Serpent's Kiss

SEVEN

She turned away from him, toward her seat, and her gaze fell on the cool stove.

She said, “You have not eaten in quite some time. You must be hungry.” She had witnessed just how much Wyr tended to eat at several inter-demesne functions, and again on the trip to Adriyel. They could put away horrendous amounts of food, especially those who were athletic. “Do you require sustenance?”

“I’m fine, thanks,” he replied. “I went hunting when I was out.”

She whirled in dismay. If anyone could break through the wards she had set around the redwoods, he could. “Not in the forest?”

His expression changed. He said quickly, “No, not in the forest. I felt your wards and left the area alone. I went fishing.”

She relaxed and took her seat at the end of the table, closest to the open door. After a hesitation, he sat at her right. She regarded her half-empty wineglass as Rune leaned his elbows on the table. She sent him a quick sidelong glance. He was staring at the table’s scarred surface, his gaze as turbulent and moody as the storm-swept sea.

She had seen him in many moods, she realized—sharply predatory, laughing, angry, dangerously intent. This quiet contemplation of his added another dimension to those strong, handsome features. She wanted to ask what he was thinking, what had put the sharp lines between his brows, why he held that elegant mouth of his in such a straight, severe line. Reluctantly she realized just how fascinated she had become with him. What would she do, if they discovered a way to halt the progression of her disease, and then he simply went away, back to his life in New York? How strange, that she had so quickly become accustomed to his presence. She would . . . miss him when he left.

She let her gaze fall to the tabletop as well, disturbed by the direction of her own thoughts and the intensity of her own reactions to him.

Rune began to speak. “I was outside yesterday evening when Rhoswen called me,” he said. “It was close to sunset and you had faded again. We went up to your room, so I could see for myself.”

None of that was news. They had already been in her room when she had come out of it. But it was apparent he had to take his own path toward whatever was the difficult part he had to say to her, so she curbed her impatience and simply nodded.

He ran his thumb along a knife mark on the table. “When we got upstairs, I saw sunlight spilling out of your bedroom doors.”

Wait. Whatever she thought he had been about to say, that wasn’t it. She sat forward, her sharpened gaze returning to his downturned face.

Rune continued, “Rhoswen didn’t see it. We checked to make sure that the sunlight I saw—or thought I saw—wouldn’t burn her. It didn’t, so we stepped into your room. I went somewhere else. Rhoswen didn’t.”

He went on with his tale, his tone expressionless and his words precise. By the time he finished, she was gripping her hands together so tightly the tendons were distended white ridges against the rest of her honey-colored skin. He put his hand over hers. His broad palm and longer fingers covered both of hers effortlessly. He held on to her with a hard, reassuring grip.

He had thought about not telling her, as he flew over the ocean throughout the windswept night and tried to figure out what he should do. In the end, he couldn’t keep silent. He refused to keep from this proud woman information she had a right to hear, no matter how hard it might be to tell her. And in the end, he needed her expertise in helping him analyze what had happened. But it was unspeakable to watch her suffer and not be able to prevent it.

She was whispering. He leaned closer to catch what she said. “. . . doesn’t make any sense. None of it does.”

“Why not?” he said. “State your reasons out loud.”

She looked up. Her eyes had dampened but their intelligence was sharp and clear. “My Power has built up markedly over the last several years,” she said. “I have so much sometimes it feels like I’m drowning in it. It flares up each time I’m about to go into a fade. But I simply do not have the kind of Power to create what you’re describing. My magic is based on skill and education. It is an entirely different thing from the kind of Power that you have. And I don’t have either the knowledge or the spells it would take to build something that huge or elaborate.”

“How do you see the kind of Power I have?” he asked, curious.

“Wyr have attributes. You can practice with them and refine them, and you can bring them to a high level of expertise, but they are an intrinsic part of you.”

“Your Power is an intrinsic part of you, and you study and practice to refine it,” he pointed out.

“Yes, I know. How can I explain this better?” She frowned at him. “Okay, here is an example. Tiago is a thunderbird, a creature of storm and lightning. He can call a storm or a lightning bolt without words or spells. It’s a characteristic, a part of who he is, yes?”

“Of course,” he said.

