Serpent's Kiss

NINE

“Get away from me.” She shoved him back and leaped out of her chair.

He sprang upright and stepped forward, hand outstretched. He said, “Not while you’re in a panic.”

She spun behind the chair, picked it up and flung it at him. She shouted, “Get the fuck out!”

With a swipe of his arm, he knocked it to one side. Determination stamped his features. “Think a minute, Carling. You’ve just had an episode. Another won’t occur for at least another several hours, perhaps even a day or more. We have time to discuss this and figure out what it means—”

She stared at him in incredulity. She could not remember the last time someone disobeyed a direct order of hers.

“Fine, goddamn you,” she hissed, “I’ll get out.”

She made it to the doorway before she felt his hand come down on her shoulder. It was too much. She knocked him away and spat out a Power-filled word that iced the air.

Rune froze in midmotion, his arm still stretched toward her. Then his Power surged in response, hot like a solar flare, and even though she had put enough force behind the spell to throw half the Vampyres in San Francisco into stasis, she knew it wasn’t going to be strong enough to hold him for long.

She never did get around to researching what spells would be effective against gryphons. She might regret that some day.

Fury pulsed from him like the outward rolling blast of a thermonuclear explosion. Slowly he began to move.

She fell back a step, staring. Then she turned and ran.

At first she headed for the house. Then she thought of Rhoswen’s stifling, resentful devotion, Rasputin’s frantic adoration, and she switched directions, racing along the path far faster than a human could ever hope to run, along the path that followed the cliff toward the other end of the island and the redwood forest. The evening sunshine slanted bars of light everywhere, transforming the idyllic scene into a deadly luminous prison.

When she was young, she had been taught that she was composed of many parts, her souls, her heart, her shadow, name and spirit.

How many pieces of yourself could you survive losing? When she had been just a child, she had lost her family and her freedom, and then she had lost her name. Just a few short years later, she had lost her breath and her heart had stopped beating. Then she lost almost everyone around her, not once but many times. With each decision she made that was based on Power, expediency, politics, survival and war, she lost pieces of her souls throughout the centuries. Her spirit felt gossamer-thin, in tatters.

She looked at the ground. Her attenuated, nimble shadow fled before her, as if trying to escape the nightmarish haunt she had become.

What if her shadow was the only real thing that was left of her? Had she, in the end, become nothing more than just the exercise of Power, the will to survive? If she removed the spell of protection, she would erupt into flames, but unlike the phoenix, she would not undergo a rebirth. Like a struck match, she would simply flare out of existence.

She could do it. She could go out, not gently into that good night but in a brilliant sunlit blaze, with no one around to witness. Her death might be solitary, as so very much of her life had been, but it would be her choice, her decision. Hers. She would own it, like she had claimed ownership of her life.

A cloud passed over the sun, so dense it eclipsed her shadow. She looked up.

It was no cloud but a great gold and bronze gryphon, soaring overhead. She could not imagine the kind of strength it must take to keep that heavy, muscled body of his aloft, and yet he made his flight seem so effortless.

Her fists clenched. He was a rampant impossibility, an enormous freak of nature.

He was such a stubborn ass.

She sucked in a lungful of air and screamed wordlessly at him. A harsh wrathful eagle’s cry sounded in reply.

The whole damn island wasn’t big enough for both of them. Okay fine. She already swore she was going to do it, and anyway, she was perfectly capable of being the one to leave if he wouldn’t do so. She took a sharp left, picked up speed, and sprinted at full strength over the edge of the cliff.

The wind whistled in her ears. As she fell, she was already making plans. She would swim back to San Francisco. Julian wouldn’t like her return. They had reached an understanding, she and the Nightkind King, when she had come to the island to die. But Julian would have to adjust, and Rhoswen was perfectly capable of making the crossing with the dog on her own.

Carling rolled in the air to dive headfirst and watched the foaming white-capped water rush toward her. She reached out to it with both arms, anticipating the cold shock of the plunge into water with grim satisfaction.

