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