She ended the call and threw her cell phone onto the passenger seat.
“Promise,” she swore to the darkness.
CLIMBING UP
ALESSANDRO 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