Serpent's Kiss

by Thea Harrison

  Grace opened up one of the cabinets. She drew out two flashlights. She handed one to Carling and kept the other one. “I don’t know if you’ll need this or not,” she said. “Your eyesight is a lot more photosensitive than a human’s. It gets pretty black down there though.”

  “We had better take it, just in case,” said Carling.

  Grace reached into the cabinet for something else that was wrapped in a protective cloth. “Pull the door shut behind you,” she said to Rune. Then she turned on her flashlight and led the way down the tunnel.

  “So much for talking over a cup of coffee,” Rune muttered. He pulled the door shut, and they turned to follow the Oracle.

  “Talking over a cup of coffee is not what you asked for,” Grace said over her shoulder. The light from her flashlight bounced off the roughly hewn rock walls and the packed earth floor of the tunnel. The temperature dropped sharply as they went, and the cold air felt faintly damp and smelled of the river. “You wanted to consult with the Oracle. Well, this is how you do it. The Oracle has always spoken from the deep places of the earth. What we channel demands it.”

  Carling got the sense of space opening in front of Grace before she saw the tunnel walls widen. She and Rune followed Grace to step into a large cavern. Rune turned in a circle with the flashlight and then he flashed the light upward. The light did not touch the cavern walls, and it only glanced off the nearest part of the ceiling.

  “It’s remarkably dry for being so close to the river,” he said. His voice echoed strangely.

  “It has the same basic structure as the Mammoth Cave system. There’s a strong solid sandstone caprock layer over limestone. On the far end of the cavern there’s a natural tunnel that leads a bit farther down. The sandstone layer is damaged down there, so there’s some stalactite and stalagmite formation and the river leaks in before the cave system ends. There’s been some falling rock too, so that area’s not safe. That’s why we lock the door, to keep out exploring kids.”

  Grace set her flashlight down and unfolded the cloth from the item she had brought with her. She let the cloth drop to the ground and as she turned to them, she held the item up for them to see.

  It was a Greek mask. Ancient gold gleamed in the beam of the flashlight. The face was androgynous, beautiful and blank, with holes for the eyes and the mouth.

  Carling murmured, “Oh my. That’s stunning.”

  “The Oracle has worn this mask for thousands of years,” Grace said. “As you can imagine, there have been many reasons for that and they have fluctuated over time. Sometimes it has been worn with a great deal of ceremony. My grandmother taught my sister and I that we now wear it for two reasons. The first is tradition and honoring our past. The second reason is to remind the petitioner, when you consult with the Oracle you will no longer be talking to me, Grace Andreas.”

  “Do you remember what is said?” Carling asked.

  “I’ve heard that sometimes we can, but sometimes we just go blank.” Grace’s head was bent. She said quietly, “But I’m no expert. I’ve only been called to do this once since Petra died.” She lifted her head. “Are you ready?”

  “Yes,” Rune said.

  Grace raised the mask to place it over her face. Something vast stirred the cavern air. The ancient Power that haunted this land began to coalesce. A dry sound scraped at the edge of their hearing, like the sound of scales sliding along the cavern walls. The sound surrounded them as the Power coiled around.

  Already unsettled, Rune’s hackles raised. He found himself growling low in his chest. Carling moved near until her shoulder brushed his arm. In the slanted beam of the flashlight, her face was composed but her eyes were wide and wary. Rune turned so that he stood back-to-back with Carling, facing outward.

  A voice spoke from behind the golden mask, but it was not Grace’s voice. It was something else, something older and much wilder than a human’s voice.

  “There you are, gryphon,” said the old wild Power. “I have looked forward to this conversation we have had.”

  Looked forward, to a conversation in the past. Rune shook his head sharply. Yeah, there was that bad dose of LSD again, tripping on his ass like a flashback.

  “How you doing?” he said to Python. “You old crazy, dead whack-job, you. Long time no see.”

  The Power chuckled, a sound that brushed against their skin. “Have you seen Schrödinger’s Cat yet, gryphon?”

