Arcadia Burns (6 page)

T
HE SWEAT ON
R
OSA’S
forehead was icy cold. Her face felt numb. She was running eastward with Mattia through the trees, while the Panthera chased after them.

How much longer before the effect of the serum wore off? Five minutes? Seven? There were no general rules; every Arcadian reacted to it differently. She could be bound to her human form for another ten minutes or more.

And who knew whether she’d be able to force herself to change shape? She just had to hope that the transformation would set in when danger threatened.

Out of breath, they passed the statue of a man sitting on a bench with an open book on his lap, a bronze duck looking up at him from the ground. Ahead, a paved promenade stretched around the perimeter of a pond. A silvery shimmer came from the ice on the water. In the light from the opposite bank, Rosa saw a single-story building with a pale green roof that reminded her of a circus tent. It had a tall spire like that of a church on top of it.

“Conservatory Water,” said Mattia breathlessly. “If we can make it over to the other side…”

He didn’t say what exactly would happen then, but she assumed that he meant they’d reach the high-rises on Fifth
Avenue whose lighted windows stood out against the night sky, beyond the building with the green roof and a row of bare treetops.

“If we go around it, we’ll never get there,” she managed to say, with a groan. The cold was beginning to hurt, and as soon as she saw his bare skin, it got even worse. Why was he doing this?

Rosa wanted to run over the promenade and cross the ice, but Mattia held her back.

“No, don’t! The pond is thawed out in the day so that sailboats can go on it. The layer of ice is far too thin to support us.”

Sailboats? On this tiny pond? But she wasn’t stopping to argue. She tore herself away from him again and ran northward along the perimeter. When she looked over her shoulder, she saw dark shapes on the snow-covered space between the trees, at least a dozen of them, maybe more. Several were carrying something in their mouths, and that held them back, but the rest of the pack adjusted their speed to the others, as if they didn’t trust them enough to let them lag behind with the prey. Four human bodies, to be divided among too many big cats.

Rosa was running so hard now that she could hardly breathe. Frost was getting into her lungs, and her throat felt as if she had swallowed splinters of glass.

Another set of bronze statues at the far end of the lake: Alice in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter, and the White Rabbit.

Mattia, too, was slowing down. The cold was beginning to numb him.

“Change shape!” Rosa called to him. Even her voice sounded like crushed ice.

“They can see us,” he replied, shaking his head. “They can’t know that I’m one of them.”

“You’re naked!” she snapped at him. “What do you expect them to think? That I picked up some kind of pervert on my way through the park?”

He swore—and turned into the panther. The change happened so fast that Rosa’s eyes could hardly follow it. His torso and limbs morphed at high speed; fur flowed over his skin like black oil. Then he was running ahead of her on all fours. For a moment she was almost overcome by envy. He was at most three years older than her, yet he had mastered the transformation perfectly. For him it was a gift. For Rosa, so far, it was a curse.

With the last of her strength she followed him to a terrace leading down to the pond, in front of the brick building with the green roof. She had expected them to run past the house and under the trees behind it. Fifth Avenue was so close; she could hear the nocturnal traffic as clearly as if she were standing on the sidewalk. A police siren howled as it went by, going south, and merged with the noises of the Upper East Side.

But the big cat was heading for the entrance of the building, and she realized that he intended to go in. She looked back once more. The Panthera were less than forty yards behind them. A gigantic leopard in the middle of the pack was carrying a human body in his jaws as if it weighed no more than a rabbit.

Jessie’s thin legs brushed the ground on one side of his muzzle, her hair on the other. Her arms swayed up and down at every step the big cat took. His head held high, the leopard was carrying her as the trophy of his victory. Full of pride, full of scorn.

“Michele,” whispered Rosa, her voice full of hatred.

When she turned to the single-story building again, Mattia was standing at the entrance in human form, beckoning to her with an exhausted gesture—and opening the gray metal door with his other hand. It swung inward. There was a key in the lock.

“I work here,” he managed to say, with a groan. “That’s why.”

The Panthera reached the terrace. Some of them, those who had killed no prey yet, couldn’t control their greed any longer and sped up. Rosa ran past Mattia, dragging him with her, and the two of them flung themselves against the heavy door from the inside. It latched. With trembling fingers, Mattia turned the key in the lock. Outside, several of the big cats uttered howls of fury as their claws scraped over the metal. The noise was deafening.

