Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [78]
The men shouted in surprise as her claws tore into their fellow’s shoulder. She threw him to the ground easily, using none of her true strength.
“They are not off limits to me,” she said, and then she leapt to the top of the high fence, daring them to follow.
After her!” shouted the centurion who’d been supervising the installation of the obelisk. His men, still reeling, charged though the gate, their swords drawn.
The creature had leapt from the fence top and down to the street without any warning. She would be gone if they did not get to her quickly.
There she was, atop a building. He could see talons from here, long and silver in the lamplight, attached to her slender human fingers. Her face was shadowed, but he had seen her fangs, her shorn black hair. He could not tell what manner of thing she was.
She laughed again, a terrible sound, and then she was gone into the shadows. The centurion cursed the darkness, signaling to his men to spread down the street.
Cleopatra waited above them, looking down at their bodies creeping through the alleyways. She could see their every move, but they could not see her unless she wanted them to. She was seized by the glory of her form once again. All the sorrow of the ship seemed far away, as she leapt from rooftop to rooftop, taunting her pursuers.
They could not catch her. They could not hurt her. This was her city now and she was a god in it. She was faster than any soldier, stronger than any Roman, and she would find their emperor and kill him. They could do nothing to stop her, with their shouting and swords. Night was her power. She would kill Augustus in front of them and show them how weak they were.
She sprang from building to building, her steps rattling the rooftops, and the soldiers struggled below her, smashing doors and sprinting up stairways moments too late.
“There!” shouted a legionary, charging at the figure before him, a slender, barefoot woman. For an instant, the soldiers saw a lioness and then she whirled and was gone again, running ever faster, closer and closer to the emperor’s dwelling.
There were guards there, but not enough. The legionaries did not understand what it was they were chasing, and they did not want to. They had never seen anything like it.
His heart pounding, sweating with panic, a centurion crept out of a doorway, leading his men, just in time to see the woman’s garments flutter around a corner.
“Get her!” he shouted, and his men raised their swords and shields and ran for the end of the alley, but when they turned the corner, all that awaited them was another group of wild-eyed legionaries, looking up into the sky in disbelief.
“Where is she?” the centurion demanded.
“Gone,” his counterpart replied.
“We must report this to Marcus Agrippa,” the centurion grunted.
“Report what? That we lost something in the dark? That we can’t say whether it was an animal or a woman?”
Cleopatra watched their argument from her perch at the top of the Temple of Vesta. There were too many lives in Rome, and she felt them all. She wearied of the chase.
She slipped off the roof and back into the streets, cutting through the Forum. There was nothing to see there, not at night, but it comforted her. She’d strolled there many years before with Julius Caesar, holding Caesarion in her arms. She walked aimlessly through the square, listening to the night birds and the sounds of legionaries running through the city, seeking her. Her mind was so occupied with the past that when she stumbled, she did not at first understand what was before her.
Her own face, ghostly pale, frozen in the darkness.
Cleopatra almost screamed, thinking she encountered some new horror, but her fingertips touched marble. A statue perfectly made in her image. She saw herself dead and broken, close to naked, an asp slithering over her breast, her head thrown back, eyes shut