Serpent's Kiss er-3

by Thea Harrison

  Back to Rune.

  He was too quiet. He moved with a cat’s sinuous predatory grace. Added to that, he was fast enough to make her heart freeze if it hadn’t already stopped beating. She pulled her bottom lip between her teeth and sucked on it as she thought.

  Could she take him in an outright fight? She was faster and stronger than most. She could take her progeny Julian, the official King of the Nightkind, and that was a claim not many creatures could make. She had turned Julian during the height of the Roman Empire, and he was quite an old, Powerful Vampyre in his own right. But she didn’t think she could take Rune without a serious struggle and investing in a considerable expenditure of magic.

  She sucked harder on her lower lip. He was here as an ally with the intention of helping her. There was no reason whatsoever to think things would come to that. But just in case, she should do a little research on what might be the right spells to use in battling a gryphon. It never hurt to be prepared, and it never hurt to fight dirty if the situation called for it. The best way to take any of the really ancient, Powerful creatures was through the element of surprise.

  There was the quiet sound of a page turning, the only sound in the kitchen aside from the cooking meat, and the infinitesimal sound of Rune’s calm unhurried breathing. The page had turned ten times since he had started, and she knew very well what kind of dense material he was reading.

  She had learned the laws of logic from Aristotle himself. She had studied each scientist who had furthered the development of the scientific method. Those notebooks Rune read held some of her finest thinking. They contained historical fact, rare accounts of oral history and snippets of information from everything she could possibly think of to get her hands on that might fuel her research.

  She had acquired fabulous wealth over the course of her life. She owned various properties scattered throughout the world in places such as New York, London, the French Riviera, Morocco and Egypt’s Alexandria. She owned irreplaceable historical artifacts, and diamonds and sapphires the size of duck’s eggs, but her finest treasure was currently spread out on the table in front of him.

  A page turned. Now he was on page eleven and he had not yet asked a single question for clarification. So he was far too clever as well. A clever male was a dangerous one, and all that much harder to surprise. She would do well to remember it.

  She sliced into the largest piece of chicken and checked the middle. The meat was white all the way through and crispy dark on the outside. He was the type of creature who would enjoy that. She piled all the pieces onto a plate and removed the skillet from the stove.

  She glanced over her shoulder. Rune had sat back in his chair. He lounged with his long legs stretched out, watching her with his full attention. Which was, one-on-one, in the quiet solitude of the sunlit kitchen, quite a considerable force of nature. He drew on her like a magnet. She picked up the plate of steaming meat. She looked at it and back at him, and she spoke a word and the meat cooled. Then she walked over to set the plate in front of him.

  She had a bizarre experience as she approached him. It started first with this thought: what an exotic thing it was to place a cooked meal in front of a waiting hungry male. No doubt it was something millions of women did daily, but throughout the several thousand years of her existence, she had never before been one of them.

  Rune gave her a slow smile, his gaze very male and lit with appreciation, and it stirred something inside. What was that? Distracted, she poked at herself, like poking at a sore tooth. That was another strange thing for her to be feeling, what was it?

  Pleasure.

  He smiled at her as she placed the meal in front of him, and she felt pleasure.

  The muscles in the pit of her stomach tightened, like a snake coiling to strike. She opened her mouth, to say what, she didn’t know. Something scathing, a suitable put-down, something by gods not vacuous, or she would have to throw herself over the nearest cliff just on principle alone—

  Rune’s smile had deepened and it carried a hint of puzzlement. “What did you do just now?” he asked. “It was a spell of some sort. I could feel it but I didn’t understand it.”

  Confused, the snake in the pit of her stomach fumbled and lost the ability to strike. She blinked and glanced at the stove. What had she done? She said, “I cooled the meat.”

  Rune’s eyes danced and his lean tanned features lit with laughter. “You . . . cooled the meat for me?”

  “Rasputin cannot eat the chicken when it is too hot,” she said, frowning at him. “It seemed logical that you would not be able to either.”

  “Of course. How remarkably—thoughtful of you.” He put a hand over his mouth to cover an explosive cough. “You named the ankle-biter Rasputin?”

  The sense of his amusement was intoxicating, like champagne must be for humans. She regretted never having had the opportunity to drink champagne when she was human. She had been a Vampyre for a very long time before she had first heard of the drink.

  She raised an eyebrow. “Your attempt to hide your amusement is futile. And Rasputin seemed an appropriate name, since he is apparently so hard to kill.”

  She had met the original Grigori Rasputin once, as she had traveled through Russia to consult with a certain hermitic and irascible witch. She had found Rasputin to be an odd, intense man. He had been undeniably human and very likely insane, but anyone who could survive reputedly being stabbed, poisoned, shot multiple times, mutilated, and badly beaten before finally drowning, deserved a certain amount of respect.

  “And,” murmured Rune, “the ankle-biter’s more than a bit rabid.”

  Now both her eyebrows rose. “I do not find him so.”

  “Of course not,” Rune told her, his tone cheerful. “You rescued him, you’re female and you cook him chicken. That makes him yours, heart and soul.”

  Her mouth tightened. “He’s a ridiculous creature.”