  Rune knew of Schrödinger’s Cat. It was a famous physics hypothesis that described the paradox of quantum mechanics. Place a cat in a box with some poison along with some twisty scientific mumbo jumbo. Rune had lost patience with the mental exercise long before he bothered to learn all the physics involved. What he remembered was, the cat was supposed to be both alive and dead in the box, until it was observed to be either alive or dead.

  Part of what the hypothesis was supposed to illustrate was, in quantum physics, the observer shapes the reality of what he observes. What did she mean by asking him that question?

  Behind him, Carling hissed and bumped into his back. She said in his head, How could she possibly know to refer to Schrödinger’s Cat? That hypothesis wasn’t invented until the 1930s, and she died—if she really did die—thousands of years ago.

  He said, I’ve lived a whole long life filled with weirdness. But this is weird even for me. He said aloud, “I’m not nearly drunk enough for this kind of conversation, Python.”

  Something rushed up to his face. He jerked back, staring at the pale indistinct lines of a face. The transparent face bore a resemblance to a human female, but only in the same kind of way a chimpanzee or ape might. Its features were too sharp and elongated, with more of a snout than a nose, and it flowed back to a hooded cobra-like flare of a neck before falling into the body of a serpent as thick as a man’s waist.

  He steeled himself and passed his hand through the apparition. “You’re a ghost. You’re not really here.”

  The woman’s smile revealed a wicked curve of fangs. “I am not here,” she said, “like a dimly seen island overlaid on the ocean. I am not here, so perhaps I am there, lost in some Other land.”

  “Are you dead or aren’t you?” he demanded. Cryptic ramblings—gods help him, his head might spontaneously combust.

  “Like Schrödinger’s Cat, I am both dead and alive,” said Python, coiling and recoiling her ghostly body through the cavern. “I was alive in the past. I died in the past. Who knows what I will be next?”

  Carling gripped Rune’s arm before he could explode. She had turned to face the apparition too. She asked, “Are you traveling through time?”

  The ghostly apparition turned to her, and Python’s smile widened. “I have traveled. I am traveling. I will travel.”

  “Is that why, even though you have died, you’re not altogether gone?” Carling asked.

  “Either that,” said Python, “or I’m just a crazy whack-job ghost.” That feral transparent face drew closer to Carling and softened. “You’re one of mine. My children are so beautiful. I want you to live forever. That is why I gave you my kiss.”

  “Your gift has lasted a very long time, and I am grateful,” Carling said. “But now I am dying, unless we can figure out how to stop it. We came to ask for your help.”

  “I can’t give you the kiss again,” said Python. “That time is past.” Her coiling and recoiling increased in speed as though she were agitated. “I took away the day but gave you an unending, gorgeous night. What you make of that is not up to me. A mother cannot live life for her children.”

  “That’s not what she’s asking you to do,” Rune said. Desperation edged his voice. He hadn’t known what to expect, but he sure had not expected this. To actually be able to talk with Python was more than he could have hoped for, but it might end up being one useless, psychedelic nightmare. “She doesn’t want you to live her life for her. We’re asking you how to keep her from dying.”

  “Wait,” said Python. “I’m confused. Hasn’t she died yet?” Her face c
ame around to Rune. “Why have you not gone back to save her?”

  Python’s words seared him. She’s crazy, he thought as he stared at her. She’s a crazy ghost. That’s all. He fought to find his voice and said hoarsely, “She hasn’t died, Python, she’s standing right here in front of you. But she is my mate, and she will die if we don’t find a way to stop it. So will you please, just fucking please make some fucking sense for once in your goddamn fucking life!”

  The feral ghost looked at him with surprise. “Well, you don’t have to yell at me,” she said in a plaintive voice. “You’re not as far along as I thought you would be by now.”

  “Where am I supposed to be?” he asked dully.

  “Right here, gryphon,” said Python. “Remember what we are. We are the between creatures, born on the threshold of changing time and space. Time is a passageway, like all the other crossover passages, and we have an affinity for those places. We hold our own, steady against the interminable flow. That’s what I tried to give all of my children. That’s who you are. The Power of it is in your blood.”

