Serpent's Kiss (10 page)

She stared at him. “How can you know that for sure? It happened thousands of years ago. You were the most amazing thing I had ever seen. I had
never
imagined anything like you, but to you, I was just another human child. I had to have been so forgettable.”

“Khepri,” he said. His voice was soft. “You were never at any time in your life forgettable.”

The sadness in his expression wrenched at her. She leaned toward him, touching his arm. “What is it, what’s wrong?”

“Never mind that now,” he said. “This is your story. It’s important you tell it.”

“All right.” She frowned but continued, “I don’t remember much else about our encounter. I remember the color of your hair. It shone golden in the sun, like the lion. You were very large and strange, and we talked for a while, but I was pretty much in shock and I didn’t retain any of what we said to each other. Then you left.”

He looked down at their hands. “Do you remember how I left?”

“No,” she said. “Did you take flight again? I wish I’d remembered that.”

He shook his head but remained silent. He rubbed his thumb lightly against the edge of her kneecap and appeared to be concentrating on the small movement.

“Well,” she said after a moment. “That same day soldiers from the city harvested our village for slaves. They took the young, the healthy and the pretty, and they killed anyone who tried to stop them. I saw them kill my father. It was terrible, of course. I was maybe seven years old. But I’ve had a long time to get over it, and the brutal fact is, I might have lived and died a very short life in the river mud if I hadn’t somehow been taken out of it. I never forgot seeing you flying overhead though.”

He nodded, his head bent. After a moment he asked, “What made you change your name?”

She gave an impatient shrug. “I took my freedom and I took control of my life, and then I took control of my identity as well. I wanted a more modern name, something that was wholly my own creation. Carling wasn’t that far off from Khepri, so it made the transition easy. One day it was time to bury that little slave girl. It actually was a bit of a relief.”

His mouth tightened. “I wish I could have stayed to help you and your family.”

She frowned. What had she said? He looked like he was in pain. “As I said, it happened a very long time ago.”

He stood with such abruptness she sat back sharply. He met her gaze for one burning moment then his eyes slid away. “Sure it did,” he said. His voice had grown hoarse. “I’m going to take a break and stretch my legs. Let’s pick this up again in ten.”

“If that’s what you need,” she said slowly.

He gave her a curt nod and strode out of the room.

She looked at the empty ottoman where Rune had sat and tapped her fingers on the arm of the chair. The intensity of his turmoil was a hot, sharp weight that lingered in the room for several minutes after he had disappeared.

It was obvious something was terribly wrong, but for the life of her she couldn’t figure out what.

R
une tried to breathe as he made his way through the darkened house. A hot, invisible boulder crushed his chest. The adult Carling had looked at him with the same pleasure and wonder that the child Khepri had. Her face was even lovelier when it was washed clean of all cynicism and calculation, stripped of the distance she held between herself and the rest of the world.

How could he look at her wonderful expression and tell her he had not met her in Egypt thousands of years in the past, but here just a few hours ago? What the hell had happened? Had it been an elaborate illusion her mind had created? How could he watch the most pleasure he had ever seen in her turn to horror as she realized how terribly her mind and magic—the two things she took the most pride in—had betrayed her?

He couldn’t. She was facing the end of her life with such courage and a very real, if acerbic dignity and grace, and instead of facing it with her, he was running away like a craven coward. He felt self-disgust and disappointment, but he could also not make himself turn around and face her. Not yet. Not until he’d had a chance to react to what had happened, and he had cleared his head enough so he could be there for her, to add to the situation, as he had told Rhoswen, and not drag on Carling’s already overstrained resources.

A light shone at the cracks of the kitchen doors. He found Rhoswen sitting at the table, her forehead propped in one hand as she watched Rasputin eat his dinner on the floor near the stove. Rhoswen looked up at his entrance.

“I have to think and I need some air,” Rune told her. “Are you up to staying with Carling until I get back?”

Rhoswen wiped her cheek. “Of course.”