  “He’s a dog,” he said, his wide shoulders lifting in a shrug. “That’s what they do.”

  She crossed her arms under her breasts. Only later did she recognize it for a defensive gesture. “I did not ask for his devotion.”

  Rune’s gaze darkened into an expression she didn’t understand, so she had no words for it. He said gently, “You know, there isn’t anything wrong with simply being kind for kindness’s sake, or other creatures responding to it.”

  This conversation had not only turned uncomfortable, it was unnecessary. She looked away from his penetrating gaze. “Do you require anything else that will help you read?” she asked, her tone frosted with ice.

  “No,” he replied. His tone was as easy and relaxed as the rest of him. “Not a thing. Thank you for the chicken.”

  “Fine.” She turned to go but found herself unable to step across the doorway.

  Being kind for kindness’s sake.

  Now the tightening was in her chest. She pressed a hand to her breastbone, bewildered. She no longer knew her own body. It was betraying her in a thousand inexplicable ways whenever she was around this male.

  She forced herself to say, “Thank you for staying and trying to help me.”

  Twenty feet away, he took a breath. He replied quietly, “You’re more than welcome, Carling. It’s my pleasure to do what I can for you.”

  Those words. He gave them to her so easily, like a gift. They were far more gracious than she deserved. She fled before her body could betray her in some other way.

  As soon as Carling’s tantalizing and distracting presence left the kitchen, Rune was able to hit his stride with the text.

  He also ate every scrap of the cold meat she had cooked for him, and good gods, it was pretty awful. Somehow she had managed to wreck the simple task of browning chicken in a skillet. The outside was charred black, and the inside oozed juice that was still pink. If he had been human, he would have been concerned about salmonella poisoning. As it was, Rune wasn’t a picky eater and had eaten some terrible meals in his time. His tastes had changed when he had first
learned to shapeshift and socialize with other species, but he was actually not averse to eating raw meat when necessary, and he had endured any number of campsite disasters.

  He started to chuckle again when he thought of her cooling the meat for him the way she did for the dog. Then he remembered how she had held herself when he had spoken of kindness, averting her face and eyes, and his laughter faded.

  Both Wyr and Vampyre societies could be brutal ones. Sometimes conflict could only be settled violently. All of the sentinels were enforcers of Wyr law, but as Dragos’s First, Rune was the ultimate enforcer. If Dragos was ever actually not in a position to do so, it was Rune’s responsibility to hunt and take down even the other sentinels if they ever went renegade. The other sentinels were his friends, partners and comrades in arms. He was glad it had never come to that, but he never forgot the responsibility of his position.

  For all of that, Rune was really an easygoing male most of the time, and quick to both laughter and affection. He was that rarest of creatures, a man’s man who had no problem admitting he enjoyed chick flicks and women’s fashion. They brought out things in women he adored, from the spiraling of emotions to mysterious heights and depths, to the flowering of wonder-filled feminine pleasure as a woman tried on new outfits and she discovered for the first time in the mirror that she was, in actual fact, beautiful.

  From what he had seen, Carling was not quick to either laughter or affection. She did not inspire thoughts of comfort or cuddles. Had she once possessed those qualities, or had her experience of life really been that harsh and unyielding? He frowned. The scars covering her body told their own tale.

  When he tried to imagine her giggling with a girlfriend, it bent his head. Rhoswen clearly worshipped her, and it was obvious Duncan felt something for her too, but as far as he could tell, those relationships were not on any kind of in-depth, equal footing. He suspected most women felt threatened by her, as well they should. Life had fashioned Carling into a sleek, lethal weapon, the double-edged kind that would cut off the hand of anyone who dared to wield it if they should try to grasp hold unwisely.

  Taking that kind of weapon would take a hard, firm hand, from one who knew how and when to hold on with a strong grip, and when to let go and let the weapon free to cut where it would. No one mastered such a weapon. If one were lucky, one might gain respect, trust, alliance, an agreement to work together.

  Carling was so shielded, and she had built up her personal arsenal over such a long period of time, he doubted if anything would change her at this late date. In that realization, at last he found the conceptual frame he needed in order to curb his fascination for her. There was simply nowhere for his fascination to go, and nothing for it to latch on to in any long-term way. She was brilliant, gorgeous, deadly and even quirky, but she would not allow someone to get too close, not even a dog.

  Fair enough. Sometimes pinnacles were so narrow and elevated, there was only room for one at the top. If she managed to live for so long with such isolation, she must like her own company. As far as he was concerned, he was happy to help her out if he could, and he would be happy to move on when it was over. And it would be over somehow. They would either find a way for her to survive, or they wouldn’t. As Duncan pointed out, people die all the time. Sometimes old, long-lived creatures died too.

  Those thoughts produced a clench in his gut, but he ignored it. One way or another, this stop on the island was just an odd blip in his road, and he would do well to keep that thought firmly at the forefront of his mind. His real life waited for him back in New York, where he had good friends and any number of people who loved him.

  He read until late afternoon, when he went on the hunt for something to drink. There were two chains at the kitchen well. One was attached to an empty bucket. Curiously he hauled on the other one and brought up a stash of Corona in a metal basket. The bottles of beer were quite chilled from resting at the bottom of the well. Score one for the thirsty Wyr.

