Arcadia Burns

THE LEOPARD


SHE WOUND HER WAY up the steps to the terrace, keeping close to the wall. Her reptilian skin shimmered in shades of bronze and gold.

The wide panoramic terrace of the palazzo lay ahead of her, surrounded by a heavy stone balustrade, gray in the pale moonlight. The next front of clouds was already coming up, and soon everything would be in deep shadow again. Someone must have switched off the motion detectors on the outdoor spotlights in the tops of the palm trees.

The first-floor windows were barred, and no light showed in any of them. The living quarters were on the second floor. Here, and on the west side of the palazzo, there were several bedrooms. Signora Falchi was standing at the open window of one of them, aiming a gun down at the terrace.

One dead man lay on the patio; a second was drifting in a cloud of blood in the swimming pool. The bluish glow from the pool flickered over the facade in indistinct reflections. The tutor’s face shone in that light as if it were covered with glass.

Rosa saw a movement on the very edge of her field of vision—only a scurrying, but at once a muzzle flash flared at the window. The bullet whipped over the terrace without hitting anyone. The Hunding for whom it had been intended came leaping up the steps, growling, right where Rosa was. He was not the same as the one she had already seen, but a powerful bulldog. With her responsive snake senses, Rosa felt the ground vibrate beneath his paws. At the same time her aggression was roused. In human form she would have run for it, or she might have been frozen with horror at the sight of the monster racing up; as a snake, however, she wanted to accept the challenge.

The Hunding knew that he was facing no ordinary reptile, but a Lamia. He stopped six feet away from her, went into an attack stance, and bared his murderous teeth. Rosa’s snake body reared up, and she hissed. He was about to leap onto her, but she was too quick. With a powerful coiling movement she shot toward him and then below him, digging her fangs into the soft skin beneath his ribs. The Hunding yowled in pain and thrust his muzzle downward, but before he could snap at her, she rammed her body against his skull. The yowling turned to a howl, and then she bit a second time, tasted his blood, and felt nothing but triumph.

She made use of the moment of surprise to coil herself around him. He fell heavily on his side, kicked out in panic, and snapped at her again. Quick as a flash, she squeezed her body hard around him, felt his bones breaking, crushed his ribs, his lungs, his internal organs.

More shots rang out, and when she looked up she saw that another Hunding had fallen to a bullet fired by the tutor. He had come out of cover to hurry to the aid of Rosa’s opponent. He didn’t get far.

Did Signora Falchi know who the snake really was? Was that why she had shot the second Hunding? Or would Rosa be next in her line of fire?

The dead Hunding in Rosa’s grip began turning back into human form. She quickly withdrew, glided over the terrace to the outer wall of the house, and followed its course northward. The bars over the windows were too close together for her to put her head through and break the glass with her skull, and the doors had security locks and bolts; her grandmother had made sure that no intruder would find it easy to get in.

She heard panting and growling in the shadows. The farther she went from the pool and its underwater lighting, the darker it was. The Hundinga were watching her. As soon as Rosa moved out of the tutor’s line of fire, there would be nothing to hold them back. Presumably most of them knew that she was the only Lamia in the palazzo.

She reached the corner of the building, and with it the end of the terrace. Quickly she slipped out between the stone bars of the balustrade on to the grassy meadow along the north facade. She was looking for a way into the palazzo at ground level, and for that she’d have to cross the open surface.

Behind her, a Hunding leaped the railing and landed on the lawn. Another—the biggest pit bull she had ever seen—raced after him. More shapes were moving among the chestnut trees bordering the meadow.

Rosa wound her way forward as fast as she could, surprising herself by her own agility. Yet she might not be fast enough. The paws of the Hundinga made the ground tremble; they had to be close behind her. The first was already snapping at her. He missed her reptilian body only by a hairbreadth.

Ahead of Rosa stood the greenhouse. Greenish light shone faintly in the glazed annex. The panes, clouded with condensation, hid the tropical jungle inside.

One glass pane in the bottom row was broken. Rosa made straight for it. The shattered glass had fallen inside; obviously the Hundinga had already tried getting into the palazzo that way. A naked corpse lay among the shards of glass. Someone had halted the charging Hunding; he hadn’t gone more than six feet inside the greenhouse.

One of Rosa’s pursuers let out a short, sharp bark, and then the ground shook one last time. The Hundinga had stopped. Rosa shot over the broken glass and the dead man, and plunged into the tropical atmosphere of the greenhouse.