  “It’s all about the blood,” Carling whispered. “The key is in the blood.”

  “The key has always been in the blood,” said Python. “You are perfect for each other. Nature could not have created a more flawless mating. You have everything you need to survive. If you survive.”

  Python faded as they watched. The Power that had filled the cavern ebbed away.

  Rune threw the flashlight to the ground and dug the heels of his hands into his burning eyes. He felt demented.

  “We have everything we need to survive—if we survive?” He roared, “What the hell did that mean, you crazy whack-job bitch!”

  Carling came around to face him. She grabbed his wrists to drag his hands away from his face. Her eyes were shining. “Rune, I think she told us everything we need to know.”

  He stared at her, breathing hard. After a moment he was able to speak more or less sanely again. “Well, do you mind explaining it to me?”

  “I didn’t get a chance to tell you everything earlier,” Carling said. “Seremela and I had talked about looking for ways to get me into some kind of remission, at the very least try to reach a holding pattern to buy us some time to do more research. She said it was possible that becoming a succubus had been a defense response from my immune system when I could no longer keep down the blood I drank.”

  “A defense response,” he said, frowning. “When you frame it that way, the transition would not have been a good thing.” Victims of prolonged starvation ate things out of desperation, often things that had no real nutritive value. Their bodies started to consume themselves until eventually their organs began to shut down.

  Carling nodded. “Seremela suggested I try to find some kind of physical nourishment that I could tolerate, in the hope that it might slow down some of the symptoms. I wasn’t looking forward to trying to drink blood again, but I’m willing to do just about anything, so I said I’d think about it. Python just said you hold your own against the flow of time, Rune, and that it’s in your blood. The key is in the blood. Those are the exact words Seremela and I said to each other.”

  Gradually he calmed, stroking her hair as he listened to her. “Could you have been starving all this time?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Eventually I stopped feeling hungry, then I began to sense emotions from living creatures and started to feel better whenever I did. From everything I had heard, that sounded like a natural progression of the disease.”

  “Well that might be so, but it still sounds a lot like starvation to me,” he said. “Much as I want this, I’m afraid to believe in it. It sounds too good to be true.”

  “But it could fit,” she said. “Your blood could have what it takes to put me in remission. This whole strange journey you and I have been on has been as a result of your Wyr attributes coming into contact with my Vampyrism.”

  He closed his eyes. “And that has never happened before,” he whispered. A sliver of hope worked its way into his chest, lightening the dull panic that had taken him over when Python had disappeared. He bent his head to kiss her, savoring the soft curve of her lips as she kissed him back. “We need to start trying this.”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re not going to give up if you hork a couple of times,” he said sternly. He yanked her close to hug her fiercely. “You haven’t eaten for a helluva long damn while. It may take some doing to get your system to accept anything. We’ll keep at it.”

  She put her arms around his waist and leaned on him. “Agreed. We can even try giving me blood intravenously if I can’t stomach it.”

  Some fifteen feet away, Grace said in a rusty-sounding voice, “I sure hope you got everything you needed from that session, because I’m cooked.”

  They turned to find the human on her knees. Carling pulled out of his arms to go over to Grace. “Are you all right?”

  “I think so.”

  As Carling helped the human to her feet, Rune collected the flashlights and wrapped the gold mask in its protective cloth. He asked, “Do you remember what happened?”

  “No. I feel like I’ve been hit over the head with a blunt object.” Grace squinted at them.

  Carling said to her, “It was a very Powerful, very strange session, but hopefully we learned what we needed to.”

  “Good, because I don’t think I can do that again in a hurry,” said Grace as she pulled away to stand on her own. She moved as if every muscle in her body hurt. “Let’s go.”

  They climbed the tunnel, moving more slowly than they would have otherwise in deference to Grace’s halting stride. As they went, questions and doubts began to crowd out Rune’s relief.

  Hasn’t she died yet?

  His blood began to pound in his ears. What were they missing? What piece of the puzzle had not yet formed? Or had Python just had one of her little diagnostic moments? He managed to keep from growling but he wanted to lash out at something or someone. He wanted to do some damage in the name of something good.

