GIO
It was just past dawn.The new-risen sun's rosy gold light crept across vineyards and citrus groves and ranks of olive trees, spreading long shadows toward a rambling Italian villa and turning its pale stucco walls pink.
The villa's grounds were beautifully landscaped, dotted with stone statues made with exquisite care and skill. In the changing dawnlight, they almost appeared to move.
And then one of them did.
It hadn't been there a moment before.
The carved lion emerged from the villa's stone-tiled patio with an obvious struggle. The head and shoulders broke through first. The creature writhed and thrashed and flung out a great paw that dug stone claws into the patio, leaving parallel grooves as if the tiles were made of butter.
When the stone creature had emerged entirely from the ground, it looked exhausted from the process. For a moment, it stood with its head lowered, a great stone shape casting a long black shadow in the morning sun.
Then it shifted. This, too, was a struggle, the gray of its granite body receding to human colors—blond hair streaked with silver, a brown jacket, human hands clutching the patio tiles.
Gio threw his head back, his hair brushing his shoulders, and took a deep breath of the morning air. His chest burned as if it was on fire, and his bones ached, but he was himself again. He straightened up shakily.
As usual, traveling via stonewalking was an ordeal. But it had gotten him here on the first try, which was more than he could have done a few months ago.
The patio door was locked. Gio retrieved a key from the terra cotta planter a few steps to the left. He unlocked the door and stepped into the cool, quiet hallways of the house where he had lived all his life.
It was strange and sad to see the house like this, shut up and musty. It was not completely abandoned; the local couple who served him as housekeeper and gardener had volunteered to stay on as caretakers in his absence. They had insisted, actually. Gio would have let them go with a generous pension, but they had been adamant that they would take care of the house until he came back.
He didn't have the heart to tell them how unlikely that was.
Once, this house had been his home and his sanctuary. His father and grandfather had been born here. Gio had imagined himself living out a long and pleasant retirement, surrounded by his books and his vineyards. It made him a little sad that over seventy years on this earth had not given him someone to love and share his life, but that was his only true regret. His life was fulfilling and full. He had his library and his correspondence with the many intellectual friends he had made through a lifelong interest in history, literature, and the occult.
And now all of that was gone. The peaceful, quiet senior years he had imagined were a distant dream to him now. In a few short months, he had been made a shifter and become a fugitive.
Just thinking about it made a rippling shift start to flow over him with a wrenching sensation of pain. "Not now, beast," he gritted between his teeth as he wrestled it to a standstill. The effort left him sweat-drenched and exhausted. His chest felt hot and heavy, as if he had swallowed a lump of superheated metal.
The sense of someone whispering in his ear faded along with the physical changes. It was only when he reached to touch his aching chest that he realized not all the changes had gone. He still had stone claws on each finger. Before he knew what he was doing, he had accidentally torn his shirt open, splitting it down the front.
Gio sighed. Better pick up a change of clothes while he was here. Actually, he could really use one even if he hadn't just shreddedyet anothershirt. He looked down at himself with a grimace. There was a time in his life when he never would have dreamed of being anything less than dapper and neat, well groomed and tastefully dressed. Now he was wearing a pair of jeans, bought cheaply from a small shop in an American big-box store and worn for a long while since their last washing, and a shirt which had also seen better days even before he tore it in half.
"Focus, Gio," he muttered to himself. He needed to gather a few things and be gone. Ordinarily he could have enjoyed a grace period of a few days before his pursuers got a fix on his new location, but in this case he was positive that they would have the house under surveillance. The longer he stayed, the more danger he was in.
This wasn't the first time he had come back during the better part of a year that he had been on the run. Always, it was for the same reason he was here today, to search his library and personal papers fruitlessly for a cure to heal the disaster that had torn his world apart, fleeing before his pursuers could catch up with him.
The last time, he had left the bedroom in a bit of a mess; he was bleeding and exhausted, and he had flung a few clean shirts in a suitcase and stonewalked away. When he walked in this time, however, it was perfectly tidy. Maria, his housekeeper, had been here in his absence. The dresser had even been dusted recently. She was taking good care of the house in his absence.
As he changed hastily into a pair of clean, dark trousers and a gray jacket, Gio wondered what she made of his sudden, mysterious disappearance and his equally mysterious and unpredictable reappearances. When Maria and her husband had refused his offer of generous severance pay, he had told them he would be traveling on business for a while, and warned them that it was possible strangers might come around looking for him and that these strangers were to be avoided. They had taken it with grace, as they had accepted all the various oddness of his unusual life, including guests who came and went mysteriously in the night, and a disappearing lion statue.
He should send the caretaker couple a gift, he thought—though he had no idea when he might have the leisure to select and mail one, or even if it would be safe for him to do so.
It was what he would have done before, when he had lived a life of gracious largesse. Now he was scrabbling through his own house like a thief. He had to stop himself from ransacking the kitchen as well. There wouldn't be any perishable food in the house, not after all this time—Maria was far too careful a housekeeper for that. He was hungry, but he could eat somewhere else.
If there was surveillance on the house, his pursuers might already know he was here. The clock was ticking.
Gio went swiftly into his home office. This was where he should be able to find the information he had come for, the clue he had forgotten about until he remembered it today.
The office was the one room in the house that Maria didn't clean. There should have been dust on everything. Instead, there were clear signs that other people had been in here: mud on the floor, smudges on the old cherrywood desk, items knocked askew. His old brass-and-leather globe had been tipped over.
"Barbarians," Gio muttered. He closed and locked the door, and set the globe carefully on top of a filing cabinet. The urge to spend some time putting things to rights was strong, but he didn't have time. Instead he went to work looking for the item he had come to find, rummaging the drawers of his antique desk, rifling the cubbyholes, ransacking his filing cabinets.
He glanced up sharply at a noise from elsewhere in the house. In the quiet of the deserted and abandoned house, it seemed loud; he thought there had been a thump or a muffled crash, as of something being knocked over. It was always possible he had heard something outside, Antonio working on the grounds, perhaps.
But he didn't think so. Time was running out.
