Serpent's Kiss

FIFTEEN

Rune stood like stone, his body clenched.

Carling reached out slowly to pick up the knife and closed her fist around it. She looked up at Khalil’s strange diamond-like gaze. The Djinn was watching her, head cocked, his expression filled with curiosity.

However, he did not ask for an explanation. Instead, he said, “This completes the second of the three favors I have owed you.”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “Thank you, Khalil.”

He inclined his head. Something else flickered across his spare features, and in a rare gesture, he touched her fingers. Then he disappeared in a whirlwind of Power.

Carling turned to Rune. He was staring at her fist, the skin around his mouth white. A vein in his temple throbbed visibly.

She could not remember her original past, but in this past they had created together, she remembered the first time she had laid eyes on him as a mature Vampyre. She almost didn’t recognize him, it had been so long since he had killed the priest and changed her life. But then there was something about the way he moved, and the way he smiled that wild white smile of his that drove females crazy with desire.

She had watched it all with a cold, expressionless face and an aged heart that had grown so cynical it no longer believed in anything except that things always change. And then on the island, she had demanded he kneel, and he had kissed her and she was dying, and he still had not remembered her, and so she struck at him with all the rage and pain she had inside—Her past may have changed and yet it was all deeper and truer than it had been before. She could even see how she must have lived her life before he had ever come into it, like shadows of reality, another Carling, much like the sketch of the island outline as it lay over the Bay’s horizon. It was so strange, how all the pieces fit seamlessly together.

Now she realized there was a problem with choosing not to stay in love with him. How could she hope to recover from such feelings or set them aside, when he was standing right in front of her, embodying everything that had slipped past her barriers and caused her to fall in love with him in the first place?

He was everything she could have wished for in a life partner and far more than she had ever hoped to find, with his compassion and caring, his intellect that was so well seasoned in nuance and strategy, his ruthlessness tempered with reason, mischievous wit and a warrior’s strength that was so indomitable, she could lean on him when she felt weak and he could match her when they went head-to-head.

As she had told him, she was not good at surrender. Something inside of her was too fierce to bend easily or often, too well entrenched in the habit of rule. But she found she had to bow to her own feelings on this and surrender to the experience of loving him, because it was simply impossible to do anything else.

She reached up and stroked his temple. He was clearly suffering for some reason, and it hurt her to see it. She said gently, “We knew this was possible.”

“Yes.” He took her hand, pressed her fingers against his mouth and closed his eyes. He wasn’t sure what hit him the hardest.

He had actually changed history. He thought of the priest he had killed and he realized that wasn’t what shook him so badly. Every time he had to kill, he changed the course of the future. He had accepted that responsibility a very long time ago.

No, what really shook him to his foundation was the thought of how many times Carling had slipped into the fade either alone or with only Rhoswen, or other Vampyres and humans to guard her. The doorway to her past had stood wide open many times for any dark creature or spirit of Power with the capacity to slip through. She had once mentioned that she had enemies. Any person with her Power and at her level of position would.

What if something had already slipped through and was stalking her in the past? Her episodes seemed to be some kind of conduit for him. When they stopped, the passageway closed and he came back to the present. What if something else found a way to stay back in the past?

The tiger-cub Carling would make such a delectable morsel for some dark vengeful thing to devour.

What if she simply disappeared?

Could the universe flex in such a way to accept Carling’s death, and absorb all that that might change? Might he turn around one day to discover that she had vanished like she had never existed? If that happened, no one would know she was gone—no one except perhaps him, since he still remembered how cruelly Carling had been whipped in the first timeline.

Or maybe, if she died and the past was changed to that profound extent, he would not remember her either. He might become oblivious Rune, living out his life in New York. He would never see her walking naked out of the glimmering river, the droplets of water sparkling like diamonds on her nude body. He would never give her that first sizzling kiss, or hear her rusty, surprised laugh, or take her on the floor with such savage need she would scream into his mouth and claw at him as she took him too.