She told him, “I might be able to call lightning, but I would have to study it first in order to do so. I would need a specific spell, and time enough to recite it. You can shapeshift. It’s part of who you are. I can’t shapeshift. I don’t have the attribute, and I don’t have a spell for it. It’s all Power and it’s all magic, and yes it can all get better with practice and refinement, but the two things stem from very different places. Dragos has studied sorcery, or spell magic. He can use both spell magic and his attributes of Wyr magic. That’s one of the many things that make him so dangerous. You see?”

He nodded, playing with her fingers as he listened. He was pleased to note that as her intellect took over, the pain in her eyes eased. It had not gone away, but it was better.

She said, “I can’t do what Dragos does and access both types of magic, of course, because I am not Wyr. I can only practice spell magic, and I cannot even come close to creating the kind of reality you described. The best illusions I could create would be suggestions, sleights of hand, things you would see out of the corner of your eye that might attract you or make you want to turn away. Or I could build on something that already existed.”

He stirred. “What do you mean?”

“Take my cottage. I could make it seem derelict and abandoned. The illusion would dissipate the moment you decided to walk up to it and explore. Or I could send a dream to you, but it really would be a dream, and any number of things might interrupt or change it. For example, you could disbelieve what was happening. People break out of dreams all the time. Or your alarm might go off and wake you up.”

He frowned. “The way you describe it, anything you could do would take a great deal of work to set up.”

“It does take a lot of work, yes.” She pulled one of her hands out from underneath his to gesture. “It couldn’t just happen when you’re talking about spell magic. That would be like saying the Power flare could enter a computer code on a security door, and then walk into a bank vault, pick the right safe-deposit box, choose the right key off a key ring and insert it into the box’s lock, pick the right file out of a pile in the box, put it all back in place and go to a notary public to get the papers in the file notarized. There are too many sophisticated steps that would need to be taken, including some high-level interaction with the person you wished to practice the illusion on.”

He took her glass of wine and drank the contents. She reached for the nearby open bottle, refilled the glass and offered it to him. He said, “So what you are saying is that what happened had to be a different kind of magic.”

Her brow cleared. “Yes,” she said. “Maybe it was still some kind of an illusion or shared hallucination, but it wasn’t any kind of spell magic my mind could have accidentally produced because I—how did you so poetically put it?—cracked out.”

He gave a ghost of a chuckle. “All right, now we’re getting somewhere,” he said. He drank half the wine and nudged the glass over to her.

She picked up the glass and drank, then regarded him over the rim curiously. “How did it feel?”

He shrugged. “It didn’t feel like an illusion. It felt as real as you and me sitting here. When I walked onto the sand, it felt like a kind of crossover passage only . . .”

She leaned forward as his voice trailed away. “Only what?”

His frowning gaze met hers. “Only it was bent somehow.”

She waited but he didn’t offer more. She said, “I don’t understand.”

He shook his head, a sharp, impatient gesture. “I don’t either. But if it was a crossover, why could I walk it and not Rhoswen? She can make other crossovers. And if it was a crossover, how could it just appear and disappear? All the other passages I’ve seen are a fixed part of the landscape.”

Carling’s forehead wrinkled again the way it did when she was perplexed. “You both can make other crossovers. So it stands to reason, if you could make this one and she couldn’t, it had to do with the differences between you.”

“You mean I could make the crossover because of my Wyr attributes.”

“Yes, although I don’t know exactly what those are, other than you turn into a truly stunning gryphon.”

He refused to let the compliment sidetrack him, even as the eagle part of his nature preened. He held out his hand for the wineglass, and she gave it to him. He drank from the place where her lips had rested. He thought she was too preoccupied to notice.

“Let’s just say I have an affinity for crossover passages and between places,” he said.

“Do you?” she breathed. “I wonder what would have happened if you had been holding Rhoswen’s hand.”

Even though Rhoswen could traverse normal crossovers, her inability to follow Rune earlier was akin to how dead-heads, or people with no Power, were unable to cross over to Other lands on their own. They needed to be brought over by someone with enough Power to make the crossing, and the only way to do that was through physical touch. When someone with no Power walked the path of a crossover, they simply followed the ravine or break in the landscape where the crossover was located, just as Rhoswen had walked into Carling’s bedroom instead of stepping into the desert scene with Rune.