He paused. The Vampyre’s face was streaked from crying. He reined in his impulse to move, to get lost out in the night and take flight. He asked reluctantly, “Are you all right?”

A small spark lightened her dull eyes. She nodded. “I’m sorry about earlier,” she said. “It won’t happen again.”

“As far as I’m concerned, you’re standing head and shoulders above all the rest,” Rune told her. He sent a pointed glance around the empty kitchen.

Rhoswen chuckled a little. “To be fair, some people would be here if they could.”

“Like Duncan?”

She nodded.

He frowned as another thought occurred to him. There were no humans on the island. There was also no refrigeration. He asked, “How are you doing for sustenance?”

“We have plenty of bloodwine. I won’t need fresh blood for a couple of weeks.”

Bloodwine was exactly as the word sounded, blood that had been mixed with wine and bottled. Rune wasn’t exactly sure how it was made. All he knew was that the process involved a low-level alchemy and it required a wine with a high alcoholic content.

Bloodwine did not have the capacity to mature over time as some wines could. At best, it might have a shelf life of two years, and it didn’t have the nutritive quality of fresh blood, but a Vampyre could survive on bloodwine for months at a time, and it could be used to supplement a fresh blood supply during lean times. Invented sometime in the mid-eleventh century, it was credited for how European Vampyres managed to survive the Black Death in the fourteenth century, when up to sixty percent of the human population had been killed.

Rune’s frown deepened. As a succubus, Carling could take sustenance from the emotions from living creatures, but she’d had only Rhoswen and Rasputin on the island for company. He said, “What about Carling?”

Rhoswen’s eyes filled. She said, “I’ve been trying to convince her to go back to San Francisco, but she won’t budge.”

“You mean she was starving herself,” Rune growled. Eager to burn off the weight of the strange crushing sadness, his temper flashed quick and hot.

“We’ve not been alone for more than a few days, and she’s been looking much better since you’ve arrived,” Rhoswen said. Rasputin finished his meal, and Rhoswen went to scoop the dog up. Rasputin tried to run away from her, but she was too fast for him. He gave her a leery look, his paws paddling at the air. She told the dog, “You’re such a little freak.”

Rune nearly turned back to confront Carling, but if he did that, he knew he would also have to confront the speculative look she gave him as he left with such abruptness. Carling had given up by the time he had arrived, but he had already known that, and it was in the past. If she tried to give up again, he would kick her ass and make sure it hurt.

Besides, he wasn’t ready to talk to her. He had too much to think about first, and he simply didn’t know what he could or should say.

“I’m going to take a flight,” he said. “See if I can clear my head. I’ll be back soon.”

“Okay,” Rhoswen said. She and Rasputin watched him leave.

Take a flight. Clear his head.

Yeah, like that had done him any good over the last couple of weeks.

Still, a body had to try.

A
s a Vampyre, Carling didn’t feel the cold like a normal human. That did not mean she couldn’t feel the lack of warmth. The spell of protection that allowed her to walk in the middle of a sunlit day was a great triumph, but at times the victory rang hollow because she would never again know the warm comfort of the sun on her skin.

She craved warmth and light. Every house she owned had fireplaces in most of the rooms. Rune’s presence finally faded from the bedroom, leaving it feeling slightly damp, dark and empty. She crouched at the hearth to lay wood for a fire. She stacked plenty of wood. She wanted a big, cheerful bright blaze.

She lit it, and hugged her knees as she watched the small new flames lick at the wood. With a sigh of relief, she let the protection spell fall away so that she could bask in the building warmth of the fire.

What had caused Rune such inner turmoil? She stood abruptly, impatient with herself. It was useless to speculate. She couldn’t know what disturbed him until he chose to tell her. Waiting for him to return made her feel helpless, and she abhorred feeling helpless.

She moved to her large east-facing windows and opened them. A restless breeze blew into the room and ruffled her hair as she looked out at a gigantic full moon. A witch’s moon. It would appear to decrease in size as it moved away from the horizon, but for now it hung impossibly huge over the ivorytipped black ocean, its color rich champagne. The brightest jewel in the night sky, it hung as though from the pendant of a goddess’s necklace, the spray of stars surrounding it the filigree within which the jewel had been set.

