“Yes, two,” he replied. “But they’re sitting in their lodge at the main entrance playing cards. One of them goes around every three hours. So we still have”—he looked at his watch—“two hours and twenty minutes.”
There were only a few lights on, here and there, inside the zoo. Several of the side paths lay in darkness, and the sounds of nocturnal animals came from a couple of the enclosures, but all was quiet in most of them.
They reached a place where two walkways met at a sharp angle. Like an arrow, they pointed to an enormous cage as high as a building. “Cesare financed that,” said Alessandro. “Probably the only decent thing he ever did in his life.”
The front of it had to be at least thirty yards wide. Rosa couldn’t see how far back the cage went on the inside. Two lamps illuminated the paved courtyard, but the light from them did not reach very far into the enclosure. Moving closer, she could tell that the ground sloped downward. Farther inside, there were angular rock formations, but she couldn’t see the lowest point.
Alessandro went over to the bars of the cage and breathed in deeply.
She wrinkled her nose. “You smell better.”
He had closed his eyes. In the dim light, she saw a black trail of fur rising from his leather jacket and up the back of his neck.
“This is what you call a controlled transformation?”
He opened his eyes again. “Come closer.”
She took another step, but stopped at arm’s length from the bars, remembering only too well the big cats who had hunted them on Isola Luna.
“These won’t hurt you,” he assured her.
Her heart was pumping an icy chill into her veins, but she went to stand beside him in front of the iron bars. Suddenly she didn’t mind the sharp, animal smell coming from the enclosure anymore.
“Can you see them?” he asked.
Her eyes were getting used to the darkness. Or was her snake’s vision taking over? Something down there radiated warmth. The interior of the enclosure was like a crater with graduated rocks, and niches and openings among them. Farther down, a pool of water lay as dark and still as if it were made of glass. On the left bank, the night had come together into a formless, dense heap of something.
“The pride,” said Alessandro.
“Won’t they pick up your scent?”
“Most of them are asleep. But look over there…and there.” He pointed to several places in the shadow of the rocks, and she realized that they had been under observation for some time. Big cats, as still as statues, sat on rocky outcrops. The longer Rosa looked, the more clearly she saw their eyes glowing in the light of the lamps on the courtyard.
“They’re keeping watch while the others sleep,” said Alessandro.
She moved a little closer to him, and he put his arm around her waist. She felt his muscular chest rising and falling faster, and pressing more firmly against hers. He put his hand under her long hair, stroked her neck. Could he sense the chill that was now reaching her lips? Her hands caressed his back, and she knew that panther fur was growing on his backbone under the leather jacket, spreading over his shoulder blades.
Smiling, she bent her head. “What were you thinking of doing?”
“Can’t you guess?”
“You lured me here,” she said with mock indignation, “in order to—”
“To show you how I’ve learned to control it.” The corners of his mouth turned down. “Only it won’t work as well if we do it right here.”
She returned his grin and let go of him. “So?”
“So I have to go in there.”
She shook her head. “No, you don’t.”
“Nothing will happen to me. They know me.”
Doubtfully, she looked from him to the motionless animals on the rocks. They seemed wild and untamed, even in captivity.
When she looked into Alessandro’s eyes again, they were glowing emerald green in the darkness, like the eyes of the big cats.
“You do understand, don’t you?” he asked gently.
She shook her head, but perhaps too soon.
Among the older Arcadians, she knew, there was a legend that the souls of their dead slipped into newborn animals of their own species, so that no Arcadian ever really died, but led an eternal life in an animal body, generation after generation. If that was true, there was a good chance that some of the big cats in this enclosure had once been human beings, ancestors of Alessandro and the other Panthera.