Serpent's Kiss

TEN

It was Carling’s turn to stare at him. “This is someone real?”

He corrected her. “This was someone real. Our paths crossed a couple of times. She disappeared a very long time ago. Last I heard, she was rumored to have died. She was one of the between creatures.”

“What do you mean?”

Rune released the ancient sketch, letting it curl back into a scroll. “There are a few creatures who came to form, not on Earth or in Other lands but in a between place, like in a crossover passage,” he explained.

In her crouch, the angle of Carling’s eyes and cheekbones were pronounced, giving her a feline look. The urge to pounce on her pulsed through him like a drug, but he held himself in check, just barely.

She asked, “Like you?”

“Yes. Python was another one.” He stood, the urge still clawing through his system and making him antsy. “She was one of those strange, hard-to-categorize creatures. She wasn’t Wyr. As far as I know, she never developed a human form, so in modern terms I suppose we would have classified her as Demonkind.”

Carling picked up the scroll and stood as well. “I sketched the cavern walls several times and after I transitioned, I tried to find out as much as I could about her. But there were so many Egyptian gods and goddesses, and the truth was often so mangled it was impossible to pinpoint their origins. Many of them were just folktales. I was never convinced she actually existed outside of the priestess’s imagination and in the end I gave up searching for her.” She studied Rune’s face curiously. “What was she like?”

He shook his head. “Being around her was like tripping on a bad dose of LSD. Not that I would know what that was like.” He offered her a bland smile. Carling gave a ghost of a laugh, and he paused to savor the quiet, husky sound before continuing. “She was filled with as many riddles and psychoses as the Sphinx. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me the legend of the Sphinx was modeled after her. She was always getting her tenses . . .”

Rune’s voice trailed away. Carling waited, watching his arrested expression. She prompted, “What?”

He came back from where he had gone with an internal click that brought his sharp, focused gaze in contact with hers. “She was always getting her tenses mixed up,” he said. “The past, the present and the future.”

“Getting her tenses mixed up?” Carling sucked in a breath. Her hand quested out, and he gripped it with his. She whispered, “What if the beginning of Vampyrism really did start with her? She might have suffered from the same kinds of episodes.”

“Don’t get your hopes up too high,” he murmured gently. “Her brain might have just been on permanent scramble, and anyway, she’s most likely gone now.”

She nodded, although he wasn’t sure how much she was actually paying attention. “We need to try to find out what happened to her.”

“Yes,” he said. She withdrew her hand and he stepped back, allowing her the space to move. She strode back to the cottage’s main room and he followed, watching the graceful sway of Carling’s hips moving in front of him as he explored the strange terrain they found themselves in. “About that second opinion I mentioned. There’s someone I would like to consult on all this, if you don’t mind.”

Carling set the scroll on the table and collected a few things from a nearby shelf, a couple of candlesticks, along with an empty marble mortar and pestle. She opened the scroll again and anchored it flat by using the pieces. Then she settled in her chair to study the ancient drawing in the encroaching shadows of early evening as curiously as if someone else had sketched it.

“I don’t mind, if you think it will help,” she said. “As long as whoever it is can be discreet.”

“She’s a pathologist and a medusa,” Rune said. He settled into his former position, leaning back against the table beside her. “So she has a certain point of view that I think might be useful.”

That caught Carling’s attention. She looked up. “Are you talking about that ME in Chicago that conducted the autopsies on Niniane’s attackers?”

“That’s the one,” Rune said. “Dr. Seremela Telemar.”

“I read her autopsy reports. She was quite competent.” Her mind went back to earlier in the afternoon when she had come out of the fade and she remembered something. She said, “Why were you looking for your pocketknife?”

He leaned back on his hands and kicked a foot. He said, “I lost it.”

She told him, “I distinctly remember you cutting the twine and then putting it back in your pocket.”

“I didn’t lose it then,” he said. “When I was caught in your memory, I gave it to the priest Akil.”

She breathed, “I never knew.”

“You weren’t supposed to. I told him to keep it a secret from everyone.” He regarded her with a gaze that had turned brooding. “I see two possibilities here. The first possibility is that what happened was self-contained and we changed just your reality—which, believe me, is earthshaking enough all on its own.”

She stretched her hands out on the table, on either side of the scroll. “Tell me about it,” she muttered. “Theoretically it could happen. Some spells work on the power of belief, especially illusions. You can kill someone that way, if they believe in something strongly enough.”

He gave her a thoughtful look but refrained from pursuing that train of thought. “So if you believed what happened was real, that could potentially have the power to physically change you, correct?” he asked. She nodded. He said, “Maybe it would have the power to change me too. I cannot shake the conviction that this has all felt very real when I’ve gone through it. It’s important to remember this does happen to both of us. It’s just that, for me, the events are occurring in a more linear fashion.”