Hard claws jerked her upward with gut-wrenching force just before she hit. Son of a bitch. Her head snapped back. As the universe wheeled, she caught a glimpse of the gigantic lion paws that curled to grip her by the shoulder and thigh. The edge of tremendous bronze wings hammered down on either side of her.

She shouted at Rune, “You did not just do that!”

His deep voice sounded overhead. “How is that disbelief working out for you?”

The need to do violence caused her fists to shake. He swooped up with her to the top of the cliff and dumped her on the ground. With a twist of her hips, she flipped onto her back and drove her fist upward as hard as she could. Before she could get the blow to full extension, he knocked her hands aside and pinned her by driving his claws deep into the ground on either side of her arms.

He imprisoned the rest of her body by the simple expediency of lying down on top of her. It felt like she had a Hummer parked on her chest. While she might have the strength to shift a Hummer—she didn’t know, she’d never tried—she sure as hell didn’t have the strength to do it without any kind of leverage.

Outrage steam-whistled. Not in thousands of years had anyone dared to try to lay a hand (or paw, as it were) on her without her permission. She felt like she was about to blow a gasket. “YOU BASTARD! Let go of me!”

“Shut the fuck up.” His growl vibrated through her body to rumble in the earth beneath her.

Sunlight blinded her as she glared up at him, turning him into a towering blur overhead. She scrambled mentally for a spell and sucked in a breath—

—and the towering blur plummeted toward her. It resolved into an immense, sleek eagle’s head the length of her arm, with a long wicked hook of a beak that snapped at her. Rune tilted his head to stare at her with a blazing fierce eye the size of a headlamp. He roared, “DON’T YOU DARE!”

It was like having an F-16 bomber take off in her face. Her hair blew away from her face.

The spell died on her lips as she stared at the enraged gryphon. She had never seen him so close in his Wyr form before. His sheer magnificent size and regal barbarity were overwhelming.

She refused to get swept away by such bizarre perfection. She said in a cold, precise voice, “I would dare.”

His head lifted. She felt him struggling with his own anger. Then he said, “Will you at least calm down enough so we can talk about what happened? You are one righteous hellcat when you decide to get going, do you know that? Way to throw an all-over hissy fit, Carling.”

She ground her teeth. How dare he lecture her? “If you ever try to do anything to restrict my movements again, you’ll find out I know how to hold a grudge too,” she said between her teeth. “In fact, I have a real talent for it.”

“I’m sure you do,” he said. “Goddammit.”

In a startlingly humanlike gesture of exasperation, he shook his head and shifted his body off of her. He did not deign to glance down as he carefully pulled his claws out of the sod and shifted his paws to one side. She watched as he did it. Those retractable claws were curved like scimitars and sharp enough to pierce steel. He settled on the ground beside her and looked out over the water, a predatory leviathan wearing a ferocious frown.

She didn’t move. She looked up at him again, at that broad, strong feline chest to the long, graceful, strong column of his neck, and she lost whatever she had been about to say. Even though they were no longer touching, the great, heavy sprawling length of his body radiated warmth that began to sink into her bones.

Time passed and as she calmed, her perspective shifted. His severe, silent contemplation of the ocean and sky suddenly made her feel impetuous and oddly young. Or perhaps it was not so very odd. To him, she was young. What an amazing thought. When he wore his T-shirt and ragged jeans in his human form, and he made wisecracks in modern slang, he lived much more in the moment than she did. The weight of passing years did not press on him. He had no mortality.

In the process of scooping her out of a dead fall and pinning her down, Rune had not given her so much as the equivalent of a paper cut. She remembered how he had gently kissed her forehead before he had left her child-self, and burning tears filled her eyes again.

“I gave you permission to go back,” she whispered. “I didn’t give you permission to change me.”

