of thing.

Her headlights had to be easily visible from pretty far away, so she hurried back to the BMW and switched them off. The silence that followed the beeping alarm felt doubly oppressive.

When she stepped through the opening in the gate, she
saw the trails of blood that Alessandro had mentioned. With a lump in her throat, she looked into the undergrowth. The men were lying in a small hollow. Four shapes, twisted and distorted. Yet more corpses.

Pulling herself together, Rosa clambered out of the bushes and back to the driveway, her legs stiff. By now it was almost entirely dark. The full moon cast silvery light on the tops of the trees standing on the hills. She had a moment’s shock as a car raced along the road as if out of nowhere, briefly bathing the parked automobiles in bright radiance, and then disappeared again. For once, she wished it had been one of the judge’s vehicles keeping her under observation. But today—of all days—there was no sign of any of the people who had been shadowing her.

She guessed that Alessandro must have reached the palazzo by now. Cutting through the olive groves on foot was shorter than walking up the drive. There would probably still be guns lying around here somewhere, but she couldn’t bring herself to search the bodies for pistols.

She listened once again for any howling from the Hundinga, but she heard only the sound of nocturnal insects and a single call from an owl. Pressing her lips together, she set off, hurried up the little slope on the other side of the drive, and ducked down among the gnarled olive trees that grew as far as the eye could see. After only a few steps, she found the path along which the olive pickers carried their baskets at harvest time. She had last been this way when she’d stolen out of the palazzo to go to Isola Luna with the Carnevares. Fundling had been waiting for
her down on the road, to drive her to the coast.

She had hardly thought of Fundling since her last visit to his sickbed. He made her feel uneasy. The strange young man was still unknowable to her, one of those mysterious
gaps in the crowd
that he had once mentioned. Crazy, confused words.

A shot rang out in the distance, echoing down the slope. Two birds rose nearby and fluttered away.

By this time Rosa was a good third of the way up the drive. She still couldn’t see the lights of the palazzo. At that moment heavy clouds moved in front of the moon. The rustling of branches in the evening wind sounded ghostly when the trees were barely visible.

There was something lying on the path in front of her.

Another dead body. But no: As she came closer, the shapeless bundle turned out to be the first of several items of clothing, stripped off and discarded. She knew that sweater. A cell phone was sticking out of one pocket of the crumpled jeans. So Alessandro was stealing through the darkness somewhere up there in his panther form. Maybe he was already at the house. Had the gunshot been for him?

She could have tried her own transformation, and for a few seconds she felt sure that would be the best way to go unnoticed. But she had no experience covering a distance of any length in her snake form, and she wasn’t sure how well she would keep up. So she continued walking, sweating profusely and persuading herself that it was only the wind on her damp skin making her shiver.

Points of light emerged ahead of her in the darkness. Only a few of the palazzo windows were lit.

Another shot, then two more in rapid succession.

A dog howled. One of the Hundinga. Or maybe Sarcasmo.

Where the olive groves gave way to lemon trees, she found another bundle on the ground. The man was naked. He couldn’t have been dead for long; the gaping wounds in his body gleamed wet with blood. His throat was torn to pieces, his head at a twisted angle. He had been killed with great savagery.

She heard the sound of paws, and panting—it came from the east, where the tall foundation wall of the panoramic terrace rose among a few palm trees. Climbing over an old wooden fence, she pressed close to a tree trunk.

Two more bodies lay not far away. Both were fully clothed. They were two of the guards here on the Alcantara property, and they had obviously been killed when they found something: several bags and backpacks lying at the foot of a palm. The wall of the terrace rose twelve feet high, right behind the tree.

Rosa held her breath and stood perfectly still.

A gigantic Doberman, larger than a wolf, coming from the south, was approaching the dead men and her find. Rosa could see the animal only from its movements, since in the darkness it blended into its surroundings.

There was a crunching, tearing sound as it changed shape in motion. From one bound to the next the creature rose on its hind legs, stretching as the bones shifted and extended. The dog’s rough coat merged with human flesh. Muscles showed, moving beneath the skin.

In the faint moonlight, the dog’s face changed, the muzzle retreated, the forehead advanced. The man raised his arms—paws became hands—and rubbed his eyes.

A few seconds later, stark naked, he went up to one of the bags and took something out. The display of a cell phone lit up, illuminating the man’s face from below. Rosa put his age at about forty, maybe a little older. He had angular, scarred features, and his hair was cut very short.

He spoke into the phone in a whisper. His accent was harsh, maybe from eastern or northern Europe, and he seemed to be reporting back on the situation to someone.

“…killed two of my men,” she heard the Hunding say. “…can’t wait any longer. The hell with the plan…going straight in…”

She dared not go any closer. Even breathing was risky, but she couldn’t hold her breath any longer.

The man lowered the cell phone and glanced around.

She was in total darkness, yet he was looking straight at her. He uttered one last, angry remark down the phone—“…for me to decide…”—and then switched it off and dropped it into the open bag.

Slowly, he came toward Rosa, a huge outline in front of the gray, moonlit wall. An angry growl issued from his throat.

If she moved her head, however slightly, he would spot her. She could do nothing but keep staring at him, whether she wanted to or not.

Her heart was racing, pumping the snake’s icy breath through her limbs with every beat. If she shifted shape now, he would definitely notice her. And she was far from sure whether, in her snake form, she would be agile enough to escape his fangs.

He dropped to all fours and exploded back into dog shape, so quickly that it was like an old-fashioned special effect in a movie. Here was the man—
cut!—
there was the dog. Not even a dissolve.

The creature was still nine feet away from her. His Doberman coat smelled of human sweat.

Once again she heard the howling of the others up at the house. They were besieging the palazzo. Shots rang out from the terrace right above them.

The Hunding froze.

A second Hunding howled in pain in the darkness. A body hit water. The bullet must have knocked one of them into the pool.

The chill in Rosa reached the ends of her hair. Everything about her was tingling, itching, burning. She tried to hold back the transformation, fight it. But she was in deadly danger, and her body reacted uncontrollably.

More gunshots. Howling that lasted longer this time. Another bullet had hit home.

The Doberman let out an angry growl, snapped menacingly at the air, then spun around and stormed along the foundation wall of the terrace to the nearest flight of steps to join the rest of the pack.

Rosa closed her eyes. Behind her lids, the pupils narrowed to slits. Her split tongue touched fangs. She opened her eyes again, but it was still dark. It took her a moment to realize why. Hissing, she glided out from under her heap of black clothes, over dry ground, and on into the moonlight.