He considered Carling’s question then shook his head. “It might be a good thing we weren’t. We probably wouldn’t have been touching when the scene disappeared—or I disappeared from the scene—and then what would have happened to her? Would she have come out of it too, or would she have been trapped there, like dead-heads are trapped in Other lands if they don’t have someone to bring them back?”

They exchanged a sober look.

“So, what do we know?” Carling said. “If what happened was an illusion, it could not have come from my spell magic.”

“Somehow it still has to be an integral part of you,” Rune said. “The scene was a very intimate and important part of your past.”

She bowed her head and the curve of her mouth turned unhappy, but she gave a reluctant nod.

Rune remembered the conversation he had had with Rhoswen. He said, “You may not be Wyr, but you are like Dragos in that you also have another kind of magic. Vampyre magic. Rhos wen said that a by-product of the virus was a certain amount of Power, at least enough for telepathy and crossovers, but the virus itself is also magic in nature. There are all the famous attributes that come from Vampyrism, like longevity, strength and speed.”

Her head came up. She gave him a puzzled look. “Yes, of course, along with all the famous limitations like the need to drink blood, inability to eat solid foods, and vulnerability to sunlight, but I’ve never heard of this kind of thing happening to any of the other Vampyres who reached the end stages of the disease.”

“How would you know?” he said. “The oral histories state that other Vampyres experienced some kind of episodes. You’re experiencing episodes too, along with all the other symptoms you’ve categorized. It seems clear they must be connected to Vampyrism. Whatever actually happened yesterday—whether it was an illusion, shared hallucination or some kind of alternate reality—it was an interaction of me coming into contact with what was happening to you, and that has never happened before. Apparently I could connect with your event because of my Wyr attributes. What I went through had a very real, if strange, crossover experience. That’s the information we have right now.”

Carling shook her head slowly. “We also know that neither one of us was in control. I had no idea how dangerous this could be for you. I don’t have a choice; I’m going through this whether I like it or not. But you do have a choice, and you need to protect yourself.”

“We don’t know enough,” he said. “And we need to learn more. What I need to do is go back into the next episode, if I can, and see what else I can discover. Carling, your life depends on us figuring this out.”

“I know.” She met his gaze. “But I don’t want you getting hurt.”

He gave her a slight smile. “And I don’t want you dying. We’ll just have to look out for each other as best we can. When you have another episode, I’m going to try to engage again. Agreed?”

She straightened her spine and nodded. “Agreed.”

She looked at the table. Rune had laced his fingers through one of hers while they talked. They had passed the wine back and forth with their free hands.

She murmured, “What do you suppose it means?”

She did not question his overtures any longer. Along with the rest of the list she had made earlier, it was clear Rune was too affectionate. Reaching out to touch or hug her seemed to come as easily as breathing to him. She was convinced that, like his penchant for flirting, it meant nothing. No doubt he did as much with everyone around him.

However, gestures of physical affection had never come easily to her. She meant to question how she had let him hold her hand without a shred of protest, but Rune’s response was ambiguous enough that he could have taken her meaning another way.

“It means,” he said as his fingers tightened on hers, “that I’ll be very interested to see what happens next.”

The morning had brightened as they talked. The air turned heavy and yellow as the sun rose high overhead. Carling reclaimed her hand and went to stand at the open door. She supposed the temperature must have warmed as well. A steady brisk breeze blew from the ocean, smelling of brine and change. Things unresolved, things not understood. It was irritating to think of dying in the face of so much mystery. Could irritation become enough motivation to stay alive? Perhaps curiosity? She sighed, rubbed her face, and wished she could experience the restoration of sleep again.

Rune moved up behind her. She could feel the heat of his body along the length of her back, a siren’s call of warmth and strength. He said, “Rhoswen didn’t stay with you.”

She turned her head slightly. “Why, was she supposed to?”

“We thought it would be best if one of us did, in case you slipped into an episode.”

So that was why Rhoswen had argued with her so fiercely. She set her jaw. “I sent her to bed,” she said. “She and Rasputin go back to San Francisco tonight.” She turned to stab him with an angry gaze. “I can send you away too.”