  They helped Grace tuck the things back in the Rubbermaid cabinets. Carling pushed open the door to the gray light of a warm, humid summer predawn. She stopped so abruptly Rune ran into her. Then he saw what had brought her to a standstill.

  A great bronze dragon the size of a private jet dominated the meadow. His gigantic horned head lay on his paws with the appearance of relaxation, except that his Power was a smoldering volcano and his eyes burned with hot gold.

  Dragos had found them.

  Rune put his hands on Carling’s shoulders and tried to ease her back inside the tunnel. She dug in her heels and refused to budge, keeping her body between him and the Lord of the Wyr.

  A whippet-slender woman with a long blonde, disheveled ponytail leaned back against the dragon’s snout. She wore cargo pants, high-end running shoes, and a cherry red tank top. Her arms were folded across her chest, and she had one foot kicked over the other. At their appearance, the woman met Rune’s gaze and shook her head.

  “I’ve got to hand it to you, slick,” the blonde woman said. “You’ve really pissed him off this time.”

  TWENTY

  Carling felt Rune’s energy spike with adrenaline and aggression. She felt his grip on her shoulders tighten, the fingers lengthening into claws. He picked her up bodily and shoved her back through the doorway. She didn’t have a chance to resist. She fell into Grace, who had been right behind them, and both women went sprawling. The human woman made a muffled sound filled with pain.

  Carling sprang around as Rune grabbed hold of the door. She didn’t bother wasting time on trying to get upright. Instead she thrust out her foot. She managed to get a boot wedged in the opening before Rune could slam it shut.

  “Goddamn you,” she said between her teeth, so furious she could hardly see straight. She twisted to grab hold of the edge of the door with both hands. Rune couldn’t shut it now without hurting her, and he couldn’t both guard her and at the same time wast
e energy on fighting with her to get her inside.

  He realized it too and gave up. She leaped to her feet and pushed outside to find the golden monster standing between her and Dragos and the woman.

  The dragon had lifted his head. Both he and the blonde woman with him were staring at Rune. The blonde woman’s wide gaze was stricken with dismay. “Oh God, you didn’t,” said the woman.

  “I did,” Rune said. He was growling, a low menacing sound that warned them off.

  The blonde woman said to the dragon, “You’re too much of a threat to him this way. You have to change.”

  Dragos considered, thoughts shifting behind his huge, fierce gaze. Carling put a hand on Rune’s shoulder as she stepped to his side. She watched the dragon carefully as she brought her Power to the ready. She may not have studied which spells would work best against a gryphon, but she had studied spells to use in battle against a dragon, because she and Dragos had not always been allies. It appeared they were not allies now either.

  “All the Elder Races agreed this was to be a sanctuary,” Grace said sharply from behind Carling and Rune. “Violence is forbidden here.”

  “People can be taken from this place,” said Dragos. “And violence done to them elsewhere.”

  Underneath the grip of her hand, she felt the golden monster take in a sharp breath. Then the dragon shimmered and changed into the figure of a six-foot-eight male with black hair, golden dragon’s eyes, and rough-hewn features. The dragon’s Power boiled in the air around him, just as Rune’s did. Dragos put his hands on his hips and stared at Rune, his expression tight.

  The blonde woman looked at Carling. “I’m Pia, Dragos’s mate,” she said. “Are you Carling Severan?”

  “Yes,” said Carling.

  Pia said gently to Rune, “We understand better now. We don’t intend any harm to your mate.”

  “But that won’t be true of those who are coming,” said Dragos.

  “What do you mean?” Carling asked. “What’s happened now?”

  “More consultations and an agreement. You are under an order of execution. What you have been going through has some sort of effect on the environment around you, and you have refused to remain segregated from others. You have too much Power, Carling. You’ve been deemed too dangerous to live. Julian and several members of the Elder tribunal are on their way to imprison you until the sentence can be carried out.” Dragos looked at his former First. “You need to snap out of it. Start coming up with reasons why they shouldn’t carry out what they plan to do, and you need to start talking now.”