Gods have mercy.

“We’ve got to stop these episodes from happening,” she said, so clearly her thoughts had run along a similar vein to all the possible consequences of what they had done.

“Yes,” he said hoarsely. “But before we do, Carling, I’ve got to go back again one more time.”

“Why?”

He opened his eyes to find her looking at him as if he were a madman. He didn’t blame her. He felt like a madman. “If I can get through to your past, something else might be able to get through too. The younger Carling doesn’t know to protect herself. She has to be warned.”

A prickling chill ran down her spine. Her mind raced as she tried to find fault with his logic, but she couldn’t.

What a dangerous game we are playing, you and I, she thought as she stared at his tense face. We are meddling in the past and with each other, and I think I barely have an understanding of all the things we may have set in motion.

She set her jaw. “All right,” she said. “You go back, one more time to see if you can warn me. If I’m too young to understand, you’ll have to go back again until I’m not. But you can’t change anything else, do you hear me? If you see something happening that makes you uncomfortable, walk away.”

“I might change you again just by talking to you,” he said.

You’ve already changed me in the most profound way possible, she thought, and the change has nothing to do with traveling in time.

“I accept that risk,” she said. “And I take responsibility for it.”

“You may not remember that.” A muscle ticked in his jaw. “You may not remember any of this.”

Her expression held steady. In his imagination, he could see her wearing that same expression as she sent thousands of men to die in battle. “If it comes to it,” she said, “then we will have to accept that too.”

Rune tossed back a hotel-sized bottle of Glenlivet and moodily spun his iPhone in circles on the coffee table as he watched CNN on mute in the suite living room. Closed captioning ran underneath scenes of Egypt’s famous pyramids, telling the tale of a sudden earthquake that cracked the foundation of Djoser’s temple at the one true gate to the funeral complex. Accompanying scenes showed the gaping hole that ran into the earth. The dust still hung over the site, and the surrounding ancient structure was reduced to rubble. Rune thought of all the warning tales of Djinn offering favors, and the horror short story “The Monkey’s Paw” by W. W. Jacobs. Be careful what you wish for, because the consequences can be a freak-out bitch. Fuck, yeah.

The knife sat on the coffee table in front of him, beside the cell phone. He picked it up and played with it, trying to pry open the various blades. The straight blade snapped off, but he got the pliers out partially.

He told himself he wasn’t surprised. He had been telling himself that since the Djinn dropped the knife off, and it was even true in a way. Then he looked at the scenes on CNN and the knife in his hands, and he felt his own kind of internal earthquake again.

He unscrewed another hotel bottle of liquor, a pretty blue bottle of SKYY vodka this time, and drank it down. He listened absently as Carling made the phone calls she needed to make from the bedroom. First she called Duncan to tell him a truncated version of recent events. She refrained from mentioning any of the more dangerous details and just simply said that she and Rune were following up on research leads on a possible cure. She also told Duncan she had let Rhoswen go, and while Rhoswen could still have access to the account Carling had set up for her, she was no longer authorized to act on Carling’s behalf.

Then Carling called Julian.

That was the phone call Rune had been waiting to overhear. He stopped playing with the knife as he pictured Julian Regillus on the other end of the phone line. Julian had been turned at the height of the Roman Empire. Serving under the Emperor Hadrian, he had been a distinguished general in a military culture that had once been described as quite like the Marines “but much nastier.” The Vampyre’s Power had a sharp potency that was characteristic of all aged Vampyres. There was nothing pretty or soft about him. His scarred six-foot-tall frame was packed with the heavy muscles of a man who had spent his life at war. He had short black hair with a sprinkle of salt at the temples and a face that carried forcefulness like a bullet, coupled with the kind of sharp intelligence needed to pull the trigger.

Rune thought of the times he had seen Carling and Julian together. Their relationship had been a matter of idle speculation over the years. Rune thought they had probably been lovers once, perhaps as long ago as when Carling had turned Julian, but that was a guess based purely on the intimacy that was often created between Vampyre and progeny, not based on any evidence he had seen. Whether or not they had been lovers, any embers from that pairing had died out long ago. Now Carling and Julian treated each other with the cool courtesy of business associates.

Rune force-fed that thought to the insane creature that tried to take over his head again, and this time he managed to keep the creature contained. He was glad he didn’t have to face Julian at that moment, because if the other male had actually been present, Rune didn’t think he could have.

“Julian,” Carling said. A pause. Her voice turned icily meticulous. “I am well aware of what we had agreed, but things have changed. The Wyr sentinel Rune and I are pursuing a line of research that is proving to be fruitful—”

Rune gripped the ends of the knife in both hands at the silence that followed.

When Carling next spoke, the iciness in her voice had turned into a whip. “You are my child,” she said to the King of the Nightkind. “My creation. I am not yours. I am not coming to you for permission to do anything. You may support me in this last endeavor or you may choose to believe I am chasing desperate dreams to my death. I don’t give a fuck either way. What you may not do is interfere with me or try to dictate my actions.”

He could hear the quiet click in the other room as Carling gently placed the phone receiver back in its cradle.

Rune lived in a brawl of an atmosphere where profanity was casual, used often and ignored for the most part. Hearing profanity come from Carling, who almost never swore, was somehow shocking, and it lent an odd, raw kind of intimacy to the conversation.

The knife snapped in his hands. He looked down at the pieces. He had bent it so much the time-stressed riveted joints had broken.

It wasn’t enough violence for him. He wanted to do damage to something else. Preferably to something with an aquiline Roman profile that said ouch.

He looked out the open French doors as he waited for Carling to step out of the bedroom. She didn’t. It was turning to early evening. Icarus had once again caught fire and was falling to the western horizon. Outside, much of the mist from earlier had burned away. What was left behind was a heavy haze that blanketed both land and sea, and turned the peaks of the Golden Gate Bridge into unearthly spires. Rune knew of an indigenous people who believed that when it was foggy, the veil between worlds became thin, and the spirits of ancestors and other things walked more freely on this land. Maybe they were right. Maybe he was one of those spirits, walking between the worlds.

He really needed to call Dragos now.

But then Carling’s Power rippled over the scene.

Instead of daylight, this time the passageway opened to a dark velvet sketch of night that overlaid the bright sunlit suite like a nightmare. He caught the heavy, humid scent of the river and the acrid hint of burning incense.

He stood and stared at the open bedroom door, his hands knotted in fists. Then he grabbed his sheathed knives. He walked to the bedroom. He studied every step he took, every nuance of the experience. He reached the bent place in the crossover passage, the turnaround that led to a different page. It rested on a singular point that was so precise it felt smaller than the tip of a pin. It would be so easy to lose track of that one tiny place, that single moment, in the infinite cascade of all the other moments in time. He tried hard to memorize the turnaround place, just in case he needed it in order to get back.

That is, if he could figure out how to use it. To his frustration, the turnaround place melted away from him, just as every moment in the present did when it slipped into the past.

He went much more cautiously than he had the first two times.

Because what happened in Vegas didn’t always stay in Vegas, baby.

Here Carling was, at another cusp.

Each time she reached one of these places, she lost her life. The first time was her childhood life by the river. It always happened by the river.

The second time, she lost her life as a slave, and she went down on her knees every day to offer incense and say prayers of thanks to the strange golden god who claimed he was no god. But he had a sigil for a name, and with a murderous blow and a kiss to her forehead, he had killed the slave Khepri and remade her into Carling, the treasured goddaughter of one of the most powerful priests in the two lands.

Because of Rune’s edict, she had enjoyed much more time to herself than almost any other woman she knew, and her father-priest Akil was as good as his word and educated her as well as any man. At twenty-two summers, she had studied maat, the order of the universe, and the three types of sentient beings that were made up of the gods, the living, and the dead. She had been privileged to study heka as well, or “the ability to make things happen by indirect means,” and because she had access to temple libraries, she learned many of the spells that were formally known only by the priests.

Many of those priests were pompous, politically dangerous windbags. She watched them utter spells and perform religious rites, and they seemed like ridiculous buffoons. Sometimes they yelled the spells at the top of their lungs, as if shouting and waving their arms would draw the gods’ attention.

She could have told them: no matter how loudly or theatrically they prayed, the spells did not work if they did not have kneph, the sacred breath that breathed life into things and gave them form. Only when one had this Power could one awaken the true movement that lived in the spells and hope to call on the gods.

Carling had always had kneph, although she had not always known what to call it. When she cast a spell, it worked, although as a woman, it was heretical for her to claim as much, so she kept her studies on a scholarly note and the knowledge of her abilities private. And even though she was treated as a favored goddaughter, she was not a female of noble birth, so she could not become a Servant of God.

She never wanted to be a Servant, anyway, because the female priestesses sang an infernal amount but seemed to do precious little else of note. Carling had no intention of spending her life warbling like a songbird in a cage.

So out of boredom as much as anything else, she had agreed when Akil came to her with a politically brilliant match. It was past time for her to leave the restrictions of this city that was so devoted to the dead, and commence with living her own life. On the morrow, she would go to a minor desert king who had asked for her hand in marriage. Then she would see what she could make of the man.

It was a sensible thing to do, and the offer exceedingly advantageous for a woman who had once been a slave. She should be thrilled. The king was much older than she, but his breath was not too horrible and he was utterly smitten with her. He had other wives, of course, and many slaves as concubines, but he had not taken any of them as his queen. Yet.

And here she was, like Osiris, dying and being reborn again. She was wrapped in a robe against the chill of the river mist that crept over Ineb Hedj’s famous white walls. The night was as rich and wild as wine singing in her blood, and she should be happy and excited. Instead she was drowning in restlessness and confusion. She was about to start on her new life and learn new things. She, who had never been with a man, would be with a man tomorrow night.

A man who was much older, his breath not too horrible.

Her own breath choked in her throat. She wanted . . . she wanted something. She did not know what she wanted, but she wanted it badly. The world was so strange and big, and ferociously beautiful. She wanted . . . she wanted her soul to fly out of her chest again from sheer wonder, as it had when she had been a child.

So she cast her first real spell in secret in the courtyard under the crescent moon’s pale smile while her elderly father-priest and the rest of the household slept. She created the words for the spell and crafted them with care, and she burned incense, and gave offerings of milk and honey to Atum, and Bat, and especially to Amunet, the “female hidden one.” And then she whispered those crafted words with her breath of Power, and felt them curl into the night along with the smell of expensive frankincense.

I give thanks to the gods

Both seen and unseen

Who move through all the worlds.

I give thanks for their eternal wisdom

And the sacred gift of my heart’s desire . . .

For surely the gods would know better than she what to make of this hot, beautiful grief, the gods who had, after all, created her with such a fierce, lonesome soul.

What a wretchedness she had created. Bah. Her fool eyes were dripping. She sniffed, hugging herself, and wiped at her face with the back of one hand.

Then a wind blew through the reeds and grasses, and it brought with it a scent of fiery Power. Something walked toward her. It moved quietly, but its presence spread absolute silence in the incense-perfumed night. A crocodile hissed from the nearby riverbank, and then there was a splash as it sped away.

Carling reached for the copper knife she had laid at her feet. It was not wise to move unguarded through the night, and she never traveled even to the household courtyard without a weapon. Calm but wary, she backed toward the door.

By the crescent moon’s thin, delicate light, a god in black appeared. A god, who claimed he was not a god, great and golden-haired and so intensely formed, his ka or life force boiled the air around him.

Carling dropped the knife, staring.

The night was not made for his vivid colors. He was best seen in the hot bright light of day. Copper, yellow, gold, bronze, and the fierce warmth of his ageless lion’s eyes.

Yes, that was it. That was exactly how she remembered it. Her soul, winging out of her body, and flying eagerly toward him.

“Rune,” she whispered. Her own Atum, who rose from the water to wing his way to the stars and complete the world.

The first time she had seen him, he had been smiling and playful. The second time he had been in a killing fury. This time she saw him made a Powerful three, which was its own completion. Three times, a heka number. His unearthly face held a troubled severity, and then it lightened into something altogether different as he saw her, something strange that had to do with the way men looked at women. Whatever that strange thing was, it had her heart racing and her hands shaking and her thighs feeling heavy and full.

“Khepri,” he said. His voice was deeper, wilder than she remembered. Or maybe she heard him better now that she was older.

Smiling, she walked toward him, this man who held her soul. “I chose another name when my slave life ended,” she said. “I am Carling now. I should have known you would come.”

He smiled back at her as she reached him. “Why is that?”

“You always come when I die,” she said.

Shock smashed a fist in Rune’s gut.

You always come when I die.

Before he knew it, he had dropped his own knives and grabbed her by the shoulders. Her head fell back and she stared at him, and he castigated himself furiously, Careful, asshole. She’s a fragile human now. He made himself cup her slender arms carefully, feeling her pliable warm flesh under his fingers, and he studied her face.

She had undeniably grown into a woman, but she was too young to be the Carling that had taken the serpent’s kiss, he guessed by as much as seven or eight years. Her face was more rounded, less carved, but she still had the same gorgeous long dark eyes, the fabulous cheekbones, that outrageous mouth. She looked at him with all the open bloom of wonder in her face, and her scent held a fragrance unlike any other.

Spiky, beautiful girl. The most beautiful girl in the world.

“What do you mean, I always come when you die?” Rune whispered. His heart had yet to recover from that one. She had not shaved her head, as so many early Egyptians had. Her long dark hair fell to her narrow waist in dozens of small meticulous braids. He touched one of the braids at her temple and traced it as it fell away from her face.

“You came the first time, when my life by the river ended,” Carling told him. Inside, she was stricken. He was touching her, his hand to her shoulder, his hand to her hair. She had no idea something could be so utterly lovely as a simple touch. She had to work to get the rest of the words out. “Then you came again and ended my life as a slave. Tonight is my last night in this life in Ineb Hedj. Tomorrow I go to another life, away from here.”

Rune stroked her petal-soft cheek with a light finger. “Is that a good thing?”

“I think so. I hope so. It is the first time I have had a choice about it.” Carling widened her eyes, tilted her head and lifted one shoulder in a shrug.

The gesture was so very like the serious, innocent child Khepri, without warning he tumbled head over heels in love with her again. He saw the child she had been, this young, proud beauty, and the amazing woman she would become, and he loved all of them, all of the Carlings past, present and future. He saw her sharpness, her frailties and her strength, and his soul embraced all of it. The feeling was a sword thrust as deep as anything he had ever felt, piercing through his body. It seemed like he had been falling for a very long while, and each time he realized it, he had fallen a little deeper, a little further. He had never known that falling in love could be as helpless and complete as this.

Then just as suddenly, he fell into a panic and he started to shake. It was not simple or quiet trembling, but a violent storm that took him over and rattled his bones. He was really back in time. Really. Back in time. This was not his Carling, not yet. He was not supposed to be here. Another, younger Rune was living his oblivious life in another part of this world.

He couldn’t stay. He couldn’t protect her, this heart-stoppingly beautiful, fragile, brave human girl. And just by being here, he might have changed history again. He might be changing her even now, so that she made some other kind of choice than she originally did, some kind of new and different choice that got her killed.

Carling—his wise and wicked Carling—might have been able to accept the consequences of that, but he never could.