Its green twilight sprang to life, hissing. They came from all sides, only a few at first, then more and more. The snakes who lived here, the Alcantaras’ totem animals, recognized their mistress and took her protectively into their midst. Some of them turned toward the Hundinga, and Rosa caught the scent of their venom, saw it glittering at the tips of their fangs. She had only recently discovered that a bite from some of these reptiles was fatal. She herself had no venom glands in her snake form, and possibly that was true of all Lamias.

The Hundinga did not follow her through the broken pane. Snarling, they retreated. Locked doors and barred windows wouldn’t deter them for long, now that their leader had decided to attack even against the Hungry Man’s orders. Rosa assumed that they had guns with them, and probably also explosives. Even if they preferred hunting in packs as Hundinga, ultimately they too were only killers with a job to do.

The snakes crowding around Rosa caressed her, rubbed against her scaly body; every single one of them seemed to want to touch her. She moved with the throng of snakes toward the heavy door leading from the greenhouse to the north wing.

There she closed her eyes, put the menace of the Hundinga out of her mind, concentrated entirely on her human nature, remembered the sensation of having arms and legs. And when she looked, she did have arms and legs again. The reptilian scales on her head and neck were dividing into strands, becoming unruly light-blond hair.

The snakes were still winding around her bare feet, but they retreated a little way when Rosa stepped forward to take the key off a hook on the wall. Cautiously, she opened the door and glanced through the crack into a corridor. Imposing frescoes covered the vaulted ceiling: angels, devils, and saints in the midst of cloud-capped mountain ranges and garden landscapes. The hallway itself was empty, but one of the lights that automatically came on after dark gave sparse illumination.

The stone floor was icy under the soles of her feet, but this time she welcomed the cold. She went into the corridor and closed the door after her. Then she crouched down, closed her eyes, and did as she might do if she were an actor calling up emotions in preparation for a scene. She thought of Zoe’s death, and her father’s betrayal of her; she conjured up the pictures on the video, her own wide, wakeful eyes as she watched what was happening, unable to do anything. Then the reptile stirred inside her. With the strength of an electrical charge, the cold filled her limbs and sent her sinking to the floor in snake form once again.

Immediately she glided forward, down the corridor, and to the staircase up to the floor above. No one came to meet her, and she heard nothing but the dry rustling of her scales moving over the worn stone slabs. She reached the second floor and set off on her way to the west wing in the dim glow of the nocturnal lighting.

Signora Falchi had stopped firing; maybe she had run out of ammunition. The handle of the door of her room was blocked on the outside by an iron rod. Rosa saw three bullet holes in the oaken door, the splinters pointing out into the corridor. It would be impossible for the tutor to open the barricaded door from the inside.

She looked attentively around her and waited until her eyes were used to the darkness. No one in sight. Michele and Valerie must have locked the tutor in her room. She was probably safer there than anywhere.

Rosa glided on to Costanza’s old bedroom. The door was open; the lock had been broken. It seemed that after Rosa left Iole had locked Valerie in again after all—but in vain.

Valerie was gone. There was no sign of Sarcasmo either. Rosa was sick with worry about Iole, and the disappearance of the dog made it no better. Had Michele done the girl any harm? Had he shot Sarcasmo? And where was Alessandro?

She quickly moved on to her own room and found it untouched. In the dressing room she returned to human form, slipped into jeans and a T-shirt, feeling dazed, and stole barefoot out into the hallway. There was a cupboard with a lock in the study. Florinda had kept a pistol and ammunition there.

Cautiously, she snuck down the dark corridors, going from niche to niche, immersed in deep shadow. Where two passages met, she stumbled upon the corpse of Gianni. Rosa turned away and ran on.

Her skin was stinging as if she had grazed it, but it showed neither injuries nor reddened patches. Maybe her brain hadn’t yet fully registered that she was not a snake anymore. Her joints, too, felt like unfamiliar structures that she would have to accustom herself to using.

She listened for voices, sounds, footsteps. Nothing. But the palazzo walls were thick, and the old tapestries on the walls swallowed up most noises.