Ever since she had claimed the island, she had sketched the positions of the night stars throughout the seasons. It was an idle, useless hobby. She had never been able to determine if the stars were actually the same ones as seen from Earth. Their positions were too different in relation to each other. There would never be any satellite telescope to capture and compare deep-space imagery with that of Earth’s.

Perhaps they were different stars altogether. Carling tended to think not, but ultimately it didn’t matter. Here, the stars were nothing more than a mystery and ornamentation. No weight of historical belief hung on their configuration. There were no myths attached to any constellations. There was nowhere to navigate to by their positions. No matter where one sailed, one always came back to the island. This little bubble of dimensional reality was nothing more than a seed pearl strung beside the goddess’s pendant moon.

This had been a good place to retreat to when the rest of the world grew to be too much, a good place to find at least a measure of solitude and quiet whenever she could find time to attend to her research and studies.

She supposed it had been as much a home as anywhere else had been, and it had been far better than most. She had made peace with the shy winged creatures that lived at the top of the redwoods. She set wards around the forest and refused to let anyone hunt them. In return, presents were sometimes left on her window ledge, a black iridescent feather, a perfect seashell, or a gold-veined rock, or sometimes a handful of tart red berries on a leaf, and once, there had been a string of strangely carved wooden beads.

The place had not changed, but what peace she had managed to find here had fled, and she missed it. She missed it badly.

All that it had taken to wreck it was the presence of one insouciant Wyr, a strange and ancient creature who, at his heart, was a compassionate man.

She caught movement out of the corner of her eye and her attention shifted.

Rune strode out in the champagne and ivory night. As she watched, he turned toward the cliff and started to run. With each powerful thrust of his long legs, he kicked to an astonishing speed, his vigorous wide-shouldered body moving faster and faster as he approached land’s end. Then he sprang like the great cat he was, landed in a crouch on top of the stone wall at the edge of the cliff, and leaped into the air, his arms spread wide, his athletic body thrown into a perfect diver’s pose.

As he soared into the air, he changed. Enormous wings flared into existence. Moonlight glimmered on his broadmuscled back as his body turned feline. Colossal paws tipped the columns of his four legs. The strong length of his neck and head became the pure sharp arc of an eagle’s, with a wicked, razor-hooked beak that had to be as long as her forearm and a great fierce raptor’s gaze. In the full light of the desert day, he had shone hot with color, copper and gold. In the light of the witch’s moon, his colors were darker and sharper, bronze tipped with the palest silvery edge.

Humans were not meant to bear the weight of immortality. Each Vampyre had to find her own way of coping with great age or eventually go mad. In the end, the best way to survive the endless onslaught of event as it turned into memory was to compartmentalize. Carling had countless closed doors in the corridors in her mind, doors that were shut against all the grinding relentlessness of the past. Those closed doors had, inevitably, become barriers to other things as well.

As Rune took flight, all the many thousands of doors in all the corridors in her mind opened and opened and opened, until she stood in solitude, utterly naked, and felt as she had as a child.

Rune was one of the oldest mysteries of the earth. His existence predated language itself. She watched him soar against the starry backdrop of the champagne moon, and just as the long-ago child Khepri had, she felt her soul leave her body all over again.

W
hen ten minutes became longer than a half hour, she stopped waiting and became busy with other things.

The books screamed as she burned them. The screeching sound they made clawed at the inside of her skull.

She was braced for it. She had made Rhoswen swear to not leave the main house. That had been a fierce argument she hadn’t seen coming, and really, she had grown too tired of how everything had become such a struggle. That was going to have to change.

Then she had spelled a circle of protection in her cottage with salt around the fireplace. She stuffed her ears with wax softened with myrrh and smudged with sweetgrass and white sage, and she wore leather gloves that were also spelled so that no magic, dark or light, could cling to them.