“You haven’t experienced anything physically traumatic in one of the episodes either, like I have,” she murmured.

“Then there’s the second possibility,” he said. “And there’s no point in dancing around it. We might have changed the actual past, and the key to finding that out is to see if we’ve influenced something outside of ourselves.”

She searched his face. “You think you might have actually gone back in time?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “The crossover passages and Other lands have already shown us that time slips. Theoretically, time is also supposed to slow down the faster one travels. Time isn’t a completely uniform phenomenon, and we know the universe must self-correct so that paradoxes cannot happen. Maybe we’re experiencing a slippage so far out of sync, I’m experiencing it as a trip back to the past.”

Paradoxes cannot happen. The universe self-corrects. It flexes, like a breathing entity, absorbing and adjusting to anomalies. It had an automatic built-in defense mechanism. It was generally believed that no one could topple history, not even the gods. If the universe could not accommodate an event, it could not happen. Rivers of events would shift only so much to accommodate change.

“You seem remarkably calm about it all,” she said. She wasn’t calm. Maybe she hadn’t been calm since he had showed up on her doorstep. You should be careful who you invite into your home . . .

He gave her a small smile. “I’m just being clinical right now.”

“You’re good at it.” He really was an excellent investigator. She sat back in her seat and looked up at the ceiling. “And at the moment, I’m not.”

He said gently, “I know it’s scary. Thank the gods all I’ve done so far is stop to talk to a child one afternoon, and prevent someone from beating you much worse than he already had. If I had done more, the repercussions could be much worse.”

He didn’t realize the profound effect he had on her.

She closed her eyes. She thought of all the many times she had looked up at the sky, hoping against hope to see the impossible happen again, and see the strange winged lion-god fly back into her life. All of the nights she had looked at the stars, wishing upon wish to see him one more time. Whether those times had happened in history or they had happened all in her mind, they had in fact happened.

And they hadn’t before he had come to the island and met her child-self. If she and Rune were actually changing the past, something else had occurred, something other than what she now remembered, something similar enough that the flow of time had flexed to accommodate the difference.

Had she once looked at the stars in some original past, and wished for something else so passionately? It was almost impossible to imagine wishing for anything as much as she had wished to see him, one more time.

She murmured, “The knife.”

There was a pause. He said, “Yes, the knife. I told Akil to bury it in a distinctive place, somewhere that I knew would survive the test of time.”

“So aside from consulting with Dr. Telemar, we need to find out if the knife is where Akil was supposed to put it.”

“Yes,” Rune said. Something was in his voice. She couldn’t identify it. She brought her head up to look at him. He was studying her, his brows contracted. He said, “Suspend dis-belief for a moment. Forget about asking why or how. What happened after I left? I made Akil swear to look after you.”

“He did,” she assured him. Or at least she thought he did. Then she did as Rune asked, and pushed all the consideration of that aside. “He gave me a new name and adopted me, just as you told him to. He gave me the best of everything he had, including the finest education, just like he promised you he would. I think he even grew to love me in his own way. At least he cherished me, if for no other reason than his god had.”

If they were really changing the past, none of that would have happened without Rune’s intervention. One way or another, it seemed she could not escape her early life being shaped by the Wyr. Something else would have occurred, something similar enough that the universe accepted the altered timeline as true. Perhaps what Rune had really given her was a kinder, gentler beginning, at least as much as he was able. Now that her panic had receded she found that she could be grateful for that.

“He gave you a new name? What did he name you?”

She whispered, “What do you think? None of us understood you at the time, none of us. We only knew that a god had touched our lives, found something of favor in me, and pronounced his decree. None of us really comprehended the things that you said.”

Rune frowned at her. He looked so puzzled, that despite all the uncertainty she faced, she had to smile. “You called me ‘darling,’ ” she said. “Remember? And we thought a god had called me something sacred.”

“Carling,” he breathed.

“What else?” she said.

Of all the shifts that might have occurred, this was not one Rune had seen coming, the possibility that the universe might flex and accommodate the intrusion of his presence into her past to such a profound and intimate extent. Before she had been the one to choose her own name, and while he had been saddened to hear of the demise of Khepri, he had understood it. Now he felt like he had stolen something precious from her, albeit unknowingly, and it sickened him. He sat frozen while Carling looked down at the table. She stroked her hands along the surface of the scroll as if to smooth out a tablecloth, smiling a strange smile that was glasslike in its fragility.