What would she do in Michele’s place? He wanted revenge, because he thought Alessandro had given orders for the murder of the Carnevares. Part of his retribution was to be Rosa’s death. When he had failed to find her at the palazzo, he must have questioned Iole. She had probably told him, truthfully, that Rosa had driven off in her car, and upon hearing that, he had surely begun searching the whole place for her—a hopeless undertaking, considering all its countless rooms and corridors. It made little difference whether Valerie had helped him or had stayed to guard Iole, particularly once the Hundinga began laying siege to the walls. Michele would have had no time to be thorough in his search; the attack must have taken him as much by surprise as it had Iole and Signora Falchi. Presumably he was nervous now. And a nervous man would make mistakes.

The study lay at the end of a long corridor on the third floor and had no door; the only way in was a rounded archway, making it almost impossible to get there unseen. In human form she would stand no chance. Even so, she put off her transformation, because she could sense that shifting shape back and forth so quickly was putting a strain on her strength. She had no idea what she could demand of her body. Biologically, the metamorphoses might be impossible to explain, but that didn’t mean that they left no trace behind. Strictly speaking, with every transformation Rosa broke all her bones. In the long run that was bound to have some effect on her physical structure, her circulation, and her metabolism.

To get to the second floor, she used one of the former servants’ staircases. The days of valets and lady’s maids were long gone, and the narrow steps that they had once used were dusty and covered with cobwebs.

She entered a corridor on the upper floor through a thin door behind a curtain. There was no one in sight, and no lamp on apart from the faint, sulfurous illumination of the nocturnal lighting. For the first time, she thought she heard voices, but when she held her breath and listened hard, there was only silence.

On bare feet, she hurried beyond the curtain and turned right. The study was in the north wing, looking out over the inner courtyard. Maybe she ought to have gone the long way around through the kitchen, to arm herself with a knife. But she would lose it anyway at her next transformation, if not before.

Concentrating hard, she was approaching a bend in the hallway when she suddenly heard sounds. Soft paws on bare stone.

Alessandro? Michele?

Or one of the Hundinga?

Taking small, silent steps, she ran back behind the curtain and leaned against the closed door to the stairway. The wine-red velvet vibrated in front of her face, not a handsbreadth away.

Through a crack in the curtain, she could see down the corridor. A shadow was coming around the corner.

Rosa fought down her sense of cold. If she shifted to her snake shape now, the sounds of it would give her away.

A big cat was prowling closer. The cat’s long tail swished slowly from side to side. Its shoulder blades stood out as the predator kept its head close to the ground, bent and waiting, ready to pounce. Bright eyes glinted silver in the dim lighting. Its whiskers and brows were white; the muscular body was covered with yellowish fur sprinkled with dark brown spots. Each of the animal’s four paws was as large as Rosa’s face.

The leopard stopped and peered down the hall. Then he began to move again.

Rosa stood pressing as close as possible to the door, intent on making no sound. And on not touching the curtain.

The snake stirred inside her as the leopard came nearer. Soon she would lose sight of him because the heavy velvet would be in the way. But she could hear him, his paws on the flagstones, the scraping of his claws.

Out on the terrace, she had killed a Hunding, a massive, lumbering colossus. One of the Panthera, however, was something else entirely. And Michele might be exceptional even among his own kind. She had seen him hunting, accepted by the others as leader of the pride because he was stronger, faster, more ruthless than the rest.

She felt her skin tense, suddenly turning dry, and tiny scales trickled from her forehead down her cheeks. Her hair formed strands, her knees stiffened, her elbows hurt. A terrible itching ran over her body in waves.

Not now!

Something touched the other side of the curtain, very slightly. Tapped it and withdrew again. The touch was repeated a little farther to the left. The leopard’s gently lashing tail. Its tip brushed the velvet as the animal moved past her hiding place.

Her T-shirt was too large for her; she felt as if she were simply passing through it, like the hero in The Incredible Shrinking Man. She was the shrinking woman, the snake girl, and in a couple of seconds she would be cat food.

Somewhere in the house, glass broke.

She heard the distant sound of Hundinga howling. The echoes resounded in the corridors and stairwells.

The leopard hissed. Suddenly she heard his paws slapping down on the flagstones several times as he moved into a swift run. Then there was silence.

Rosa’s back slid down the door until she was crouching, with her knees pushing the curtain outward. There was nothing she could do about it. Her heart sank, and for a moment she didn’t know whether she was in human or snake form. The heavy curtain was pressing in on her, keeping her from breathing. Energetically, she thrust it aside and looked out at the corridor.

The leopard had disappeared. She thought he had run left. The study was in the opposite direction.

She struggled to her feet and went that way.