His eyelids dropped down, veiling the flare of ferocity in his gaze. “Can you now,” he said. His voice dropped to a quiet low rumble in his chest, like the warning rumble of an earthquake deep in the earth before it rattled to the surface with a roar that toppled skyscrapers.

“Do not ever again make decisions for me, or about me, without my knowledge,” she said between her teeth. “I am not senile. I am not suffering from dementia. I will not tolerate it, do you understand?”

His gaze lifted. He studied her tense face, and the anger that had taken over his own expression broke apart. “I’m sorry, Carling. It wasn’t meant like that. We just didn’t want you to go into a fade by yourself, especially if the situation might become dangerous because then you wouldn’t be able to defend yourself. And you weren’t available at the time for us to consult with you.”

She searched his face and saw nothing but sincerity. After a moment her rigid stance relaxed somewhat. She gave him a curt nod and turned back to the open door, her arms wrapped around herself tightly.

Then he moved, to do what, she didn’t know, but she propelled herself forward, because she couldn’t stand it if he touched her right then with another one of his affectionate gestures. One of these days she thought he might touch her one too many times, and she would shatter like a piece of overstrained porcelain. “You have reading to do,” she said shortly. “And I have a mess to clean up.”

She walked fast down the sun-filled path to her work cottage, stood in the open doorway, and took stock of last night’s work. The air was tinged with a hint of soot and the lingering echo of dark magic, but the sun and the wind would help to take care of that. Herbs, empty pitchers, and her jar of sea salt littered the work table, and the fireplace was full of soggy ash. The circle of sea salt she had cast still lay strewn on the floor, its former pure white turned dingy.

She had better start with the salt or she would track it all through the cottage. She went to the closet and pulled out a broom. Rune’s hot sunlike presence filled the open doorway. She gritted her teeth and gripped the broom handle hard. One wrong word or move from him and, swear to gods, she was going to smack him over the head with the broom.

“You’ve been busy,” he said, his tone mild. “Do you mind if I read in here?”

She struggled with herself then said, “Not as long as you’re quiet.”

“I promise,” he said gently. “I’ll be as good as gold.”

His voice seemed to brush along her skin in a featherlight caress. She bristled against the sensation and said, “Shut up.”

He laughed, a quiet husky chuckle that filled all the cold, dark corners of the room with warmth and sounded like it belonged between silken sheets. She gave him a glare and then attacked the floor with the broom.

He was as good as his word. If he hadn’t been, she really would have smacked him. He pulled one of the armchairs over to the open doorway and the morning sun. Then he settled himself, one ankle propped on the jeans-covered knee of his other leg, and he opened her journal. She glanced at him. His tousled hair was crowned in bright gold, his lean spare face turning still with concentration.

Her greedy soul drank down the sight. Then she forced herself to turn away. She set to work, and gradually, as she cleaned and Rune read, a fragile calm stole into the cottage and into her mind. When she finally had the room spotless and all her supplies put away, she set several branches of dried white sage in the empty fireplace. The sage would dispel any lingering darkness that might cling to the stones.

As the morning evaporated into afternoon, the edges of her vision began to flicker with the telltale sign that her Power was building again, and she knew she was headed into another fade soon. She would not accept the feelings that tightened her stomach and dried out her mouth. She refused to feel trapped, and she would not let fear rule her. With Rune present, they had an opportunity to learn more together than she had been able to in the last two centuries combined.

The best thing to do was to keep busy until it happened. She went into her office to frown at the empty cabinet where she had stored the books of black magic.

She sucked on her lower lip as she regarded it. It was a fine, well-constructed cabinet built of cedar. She had carved the surface herself with spells of protection and binding. The work had taken days, and she hated the thought of destroying it. But the books had been stored in the cabinet for too long. She could feel their lingering malice. It had soaked into the wood.

Reluctantly she came to the only conclusion she could. She could try to purify the cabinet, but that would be time-consuming and she was never going to trust storing delicate things in it. In the end, there was only one way to be absolutely sure all of the dark energies were well and truly dissipated. The cabinet would have to be destroyed as well.

She heaved a sigh, retrieved a hammer and screwdriver from the small toolbox in the office closet, and began to dismantle the cabinet by striking at the joints.

Rune appeared soon after the first hammer blow. She had grown so sensitized to his energy, she knew without bothering to look the moment he stepped into the room.