“The windows have grates over them,” Mattia whispered to her. “They won’t get in here even in human form.” His catlike eyes were glowing as brightly as the single emergency light above the entrance. While she saw him only as a vague outline, he must have as clear a view of her as if it were daylight. She put out one hand, her fingers so cold that she was afraid they might break off if they met the slightest resistance.
Hesitantly, she touched his shoulder. It could have been made of ice.

Only now did she realized that it was improbably warm in this building. The heat was on full blast.

“You planned to bring me here,” she said.

He nodded, faintly. “The key was on the outside of the door, and I turned the heat up hours ago. I knew what state we’d be in when we got here.”

He moved away from the entrance and opened a small switch box on the wall. A red light showed. Mattia pressed it.

“The alarm system,” he said, loud enough for those outside the door to hear it. “It’s switched on now.”

The scraping of claws stopped. Something dropped on the snow—Jessie’s body?—and now they heard Michele speak. He was back in human form.

“How long are you going to hide in there? Until morning?” He uttered a sound that was possibly meant to be a laugh, but wasn’t. It was more of an animal screech. “There’s already someone on the way to fetch men with tools.”

Mattia lowered his voice. “If the alarm goes off, this place will soon be teeming with security guards. They won’t risk that until they’ve hauled some park official out of bed and bribed him. That’ll take at least an hour, and by then the effect of the serum will have worn off.”

As if that guaranteed her survival. “Let’s set off the alarm ourselves,” she said.

“I have to talk to you before all hell breaks loose,” he said. “What’s more, then they’d find us both here, me naked and
you…well, with not much more on.”

She followed his glance to her legs, which were blue with cold. There was hardly anything left of her tights.

“Better to appear in court on immorality charges than dead,” she said, going to the window and peering out. The Panthera had retreated to the edge of the terrace. Only Jessie’s body lay in the snow, distorted, looking like a dirty garment and easily visible from the window. A promise.

Rosa abruptly turned away. She stepped aside, leaning against the brick wall. “They’re waiting.”

“Good. That gives us time.”

Long tables dominated a gloomy room that occupied the entire single story. Several dozen model boats stood there, none of them more than a foot long, with pointed sails, countless little pennants, and colored symbols. By one of the side walls stood a workbench with carpentry tools, stacks of paint and varnish cans, plastic canisters, and rolls of sailcloth. There were more tools hanging above it.

“Kids and tourists rent the boats and sail them on Conservatory Water,” said Mattia, as if it were something she would need to know. “I repair them when they break down, which is quite often.”

She looked at his glowing eyes. “What’s the plan?”

“We have to talk. About Valerie.”

“They’re going to kill us, Mattia, whether or not the serum’s still working.” She fell back against the brick wall, which was so cold that she hardly noticed her backbone rubbing against the joins in the brickwork as she slowly slid down
it. She sat on the floor with her knees drawn up. “Why Valerie? What does she have to do with any of this?”

“She and I,” said Mattia hesitantly, as if it were something to be ashamed of, after he had been running around beside her stark naked all this time, “we were a couple. And she still loves me, I know she does.”

She stared at him, unable to take this in. She didn’t feel like laughing, but she laughed all the same. It sounded slightly crazy, but it felt good.

“Love?” she repeated. “So that’s what this is all about?”

He shook his head as he crouched in front of her until their faces were level. Her eyes traveled down. “You thought of everything, but not a pair of
pants
?”

“Sorry.” He stood up, glanced at the window, and went over to the workbench. A moment later he came back with a piece of cloth, spattered with varnish, knotted around his waist. “Better?”

She nodded.

“Valerie and I,” he started again, “were inseparable for almost a year. Then I made the mistake of introducing her to my family. I took her to parties with me, to the Dream Room and a few of the other Carnevare clubs. That’s how she met Michele.”

Rosa tried to forget about the murdered girl out in the snow for a moment. To forget about her own fear. She began to guess where this story was going. “Michele took her away from you,” she said, and only then did it finally sink in that they were talking about
her
Valerie. The Valerie who always
steered clear of men. Who had never mentioned so much as a one-night stand, let alone a steady boyfriend.

“She fell for him.” Mattia sounded as if it still hurt to talk about it. “She’d have done anything and everything for him…. She
did
do anything and everything for him,” he corrected himself. He paused briefly, as if to choose his next words carefully. “She found out somehow or other. What he is, what we all are. I never told her; she must have watched him, or else she found something out by chance.”

“Mattia,” Rosa said imploringly, “why here and now? You could have asked me out for coffee to tell me this. Those people out there are going to kill us.”

