The Book of Stolen Tales by D. J. McIntosh

Author:D. J. McIntosh [McIntosh, D. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788634236
Publisher: Canelo
Published: 2019-02-04T05:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Seven

I ran to her. As I bent down, I noticed her jacket had torn, exposing small white scars crisscrossing her stomach underneath her breasts. They looked like incisions made with a small blade. More of Mancini’s torment or an act of self-harm?

Dina murmured something in Italian.

“You’ve had a bad fall,” I said. “Do you think you can get up?”

“Hit a branch when the mare ran into the wood.”

With my arm securely around her, I helped her stand. She winced in pain. “Try to walk. We’ll take it slowly.” Her hair hung in wet drapes around her face and she grimaced with every step.

I listened for the sound of the hounds. They must have finished with Alessio by now. The man hadn’t even cried out, so fast had the animals attacked him. We had to find shelter quickly. I decided we could do no worse than to follow the horses. To our immense relief, within a short time the wood thinned, ending at a stone barrier. We entered through a hole in a crumbling wall and found ourselves in a garden.

It was a strange garden, tangled and wild, but also a place of rare beauty. Oddly, no snow lay on the ground here. A beam of moonlight on a sundial cast a shadow over the Roman numeral three. It may indeed have been three in the morning by now. I couldn’t tell.

Rows of lavender, the flowers dried on their thin stalks, lined a gravel walk, throwing off a faint, pungent odor. Ahead, life-sized statues of Grecian-robed men and women holding flaming torches gave the place a magical air. Farther on we saw banks of flower beds in disarray, huge rose bushes with briars overgrown, blossoms gone to seed.

Beyond the roses was a rectangular reflecting pool, its surface a mat of floating yellow leaves. The pool was surrounded with paving stones almost hidden by plush moss. At one end stood an arbor, also covered with rose vines, where one fragile flower still bloomed. The arbor surrounded a sculpture of Eros, the fluid muscles of his masculine shoulders ready to loose an arrow from his bow, his gaze directed longingly at a slumbering Psyche.

The path led to a short set of broken stone steps, two gigantic iron urns on either side. As we looked ahead we could see palm trees and the rising wall and roof of an enormous house. All the windows were shuttered and no light seeped from between the cracks.

Dina revived at the sight. “Thank the Lord. We made it after all.”

“Assuming it’s Renard’s home, who knows if he’s even here? It’s all shut up.”

“Didn’t Hanzi say he never goes anywhere?”

“This looks like the rear of the house. Let’s find an entrance.”

Behind the palms another stone wall emerged, this one about five feet high. It appeared to be the foundation of an old building. A wooden gate kept in good condition was firmly locked. I desperately wanted to find a route past the wall away from the dogs. We walked its length and it eventually opened onto a stretch of overgrown grass with a circular driveway.

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