delivery van. When the metal door was bolted behind her, she lay there alone in the dark, doing her best to rouse the reptile within her.
It didn’t work.
She tried to do it by concentrating hard, but that was hopeless in her present situation. Then by dwelling on her fury with Michele. No chance.
The van began to move uphill. Rosa rolled over the floor, groaning, and collided with the rear door. The noise of the nighttime streets grew louder. They were climbing the ramp of an underground garage, and now they joined the traffic. She heard the muffled voices of two men in the front seat but couldn’t make out the words.
Now she was lying on her side, with her knees drawn up, her tights torn, her hands tied behind her back, and her feet painfully lashed together. The cables cut into her skin and wouldn’t work looser by even a fraction of an inch. There was a rubber ball in her mouth, held there by a strap buckled tightly behind her head. With the tip of her tongue, she could feel someone else’s tooth marks in it. She wasn’t the first to go through this ordeal.
The floor of the van was sandy. God knows what they usually carried around in it. When the tires bumped over manhole covers and potholes, she was tossed around, grazing her skin. Once, the back of her head hit the side wall of the van, and for a moment she saw swirling lights in the darkness.
The more desperately she tried to force herself to shift shape, the more impossible it seemed. She felt not a rising chill but waves of heat as her fear got the upper hand. Her clothes were drenched in sweat; her hair stuck to her forehead.
They hadn’t even given her an injection, like Cesare had that time when he’d wanted to make sure she didn’t get away from him in her snake form. Michele Carnevare didn’t need second sight to guess at her lack of experience. She had known for only four months what she was, and what she had inherited. An Arcadian first shifted shape on the verge of adulthood, seldom before the age of seventeen. Merely by counting on his fingers, Michele could tell that the hormonal turmoil of adolescence had only recently given way to something much worse.
All the same—it ought to be possible. Several times, she’d seen Alessandro change into a panther at will. Yet something or other kept her from doing it. No self-control, probably.
And then she knew what it was. She literally couldn’t change her spots, like the proverbial leopard. While Alessandro was able to put his own interests to the back of his mind when he had to do something he didn’t like, to achieve his one great aim, she couldn’t do the same. For her, changing shape at will was about as realistic an idea as jumping across the East River. She was always herself, and anyone could see what she was thinking from a mile away. The whole show she put on of being head of her clan was a farce. She didn’t want it; she wasn’t able to do it.
It was the same with changing into the snake. The harder she tried to force the transformation, the more useless it was. Her body wasn’t interested in the least—it just wanted to crouch there in a heap and wait for the danger to pass.
When Salvatore Pantaleone, the former capo dei capi, had attacked her at the top of the Sicilian ravine, she had turned into a snake within seconds. Maybe if Michele or one of the others went for her…But could she wait that long? And wouldn’t Michele foresee that very thing? He was no fool—he might even be counting on her transformation.
He had something planned for her, and it seemed to be only part of a larger scheme. That was why they were in such a hurry. Everything was almost ready, the security man had said. Ready for what? They hadn’t been expecting Rosa, but there was obviously room for her, too, in whatever net they had cast.
Bitter gall rose in her throat. In disgust, she swallowed it down. With the rubber ball in her mouth, she’d choke on her own vomit.
She had shifted shape twice when the lives of others were at stake. The first time out of love for Alessandro, in a cellar near the Gibellina monument while Cesare’s henchmen were coming to kill him. And the second time