The gryphon bowed his head, and somehow that giant fierce eagle managed to look humble and chagrined. “I heard the whip,” he confessed in a quiet, pained voice. “And I heard you cry out, and I couldn’t think. All I knew was I couldn’t let that lash fall on you again.”

The tears spilled over, sliding down her temples to soak into her hair. She glanced at his immense paws again. She hadn’t seen him kill the priest who had been whipping her, but she had seen the priest’s body afterward. The broken corpse had been in ribbons, its bones split apart. She reached out to touch one paw. “Okay,” she said unsteadily. “Okay. But I don’t remember what happened to me before you did that.”

He sighed and lifted up his mammoth wings to resettle them more comfortably into place along the sleek arch of his muscled back. Only then did he lift his head enough to look at her. “I don’t believe I have the Power to change you,” he said, still in that quiet, careful voice. “Not you, not your soul or spirit, or your ba, if you will. We don’t yet know what the rest of it means.”

She gave in to impulse and rolled over to sink her fingers into the fur at his breast. The fur was as thick and soft as it looked. Underneath, his hot skin was a tight cloak over muscles that were so massive they were as much of a shock to feel as they were to look at. She ran her hand upward through the fur, reaching the place where it gave way to a luxuriant burst of soft, small feathers. The feathers lengthened and darkened until they lay in a sleek bronze cap over his neck and head.

He began to purr as she petted him. The sound rumbled through her body. She raked her fingernails gently through the thick fur and soft profusion of feathers. He lay naturally in the position known in heraldry as the lion couchant, relaxed but alert as Carling studied him.

How could he not believe he had the Power to change her? What thrummed under her fingertips was indescribable. She realized how much of Rune’s personality came from his catlike sense of play. In his gryphon form, he revealed something much more ancient and unknowable.

How could he exist as two creatures melded into one? He said he had an affinity for crossovers and between places. She had nodded and thought she understood. Now as she stared at him, she didn’t think she had understood anything.

The Power of the between places roared in his body. By its very definition it was a transformative force filled with tension and dynamic movement. Yet instead of the tension tearing him apart, he contained it, the transformative force held steady as a rock by his immortal spirit, and the Power that required was unimaginable to her. It seemed the very definition of impossibility.

A mysterious, magical riddle.

With that realization, she had an epiphany.

“The mystery is written in your form,” she said. “Your body is the rune.”

His massive head tilted. He regarded her with a gaze made tranquil by the bright sun and the limitless sky.

She said in wonder, “You are the riddle.”

“Of course I am,” said the gryphon.

She rolled onto her knees and, since he appeared willing to indulge her scrutiny, she continued with her exploration of his fabulous body. It brought such simple pleasure, she found it soothing. She ran her hands along the huge graceful arc of one wing. His primary feathers were the darkest bronze. They held glints of gold in the sun. She stroked along the vane of one feather. It was as long as her torso.

“Do you ever lose these?” she asked. The feather felt so strong, it might have been made out of metal.

“Sometimes,” Rune said. “Not often.”

“Next time you lose one, think of me at the Festival of the Masque or at Christmas,” she told him. The Elder Races celebrated the seven primal powers at winter solstice with an annual event called the Masque of the Gods. While the Masque was traditionally a dance, it was also a time to exchange gifts, much like Christmas or Hanukkah.

He craned his neck to give her a skeptical look. “And give you something of mine you can spell during one of your shit fits?”

She looked at him with wide eyes. “I would never use a gift to spell someone.”

His incredible lion-colored eyes narrowed. The gryphon said, “I think your pants are on fire.”

She burst out laughing. She conceded, “Perhaps they might be a little singed around the hem.” Part of her was in shock that she could laugh at all, or that they had achieved such a strong turnaround of feeling in such a short amount of time.

She settled the feather gently back into place, and Rune shimmered and changed into the form of a man. He sat cross-legged on the ground, and her hands rested on his wide shoulder. He was the same creature. That incredible Power still roared under her fingertips. His tanned skin radiated heat. All the colors of his Wyr form streaked through his hair.

