Arcadia Burns - By Kai Meyer Page 0,130
stole over her features. “No, the island was your mother’s favorite place. She wouldn’t have let that happen.”
“She wouldn’t have let Cesare murder her, either, given any choice.”
She sighed softly. “No.” A gust of wind blew through her hair from behind, sending it fluttering around her face. She had to tame it with her hands so that she could lean over and kiss him.
When she opened her eyes, she saw that he was staring at her.
“Not fair,” she complained. “People aren’t supposed to look when they’re kissing.”
“Says who?” His smile was as infectious as ever, and she was glad that he had forgotten his grief again.
“Kissing calls for concentration if you want to do it properly.”
“We don’t have transformations anymore when we kiss. Did you notice?”
She reacted with pretend surprise. “And I was just wondering what was different from usual.”
His grin widened, the dimples were deeper. “Want to go down there?” He pointed into the crater.
Rosa shook her head. “No, I’m sunburned already.”
“That’ll go away again after the next transformation.”
She moved away from him and climbed up a small rise with a flattened surface on top. “Come up here.”
In spite of his injuries, he followed her nimbly. They sat down on the rock, held hands, and looked out over the slope of the volcano onto the wide expanse of the Mediterranean.
“It’s out there somewhere,” she said thoughtfully.
“The Stabat Mater?”
“The answer. The ship is only a part of it.”
“Probably.”
“And Arcadia once lay somewhere there.”
They fell silent as their eyes lingered on the horizon, looking for something that might have existed thousands of years ago. They themselves were only an echo of it, the shadow cast by Arcadia into the present.
“We ought to try it again sometime,” he said after a while.
“Kissing without turning into monsters?”
“I like you even as a monster.”
“But at the end of love stories like that, the monster always falls off the Empire State Building.”
“Except that we’re both monsters. Or all the others are, depending how you look at it.”
This time the kiss lasted much longer. Rosa peeked, but Alessandro’s eyes were shut tight. With a warm feeling inside, she closed her own eyelids, searched for the chill of the snake inside herself, and found nothing but a faint breath of icy air that she could easily tamp down. Was it only a question of practice? Of readiness? Of being an adult?
The sun was high in the clear sky, yet the moon was visible, pale in the radiant blue.
“You can only see it from here at this time of the year,” he claimed.
She didn’t believe a word of it. “Imagine that!”
He hesitated, and then said, suddenly very serious, “I’d like to give you all this, if you’d like to have it.”
She stared at him, openmouthed. “The sun? The moon?”
“The island. Well, the moon as well if I could get my hands on it.”
“Just like that?”
“You said you liked the villa. My mother loved it, and you once said that you could see why.”
“I do like being here. But what about you? I don’t want to have an island where you never come to visit me.”
“I always liked Isola Luna, and that won’t change.”
“The weird seventies look of the villa?”
“Throw out what you don’t like.”
“I like it all. Especially the record collection.”
“You’re crazy.”
“I’m in love.”
The sun sank lower, and the moon moved on. The flickering haze in the crater faded.
“It will be dark soon,” said Alessandro.
“Not up here.”
He stroked her hair and kissed her.
“Not with you,” she whispered.
Never with you.
Later, when they were halfway down the mountain, Alessandro’s cell phone rang. He answered it, with a guilty expression. Rosa watched him as he listened.
After only a few minutes, he thanked the caller and ended the conversation.
“That was the hospital.”
The moon was hovering above the volcano, and the sun had disappeared behind the rocks. Shadows lay on the slope.
“Fundling.”
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KAI MEYER is one of Germany’s most successful authors, with millions of books sold worldwide. His novels have been translated into thirty languages. The British edition of THE FLOWING QUEEN (published in the U.S. as THE WATER MIRROR) won the 2007 Marsh Award for Best Children’s Book in Translation, and his historical novel THE VOW was turned into a movie by celebrated German director Dominik Graf. Kai lives in Germany. You can visit him online at www.kaimeyer.com.
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CREDITS
Jacket photo © 2013 by Hendrik Jaques Lombard
Jacket design by Michelle Taormina
COPYRIGHT
Balzer + Bray is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
ARCADIA BURNS. Copyright © 2010 by Kai Meyer. Translation copyright © 2013 by HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Meyer, Kai.
[Arkadien brennt. English.]
Arcadia burns / Kai Meyer; translated from the German by Anthea Bell.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Summary: “When Rosa Alcantara becomes the head of a Sicilian Mafia family, she must contend with her family’s sordid past and the secrets that keep haunting the present” —Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-06-200608-0 (hardback)
[1. Organized crime—Fiction. 2. Vendetta—Fiction. 3. Shape-shifting—Fiction. 4. Sicily (Italy)—Fiction. 5. Italy—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.M57171113ard 2013
2012019041
[Fic]—dc23
CIP
AC
13 14 15 16 17 CG/RRDH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First U.S. Edition, 2013
Originally published in Germany in 2010 by Carlsen Verlag.
EPub Edition © JANUARY 2013 ISBN: 9780062092977
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Table of Contents
The First Chapter
Flight
Without You
New York
His Face
Valerie
Freaks
Blood Relations
Retribution
One of Them
The Pack
The Boathouse
The Transformation
Call It a Dream
Gemma
Sicily
A Reunion
Revenge
Fundling’s Sleep
Creatures of the Same Species
The Avvocato
The Prisoner
A Pact
Costanza’s Legacy
Apollonio
Three Words
Certainty
The White Telephone
Lycaon’s Curse
The Serum
At Sea
The Visitor
The Video
An Experiment
Hundinga
The Contessa
The Thrice Great
A Deathly Silence
Climbing Up
The Leopard
Suicide Queens
In Flames
The Voice of Arcadia
The Hungry Man
The Alchemists
The Island and the Moon
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About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher