Serpent's Kiss

ONE

“I am a bad woman, of course,” said Carling Severan, the Vampyre sorceress, in an absent tone of voice. “It is a fact that I made peace with many centuries ago. I calibrate everything I do, even the most generous-seeming gesture, in terms of how it may serve me.”

Carling sat in her favorite armchair by a spacious window. The chair’s butter-soft leather had long ago molded to the contours of her body. Outside the window lay a lush, well-tended garden that was ornamented with the subtle hues of the moonlit night. Her gaze was trained on the scene, but, like her face, the expression in her long almond-shaped eyes was blank.

“Why would you say such a thing?” Rhoswen asked. There were tears in the younger Vampyre’s voice as she knelt beside the armchair, her blonde head turned up to Carling like a flower’s to a midnight sun. “You’re the most wonderful person in the world.”

“That is very sweet of you.” Carling kissed Rhoswen’s forehead, since the other woman seemed to need it. Although the distance in Carling’s gaze lessened, it did not entirely disappear. “But those are rather disturbing words. If you believe that of someone such as I, you must acquire more discernment.”

Her servant’s tears spilled over and streaked down a cameo-perfect face. Rhoswen threw her arms around Carling with a sob.

Carling’s sleek eyebrows rose. “What is this?” she asked, her tone weary. “What have I said to upset you?”

Rhoswen shook her head and clung tighter.

Rhoswen was one of Carling’s two youngest progeny. Carling had stopped creating Vampyres long ago, except for a few extraordinarily talented exceptions she had discovered in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Rhoswen had been part of a shabby Shakespearean theatre company, with a voice of pure gold and a fatal case of pulmonary tuberculosis. Carling had turned Rhoswen when she had been a frightened, dying eighteen-year-old. She allowed the younger woman greater liberties than she did her other servants. She endured Rhoswen’s strangling hold as she thought.

She said, “We were talking about the events that led up to the Dark Fae Queen’s coronation. You persist in believing that I did a good thing when I healed Niniane and her lover Tiago when they were injured. While the results might have been beneficial, I was merely pointing out what a selfish creature at heart I really am.”

“Two days ago,” Rhoswen said into her lap. “We had that conversation two days ago, and then you faded again.”

“Did I?” She straightened her back, bracing herself against the news. “Well, we knew the deterioration was accelerating.”

No one fully understood why very old Vampyres went through a period of increasing mental deterioration before they disinte-grated into outright madness, then death. Since it was rare for Vampyres to achieve such an extreme old age, the phenomenon was little known outside the upper echelon of the Nightkind community. Vampyres lived violent lives, and they tended to die from other causes first.

Perhaps it was the inevitable progression of the disease itself. Perhaps, Carling thought, in the end our beginning contains the seeds of our eventual downfall. The souls that began as human were never meant to live the near-immortal life that the Vampyrism gave them.

Rhoswen’s tear-streaked face lifted. “But you got better for a while! In Chicago, and later at the Dark Fae coronation, you were fully alert and functioning. You were present for every moment. We just have to keep you stimulated with new things.”

Carling regarded her with a wry expression. Extraordinary experiences did seem to help, as they jolted one into alertness for a time. The problem was they only helped temporarily. To someone who has witnessed the passage of millennia, after a while even the extraordinary experiences became ordinary.

She sighed and admitted, “I had a couple of episodes I did not share with you.”

The grief that filled Rhoswen’s expression at that was positively Shakespearian. Carling’s sense of wryness deepened as she looked upon the face of fanatic devotion and knew she had done nothing whatsoever to deserve it.

She had been born into obscurity so long ago the details of that time had faded from history. She had been kidnapped into slavery, whipped nearly to death and given as a concubine to an aging desert king, and she had sworn she would never let anyone take a lash to her again. She seduced the king into making her a queen and squandered an almost unimaginably long life in the acquisition of Power. She learned poisons, and warfare, and sorcery, how to rule and how to hold a grudge with all of her heart, and then she discovered Vampyrism, the serpent’s kiss that had given her near immortality.