She wasn’t ready to stop touching him just because he had decided it was time to change forms. She fussed at his tousled shoulder-length hair, running her fingers through the length to smooth out the tangles.

“Don’t you ever comb this mess?” she grumbled. It was gorgeous. She refused to say that. It was bad enough she’d already slipped and called his gryphon form stunning. “Or wear jeans that don’t have holes in them?”

“I’ll buy new jeans when I get back to the city, just for you.” He turned his face into her hands and closed his eyes. She bit her lips and let her hands flow around him, her fingers framing those warm, lean features that were so handsome they made her chest ache.

“I’m scared,” she said. The words fell out of her mouth, and more tumbled out after. “Before I wasn’t letting myself feel anything. I’d gotten to a place where I accepted what was happening, and I was ready for it to be over with, but now I’m feeling everything again. I’m feeling too much, and I’m really, really scared.”

His arms came around her as she talked. He pulled her down and around, until she sat sprawled across his lap. Her head remembered the perfect fit in the hollow of his neck and shoulder, and she burrowed back into that place. He held her with his whole body, one hand cupping her head. She felt strange, surrounded by his strength. She felt breakable, and somehow cherished. One of her arms crept around his neck, and she found herself clinging to him.

“It’s all right,” he said, and for a moment she thought he was uttering stupid platitudes. “It’s all right to be scared. This is scary stuff.”

“I’d rather face monsters,” she muttered. She buried her face in the warm skin at his neck and inhaled his clean masculine scent. “Monsters are easy. This isn’t easy.”

“No, it isn’t,” he whispered. He rocked her a little.

There they were again, the strange new feelings he prompted in her, the sense of all her doors and barriers opening inside. Even though her caftan kept her covered down to her ankles, she felt naked and exposed. “I don’t know how to cope with the thought of my memories changing,” she breathed. “Even when I’ve lost everything and everyone, I always knew I could rely on myself. Now I don’t even have that. I don’t know what to rely on.”

“Rely on me,” said Rune. He pressed his lips to the fragile skin at her temple. “Listen to me. I am not sorry I saved you from that whipping or tried to make a horrible situation better for you, but I am profoundly sorry I did it without thinking through the real consequences of what might happen. Still, I do not believe that you—you at your essence—have changed. And you know that things must change if you are to survive, correct?”

She nodded.

“You could try to surrender to the experience and let change happen.”

“Change or die?” she said.

“Yes. Change or die.”

“You might have noticed, I don’t do surrender very well,” she told him in a dry voice.

“No, I don’t either.” He sighed and was silent a moment. Then he asked, “Did you choose to become a Vampyre, or were you turned against your will?”

She shivered. She did not know this person huddled against Rune’s chest. She said, “I chose it. In fact, I heard rumors and went in search of it.”

She felt him nod. He told her, “You embraced a change once that was so profound, it altered the definition of your existence. You can do it again if you have to.”

“I was a lot younger then,” she muttered.

His chest moved in a quiet chuckle. “Now you have experience to help guide you. Think back to that time and how you embraced the change. I have faith in you. I know you can do it.”

She soaked in his humor as she rested against his body’s support. When had his every move become important to her? How had she let that happen? She asked, “Why do you have that kind of faith in me? What did I do to deserve it?”

His chuckle turned into an outright laugh, the husky sound vibrating against her cheek. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that when everyone around you had a lifespan of perhaps forty years if they were lucky, you outlived them all by over four and a half thousand. You survived the rise and decline of the Egyptian, the Roman and the Islamic Empires. The gods only know what you did for shits and giggles during the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition. And you were one of the principal architects for how the Elder Races demesnes interact and coexist with the U. S. government.”

“You did all of that too,” she muttered. She plucked one of her long hairs off his black T-shirt. “The Spanish Inquisition, shits and giggles and whatever.”