He grabbed her by the shoulders again and hauled her against him, and growled into her gorgeous, unbearably naive, incredulous face, “You listen to me. I am not supposed to be here. It is incredibly dangerous for me to even be talking to you.”

Carling’s expression flared. She gripped his wrists. “Why do you say that?”

“I am not from this time or this place. I am from somewhere else.” He could see she did not understand. How could she possibly understand? He struggled to find words that would have meaning for her and still convey the urgency of his message. He said with slow emphasis, “I am from many human lifetimes away, from so far in your future of tomorrows that the pharaoh no longer exists. Where I come from, all the gods have changed, and everything you see around us is either rubble or has completely disappeared.”

The wonder in her face was replaced by white shock. “It’s all gone?”

“Gone.” He got a grim sense of satisfaction from the sharp, sober attention she now gave him. He grabbed her head, his shaking hands cupping the graceful arc of her skull as his thumbs braced under her delicate, stubborn chin, holding her so tightly she could not deny him or turn away. He spoke from the back of his throat, words that were so raw they came from the place where the sword had thrust through him. They fell from his mouth, hissing through the air like dripping acid. “Doorways have been opening in time. I have been falling through them and traveling to your place. In the future, you and I are searching for a way to close them, because they are very dangerous. Other things, dark spirits or creatures that mean you harm, might come through those doorways. That’s why we decided I had to come back to warn you. You must take care and learn to guard yourself. There are times, like this night, when you are not safe.”

She trembled all over, that beautiful young tigerish woman, and her breath shook out of her, and he felt like such a rotten, stupid bastard to put the burden of all of this on her young shoulders. But then wonder came into her face. “You and I are working together in this future place?”

He tried to think of what would be the best thing to say, but he couldn’t because he was in a blind panic, the likes of which he had never before experienced. He said, “Yes. You hold my life in your hands just as surely as I am holding yours now in mine. There is a way for you to live to reach that distant future. You must find it. Do not turn away, or give up, or let anyone take that away from you. You must live. Do you understand me? You must live or I will die.”

Her mouth shook as she whispered, “You would be there waiting for me?”

He was doing everything wrong. He was only supposed to warn her to be careful. He should have kept his damn mouth shut. But he couldn’t stop himself. He whispered, “I will not remember you at first. You will live through your life and meet a younger me, one who has not yet come back to this place to meet you. Then I will see you at twilight, by a river in a place called Adriyel, and I will start my journey toward you.”

She studied his face, her forehead crinkled. “But you will remember me some time?”

This is crazy, he thought. It makes no sense. The time slippage is so far out of sync it is working in loops, like a serpent’s coils. She and I are drawing each other into existence. If we don’t find our way out of this, we may not survive.

He had no cunning for this, no grand plan or intelligent rationale, no established ethical protocol for time travel like out of a sci-fi movie. This was just raw, unvarnished truth, and deadly uncharted territory for how it might carve through history.

And because he had gone much too far to stop now, he gave her everything he had.

He put his lips to her forehead and said against her skin, “I will remember you, very soon after the Adriyel River. And when I do, you will come to mean everything to me. Who I am at this moment, this man who is standing in front of you—I would wait forever for you. But you must live to get there or none of this will happen.”

She reached to touch the place where his lips met her skin, murmuring, “It always happens by the river.”

He closed his eyes and pressed his lips to those gentle, questing fingers. “What does?”

“The beginning of a new life.” She pulled back to look at him, and the expression in hers was grave. “If there is a way for me to live to get there, I will find it.”

“There is,” he said, pushing all of his conviction into the two words. “You found it once. You got there already. But now I have come back and touched your life again, and every time I do that something else changes, and I am afraid—” His throat closed and for a moment he could not continue. “I am so goddamn afraid that by coming tonight I might have changed something else you do or decide, and you won’t be there in my life when I go back. And I have to go back, because I don’t belong here.”