  He grabbed a couple and lowered the rest back into the well then went back to his reading. Scientific journals were more Dragos’s schtick, not his. Carling’s research was undeniably difficult reading. Whenever he reached a chemical or magical equation, he simply memorized the formulas without trying to decipher or understand them at this point. But he had thought he would find slogging through Carling’s notes to be a mind-numbing chore, and that wasn’t so. The process she had gone through pulled him in, almost in spite of himself.

  Many creatures, human and otherwise, approached matters of magic in different ways. Throughout history, magic had been shrouded in mysticism, and sometimes outright religion, and many of those religious or mystical practices were still in use. Others practiced magic as a matter of folk tradition, much like the herbalist lore in indigenous societies that had been passed down by word of mouth for generations.

  Given her roots in early Egypt, he guessed that Carling would have originally learned her magic from the standpoint of religion. By the nineteenth century, Vampyrism was, in large part, no longer viewed as a mystical curse but as a disease, and her approach to solving the issue was correspondingly scientific.

  Her analyses were cool and precise. Upon learning the symptoms of the end stages of the disease and the challenges she would be facing, her attitude was unflinching. How humans lived with the knowledge of their own mortality was beyond him. He tried to imagine what it would be like to learn he was mortal, that his time was measured and must come to an inevitable end, and he simply couldn’t. If he was ever killed, he would go into his death with astonishment and incomprehension. Among all the other reactions she elicited from him, Rune had to admit to a certain grudging admiration for Carling’s courage.

  But each research path she took came to a dead end. Her attempts to isolate the infection that caused the disease failed.

  So what was wrong? What logic path or experiment had she not considered? He could see nothing among the elegant lattice of thought laid out so meticulously on the pages, and yet something niggled. What was it that bothered him? He wasn’t going to try duplicating any of her processes. He didn’t have the ability to replicate any of the experiments she had chronicled. She was the scientist, the clear expert in this field. He took it as a matter of faith she had been as meticulous in her experiments as she was in her handwriting. If something failed, it failed.

  So it was something else that bothered him. Was it a premise or a conclusion?

  The light was fading in the kitchen when he finally admitted he needed a break. He pushed away from the table and stretched his stiff neck and shoulders. He had almost a hundred pages left to read, but he had reached a point where he was no longer absorbing the information. Some fresh air might help clear his head, and his body needed to move.

  He went outside and walked through the gardens, around the house toward the cliff. It was nearing sunset, and the shadows thrown by the foliage were elongated. The twists and angles of the shadowed tree limbs cut exaggerated dark paths across the lawn.

  He walked along the waist-high stone wall that bordered the edge of the cliff, and he looked out over the water. The sun was an enormous blazing orange ball. It seemed to grow larger as it neared the horizon. Like Carling, the island was wrapped in its own strange, solitary existence. This piece of Other land gave the perfect illusion that nothing else existed except for it, the cobalt ocean and the limitless sky. He took in deep breaths of the salted air and pretended he was up there, high in the air, flying over the water until all sight of land disappeared.

  Then he felt something ripple, like a breeze fluttering against his skin, and everything shivered and changed. He blinked hard and stared around him, as he tried to figure out what was different.

  The flaming sun still lowered in the west, an Icarus who flew too high and died his daily death. The ocean was still cobalt blue, darkening as the daylight faded. He turned. Cliff, wall, garden, shadows, great sprawling, crazy-gothic house . . .

  . . . and beyond the house, far in
the east, were electric lights, like a spray of stars that had committed mortal sins and had fallen from heaven. They lay strewn in a smoldering carpet on a distant, barely visible land.

  Wow, so that’s what it looked like on this side, when the veil between this land and the Bay Area thinned. He strolled eastward along the wall as he soaked up the strange sight. The illusion of land was immense, sketched in transparent lines across the entire east. Through it the ocean was clearly visible. The double horizons were dizzying.

  “Sentinel?” Rhoswen’s sharp call came from the direction of the kitchen door, the eastern side at the back of the house. “Sentinel!”

  The Vampyre sounded upset, even urgent. He broke into a jog. By the time he rounded the corner, he was at a flat-out run.

  Rhoswen stood in the doorway, Rasputin tucked under one arm. The powder puff with teeth broke into a frenzied barking when he appeared. Out of patience for the dog’s histrionics, Rune bent, bared his teeth and growled a deep-throated warning. “Behave.”

  Rhoswen stared at him. Rasputin froze, his frenzy stopped in midbark. The whites of his eyes showed around shiny black irises. He looked like a startled stuffed animal.

  “That’s better,” Rune muttered grimly. He patted the little dog on the head. “Good boy.” He straightened. “Now, what’s wrong?”

  “I just woke up a few minutes ago,” Rhoswen said. Her hair was mussed, and she had a crisscross of pillow lines on one cheek. “I went to check on Carling. I thought you should know—she’s faded again.”

  Rune grew grimmer. He said, “Show me.”

  FIVE

  Rhoswen strode quickly through the house. Rune kept effortless pace beside her, his long legs eating up the distance.