Carling had always had a poise that lay along her skin like a second spell of protection and made her look bulletproof, but now she looked more vulnerable than he had ever seen her. She looked tired, at a loss, even sad. The heavy mass of her hair lay against the graceful nape of her neck in an untidy knot. A few individual strands had escaped. They shone with ruby glints in the early-evening light.

His chest ached again. He rubbed his breastbone. When he spoke, his voice had filled with gravel. “No wonder you hate me sometimes.”

Her head tilted toward him but she didn’t look up. She kept smoothing the invisible tablecloth with those long slender fingers. “I don’t hate you,” she said. “I’m afraid of you. I wasn’t afraid of you before, but I am now. Change is hard, Rune.”

She didn’t know, he realized. Of course she didn’t. How could she? The sickened feeling increased to the point of actual nausea. He couldn’t look at her as he forced himself to speak. “You chose your own name. Before. I’m so profoundly sorry I disrupted that.”

He sensed rather than saw her quick, sharp look, the inhuman stillness of her rigid body. Then she moved and said softly, “We thought you called me something sacred, but I chose to take it as my name, Rune. I remember that distinctly. You didn’t take away the fact that I made that choice, or that I chose to keep it for all these years.”

At that he was able to breathe again. He touched the smooth skin on the back of her hand. He found every excuse to touch her. He couldn’t stop himself. Before she looked at him with outrage, bewilderment, and now she seemed to welcome it. Or so he told himself.

They sat in silence, absorbing what had happened. After a few moments, he shook his head and growled, “I still want to fight something.”

She nodded as if to herself. “Now there’s a logical reaction,” she murmured. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

He wanted to fight something and win, so he could show her there was nothing to be afraid of anymore, that everything would be all right. But he was no longer certain of that himself. She was right, monsters were easy. “You know I can’t leave you now, don’t you? No matter how you might demand it of me. I just can’t.”

Her lovely eyes flashed up to his. She sighed. “I don’t want you to leave,” she admitted. “That was my fear talking earlier. Even though what is happening is strange and frightening, it’s got to be better than coming to a standstill and waiting to die. We might actually find something in all of this mess that will save my life.” She turned her hand over and curled her fingers around his. “Because I do want to live, if for no other reason than to solve this mystery and discover what else life can be. Maybe it will become so strange, it will be interesting.”

“Living is always interesting,” he said. “You just got bored.”

He loved watching her laugh. Every time she laughed, she looked surprised. She said, “I guess I did.”

He nodded, looking at the pearl-hued ovals of her fingernails. With a brutal honesty, Rune acknowledged where he was because he couldn’t afford to do anything else.

He had a thing for her. He had it bad and it gnawed in his gut, a craving he had not yet found a way to satisfy.

Wyr, when they mated, did so for life. There was a line beyond which an irrevocable change occurred. No one fully understood where that line was drawn because, he believed, it was different for everyone. Mating, for a Wyr, came from a complex combination of choice, sex, instinct, actions and emotion.

He did not think mating could happen unless something deep and fundamental within a Wyr invited it in. He had witnessed firsthand both Dragos and Tiago as they had experienced the throes of mating. He had talked to each male at some point as they had gone through the experience, and he had, in fact, tried his best to get Tiago to reverse course, which had nearly cost him not only Tiago’s friendship, but Niniane’s as well. Neither Dragos nor Tiago had chosen to back away when they realized what was happening. Instead they seemed to embrace their fate. More, they did everything in their power to make it happen.

Rune had acknowledged the presence of a few other potential mates throughout his life. There had been a couple of rare women who had a combination of personality traits that caused him to look at them in speculation and think to himself, you might just be perfect. In the end he had not pursued any of them.

He wondered now what would have happened if he had. Perhaps nothing. They might have been terrific lovers for a time and become a good memory. He had not wanted to take a mate and had chosen not to risk it.

He believed he was all right for now. A dangerous fascination did not turn into mating all on its own. Carling’s own barriers would help with that.

He had been wrong about her. Maybe she wasn’t a giggling girlfriend type, and maybe she didn’t allow very many people to get too close, but she wasn’t alone on a pinnacle and completely closed off. She cared, sometimes very deeply, sometimes, he thought, more than she knew, which was why Duncan had been grieving when Rune had talked to him. It was also why Carling had tolerated Rhoswen’s excessive devotion for so long, and why she insisted on healing and keeping Rasputin, even though it was not easy or convenient for her to do so. He wondered if she realized the real reason she cooked Rasputin chicken. It wasn’t to remind herself of the details of physical appetite. It was to remind herself of love.

That being said, the invisible line she had drawn between them still stood. They were still too different from each other, their lives too far apart. He could come up to the line and then choose to go no further.

