I did. As if they were a kind of prophesy, and the two of us were going to make it come true.”
“Kind of like that, yes.”
“But that had nothing to do with TABULA. We fell in love, but they had no control over that. And they can’t have been very happy about it. Agreed?”
Rosa nodded.
Now Alessandro was hitting his stride. “Scientists prefer to carry out experiments in a controlled environment, don’t they? In the laboratory, where they can influence everything.”
“You think—”
“They knew about the statues. They probably even know what they stand for. And that’s why they wanted a Panthera and a Lamia—” He struggled with himself, but he couldn’t finish the sentence. “Why it was one of their conditions,” was all he added.
“So there’s no such thing as artificial insemination where they come from?”
He shrugged his shoulders, unsure.
“The question is,” she said in a neutral voice, “did they want a child, or would aborted tissue be enough for them? A fetus?”
Alessandro’s cheekbones were working, but he said nothing.
She perched on the edge of the table where she had put down the photo album. Her head felt as if she had unexpectedly run into a glass door.
“I’ll go crazy if I play this game to the end. My father has turned into Apollonio, and Apollonio was paying Tano and Michele. Those are the facts. That’s all.”
“Seems like it.” He took a deep breath. “Then it was your father who also supplied Tano with the serum.”
Rosa pushed up her sleeve and looked at the blue marks where the needles of the syringes had gone in. “They’ve probably infected us with their fucking mutant blood.”
“But none of this has anything to do with us. With what we did last night.”
“No.”
“Really?”
She shook her head. “High time for me to get the transformations under control. I can’t take that stuff again. It’s almost as if my father—”
“Was making sure that we slept together, too?”
She looked darkly at him. “I didn’t sleep with Tano, Alessandro. I can tell the difference.”
“Yes…sorry. I…I don’t know why I said that.”
She gave him a kiss, first tentatively, then firmly.
“They won’t leave us alone,” she whispered. “Even if they don’t do anything, I mean don’t do anything else to us, they’re there all the same, distorting our thoughts and our feelings and—”
“I know exactly what my feelings are.”
She nodded slowly. What she had seen on the video changed everything—and nothing. And if Trevini had thought he could use it to bring her to her knees, he’d been mistaken.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
“What for?”
“For understanding me. Even if you don’t understand me.” She gestured clumsily. “You shouldn’t understand me. But somehow you do anyway.”
He smiled. “The Rosa version of those three words?”
“Oh, yes.”
HUNDINGA
THEY SPENT THE NIGHT on the sofa in the library, sleeping in their clothes, Rosa’s head on Alessandro’s chest.
But when day began to dawn, that position wasn’t nearly as comfortable as it had been a few hours earlier. Rosa moved and felt as if someone had been driving steel nails through her joints. Her back was really stiff.
“Good morning,” he said, kissing her on the forehead.
“Morning,” she groaned. “Just how good it is I’ll find out—if I can stand up without collapsing.”
Alessandro moved, shifting his own position, and he, too, let out a groan. “Who the hell builds sofas like this?”
She sat up. “At least it was expensive.”
“So we have to put up with the discomfort.”
Rosa smiled, but even her facial muscles hurt. She grimaced to relax them, saw her reflection in a glass picture frame on the wall, and cursed. “Well, could have been worse,” she finally said. “I could have woken up a hybrid.”
“Which isn’t—”
Suddenly she leaped to her feet. “Why didn’t I change shape?” Her aches and pains were all gone at once. “Because of my father, I mean. I thought it happened on its own with violent outbreaks of feeling?”
“Maybe you have it under control better than you think.”
“But I don’t want to be able to do something without understanding why! I’m sick and tired of that. Just for once, I’d like to feel like I know everything about myself, and not keep seeing a total stranger in the mirror.”
“There’s no one I know as well as you.”
“Weird.”
“No, great.” He smiled with difficulty as he sat up straight. “A person who knows you doesn’t have to know anyone else. There are enough facets to your character for twenty people.”
“Schizophrenic, you mean.”
“You know exactly what I mean.”
“At least you’re not trying to compliment my eyes.”
“Oh, those