“Valerie disappeared,” he said. “Sixteen months ago.”

Rosa jumped to her feet as if electrified. Her chilly skin was tingling all over from the warmth in the room. The question slipped out. “When, exactly?”

He bowed his head slightly as he looked intently at her. “Just after Halloween.”

She pressed her lips together and breathed out sharply through her nose.

Mattia went to the window again and watched the Panthera. As she waited impatiently for him to go on, she looked past him outside. All was still calm out there. Michele and the others were waiting for reinforcements to arrive with crowbars. Presumably a parks department official had already received a phone call to warn him, and to make sure that no security guards responded to an alarm from the boathouse.

“Well?” she asked.

“The last I heard, she was traveling in Europe.” He was still looking at the scene outside, and without doing so herself Rosa knew that he was staring at the girl’s corpse. “I don’t know if that’s the truth. It’s possible that Michele—”

“Killed her?” She went over to him. “Why?”

“To keep her quiet. The concordat was still in force at the time, and there was something that no one could know.” He turned his head and looked her in the eye. “I know what happened to you at that party. So does Michele.”

Her face was numb. She bit her lower lip, but didn’t feel it until she tasted blood.

“Michele?” she asked tonelessly.

Mattia nodded. “He was there,” he said. “Michele was one of them.”

R
OSA WAS PERFECTLY CALM
. Exhaustion that had nothing to do with her run came over her. Like the feeling when hysteria changes to dull indifference. She had passed the point of screaming and raging, and had reached a state when she felt nothing anymore.

“Who else?”

Mattia sighed. “The building where the party was held, Eighty-Five Charles Street…it’s in the West Village. Does that address mean anything to you?”

Her fists were clenched so hard that her fingernails dug deep into the palms of her hands. “Tell me names. One or two of them, any names you know.”

Something was happening outside. Mattia’s glance moved nervously from Rosa to the terrace. He cursed under his breath. “There’s a car coming, on the other side of the pond. Those are Michele’s men.”

“Mattia, damn it!” she shouted at him. Now, at last, she felt something again, and she welcomed that familiar but still strange sensation like a friend.

“One of the apartments in that building…it belonged to Gaettano. That’s—”

“Tano?” She stumbled back and knocked into one of the
tables covered with model boats. “
That
Tano?”

“He was here a lot. He and Michele were good friends. Michele’s younger brother was shot a few days ago, but that didn’t hit him half as hard as Tano’s death a couple of months back. His brother Carmine was a bastard, even Michele could see that, and a coked-up walking corpse, too. More people mourned him in Colombia than here in New York. But to Michele, when Tano died it was—”

“I was there.”

He nodded. “Michele says you’re responsible for his death.”

“I wish I were.” She ran her hands over her face. After so long, she suddenly felt dirty and humiliated again, as if the rape had been only yesterday.

Tano. And Michele.

Once again she had to lean against the wall for support. “Anyone else?”

“Those two are the only ones I know about.” He was obviously uneasy, and not just because of the headlights approaching along the perimeter of the pond. “But there must have been others involved, probably two of three of the men waiting outside for us now.”

She closed her eyes, felt her breath streaming into her lungs and out again. And every time she let air out, something else rose with it, slowly, as if it first had to dig its way out from deep within her up to the surface. A chill that had nothing to do with winter was spreading through her rib cage, rolling over the remains of the serum in her bloodstream like a wave of quicksilver.

“What do you want from me?” she asked Mattia.

“If Valerie really is in Europe, then she’ll turn up at your place there sooner or later.”

“She dragged me along to that party with her, Mattia. If she knows what happened there, and that Michele was involved—”

“She was the one who told me about it, the very next day. That was the last time I saw her.”

Scales were forming on the backs of her hands. They felt like tiny hairs standing erect in an icy draft of air. “If I see her, I’ll kill her.”

“But she couldn’t help it! She swore that to me. She didn’t find out until later that night, when Michele told her. Michele was doped up to the eyeballs at the time. It knocked her sideways, and she came to me to—”

“Oh, sure,” she interrupted icily. “I bet she felt truly terrible. Because
I
had been raped. By
her
boyfriend.”

The sound of the car engine laboring as it made its way through the snow was getting louder. But Mattia was so desperately trying to justify Valerie that he took no notice of it.

“It wasn’t her fault,” he said. “She said she wanted to talk to you. She was going to ask you to forgive her.”