She had played chess with demons for human lives, counseled monarchs and warred with monsters. Throughout the unwinding scroll of centuries she had ruled more than one country with unwavering ruthlessness in her slender iron fist. She knew spells that were so secret the knowledge of their existence had all but passed from this earth, and she had seen things so wondrous the sight of them had brought proud men to their knees. She had conquered the darkness to walk in the full light of day, and she had lost, and lost, and lost so very many people and things that even grief failed to move her much anymore.

All of those fabulous experiences were now fading into the ornamented night.

There was simply nowhere else to take her life, no adventure so compelling she must fight above all else to survive and see it through, no mountaintop she had to scale. After everything she had done to survive, after fighting to live for so long and to rule, she had now become . . . disinterested.

And here was the final of all treasures, the last jewel in her casket of secrets that rested on top of the others, winking its onyx light.

The Power she had worked so hard to accumulate was pulsing in rhythm with the accelerating deterioration of her mind. She saw it flare all around her in an exquisite transparent shimmer. It covered her in a shroud that sparkled like diamonds.

She had not expected that her death would be so lovely.

She had lost track of when it had begun. The past and the present intermingled in her mind. Time had become a riddle. Perhaps it had been a hundred years ago. Or perhaps it had been the entirety of her life, which held certain symmetry. That for which she had fought so hard, shed blood over, and cried tears of rage would be what consumed her in the end.

Another Power flare was building. She could sense its inevitability, like the oncoming crescendo in an immortal symphony, or the next intimate pulse of her long-abandoned, almost-forgotten heartbeat. The expression in her eyes turned vague as she focused her attention on that ravishing internal flame.

Just before it engulfed her again, she noticed an oddity. There was no sound in the house around them, no movement from other Vampyres, no spark of human emotion. There was nothing but Rhoswen’s hitched breathing as the younger Vampyre knelt at her feet, and the small contented sounds of a dog nearby as he scratched at his ear then dug out a nesting place in his floor cushion. Carling had lived for a long time surrounded by jackals eager to feed from scraps that fell from the tables of those in Power, but sometime over the last week, all her usual attendants and sycophants had fled.

Some creatures had a well-developed sense of self-preservation, unlike others.

She said to Rhoswen, “I suggest you work harder on acquiring that sense of discernment.”

Every little thing is going to be all right.

Recently Rune had quoted Bob Marley to Niniane Lorelle when she had been at a low point in her life. Niniane was young for a faerie, a sweet woman and had been a close friend of his for a long time. She also happened to be the Dark Fae Queen now and the newest entry on America’s list of the top ten most powerful people in the country. Rune had brought Bob up in conversation to comfort her after an assassination attempt had been made on her life, in which a friend of hers had been killed, and her mate Tiago had nearly died as well.

And damn if that Marley song didn’t keep running through his head ever since. It was one of those brain viruses, like a TV commercial or a musical theme from a movie that got stuck on perpetual replay, and he couldn’t find an off switch for the sound system that was wired into his brain.

Not that, in the normal course of things, he didn’t like Bob’s music. Rune just wanted him to shut up for a little freaking while so he could get some shut-eye.

Instead Rune kept waking up in the middle of the night, staring at his ceiling as silk sheets sandpapered his oversensitive skin and mental snapshots of recent events shuttered against his mind’s retina while Bob kept on playing.

Every little thing.

Snap, and Rune’s other good friend Tiago was sprawled on his back in a forested clearing, gutted and drenched in his own blood, while Niniane knelt at his head and held on to him in perfect terror.

Snap, and Rune stared into the gorgeous blank expression of one of the most Powerful Nightkind rulers in history, as he grabbed Carling by the shoulders, shook her hard and roared point-blank in her face.

Snap, and he struck a bargain with Carling that saved Tiago’s life but could very well end his own.

Snap, and Carling was walking naked out of the Adriyel River at twilight, deep in the heart of the Dark Fae land, drenched in silvery water that glistened in the dying day as if she wore a transparent gown of stars. The curves and hollows of her muscled body, the dark hair that lay slick against her shapely skull, her high-cheeked, inscrutable Egyptian face—they were all so fucking perfect. And one of the most perfect things about her was also one of the most tragic, for the lithe sensual beauty of her body had been marred with dozens of long white lash scars. When she had been a mortal human, she had been whipped with such force it must have been a ferocious cruelty, and yet she moved with the strong, sleek confident sensuality of a tiger. The sight of her had stopped his breath, stopped his thinking, stopped his soul, his everything, so that he needed some kind of cosmic reboot that hadn’t happened yet because part of him was still caught frozen in that moment of epiphany.

Snap, and he bore witness as an antique gun simultaneously fired and exploded in the forest clearing, killing both a traitor and a good woman. A woman he had liked very much. A strong, funny, fragile human who shouldn’t have lost her short precious life because he and his fellow sentinel Aryal had screwed up and left her to protect Niniane on her own.

Snap, and he saw Cameron’s face when she had been alive. The human had had the long, strong body of an athlete, her spare features sprinkled with good humor and cinnamon-colored freckles.

Snap, and he saw Cameron that final time as the Dark Fae soldiers prepared and wrapped her body for transportation back to her family in Chicago. All the pretty cinnamon color had leached out of her freckles. The exploding gun she had shot to save Niniane’s life had taken out a large chunk of her head. It was always so harsh when you saw a friend in that last, saddest state. They were okay. They didn’t hurt anymore. At that point you were the one who was wounded.

Every little thing is going to be all right.

Except sometimes it wasn’t, Bob. Sometimes things got so fucked up all you could do was send them home in a body bag.

Rune’s temper grew short. Usually he was an easy-going kind of Wyr, but he started snapping off people’s heads for no reason. Metaphorically, anyway. At least he hadn’t started snapping off people’s heads for real. Still, people started to avoid him.

“What’s up your ass?” Aryal had asked after Niniane’s coronation, when they had crossed over from Adriyel to Chicago and were en route back to New York.

They took their preferred method of travel and flew in their Wyr forms. Aryal was his fellow sentinel and a harpy, which meant she was a right royal bitch ninety percent of the time. Usually her snarky attitude cracked him up. At the moment it almost had him drop-kicking her into the side of a skyscraper.

“I’m being haunted by Marley’s ghost,” he told her.

Aryal slanted a dark eyebrow at him. When she was in her harpy form, the angles of her face were pronounced, upswept. Her gray-fade-to-black wings beat strongly in the hot summer wind that blew wild around them. “Which ghost?” the harpy asked. “The past, present or future?”

Huh? It took him a second to catch on. Then the Dickens connection happened in his head and he thought, Jacob Marley, not Bob. Aryal had gotten the Jacob Marley character and the three spirits of Christmas past, present and future all muddled up.

Time and time and time. What happened, what is, and what is yet to come.

He barked out a laugh. The sound was filled with ground glass. “All of them,” he said. “I’m being haunted by all of them.”

“Dude, give it up,” said Aryal, in a mild tone that he recognized as a conciliatory one, coming as it was from her. “Believe in Christmas already.”

The harpy looked almost delicate as he flew by her side. His Wyr form was that of a gryphon. He had the body of a lion and the head and wings of a golden eagle. His paws were the size of hubcaps and tipped with long wicked retractable claws, and his eagle’s head had lion-colored eyes. His feline body had breadth and power across the chest, sleek strong haunches, and was the dun color of hot desert places. In his Wyr form he was immense, easily the size of an SUV, with a correspondingly huge wingspan.

