Free Arcadia Burns by Kai Meyer Page B

snowdrifts caught in the tangled tendrils and roots. Broad tree trunks rose above the slope. Something was moving behind them.
    The panther let out a snarl, but she didn’t turn around.
    Then the sounds coming from his muzzle changed.
    “Not that way.”
    She looked down on the path. A naked man was crouching in front of the tunnel, at first glance not much older than Rosa herself. As she stared at him, he stood up, swaying, dazed by the speed of his shift back to human form. Strands of panther fur scurried over his muscular body, branched out, and disappeared. But his eyes were still glowing; his hair was still raven black.
    “I’ll help you,” he managed to say hoarsely, as his interior organs went on changing and his vocal cords became human again. He looked pale and defenseless in front of the deep, black mouth of the tunnel.
    “Come with me.” He stretched out a shaking hand.
    She went on climbing. Up to the trees. To the figures moving among them.
    Swaying, she straightened up, and now she could see just over the top of the slope.
    Two lions were prowling through the undergrowth. Thenshe saw the girl. Jessie was cowering behind a tree over to the right, trembling with the freezing cold as she hid from the beasts. When Rosa looked left again, there were more Panthera there. A leopard. Two tigers. A graceful lioness with huge eyes, her beautiful feline face seeming almost innocent.
    The beasts were approaching Jessie’s hiding place. The girl couldn’t see them, but she probably smelled them, heard the crunch of frozen foliage and twigs under their paws. But Jessie stood there, frozen to the spot, behind the trunk of the oak tree, not daring to move.
    Only her eyes were turned toward Rosa, over a distance of some twenty-five feet, pale pearls shining in the darkness. A pleading, terrified glance.
    A hand was placed over Rosa’s mouth from behind and forced her down, into the shelter of the edge of the slope. A whisper in her ear, almost inaudible: “There’s nothing you can do for her.”
    As if she had no will of her own left, she let him lead her down the hill. She knew he was right. But she had just turned her back on a stranger who, in those few seconds, had begged Rosa for her life.
    Down at the foot of the slope she tore herself away from the man, ready to scale it again and intervene after all, shout at the Panthera that she was the only one they really wanted, the Lamia they hated so much.
    Except that that wouldn’t change anything.
    Up in the darkness, Jessie began to scream.
    The man leaped after Rosa and hauled her down again. “Ifyou don’t come with me, you’ll die,” he hissed at her, still with that dangerous feline growl in his voice. She thought it attractive in Alessandro, merely menacing in this man.
    She wanted to resist, contradict him, run to help the girl.
    But she did none of those things. She just stared at him, feeling something die inside her, maybe her pity, maybe only her brief moment of desperate courage, and then she nodded.
    “This way,” he whispered, and ran into the tunnel ahead of her. “Come on.”
    She followed him, hoping that Jessie’s screeching and howling would lessen down there, but instead it was amplified. Many growls and much feline mewling mingled with it as the Panthera quarreled over their prey again, and then, as before, an animal roar silenced them. It did not sound as fierce and barbaric; more domineering. A short command in the language of the Panthera, and immediately there was quiet apart from Jessie’s weeping and pleading.
    The sounds that finally silenced the girl almost brought Rosa to her knees. The noise of snapping and tearing echoed through the tunnel, as if the Panthera were feasting down here in the shadows, right beside Rosa.
    The man seized her again and pulled her along. “They’ll kill us both if they catch up with us.”
    “You’re one of them.”
    He didn’t deny it.
    “Why are you helping me?”
    She might have expected