He captured her hand and brought it to his mouth to kiss her fingers. He said, “Yes, but there is a fundamental difference between us. I only did what was already in my nature, and lived. You were human. You not only transcended your nature, you found ways to excel through some of the most misogynistic times in human history. It is incomprehensible to me how you can have such a sense of pride, but no real sense of self-worth.”

“Well,” she said with a frown. “I don’t think people like me very much.”

She hadn’t meant it as a joke, so she was startled when Rune clutched her tight and guffawed. He leaned back to look at her with dancing eyes. The impact of his handsome face laughing full bore into hers was a sucker punch she hadn’t seen coming. She struggled to find some sense of inner equilibrium and failed utterly. The sight of him filled her to the brim, and all she could do was cling to him and stare.

Rune told her, “You know the real reason why I snatched you up when you went over the cliff? I knew you were about to swim the ocean. I was just saving Tokyo, baby.”

She shrugged with a blank expression. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

His expectant expression turned to disappointment. He said, “I just called you Godzilla?”

She rolled her eyes. “Of course you did. Your reference to Tokyo made it so obvious. No doubt I should have picked up on it immediately, just as I should have known the identity of the hairy man with spectacles on that awful T-shirt of yours.”

“Clearly, this is a teasing session that has not gotten off on the right foot,” he said. “You’ve got to start watching old monster movies on TV. Oh, and football. Otherwise we’re going to run out of things to talk about.”

She raised an eyebrow. “I’ll be sure to get right on that.”

“Actually,” he confided with an intimate smile, “I was more afraid you would melt when you hit the water.”

She pointed at him. “I got that one. You think I don’t know people have nicknamed me the Wicked Witch of the West?”

He grinned and kissed the tip of her finger. “And a very accomplished lady she was too, if a bit combative.”

“You’re ridiculous.” Somehow her hand slipped, and she stroked his face. She felt like she could spend forever like this, resting against his long sprawling body, talking and laughing in the lazy, late afternoon. She might not be able to feel the warmth of the sun directly on her skin, but she could feel how it warmed Rune’s, and the heat from his body sank into hers.

The laughter in Rune’s face died away, and was replaced with an expression that was edged and raw. His gaze darkened and fell below hers, his mouth level and unsmiling. Realization pulsed. He was watching her with such hunger it was a palpable force. She licked her lips and saw in the flicker deep in his eyes that he tracked the movement.

He was going to kiss her, and she wanted it. Gods, she wanted it, full-bodied and openmouthed, both of them tearing into each other like there was no tomorrow, because there really might not be a tomorrow, and all they had was here and now.

This was such a fleeting treasure, this sense of ephemeral beauty, this gorgeous, impossible ache that came when the passions of the spirit turned flesh. This was what it meant to be alive and to be human, to cup the abundant, champagne light of a goddess’s pendant in one’s hands but never be allowed to grasp hold of it.

She took a breath and trembled.

He turned his head and looked away, and the light flowed out of her empty hands. The muscles in his lean jaw flexed. He said, “Are you ready to get serious again?”

She let her hand fall from his lean cheek. Disappointment tasted like ashes. She had done that to him. First she had struck him so hard and cruelly, she had drawn blood. Then she had knocked him away with such violence, she sent him sprawling to the ground. She had spelled and threatened him too, whereas he had shown her nothing but generosity and kindness.

An accomplished lady, she was, if a bit combative.

Really, it was for the best. She had no time for inconvenient attraction, or the luxury to explore strange new feelings or indulge in lazy sun-filled afternoons. If something didn’t happen to change the normal course of events, soon she would have no time at all.

“Of course,” she said, her voice toneless. She pushed off of his lap. She told herself she was not further disappointed when he let her go.

He stood and held a hand out to her. She took it, and he lifted her to her feet. The wind and their struggle had tangled her waist-length hair. She gathered it up impatiently, wound it into a messy knot and tucked the end into the knot itself to anchor it away from her face. Rune watched her, his hands resting on lean hips, his expression inscrutable.