In his human form, Rune stood six-foot-four, and he had the broad shoulders and lean hard muscles of a swordsman. He had sun-bronzed fine-grained skin with laugh lines at the corners of lion’s eyes that were the color of sunlit amber. His even features and white smile were popular commodities, especially with those of the female persuasion, and the mane of sun-streaked hair that fell to his broad shoulders held glints of pale gold, chestnut and burnished copper.

He was one of the four gryphons of the Earth, revered in ancient India and Persia, an immortal Wyr who came into being at the birth of the world. Time and space had buckled when the Earth was formed. The buckling created dimensional pockets of Other land where magic pooled, time moved differently, modern combustible technologies didn’t work and the sun shone with a different light. What came to be known as the Elder Races, the Wyrkind and the Elves, the Light and Dark Fae, the Nightkind, Demonkind, human witches, and all other manner of monstrous creatures, tended to cluster in or near the Other lands.

Most of the Elder creatures came into being either on Earth or in the dimensional pockets of Other land. A few, a very few, came into existence in those crossover points between places, where time and space were fluid and changeable, and at the time of the world’s creation, Power was an unformed, immeasurable force.

Rune and his fellow gryphons were just such beings. They were quintessential beings of duality, formed at the cusp between two creatures, on the threshold of changing time and space. Lion and eagle, along with the other ancient Wyr, they learned to shapeshift and walk among humankind, and so they also became Wyr form and man. They had an affinity for the Earth’s between places. They could find crossover passages and Other lands that remained hidden from all others, and in early history they were known throughout the Elder Races for being fearless explorers. There would be no others like them. Creation’s inchoate time had passed and all things, even the crossover points between places, had become fixed in their definitions.

The past scrolled behind him. The future was the unknown thing that waited ahead of him, smiling its Mona Lisa smile. And the ever-fleeting now was continually born and continually died, but was never anything you could get your hands on and hold on to, as it always pushed you along to some other place.

Yeah, he knew a thing or two about living life on the threshold.

He and Aryal had returned to Cuelebre Tower in New York.

There were seven demesnes of Elder Races that overlaid the human geography of the continental United States. The seat of the Wyrkind demesne was in New York City. The seat of Elven demesne was based in Charleston, South Carolina. The Dark Fae’s demesne was centered in Chicago, and the Light Fae’s in Los Angeles. The Nightkind, which included all Vampyric forms, controlled the San Francisco Bay Area and the Pacific Northwest, while the human witches, considered part of the Elder Races due to their command of Power, were based in Louisville, Kentucky. Demonkind, like the Wyr and the Vampyres, consisted of several different types that included goblins and Djinn, and their seat was based in Houston.

Upon Rune and Aryal’s return, the first thing they did was debrief the Lord of the Wyr, Dragos Cuelebre. A massive dark man with gold eyes, Dragos’s Wyr form was a dragon the size of a private jet. He had ruled over the Wyrkind demesne for centuries, with seven immortal Wyr as his sentinels.

Rune was Dragos’s First sentinel. Among Rune’s other duties, he and the other three gryphons, Bayne, Constantine and Graydon, worked to keep the peace in the demesne. Aryal was the sentinel in charge of investigations, and the gargoyle Grym was head of corporate security for Cuelebre Enterprises.

Dragos had just lost his seventh sentinel, who had not yet been replaced. The Wyr Tiago, thunderbird and longtime war-lord sentinel, had walked away from his life and position in the Wyr demesne in order to be with his newfound mate, Niniane.

Dragos was not the most even-tempered at the best of times. At first he had not been pleased with the debriefing. He had not been pleased at all.

“You promised her WHAT?” The dragon’s deep roar rattled the windows. They stood in his office. Dragos planted his hands on his hips, his dark machete-edged features sharp with incredulity.

Rune set his mouth in the taut lines of someone struggling to hold on to his own temper and said, “I promised to go to Carling in one week and do a favor of her choosing.”