“So that’s what the mess in the other room was about,” he said. “You decided to get rid of the misbehaving books.”

“It was past time.”

He sent her a thoughtful glance but refrained from commenting. Instead, he said, “I take it the cabinet is contaminated.”

“Yes. It’s best to be on the safe side and burn it.” She positioned the tip of the screwdriver at the juncture of a panel, struck it with the hammer, and levered the pieces of wood apart. They came apart with a sharp crack.

He came up beside her, standing too close. He asked, “May I help?”

How like a male. Pull out some tools and start banging on something, and they flocked in from miles around. She pushed her hair out of her face with the back of one hand and scowled at him. “I am perfectly capable of breaking it down myself.”

“Of course you are,” he told her, smiling. “That’s not what I said. I said may I help?”

She shrugged irritably and stepped back. Rune studied the cabinet for a moment then grasped the sides. She said, “I could tear it apart with my bare hands too if I wanted, hotshot, but I don’t want my office walls scratched.”

“Have some faith,” Rune said.

“Fine.” She threw up her hands. The fragile calm she had achieved blew into tatters. She wanted the broom again. She might still smack him before the day got much older. “If you scratch my walls, you’re going to repaint the office yourself.”

He gave her an amused glance over one wide shoulder. “You’re in a mood.” The muscles in his wide, powerful back tensed, and he pushed out with controlled force. The cabinet split apart at the joints. He made quick work of dismantling it without, she noticed, scratching the walls once. Then he bent to stack the pieces together. “Do you have any twine?”

She went over to the open toolbox that sat on the floor just outside the closet. She set the hammer and screwdriver in the box, found a ball of twine and threw it at him hard.

It whistled through the air with such speed a human couldn’t have seen it, but he reached out and plucked it from the air with a lazy-seeming gesture. Of course he did. He bound the cedar pieces together swiftly, pulled out a pocket-knife, cut the twine and pocketed the knife again. Without looking up, he flung the ball of twine back at her. Hard.

She flinched back a step but caught it. She glared at the ball and slam-dunked it into the toolbox, and suddenly Rune was right in front of her. Too close. Of course. He was always too close, and he stepped forward, closer still, until their bodies brushed together.

She looked up, her gaze narrowed. “You’re in my space.”

“I know I am.” He brought his amused, sensual face down to hers. In a murmur so quiet it came out as a throaty purr, he asked, “Would you like to tell me what might coax you out of your mood? I would be happy to oblige you with just about anything.”

She stared up at him, her eyes widening. Desire roared back between them, both his and hers. It flared low in her belly and weighted her limbs so that she wanted to lie down. Her imagination supplied her with the molten image of him lying on top of her, his nude muscled body flexing, that beautiful wild face of his sharp with sex and need.

Her body insisted it needed to suck in some air. She fought and lost a battle with control, and took a breath, all of her senses thrumming with his hot vivid presence. The light brush of his hard chest against her nipples ignited sensations that were so long dormant, they should have remained dead and buried.

This was a wicked madness. He caused her to feel too much. It had gone beyond a dangerous, useless distraction and was fast approaching obsession. She couldn’t cope with all of it, both his emotions and hers. Coping with simple hope and fear were hard enough.

She tore her gaze away from his compelling face. Her hands shot out. She fisted them in his black T-shirt. “Did you finish reading?”

His sensual amusement faded. “Yes, just before I came in here.”

She concentrated her gaze on her fists as they rested against the hard plate of his breastbone. “And?”

He cupped her shoulders. “And, I don’t know. Your work is brilliant, but then you knew that. Something bothers me, and I haven’t been able to pinpoint what it is. It’s like trying to say that word that’s sitting on the tip of your tongue. You know the word is there and you’ve used it many times before, but you can’t quite think to say it.”

“Try harder.”

His fingers tightened. “What’s wrong?”

She tried to smile. It came out all twisted and wrong. “I’m starting to feel my Vegas again.”

He took a deep breath and pulled her into his arms. “That’s okay,” he said. His voice was as rock-steady as his gaze had been earlier. His cheek came down on the top of her head. “We knew it was coming. We’ll go through it together and we’ll learn more.”

She forced the words out. “That’s what I’ve been telling myself.”