“Do you remember the conversation we had just as you were fading?” Rune asked.

The question knocked her out of her preoccupation. She focused, thinking back. Oh yes. Sometimes I think I hate you, she’d said. She’d forgotten to add that to her list of things she’d done to him. She had to hand it to herself. She had quite a bag of tricks, and none of them were charms. She rubbed her forehead. “Look, I’m sorry about what I—”

He interrupted, his tone impatient. “Do you remember what I said? Because I don’t think you do. I think you were already gone.”

She shook her head, her mind a blank.

He watched her expression closely. “I told you I figured out what was bothering me. I said, what if Vampyrism is not a disease? What if it’s something else?”

“Something else?” Her eyes widened.

“Your research chronicles the history beautifully,” Rune said. “Reading through it, I got to watch it all happen in fast-forward. But you were immersed in it. You lived it all at a much slower pace. You were part of the scientific discussion in the nineteenth century with brilliant scientists who were engaged in cutting-edge medicine. It all made so much sense at the time that now virtually everybody accepts the premise to be true. Vampyrism has so many characteristics of a blood-borne pathogen, but Carling, to me you seem perfectly healthy.”

“How can that be?” She struggled to absorb what he was saying. He kept taking hold of the ground and yanking it out from underneath her, like a magician yanking away a tablecloth set for dinner. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” he told her. “At least I’m sure of what I sense. Wyr have highly developed instincts and senses—and the older the Wyr, the more sensitive they are. The older Wyr can smell sickness and infections, tainted food, and many poisons undetectable to others. To me, you do not carry any scent of disease. You have the characteristic tinge to your scent that all Vampyres have, but I do not register that as an unhealthy scent.”

“If you’re right,” she said, staring at him. “Everything I’ve done—or anybody else has done in the last hundred and thirty years—has been based on a false premise.”

“Yes,” he said.

Not a disease. If he was right, no wonder her research kept stalling. All the vaccines she had tried to create, all her experiments, had been wasted effort. She coughed out an angry laugh. She whispered, “All that time.”

She had lived for so long, she had forgotten what a precious commodity time was until now, when it had nearly run out. She turned to walk back toward the cottage.

He fell into step beside her. “I’ve had several more hours to process this than you have,” he told her. “And I still don’t know what to make of it. I did think about all the physicians you listed that you worked with. Were any of them Wyr?”

She shook her head, frowning. “No. In fact I don’t know of any Wyr pathologists who have made Vampyrism their subject of research. Humans and Nightkind are the ones who study the subject in any real, serious way. We’re the ones with the vested interest.”

He nodded. The day had melted into early evening. The slant of the sun picked up the gold glints in his hair. “There’s a chance even a Wyr physician wouldn’t have caught this, especially if he or she were a younger Wyr with less developed experience or senses, because Vampyrism does have so many characteristics of a blood-borne pathogen. I had to get right up to the subject and consider it in depth, read about all your blind alleys and dead ends and get puzzled as to the why of it—and then also come into very close contact with you repeatedly before it ever occurred to me.”

“God, the implications,” she muttered.

“So what do we have?” Rune asked.

She said bitterly, “We’re back to square one and we’re running out of time.”

“No,” he said. He threw her a chiding look. “You’re still reacting. If you wiped out all the research, you would be wiping out all the realizations that came from it, including this one. A negative answer is still an answer.”

“Fine.” She gritted her teeth, and forced herself to think beyond feeling poleaxed. “If the research didn’t exist, logic would still have us deducing that Vampyrism is a disease.”

“So we’re not back to square one.” They reached her cottage, and he held the door for her and let her precede him. “We’ve reached some other square where no one has ever been before. Now we’ve got to figure out what to do next.”

She sat at the table and put her head in her hands. Immortal Wyr, interacting with aged Vampyre, made for one shaken cocktail. On the rocks.