“Un-fucking-believable,” the Wyr Lord growled. “Do you have any idea what you gave away?”

“Yes, actually,” Rune bit out. “I believe I might have a clue.”

“She could ask you to do anything, and now you are bound by the laws of magic to do it. You could be gone for HUNDREDS OF YEARS just trying to complete that one fucking favor.” The dragon’s hot glare flared into incandescence as he paced. “I’ve already lost my warlord sentinel, and now we have no idea how long I will have to do without my First. Could you not have come up with something else to bargain? Anything else. Anything at all.”

“Apparently not, since I was the one who made the goddamn deal,” Rune snapped, as his already strained temper torched.

Dragos fell silent as he swung around to face Rune. It had to be in part, no doubt, from surprise, as Rune was normally the even-keeled one in their relationship. But Dragos was also taking a deep breath before releasing a blast of wrath. The dragon’s Power compressed in the room.

Then Aryal, of all people, stepped in to play her version of peacemaker. “What the hell, Dragos?” the harpy said. “It was life-or-death, and Tiago was bleeding out right in front of us. None of us actually had the time to consult our attorneys about the best bargaining terms to use with the Wicked Witch of the West. We brought you a present. Here.” She threw a leather pack at Dragos, who lifted a reflexive hand to catch it.

Dragos opened the pack and pulled out two sets of black shackles that radiated a menacing Power. “There’s finally a piece of good news,” he breathed.

The three Wyr stared at the chains in revulsion. Fashioned by Dragos’s old enemy, the late Dark Fae King Urien Lorelle, the chains had the ability to imprison the most Powerful Wyr of them all, Dragos himself.

His outburst of anger derailed, Dragos listened as Rune and Aryal finished telling the story of how Naida Riordan, wife of one of the most powerful figures in the Dark Fae government, had used Urien’s old tools in her attempts to kill Niniane and Tiago.

“The shackles prevented Tiago from healing,” Rune said. “We nearly lost him while we were figuring how to get them off. That’s when I had to bargain with Carling.”

The dragon gave him a grim look, thoughts shifting like shadows in his gold eyes.

“All right,” Dragos said after a moment. “Use the week to get your affairs in order and delegate your duties. And when you get to San Francisco, try like hell to persuade Carling to let you do something quick.”

So Rune spent the week delegating, while Bob and the images in his head kept him company at night, and the sights and the sounds of New York assaulted his senses by day.

Normally he enjoyed New York’s energetic hustle and bustle but since returning from Adriyel, the gigantic city steamed in the summer heat, all the smells trapped in a heavy humidity as it emitted a constant harsh, cacophonic noise that scraped like sharp fingernails underneath Rune’s skin. It turned him into a feral stranger with a short, unknown fuse so that when his temper exploded, he shocked himself as much as anyone. He felt something he had never felt before in the long uncounted years of his existence: he felt unsafe.

Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing he had to take off for a while. It might give him a chance to regroup, recover his equilibrium. It would be wise to take a break from dealing with Dragos’s temper, since his own self-control had become so uncertain. He and Dragos had had a productive relationship that had spanned centuries, and it was based partly on friendship and very heavily on a partnership of reliance on one another’s skills, such as Rune’s even temper and diplomacy.

But at the moment he seemed to have misplaced all of his not-inconsiderable skills at “managing up.” If he continued as he was, he and Dragos could possibly have a serious, very ugly clash, and that wouldn’t be good for anyone, least of all himself. There was simply no reason to let things degenerate to that point.

He was supposed to coax Carling into letting him do something for her that was quick, huh? Maybe he could offer to take out her trash or do her dishes. He wondered how well that would go over.

Did the Wicked Witch of the West have a sense of humor? Rune had seen her at inter-demesne affairs over the last couple of centuries. While he might have heard her say something once or twice that seemed laden with a double entendre, or he might have thought on occasion that he’d seen a sparkle lurking at the back of those fabulous dark eyes, it seemed highly doubtful. She seemed too intense for real humor, as if laughter might fracture some kind of critical weapons system inside.