Her trembling stopped. She stood steady and straight under his hands, her Power a slim, newly minted, adamant flame. She repeated, “If there is a way for me to live to get there, I will find it.”

He took a deep breath as he searched her gaze, and the tiger looked back at him, unafraid. Another realization jolted through him, and even as he spoke he knew that the words he said were true.

“This is not all on you. Everything that has happened to me, I have remembered,” said the gryphon. “I have held my place and my identity as time and space have flowed around me. The past has shifted twice for us already, and I remember all of it. If you fail somehow—if you die—I swear I will look for a way to walk through time again to find you. No matter where you are. No matter when. I swear it.”

He should have known. The joy that filled her face had a keen ferocity that would propel her forward through the centuries. Gods, what passion this mortal had. It filled the chalice of her heart to overflowing.

He thought of his Carling, sitting unprotected in the hotel suite. Time was flowing for her as well. “I have to leave,” he said abruptly. “You must take shelter. Go inside. Do not sleep. Do everything you can to protect yourself. This night, for you, is a dangerous one.”

She looked around in sharp, quick assessment and gave him a firm nod. “I will take care. It will be all right.”

This young woman wasn’t his Carling. If Rune and this young woman had the luxury of unlimited time together, realistically he wasn’t even sure if they could find anything much to talk about for any length of time. But he still could not resist cupping her soft cheek. “I will treasure the memory of meeting you like this,” he said, and he kissed her.

Carling stood frozen and focused everything she had on the touch of his mouth on hers, so fierce yet tender, and filled with the blaze of his Power. It was the first time anyone had ever touched her like that. She knew she would never allow that elderly petty king to touch her on the lips. Then Rune let her go and scooped his weapons off the ground, and she watched as he turned on his heel away from her and faded from sight.

He just faded away, like a dream. Or perhaps a spell-induced vision.

She fingered her lips. They still tingled even though he was gone.

You must live or I will die, he had said. And that could not happen, not to the one who held her soul.

I will treasure the memory of meeting you too, she thought.

And wait forever for you.

Carling opened her eyes and gazed out the open French doors in the hotel bedroom at the rich heavy gold of the westering sun. Morning might be bright and beautiful, but it did not hold the same poignancy as the evening, that had gathered all the day’s memories and carried them into night.

She sat on the bed with her legs curled up, her back braced against the headboard. Rune stood at the open doors, facing outside. He leaned a broad shoulder against the frame, his arms crossed. His quiet, strong profile had an uncertain vulnerability she had never seen in him before. He looked proud, self-contained and braced for bad news, a god in black who claimed he was not a god, great and golden-haired and so intensely formed, his life force boiled the air around him.

He was indeed best seen in the hot bright light of day, where he shone with all the colors of creation’s fire. Copper, yellow, gold, bronze, and the warm fierce amber of those playful, ageless lion’s eyes.

Yes, that was exactly how she remembered it, both so long ago and again just recently on the island. Her soul, winging out of her body, and flying irrevocably toward him.

Some instinct told her he knew very well she had come out of the fade. Why wouldn’t he turn to look at her?

She stared out the window again, and thought. The silence of ages lay heavily between them.

I will remember you, very soon after the Adriyel River. And when I do, you will come to mean everything to me. Who I am at this moment, this man who is standing in front of you—I would wait forever for you.

While she was not familiar with the details, she knew that when Wyr mated, they did so only once. Dragos, Lord of the Wyr, had just found his mate. Tiago, Wyr warlord and thunder-bird, had mated with the Dark Fae Queen Niniane. Was that what Rune had meant? Was she that lucky—and he that damned?

She straightened her spine and took a breath, and began to speak. “You did not change me this time.”

His head jerked sharply to the side, as if she had struck him, but other than that he did not move and he still would not look at her.

“I cast a spell one night and had a vision of you. That was my experience of it, anyway,” she said. “I remember you warning me to take care. After that I studied defensive spells, and I put up wards when I slept. I was very careful.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Rune asked coldly.