Rune leaned against the table beside her. Naturally. The other chair was too far away on the other side of the table, and apparently he couldn’t be bothered to retrieve it. She was already expecting it when he placed his hand on her shoulder, expecting and looking forward to his touch.

“There is one thing about square one,” he said.

“What’s that?” Somehow she found herself leaning into his grip. She struggled with herself, gave up, and rested her cheek against the back of his hand.

He squeezed her lightly. “If this was a crime and I was investigating, I would be headed back to the beginning and the scene where it happened. Maybe there’s missed evidence. Maybe the information has been put together incorrectly. The crime scene needs to be reprocessed, and we need a second opinion.” He pulled at the knot resting at the nape of her neck, and her hair came loose and slid down her back.

She pushed at his thigh. “Stop that.”

“But I don’t want to.” He gathered up a long silken lock and began to twirl it around his fingers.

She lifted her head and gave him a sour look. “What are you, the emotional equivalent of a five-year-old?”

He gave her a slow lazy smile and rubbed the end of her hair against his well-cut lips. It was such a blatantly sexual thing to do, she felt her knees weaken and knew it was a good thing she was already sitting down.

So flirting with her was okay but kissing her wasn’t?

Confused, angered and more than a little aroused, she glared at him and snatched her hair out of his hands, and he chuckled. She gathered her hair and twisted it into a knot again. She tucked the ends into itself.

“Back to the beginning,” she said. “Do you mean back to Egypt, when I was turned?”

He shrugged, considering her. “Maybe that too. But we’re talking in more general terms, so I think we should consider the origins of Vampyrism itself. It was not always part of human history. Where did it come from? If we can answer that, then we may be able to define it in such a way that we can find a way to counteract what is happening to you.”

She dug the heels of her hands into her eyes. “The beginning is a legend. Vampyrism is also called the serpent’s kiss, did you know that?”

“I’ve heard that before,” he said. “I thought the term was because of the fangs Vampyres get that descend when they’re hungry.”

Listening to his rich, deep voice with her eyes closed evoked more erotic images, of him murmuring velvet words against her bare skin in the dark of a desert night. She stiffened and brought her flattened hands down on the table with a stinging slap, as she forced her mind to stay on topic. “There is that,” she said. “But it has been called the serpent’s kiss for a very long time.”

He frowned. “Was it called that in your youth?”

“Yes. Once, it was believed the bite was a necessary part of a ritual for changing someone. Now we know there’s very little possibility of Vampyre bites themselves causing the change, otherwise they would infect everyone they fed upon. To successfully spread the pathogen you need a blood exchange, and Vampyres don’t need to drink the blood of those they change, only offer their own. The human can either drink the Vampyre’s blood or let it flow into a cut. As long as the Vampyre’s blood flows fresh, and the integrity of the human’s skin is compromised, in most cases that’s all that’s needed to initiate the change. Anything added to that is just . . .” She lifted a hand in a fill-in-the-blank kind of gesture.

“Personal choice,” he said. “Superstition. Religion. Fetish.”

“Sometimes all of the above,” she said. She had already reached the point where she had stopped taking physical nourishment by the time she had turned Rhoswen and Duncan. She frowned as well as she thought back to the time when she had changed.

Those early memories were not pleasant to revisit. As soon as she had learned there was the possibility of changing and becoming immortal, it had driven her beyond all reason. She had needed to discover if the stories told around her campfires had any merit to them, whereas she had learned long since then that myth and legend were too often an impenetrable tangle, the stories saying far more about the people who told them than imparting any real truths about the world they lived in.

Rune stayed silent as if he sensed she needed the time to think. She sighed.