Forgive her
. Rosa felt like laughing at him for his stupid, blind love for a girl like that, but then she remembered how she herself had fallen under her spell. Valerie had charisma that made it easy for her to bewitch other people.

“What do you expect me to do?” she asked. “Act as if nothing happened?”

“When you see her, tell her I’m waiting for her,” he said. “Tell her she can always come back to me, never mind what
she’s done. You’re the only hope I have left. If Valerie’s alive, she’ll go to you to ask your forgiveness. That’s what she said then.”

Rosa thought of the video, and she wondered whether Valerie hadn’t, in fact, tried to get in touch with her long before this. She just didn’t understand how Trevini had come to be involved.

The car stopped by the terrace. Its headlights shone through the window, casting the shadows of the sailboats on the back wall of the room. They looked like rows of black teeth.

Rosa’s skin was moving beneath her clothes. Scales caught on fibers of fabric, rubbing against each other like the surfaces of Velcro fasteners. Her tongue split into two in her mouth, but it happened so naturally that she noticed only when she tried to speak.

For a second she wondered whether he had told her all this intentionally, to set off exactly this reaction—the one moment when she lost all control over her body.

Metal clinked as tools were unloaded from the car. Footsteps stamped through the snow, and then she heard voices outside the door.

Rosa realized that she wasn’t in human form anymore only when she sank to the floor in the middle of her clothing. It didn’t hurt; it never did. It was almost pleasant, as if in leaving her human body she also left behind some of her fears. She perceived everything now with a cold, precise, reptilian mind.

Outside, orders were given, and then there was a long-drawn-out mechanical hissing sound. Mattia swore. “They’ve brought an oxy-acetylene cutter with them. They’ll be through
the door in a couple of minutes with that.”

Rosa looked up at him from the floor, trying to get her bearings in her new shape. She wanted to say something to him, but found that only a hiss would come from her throat. Anger took possession of her, and she couldn’t direct her feelings in any particular way or against any individual. Valerie, Michele, even the dead Tano—they had all merged into a faceless phantom that aroused nothing but rage in her. Rage that banished her human thinking and dominated the mind of the snake.

An acrid smell wafted under the door. She felt vibrations that she couldn’t have perceived in human form. But the noise was suddenly more diffuse. She knew that she had to rely more on her sense of smell than on her hearing. Her field of vision was more restricted, too, and she didn’t see as clearly, although she saw differences of temperature optically, almost as an infrared camera would show them. That may have been why she saw the glowing patches on the door way before Mattia. The men were moving the oxy-acetylene cutter in a semicircle around the handle and lock. If the door had nothing else securing it at the top and the bottom, it would swing open as soon as the locking mechanism was cut away.

Mattia called to her to get to the back of the room and escape through one of the windows while he distracted the Panthera. She heard him, but it was a moment before she could connect the sound of his words with their meaning. Then she slid nimbly under the tables of model boats and deeper into the shadows.

Mattia was still in human form when he ran over to the
workbench and pulled a plastic canister out from among the cans of paint and varnish. Rosa waited a moment to see what he was doing. With frantic movements, he opened it and held it upside down over a plastic bucket. The caustic smell immediately threatened to cloud her heightened senses; as a snake, she felt as if someone were dripping acid into her nose. Rosa hurried away, but the odor of the solvent followed her through the boathouse.

The gurgling as the canister was emptied into the bucket was dull to her snake’s ears. The hissing of the oxy-acetylene cutter was more aggressive. When she looked back, the tops of the tables got in the way of her view of the door. Between two of the tables, she raised the front half of her serpentine body almost five feet up in the air, saw a window in front of her, and glanced back once more.

Mattia threw the empty canister aside, picked up the bucket, and ran to the door. He took up a position two steps away from it. The cutter had left a glowing track in the iron, a white half-moon shape around the lock. Sparks were flying into the room. Outside, two men called something to each other, but to Rosa it only sounded muffled, strange, incomprehensible.

But she felt new vibrations, much stronger now, as someone kicked the door from the outside. She knew from experience that her hypersensitivity would wear off soon, as soon as her mind was used to the new body. At this point, however, it was still almost unbearable. The air itself seemed to throb with every blow to the door.

She went down between the tables again, heading for the
window in the back. Only when she had reached the wall did she raise her snake’s head again and look out through the glass. Leafless bushes stood outside the window; she could see the lights of Fifth Avenue through their branches. It wasn’t far, but at this moment the street might as well have been on the moon.

