held him until neither of them could breathe and they moved apart, laughing.
“Do they still hurt?” He pointed to the blue marks where the needle had gone in.
“I’ll live.”
He made an instinctive sound as she moved away from him and sat cross-legged on the sofa. She watched him as, once again, he gave her the youthful grin that didn’t seem to suit the capo of a Mafia clan. A fresh evening breeze blew her hair in front of her face, and she tried to hold it back with both hands.
There was a buzzing sound. Her cell phone was lying on the table in front of the sofa. The vibration from the ringtone made it circle around the glass surface like a drunk bumblebee.
When she looked at the display, she recognized the number. “The lab. Finally.” Before they had left the palazzo for the coast, Rosa had sent a driver to Enna with a vial from the cellar and what was left of Alessandro’s serum. They must have come up with the results of the tests.
She took the call, as Alessandro expectantly pressed his lips together. A little later she thanked the caller, said the laboratory was to invoice her at the office in Piazza Armerina, and put the cell phone back on the table.
“The same substance,” she said. “Probably still effective, even after all the years it’s been stored down there.”
“Then Tano really was in touch with this Apollonio. Or some other TABULA go-between.” She had told Alessandro that her father had forbidden the attorney to pursue his own inquiries, saying that he would follow the trail of Apollonio himself. She suppressed the thought of that empty tomb as best she could, for now.
“Try as I might, I can’t remember ever hearing the name before,” said Alessandro. “Tano and Cesare talked about many of their business associates, but not an Apollonio…or at least not when I was present.”
“And the people at the lab said something else. The substance is really an antiserum derived from blood. They tried to isolate its components, but they thought there was something wrong with the original blood.”
He looked at her as if trying to estimate just how bad the news about to follow was.
“They can’t classify it as either human or animal blood,” she explained. “Obviously the serum has features of both, different proteins or…or whatever. But the serum we sent them is from a single donor, so it’s not a mixture of several.”
“Sounds impossible,” he said.
“That’s what they thought, too.”
“As long as we’re in human form, everything about us is human, including our blood. And after transformation—”
“Yes, our blood is also animal. One hundred percent.” She nodded slowly. “However, the raw material for the serum came from someone who’s both. Human and animal at the same time.”
Alessandro linked his hands behind his head and leaned back with a groan. “Hybrids.”
Rosa frowned. “Hybrids?”
“Arcadians who stop changing in midtransformation. Half animal, half human.”
“Stop changing?”
“It’s only a rumor. Don’t worry about it.”
Her eyes narrowed. “If that means I’m going to be walking around with a snake’s head someday, then I have plenty to worry about.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
“And that’s why you never mentioned it before?”
“Sorry.”
“What else have you kept from me?”
“I haven’t kept anything from you,” he snapped.
“How often does that kind of thing happen?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Once a month? Once a year? Once in a lifetime?”
“You’re not going to get hysterical, are you?”
She jumped up, almost sweeping one of the candle lanterns off the table. “As if having to change into an animal wasn’t bad enough! And now there’s the risk of ending up as a sideshow act on top of it. The amazing reptile woman.”
“The risk of dying of a perfectly normal cancer someday is probably a hundred times greater. Or a thousand times. How would I know?”
“So what about the blood in the serum?”
He sighed quietly. “Yes, you have a point there.”
“Does TABULA breed these creatures?”
“Why would they do that?”
She went over to the rail and leaned against it. “Why would they capture Arcadians and then skin them? Why would anyone make coats out of the pelts? Damn it, it doesn’t matter why all this happens! Just that it does happen.”
“You think that the experiments carried out by TABULA—and we only know about those from hearsay, right?—led to the creation of hybrids of some kind?”
She took a deep breath and watched him in the light of the flickering candle lanterns. He looked slightly ill. “We don’t know anything for sure, do we? But