On Thursday, the sixth day, his iPhone pinged. He dragged it out of his jeans pocket and checked it. He had received an email from Duncan Turner at Turner & Braeburn, Attorneys at Law, headquartered in San Francisco.

Who the hell?

Oh riiight, Duncan Turner was Duncan the Vampyre. Duncan had been part of Carling’s entourage as she traveled to Adriyel, the Dark Fae land, for Niniane’s coronation in her position as Councillor for the Elder tribunal.

The Elder tribunal acted as a sort of United Nations for the Elder Races. It was made up of seven Councillors that represented the seven Elder demesnes in the continental United States, and it had certain legal and judicial powers over inter-demesne affairs. Their main charter was to keep the current balance of Power stable and work to prevent war.

Among other things, the Councillors had the authority to command the attendance of residents of their demesne when they were called to act in their official capacity as representatives of the Elder tribunal. Like jury duty for humans, demesne residents either had to comply or provide proof of their inability to serve.

Rune wondered how many billable hours Duncan had lost for the privilege of attending Carling on the trip to Niniane’s coronation in Adriyel. Not only had Duncan proven to be an asset on the trip, he never showed a hint of frustration, impatience or resentment. He had been the ideal travel companion, and while Rune distrusted such exemplary behavior, he had grown to like the Vampyre in spite of it.

Rune clicked the email open and read through it.

Rune Ainissesthai

First Sentinel

Cuelebre Tower

New York, NY 10001

Dear Rune:

RE: Per verbal contract enacted 23. 4. 3205, Adriyel date.

As payment for services rendered by Councillor Carling Severan, please present yourself at sundown tomorrow at my office in Suite 7500, 500 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Further instructions will be given to you at that time.

I hope you have had a good week, and look forward to seeing you in due course.

Best regards,

Duncan Turner

Senior Partner

Turner & Braeburn, Attorneys at Law

Rune rubbed his mouth as he read through the message again. His already grim mood darkened further. Ask Carling if he could do something quick, huh? Take out the trash. Do the dishes.

Bloody hell.

Until he knew what was expected of him, he decided it might be a smart thing to have comfortable accommodations arranged, so he reserved an open-ended stay in a balcony suite at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, opting for the suite’s more modest size in favor of the room’s view and French doors that opened onto a wrought-iron balcony. Then he said good-bye to his peeps, packed a duffle and fought a nasty short battle with the pride of Wyr-lions that was the Cuelebre Enterprises army of attorneys, for the use of the corporate jet. Despite their vociferous objections, the argument was over the moment he pulled rank. He sent the group of pissed-off cats scrambling to book first-class tickets for their corporate meeting in Brussels.

He could have flown in his gryphon form from New York to San Francisco, but that would mean he would arrive tired and hungry at the law offices of Turner & Braeburn, which did not seem to be the best strategic option when facing an unknown, potentially dangerous task. Besides, as he told the cats, he had some important last-minute things he had to take care of during the flight.

And he did. As soon as the Lear had left the tarmac, he stretched out on a couch with pillows propped at his back and a pile of beef sandwiches at his elbow. He punched a button that opened the shutters that concealed a fifty-two-inch plasma widescreen, settled a wireless keyboard on his upraised knees, a wireless mouse on the back of the couch, and he logged into the World of Warcraft’s game Wrath of the Lich King via the jet’s satellite connection.

After all, he didn’t know when he was going to get the chance to play WoW again. And it was damn important to do his bit to save all life on Azeroth while he could. Booyah.

He played WoW, and ate, and napped while the Lear shot westward through the sky, hurtling toward the death of the day. It felt good to be on the move again, albeit in such a leisurely fashion, and Rune’s mood lightened until he felt almost cheerful again.