A mating Wyr gave his life to his mate. Such an extreme gift called for an extraordinary kind of devotion or loyalty in return, especially from those who were not Wyr, for they could always choose to walk away while the Wyr who had mated to them never would. Although Rune had been concerned at first when Tiago had bonded with Niniane, he had come to admit, Niniane had the kind of capacity for devotion Tiago needed. Rune did not believe he could throw himself one-sided into mating with someone. He simply was not impetuous to the point of being suicidal.

But what a spectacular lover Carling would make. The thought caused his groin to tighten. Rapid-fire images bulleted through his brain, images of her curved luscious body writhing under his, her head thrown back, gorgeous eyes glittering with desire and pleasure as he pistoned into her. She would be a truly haunting lover. He wanted her mouth on his skin, her hands on his body. He wanted it more than he had wanted anything before. He broke into a sweat just thinking about it.

He regarded her, his lids dropping to hide whatever expression might be in his eyes. The way to satisfy a craving was to indulge it. To gorge on what one craved, taking and taking it, until the blaze of desire finally melted into satiation. That was how he could work Carling out of his system once and for all.

As fascinated as he had been with her these last few weeks, he hadn’t made the decision to actually pursue her.

Not until just now.

And she would want him to. He had already seen the kernels of passion in her, like a banked fire that had been abandoned but had not yet gone out, and he had tasted it on her lips. Earlier on the cliff, he had watched as desire warred with other emotions on her expression. He had chosen not to push, but not any longer.

By the time he was done with her, by all the gods, she would want him.

Carling watched in bemusement as Rune’s face and body grew tight and sharp-edged. His heart rate increased, a flush of color darkened his lean cheeks and an intensity of emotion exploded out of him.

What was that feeling? It was the same kind of feeling that had poured out of both Tiago and Niniane whenever they were together, a driving force that had impelled them into a new, uncertain future. Carling had known the feeling before as well, so very long ago. . . .

Hunger. Rune looked at her and felt hunger.

She stilled and opened her mouth, just as he launched off the table to pace throughout the room, his restless movements filled with a tight, liquid, urgent grace.

“We need to come up with a plan and it should be a fast one,” he said. “We have to go to San Francisco to call Seremela. Maybe she’ll be able to fly out for a consultation.”

Carling nodded slowly. She had been angry and shaken earlier, and ready to do anything that would let her escape from Rune. Now, with a cooler head, she thought of Julian again. Julian considered her deteriorating state too dangerously unpredictable. Even though she had originally agreed to stay on the island, now there really wasn’t any other option.

Rune continued. “And we need to discover whether or not the knife is where I told Akil to put it without expending any time or energy on it ourselves.”

Carling stirred. “I can see that it gets done. A Djinn owes me two favors. He’s very old and Powerful. I’m sure if anyone can retrieve your knife quickly, Khalil can, and there’s certainly no reason any longer for me to save those favors for a rainy day.”

“A Djinn.” He barked out a laugh. “Is this the same Djinn that kidnapped Niniane and threw Tiago into a frenzy?”

“The very same,” she told him.

He swiveled to look at her. A strange angry feeling gnawed at his insides. “What did you do for him that got you three favors?”

Her expression shuttered. “That is not my story to tell.”

“It had to have been a hell of a thing to get a Demonkind that Powerful indebted to you.” He said roughly, “You had to have given him something rare and precious, something no one else could have given him. And he had to have wanted it very badly.”

Carling raised her perfect brows. She said, “All of that is true.”

He felt goaded by her impenetrability, by what clawed at him from within. He started to growl.

Her eyes widened in surprise. “Are you growling at me?” Her face hardened. “Whatever the hell is going on with you, I suggest you think twice about it.”

Instead of stopping, he actually bared his teeth at her. Bared his teeth. He turned her chair while she was still in it, moving so fast she made a muffled sound of surprise. He slapped his hands onto the table on either side of her, pinning her in her seat. “What did you do for him?”

She looked from one side to the other at his corded arms trapping her in place. The angle of her slim eyebrows turned wicked. “Remember what I said earlier? Do not try to restrict my movements.”

“Damn it, Carling,” he hissed. He leaned down close so that she came nose-to-nose with his angry face. “Now is not the time to cop an attitude with me.”

“Pause that.” She flicked his chin with a forefinger, hard. “Who’s copping an attitude here?”

His expression turned murderous. “Your life is riding on what happens next, and maybe mine is too. You know how capricious and malicious the Demonkind can be.”

“I know exactly what the Demonkind can be. Khalil and I have known each other for a very long time.”