Then, because he was waiting, she said, “It started for me when I heard stories. You know the kind of thing, those tall tales told across the flicker of firelight late at night. I guess I heard something one too many times, about a stranger wandering into an encampment full of hunger and a burning gaze that mesmerized, or a caravan found with everyone dead and covered with bite marks. About a rare, strange people who avoided the sun and lived forever. About a dark miracle called the serpent’s kiss that could transform someone into a god. I began to ask the storytellers where they had heard their tale. I moved across the desert, following each thread back as far as I could. I lost the trail of most stories but was able to follow one to its beginning, and of course that was all I needed.”

“What did you find?” Rune asked. He watched her with close fascination.

She gave him a wry smile. “A Vampyre, of course. She was a hermit living in a corner of a huge cavern, with the remains of a settlement nearby. She talked of a serpent goddess who had once lived in the cavern and honored her with the kiss of life that was also death.”

“Serpent goddess,” Rune repeated. His eyes narrowed.

She nodded. “The settlement had been filled with worshippers of this serpent goddess. According to the woman, the settlement had gradually died out when the goddess had left. Either all the humans had been killed or they ran away, and the Vampyres had abandoned the place, all except for this last priestess who had stayed, hoping her goddess would return.”

Rune thought of Rhoswen, existing on the bloodwine. But bloodwine hadn’t been invented that long ago. He asked, “How did she survive by herself?”

Carling shrugged. “As best I could guess, she lived off the blood of rats and other small desert mammals. Animal blood doesn’t have the same nutritive value for us as human blood, so she had to have been malnourished. I took everything she said with a healthy dose of skepticism, because she was quite mad. I might have dismissed her stories completely except for the things my people found in the settlement itself, like the empty sarcophagi in the houses, and the strange carvings on the cavern walls depicting a huge, part-serpent, part-human creature. Then the woman showed me how her fangs descended when she hungered, and how she burned in the sun, and I was hooked. In retrospect I had to be more than a little crazy myself to let her bite me, let alone consent to a blood exchange, but I was still young, and the young are always crazy.”

Rune’s eyebrows rose. “Could you draw what the carvings of the creature looked like?”

“Not from memory, not after so long,” Carling said. She watched his wide shoulders sag. Then she smiled. “So I guess it’s probably a good thing I drew lots of sketches at the time.”

His gaze lit with a fiery expression that spread to his face. “You didn’t. Did you? Where are they now?”

She nodded toward the hall. “In the other room.”

“They’re here?” He smiled. “You’re a wicked tease. I like that about you.”

She smiled back. “I’m learning it from an expert.”

His smile widened. “Come on. Don’t just sit there.”

He grabbed her by the hand and yanked her out of her seat before she realized what he meant to do. Laughing, she led the way down the short hall to the part of her library that held the oldest scrolls. There, back in one corner of the room, she went to her knees to look along the row of cubbyholes that held scrolls of papyrus so old they had to be spelled in order to keep them from disintegrating.

Rune watched Carling kneel on the floor and run her fingers along the bottom row of cubbyholes. He found every aspect of her scholarship fascinating, from her scientific research to the neat notations she had made on the labels over each cubbyhole. More than fascinating, he found it endearingly nerdy, refreshingly efficient and sexy as hell.

He rubbed his mouth. Of course he found everything about her as sexy as hell.

She murmured something to herself and pulled out a scroll. “Here it is. We have to be careful. I haven’t bothered to renew the protection spells on these in a long time. It looks like the humidity is starting to get to them.”

He knelt in front of her. “I’m just amazed so many of these have lasted as long as they have. It must be your penchant for keeping your libraries and workshops in quiet, out-of-the-way places.”

“I’m sure that has helped.”

He gently took hold of the corners of the scroll she indicated, watching as she eased it open with slender fingers.

Then he stared down at the faded lines that had been drawn in some unknown ink, at a face and form he had not seen in a very, very long time. It had four short muscular legs with powerful, gripping claws and an elongated, serpentine body. Its tail wound in coils, and its neck rose up from the two legs into a cobra-like hood that framed a distinctly humanlike, female face.

“Hello, Python,” he said softly. “You crazy old whack-job, you.”