Damn him, he stroked her hair, and then there were more feelings, traitorous feelings accompanied by weakening thoughts.

What would it hurt if she relaxed her rigid spine just once, just for a little bit? She tried it and found herself leaning against him. He guided her head so that it rested in the hollow of his shoulder. Her head seemed to fit there so flawlessly, the realization felt like it bruised her. Strength coursed through his long massive body, an inexhaustible well of Power that surrounded her with warmth. He wrapped his arms around her and somehow her arms found their way around his waist, and then they held on to each other tight.

Her eyes prickled again. They filled with burning liquid and spilled over. It had been so long since she had cried it took her several moments to identify the wetness.

He had done this to her. He opened doors in her that never should have been opened again. He was a sirocco that blasted through the topography of her mind and soul until they shifted like desert sands, and he forced her to confront feelings she had thought she would never feel again, wonder and desire, hope and fear.

Then he taught her how to feel new things, things that were so fresh and fragile and crushable, she was afraid they might break her. Fight to live, he said to her, and it was such a hard thing to do, because she couldn’t rouse herself to care enough to fight without also feeling afraid. Before he came, she thought she would only lose her life. She had distanced herself so she could witness her own end with detachment. Now she felt like she might lose something else just as valuable: her understanding of who she was.

She whispered, “Sometimes I think I hate you.”

He rubbed his cheek in her hair. “Why is that, darling?”

Her lips parted. Hadn’t he called her that once, so very long ago . . . or at least what seemed to her so very long ago? Only she hadn’t known what the word meant or understood what he was saying. She had thought he was a strange and beautiful god, calling her by a sacred name . . .

Rune cradled her close as he felt his T-shirt grow wet. He could smell a trace of frankincense in her hair, along with the clean fresh scent of lavender. Underneath that was her lush womanly fragrance, and she was so utterly perfect that bewilderment and outrage roared through him again at the thought of her dying.

Wait. His breath hissed. There it was, the word on the tip of his tongue, only it wasn’t a word but a concept. A premise, not a conclusion.

He buried his face in the slender crook of her neck, crushing her to him. She stirred and murmured either a protest or a question. He muttered, “Hold on just a minute.”

He wrapped his Power around her and opened his Wyr senses wide, and inhaled Carling’s fragrance again.

Wyr, especially the older and more Powerful Wyr, could sense disease in a way that animals could. They could taste when food was tainted, which made them extremely difficult to poison. They could smell when injuries became infected, or when illness was exuded in a person’s sweat glands.

Carling’s research had taken the path of modern medicine. She had followed closely the research done by Louis Pasteur and Emile Roux. She had chronicled how she had corresponded with the two doctors in the 1880s, asking detailed questions about their development of a vaccine for rabies. In turn the two scientists had studied Vampyrism with fascination.

Vampyrism had all the characteristics of a blood-borne pathogen. It was found in blood and certain other bodily fluids and had a 98. 9 percent infection rate when a direct blood exchange had occurred. It could not be transmitted through air, and intact skin acted as an effective barrier. The conviction that Vampyrism was an infectious disease had become so well-entrenched in modern thought, it was no longer questioned. Now in the twenty-first century, virtually all medical and scientific research on Vampyrism was based on that premise.

But every instinct Rune had was telling him Carling’s energy was robust. She did not smell diseased. He thought of the woman he had passed just outside the Bureau of Nightkind Immigration. That woman’s sickness had been evident. The taint had lingered on her skin underneath the scent of lilacs.

Carling smelled sexy and feminine with the tantalizing sultriness of her own Power, and the faint metallic tinge that all Vampyres shared.

In fact, to Rune she smelled perfectly healthy.

“I’ve got it, I figured out what bothers me,” he said. He straightened and pulled her away as he talked. Her arms fell loose to her sides. “What if everything you tried didn’t work because Vampyrism is not a disease?”

Grinning, he looked down into that haunting, beautiful face of hers that had grown on him like an addiction. Her expression was blank, those long almond-shaped eyes of hers fixed on something only she could see.

His stomach clenched. He guided her over to her office chair and nudged her to sit. She went without a protest, as passive as a doll.

A ripple went through the office. Then the scene changed. He relaxed and let it take him.

It was time to hit Vegas again, baby.