“What did you give him that got you three favors?”

“That’s none of your business!”

“Like hell,” he bit out.

She glared at him, her dark eyes snapping. “He’s the one who came to me. He asked me for help, and he offered me three favors. He has no reason to resent me, and now he can’t renege, and that’s all you need to know.” She thrust her face even closer so that the tips of their noses touched. “Now get out of my face, Wyr.”

The low, rough sound he emitted at that was infuriating, fascinating. Wait. Was he still growling? Or was he purring? His eyes drifted half closed. He gave her a heavy-lidded, sleepy, sensual, entirely disingenuous look.

“Make me,” he said. “Witch.”

The force of feeling that punched out of him was stronger than anything she could remember sensing before from anyone, the molten sirocco that reformed her world.

Violence. Rage.

Not simple hunger. A voracious, ravening urgency.

It clawed all common sense from her bones.

She growled back, shoved him away, and then she launched out of her chair to body slam him.

Surprise bowled him over more than anything else. He fell back onto the floor with a force that would have knocked the breath out of anyone human, and she came right along with him. Still growling, she landed on her knees straddling his body and planted her hands on either side of his head. Her loose caftan rode up to her bare thighs, and her hair came loose and spilled all over them in an extravagant waterfall of midnight silk.

He stared up at her, transfixed, all the rage knocked out of him.

He was such a beautiful man. He was far more beautiful than he had any right to be, and then he started to laugh and his handsome face creased with vivid recklessness. Her legs tightened until she gripped his long, lean torso with her calves, and there was so much Power that coursed through the massive muscled body between her legs, it caused a railroad spike of need to slam into her body from the long-dormant nerve endings at the apex of her legs.

As old and disciplined as she was, as solitary as she had been, out of choice as much as anything, it was all too much for a woman to take. She made a muffled sound and reached for him with both greedy hands.

He surged into a sitting position even as she sank her fists into his tangled hair. His arms came around her waist. Her legs were still on either side of him, and he yanked her down onto his pelvis so that the empty part of her that ached so desperately slammed onto the hard swollen length of his erection. He jammed his open mouth over hers.

Then they were together, locked in the same place of extremity, shoving their tongues into each other. Nothing about it was gentle or civilized. She jerked at his hair, pulling it with enough force it had to have hurt. He hissed against her lips. He pulled her lower torso closer as he ground upward onto her, hard, with his hips.

She was locked rigid into place, her need so severe that when she tried to pry her fingers out of his hair, she couldn’t. All of her plotting, all of her fine thinking, was vaporized until what was left came out of her in a thin, shaking animal whine.

His lungs worked like bellows. Heat blazed out of him. The rough vibrating rumble in his chest turned into a raw groan. He ran one hand up her spine to grip the back of her head, supporting her head and shoulders on his arm. With his other arm, he clenched her hips firmly against him. She took the hint and wrapped her legs around his waist as he rose up on his knees. He bent over to place her on the floor and then he came down with her, until there it was, what she had envisioned for what had seemed like forever, as she lay down with weighted limbs and his heavy body settled full on her.

Then she was able to loosen her grip in his hair only enough to hook her fingers into his T-shirt. She tore the cotton down his back, baring a wide expanse of muscle that flexed as she dug her fingers into him. He dragged his mouth away from hers with a shaken gasp. She had no idea what he said, but it seemed like it was in the form of a question.

“I hate your clothes,” she muttered.

He flattened his hand on her breastbone just under her throat and held her down as he reared back to stare at her. He was so roused, a luscious flush of blood darkening his tanned skin, those lion’s eyes glittering brilliant with desire, his face taut.

“I hate your stupid clothes too,” he said. He took the neckline of the caftan and ripped it wider, baring her breasts.

The door to the cottage opened, and a chilly rush of wind entered the room. Rhoswen stood in the doorway, clutching the dog under her arm. Rasputin erupted into a frenzy of snarling and barking. Moving almost quicker than sight, Rune lunged forward to cover Carling. She turned her face into his chest, not from any modesty but from the need to continue touching him in any way that she could.

He cupped the back of her head, shielding her face from scrutiny, and growled again, and this time there was no mistaking that low menacing sound. The heavy bones in his broad chest seemed wrong, as though he might have flowed into a partial shapeshift. She thought of Tiago’s monstrous partial shift when he had come after Niniane, both at the hotel and later when Niniane had been kidnapped, and need pulsed through her again. Carling closed her eyes and opened her mouth on Rune’s skin. She drank down his feral emotion like wine.

In her precise, Shakespearean-trained voice that was frigid with bitterness, Rhoswen said, “Apparently this was not the best time to say good-bye.”