She looked down at the fun, flirtatious outfit she wore and gently smoothed the soft material of her top. She kept her voice calm as she told him, “I’m working through what happened, and what might have been different. I remember agreeing that you needed to go back to warn me and I remember taking responsibility for that. I think we got lucky. I think we changed what we needed to change, and everything else stayed stable.”

Everything she told him was the truth. She would not lie to him. His truthsense would be highly developed, and in case, he deserved better than that. But even as her words told him a kind of truth, her soul whispered a deeper, more heartfelt one.

After the first few nights, when the blaze of excitement had died down, doubt had crept in. She couldn’t believe he had meant what she thought he had said. She had to have misheard him, or misunderstood. The years passed and gradually turned to centuries, and as she received no other message or sign, she settled into a more mature and balanced “wait and see” attitude. She would not put the entirety of her life on hold for a single spell-induced vision, no matter how vivid or compelling it might have been.

But she had never forgotten how his kiss had burned. She had never let her petty king of a husband kiss her on the mouth, ever, nor had she allowed that liberty to any of her other lovers. Not that she had taken all that many of them, considering the years of her existence. She had stopped after a few hopeful attempts, because they either fell asleep after sex or they ran away, and it was all so relentlessly banal she would rather have walked unshielded into the sun than have to endure one more meaningless, insipid love affair.

Now as she looked at his stiff half-averted form, she told him silently, I fell in love with you earlier today in the hotel lobby. And everything you once said has come to pass. But so much time has gone by. Too much time. So many tomorrows, and tomorrows, and tomorrows, that the pharaohs really do no longer exist, and all the gods have changed and everything I once knew has turned to rubble or has completely disappeared. We have come together too late.

You must live or I will die.

Now I am the one who is dying, and you cannot mate with me and hope to live. What a Gordian knot we have tied ourselves into.

And as Alexander the Great had known, the only solution to untangling an unsolvable knot is to slice through it.

She looked down at the bedspread.

“So let’s review,” she said. Her voice was under perfect control. “Because of your help, in just a few days I have learned a tremendous amount about my condition, in fact more than I have learned in the last two centuries. And now that Dr. Telemar will soon be here to consult, I am hopeful I will learn even more. I owe you a big debt of gratitude.”

He had turned to look at her. She could sense it, that tall powerful black-clad figure standing just barely at the edge of her sight. Underneath the cover of one hand, she curled the other into a tight fist.

“But we both know we can’t risk any more of these strange collisions in time,” Carling continued. “They are too dangerous for either one of us, and God only knows what we might have changed in the rest of the world.” And she knew she could not trust her younger self around him, not for a single moment. If that younger Carling saw him again, she would never be able to contain her joy and she would not know of any reason why she should. “Rune, it’s time for you to back out of this now. You’ve helped me enough. You’ve certainly done far more than anybody could have expected. I want you to go back to your life now.”

The beast that had taken over Rune studied his prey with a critical eye.

Her facade could not have been better. She had no pulse for him to gauge, and she would not show him the look in her eyes. Her beautiful body was arranged just so against the pillows on the bed, like a posed still life, all artifice and composition. She was cool, controlled, rational perfection. She appeared to be a completely different creature than the fierce, eager young tiger he had left just moments ago, and why wouldn’t she be a different creature, when that moment was, for her, thousands of years ago?

But her facade was too perfect, and that was her fatal flaw. She should have been reacting more to what had happened between them this afternoon, all that magnificent crazed passion, their laughter and the moments of real intimacy. The memory of what had happened in the fade should have unfolded naturally, as it had the first couple of times. Instead that was the first thing she offered him, only to coolly negate it.

Fury swept a firestorm through him. He sprang across the room, knocked her flat and slammed down on top of her. Shock bolted across her expression as he gripped her lovely throat with long, claw-tipped fingers.

The beast hissed in her face, “You’re such a fucking liar.”