The damn mesh over the glass was too narrow.

Her amber-colored snake’s body was the size of a human thigh at its widest point. She would never be able to force it through the fine steel screen, even if she succeeded in pushing out the glass without beheading herself.

Her head swung around when there was a metallic grinding sound from the entrance. The point of light showing the cutter’s path blazed with painful intensity while it moved once more along the glowing track. Mattia stood motionless in the dim light, holding the bucket of acrid solvent in his hand.

He glanced at her. “The other window! Quick!”

While the bright tip of the cutter in the iron traveled the last half inch, Rosa slid over to the next window. The pane stood ajar; she could easily open it with her head. It swung open without a sound, and cold night air immediately blew in. Mattia had planned ahead here, too. The steel mesh itself was as narrow as in the other pane, but now she saw that the long screws holding it in place had been removed. It was loose in the frame, and a firm push from inside would be enough to—

Something was making its way through the bushes. Twigs cracked under mighty paws. A muscular body with tiger stripes.

The big cat was patrolling the back of the boathouse. Even
as Rosa stared, the tiger raised his head and looked straight at her. Their eyes met. He opened his mouth and let out a savage roar.

Rosa heard the sound of feet kicking the iron door behind her again. This time, the glowing edge of the hole traced by the cutter gave way. As she swiveled around, Rosa saw the door swing in and the shapes of two men appear. One with the oxy-acetylene cutter, its blade of flame blazing in the darkness as if through a half-closed eye, the other with a shotgun raised.

Mattia flung the contents of the bucket at them. As it flew through the air, the flame set the solvent on fire. The explosion enveloped the men, turning them into living torches. Screaming, they stumbled apart. The gun fell to the floor; the flame of the cutter went out. The burning fluid was blazing in the doorway and in front of the entrance.

Rosa was briefly dazzled. For a few seconds all she saw was brightness. She was almost stunned by the stench of the chemicals and could hear hardly anything except the men’s screams. Within a moment Mattia took on his panther shape and, with one great leap, sprang through the flames. Here and there sparks caught on his fur, leaving little tracks of light.

Now Rosa was alone in the boathouse. She turned to the window again, hoping that the tiger had been driven away by the noise and heat, but instead he had come closer and was looking straight in at her. He stood up on his hind legs, propping his forepaws on the windowsill. The light of the fire danced in his eyes; glittering saliva dripped from his fangs.
Rosa ought to have known better than to count on his mind being a tiger’s; this was a man in the shape of a big cat, and he had worked out long ago what she planned to do. Soon he would notice that the mesh was loose in the window frame, he would pull at it from outside, and with one leap he would be in the room with her.

She abruptly dropped to the floor and slid under the tables in the direction of the door. The heat was fiercer here. The glow and the wavering heat haze blurred Rosa’s vision more and more. The noise could no longer be unraveled into voices: It was a chaotic mixture of human screams, the sound of the flames, and the roaring of the Panthera. Had they caught Mattia? Were they waiting for Rosa to find a way out into the open air? Or had they started to retreat, well aware that no bribe, however large, could keep the firefighters away from this?

Rosa realized that the place was also burning overhead when scraps of sailcloth sank to the floor around her in flames. Splashes of solvent must have carried the fire to the front tables. Several model boats had caught at the same time, and now the flames were leaping from table to table, fanned by the draft between the entrance and the open window.

The only way out was through the door. Large areas of the floor were burning on both sides of it. One of the men lay twitching in the middle of the puddle of bubbling solvent; the other was nowhere to be seen.

The tiger roared at the window behind Rosa. With a furious blow of his paw, he tore the mesh out of the frame. It fell with a clatter.

Her chances of getting out of here alive were shrinking with every second that passed. In human form, she could have tried leaping across the sea of flames. As a snake, however, she could move only over the floor, through the middle of it.

She couldn’t close her eyes because they had no lids. She could hardly breathe for the stench, and the heat was nearly intolerable. Even the concrete seemed to be burning where the solvent had seeped into its hairline cracks. The steel threshold of the doorway glowed like a red neon sign.

The glass of the window broke behind Rosa as the tiger leaped into the room, and the frame crashed against the wall. He raced toward Rosa under the tables where the burning boats stood. His jaws snapped shut just where one of her coils had been lying. His fangs scored furrows in her scaly skin, but missed her backbone. Fire rained down on the tiger’s fur and made him shrink back, but not for long. The stench of burnt hair mingled with all the other fumes, choking her.