Then the pilot’s voice overrode the game on the Lear’s sound system. “Sir, we’ve begun our descent. It should be a smooth one. We’ll reach SFO within the half hour, and we’re already cleared for landing. San Francisco is currently at a balmy seventy-four degrees and the skies are clear. It looks like we’re in for a beautiful sunset.”

Rune rolled his eyes at the travelogue, logged out of WoW, stretched and stood. He stepped into the luxuriously appointed bathroom, shaved and took a five-minute shower, dressed again in his favorite jeans, Jerry Garcia T-shirt and steel-toed boots, and went to check out the scenic action in the cockpit.

Pilot and co- were a mated pair of Wyr-ravens. They sat relaxed and chatting, a slender, dark-haired quick-witted couple who straightened in their seats as he appeared. “Dudes,” he said in a mild tone, resting one elbow on the back of co-’s chair. “Chill.”

“Yes, sir.” Alex, the pilot, gave him a quick sidelong smile. Alex was the younger and the more aggressive of the two males. More often than not, his partner Daniel, who was the more laid-back of the pair, was content to play backup. For the longer flights, they tended to switch hats, one flying pilot for the flight out and the other piloting the return trip.

The Lear would be serviced and refueled overnight, and the ravens were headed back to New York first thing in the morning. Rune asked, “What are you guys going to do with your evening—have dinner out, take in a show?”

As they chatted about restaurants and touring Broadway shows, Rune gazed out at the panorama spreading out underneath the plane.

The San Francisco Bay Area was awash in gigantic sweeps of color, the bluish grays of distant landmarks dotted with bright sparks of electric light, all of it crowned with the fiery brilliance of the oncoming cloudless sunset. All five of the Bay Area’s major bridges—the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, Hayward-San Mateo Bridge and the Dumbarton Bridge—were etched in perfect miniature in the watercolor distance. The southern San Francisco peninsula sprouted skyscrapers like colossal flowers in some god’s back garden. At the other end of the Golden Gate lay the North Bay area, which included Marin, and Sonoma and Napa Counties.

Sometimes there was another land in the distance, sketched in lines of palest transparent blue. One of the Bay Area’s Other lands had started appearing on the horizon around a century ago. It seemed to sit due west of the Golden Gate.

The island had first been sighted around the mid-nineteenth century and had caused major consternation and a remapping of shipping lanes. Much research and speculation had gone into the singular phenomenon, sparking ideas such as a Power fault that might be linked to California’s earthquake faults, but no one really understood why the island appeared at some times and disappeared at others. Eventually an adventurous soul discovered that the island disappeared once ocean-faring vessels sailed close enough. After that the traffic in the shipping lanes returned to normal.

Soon the island became another Bay Area tourist attraction. Sightseeing cruises increased exponentially whenever the Other land was visible. People began calling it Avalon, the shining land of myth and fable.

But Rune had heard whispers of another name. There was another population in the Bay Area. It was not the population that took cruises, ate in restaurants or went to see touring Broadway shows. It lived in the corners of old abandoned buildings, and hid when night fell and all the predators came out. The crack addicts and the homeless didn’t call the land Avalon. They called it Blood Alley.

The island was visible now in the distance, the immense orange-red ball of the setting sun shining through its unearthly silhouette. A small colony of Vampyres reputedly lived on the island. Rune watched it thoughtfully, shifting his stance to take in the change in gravity as the Lear tilted into a wide circle that would bring it into a landing pattern for SFO.

As the seat of the Nightkind demesne, the Bay Area had many Vampyre enclaves, especially in Marin County where an extensive community surrounded the home of Julian Regillus, the official Nightkind King. As far as Rune knew, the street people did not whisper of Julian’s community with the same kind of fear as they did the island. Was that because of the island’s otherworldly habit of appearing and disappearing, or because of who lived there?

Alex the pilot heaved a sigh and said, “I am required by FAA regulations . . . blah blah . . . seat belt . . . blah . . .”

