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.
SUICIDE QUEENS
THE HALL LEADING TO the study stretched ahead of her like the inside of an accordion, getting longer and longer—an optical illusion. It was all in Rosa’s head. In her crazy, bewildered brain.
Pictures in black frames with gold leaf flaking off them hung on the walls. Tables and lamps lined the corridor, along with a suit of armor too small for a man. This palazzo had always been a house full of women, often at odds with one another.
Rosa was sick and tired of hiding. She stepped out into the middle of the corridor and walked toward the open archway leading to the study.
She saw the desk in front of the glazed door to the balcony. Saw the high back of the chair at the desk—it was empty. Saw herself as a faint reflection in the glass of the window, an outline emerging from the gloom of the corridor, the ghost of her belligerent forebears, or just a girl who had come to