could be bound to her human form for another ten minutes or more.
And who knew whether she’d be able to force herself to change shape? She just had to hope that the transformation would set in when danger threatened.
Out of breath, they passed the statue of a man sitting on a bench with an open book on his lap, a bronze duck looking up at him from the ground. Ahead, a paved promenade stretched around the perimeter of a pond. A silvery shimmer came from the ice on the water. In the light from the opposite bank, Rosa saw a single-story building with a pale green roof that reminded her of a circus tent. It had a tall spire like that of a church on top of it.
“Conservatory Water,” said Mattia breathlessly. “If we can make it over to the other side…”
He didn’t say what exactly would happen then, but she assumed that he meant they’d reach the high-rises on Fifth Avenue whose lighted windows stood out against the night sky, beyond the building with the green roof and a row of bare treetops.
“If we go around it, we’ll never get there,” she managed to say, with a groan. The cold was beginning to hurt, and as soon as she saw his bare skin, it got even worse. Why was he doing this?
Rosa wanted to run over the promenade and cross the ice, but Mattia held her back.
“No, don’t! The pond is thawed out in the day so that sailboats can go on it. The layer of ice is far too thin to support us.”
Sailboats? On this tiny pond? But she wasn’t stopping to argue. She tore herself away from him again and ran northward along the perimeter. When she looked over her shoulder, she saw dark shapes on the snow-covered space between the trees, at least a dozen of them, maybe more. Several were carrying something in their mouths, and that held them back, but the rest of the pack adjusted their speed to the others, as if they didn’t trust them enough to let them lag behind with the prey. Four human bodies, to be divided among too many big cats.
Rosa was running so hard now that she could hardly breathe. Frost was getting into her lungs, and her throat felt as if she had swallowed splinters of glass.
Another set of bronze statues at the far end of the lake: Alice in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter, and the White Rabbit.
Mattia, too, was slowing down. The cold was beginning to numb him.
“Change shape!” Rosa called to him. Even her voice sounded like crushed ice.
“They can see us,” he replied, shaking his head. “They can’t know that I’m one of them.”
“You’re naked!” she snapped at him. “What do you expect them to think? That I picked up some kind of pervert on my way through the park?”
He swore—and turned into the panther. The change happened so fast that Rosa’s eyes could hardly follow it. His torso and limbs morphed at high speed; fur flowed over his skin like black oil. Then he was running ahead of her on all fours. For a moment she was almost overcome by envy. He was at most three years older than her, yet he had mastered the transformation perfectly. For him it was a gift. For Rosa, so far, it was a curse.
With the last of her strength she followed him to a terrace leading down to the pond, in front of the brick building with the green roof. She had expected them to run past the house and under the trees behind it. Fifth Avenue was so close; she could hear the nocturnal traffic as clearly as if she were standing on the sidewalk. A police siren howled as it went by, going south, and merged with the noises of the Upper East Side.
But the big cat was heading for the entrance of the building, and she realized that he intended to go in. She looked back once more. The Panthera were less than forty yards behind them. A gigantic leopard in the middle of the pack was carrying a human body in his jaws as if it weighed no more than a rabbit.
Jessie’s thin legs brushed the ground on one side of his muzzle, her hair on the other. Her arms swayed up and down at every step the big cat took. His head held high, the leopard was carrying her as the trophy of his victory. Full of pride, full of