Rune burst out laughing. “If we wouldn’t lose all the shit that’s not anchored down in the cabin, I’d be tempted to just pop open a door and hop out.”

Daniel shot him a look. “Thank you, sir, for refraining from that action.”

“You’re welcome.” Rune clapped the co- on the shoulder and left the cabin.

Truth was, he wasn’t in all that big of a hurry, and they set down soon enough. When they had taxied into position and Daniel opened up the Lear, Rune thanked him and took off. He shapeshifted just outside the jet and, cloaking his Wyr form from scrutiny, he launched into the air and flew into the city.

He was undecided about where to land, since he wasn’t familiar enough with the location of 500 Market Street that he could locate it from the air. Finally he chose to set down near the west end of the Golden Gate Park. As he spiraled down toward a paved path, his shadow flickered over a slender furtive figure that stood in front of a sign and shook a can of spray paint in one fist.

Rune landed, changed back into his human form and let his cloak of concealment drop away. He slung his duffle bag onto one shoulder and watched as the figure tagged the sign. The brown creature looked like an anorexic humanoid female, with a skeletal frame and long spidery hands and feet. Her dripping hair had strands of seaweed tangled in it.

She glanced over her shoulder, caught sight of him and scowled. “What are you staring at, ass-wipe?”

He said in a mild tone, “Not a thing, my good woman.”

“Keep it that way.” She darted to a nearby trash can, tossed away the spray paint can and dashed across the path to dive into a nearby pond. Soon the quiet sound of brokenhearted sobbing came from underneath a weeping willow at the pond’s edge.

Rune walked over to the sign. It was one of the myriad signs that were posted throughout the Bay Area’s ponds, lakes and rivers that warned tourists: Please Do NOT Feed the Water Haunts.

This particular sign had one word blacked out with spray paint. It now read: Please Do Feed the Water Haunts.

Welcome to the Nightkind demesne, the home of water haunts, night elves, ghouls, trolls and Vampyres. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of several night elves trotting through the park. Unlike real Elves, night elves were typically slender and child-sized creatures, with large eyes and large bald heads and pointed ears, and they schooled together like fish.

He strolled over to the willow tree and cocked his head to look underneath the dripping leaves. The water haunt sat in the water, her bony thin shoulders hunched. She caught sight of him and sobbed harder.

He dug in his duffle bag. The water haunt gave a piteous whimper, her lips trembling, as she tracked his movements with a mud-colored gaze. He pulled out a PowerBar and held it up. The haunt’s eyes fixed on it. She wailed as she crept close. He raised a finger. Her wailing sailed upward on a questioning note and hitched to a stop.

He told her, “I’m onto your tricks, young lady. You try to bite me and I’ll kick your face in.”

The water haunt gave him a crafty grin that had a great many teeth. He indicated the PowerBar and raised his eyebrows. She gave him an eager nod. He tossed her the bar, and she snatched it out of the air. With a whirl and a splash, she dived to the other side of the tree to devour her prize.

He shook his head and checked his watch. He had about a half hour to sunset. Plenty of time to walk west, connect to Market Street, and find out if he needed to hook either a left or a right in order to reach his destination.

Bob started up in his head again as he headed out of the park. Every little thing is going to be all right.

Oh no. Not again. He wanted to at least start out this venture with some semblance of sanity. As he strode down the street, he unzipped a side pocket on his duffle and fished around inside until he nabbed his iPod. He popped in the earbuds and scrolled through his extensive playlists for something else. Anything else. Anything at all.

“Born to be Wild.” Yeah, that’d do. He punched play.

Steppenwolf’s strong raw voice sang in his ears.

Fire all of your guns at once and explode into space.

It was twilight, one of the world’s threshold places, the crossover time between day and night. The dying sunshine caught in his lion’s eyes. They flared with radiance as Rune smiled.