Serpent's Kiss (14 page)

He closed the knife again and held it out. Akil took it with reverence. “I will, my lord. You can be sure of it.”

Yeah well, Rune thought. We’ll see about that.

C
arling’s gaze focused on the interior of her office.

She was sitting in her desk chair. The cedar cabinet lay dismantled in a bundle against one wall. The slant of the sun had shifted from afternoon to early evening. The sunlight poured through the window in lethal bars of burning gold. She shuddered and looked away.

The room echoed with the emotional aftermath of aggression and violence. Rune prowled the office with the intensity of a caged animal. His face was set, his eyes roiling with the restless flicker of rapid thought. His long athletic strides made the roomy office seem stifling and too small. He shifted the heavy bundle of cedar to check underneath it. Then he moved to search alongside the floors beside the filing cabinets, and the space between the desk and the wall.

She cleared her throat and asked in a rusty-sounding voice, “What on earth are you doing?”

He swung around, his gaze flaring. He sprang to crouch at her feet. “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” she told him. It was a ridiculous thing to say, given everything that was going on. “You looked like you lost something.”

“I was looking for my pocketknife. I had it in this room and now I can’t find it anywhere.” He searched her face with a peculiar intensity that felt like a physical touch. “Do you remember seeing it anywhere?”

She scowled. “Of course I remember seeing it. I watched you cut the twine with it. Why do you ask?”

“It’s been an eventful afternoon,” he said.

“That doesn’t really answer my question,” she said.

“I don’t have any answers,” he told her. He gripped the arms of her chair. “I’m busy grappling with too many questions of my own. Do you remember going into a fade?”

“That’s right,” she murmured. “Of course I did.” She fell silent as she studied him. She thought of the memory she had gone back to when she had slipped into the fade, back and back, to one of the most painful, traumatic and pivotal times of her early life. She had been kept pristine, her virginity intact, saved and trained until she could be given as a gift at a strategic time to an important personage.

Then an immense, dark and terrifying god had touched down to earth to regard white-walled Ineb Hedj and its people with a passing curiosity. In the end, he had been indifferent to the city, its devout priests and religion, and uninterested in her as a gift. He had left, and she had been punished for it.

Then, with a crystalline clarity that the many intervening centuries had not dimmed, she remembered the whistle of the whip as it snaked through the air and plunged her into the most savage, transcendent pain, turning her world raw with the screams she did not have the breath to cry out.

And into that raw place an enormous golden monster had erupted, roaring with an agony as if he had been the one who was whipped, bringing with him both death and salvation.

The world rattled. Carling’s mouth opened. She tried to form words.

“God, you’re shaking like a leaf,” Rune muttered. “Talk to me.”

“I’m trying,” she gritted. She grabbed his strong, tanned wrists. He seemed to be the only thing that wasn’t shaking, that held steady. Their eyes met. “I s-see you went back a second time.”

He turned his hands to grip her wrists as well. “Yes. Can you tell me what happened to you? There was another Wyr involved, or at least there had been before I got there. Do you know who it was?”

The other Wyr had been Tiago, of all people, who had never remembered what had happened, because to him the whole incident had been unimportant. He had never known what the consequences of his indifference and departure had meant for her.

She shook her head. She had been angry and resentful at Tiago for so long, but for once, she meant what she said as she told Rune, “It doesn’t matter. It was just a curious Wyr who looked around briefly and then left again. The priests wanted him to stay, of course, which was why they gave me to him, but he wasn’t interested.”

Something unpredictable and razor-edged prowled in his lion’s eyes. “So he didn’t come back.”

“No,” she said. “At least not while I lived in the city.”

“Okay.” Rune seemed to relax only slightly. “Does . . . what happened . . . feel as real to you as the first time when I appeared?”

The world started to rattle again. She nodded.

His hands tightened on her wrists as he whispered, “It does to me too. Carling, I need to have a look at your back.”

She stared at him. “Why?”

The handsome, clean lines of his face were rigid with an emotion that rioted through the heavy afternoon air. “I need to look at your scars. It’s important.”

With a bewildered shrug, she leaned forward and bent her head. She held the caftan in place over her breasts and allowed him to ease the loose cotton material away from her neck. With a featherlight touch he pulled her hair to one side. He handled her as gently as if she were spun glass, and his big body was so near as he knelt in front of her, that she let herself lean a few inches farther to rest her cheek on his wide shoulder. He caressed the nape of her neck as he slid the caftan down her back.

She felt the breath leave him hard. His fingers were unsteady against her bare skin. She lifted her head to stare at the clean, spare lines of his profile. She was so close she could see the fine lines deepen at the corners of his eyes, and sense the shift in his throat muscles as he swallowed hard.

“What is it?” she asked.

She craned her neck to look over her shoulder. She could just see the ends of the long, white sinuous scars that crossed her spine like two snakes winding around a staff. She had lived with those scars for thousands of years. She knew them like she knew the back of her hand. She would never forget the night they happened, or how Rune had broken into the room to stop a third one from falling on her . . .

She stiffened. No. That hadn’t happened thousands of years ago. That had happened just minutes ago, this afternoon. What had happened before Rune took action? What had really occurred to her, four and a half thousand years ago?

“Something else happened before you showed up,” she whispered. “I don’t remember. I don’t remember what originally happened to me.”

Before Rune had burst into the room, the priest had stood over her in a rage. He had shaken out the whip. He would have struck her again, except that Rune had killed him with one savage blow.

Rune looked at her, his eyes darkened. He said in a low voice, “All I know is that a couple of weeks ago you went swimming in the Adriyel River and when you walked out, you didn’t have just two whip marks on your back. Your whole body was striped with scars.”

She remembered it well. She walked nude out of the water while Niniane and Rune waited on the riverbank. Rune had stared at her with such a fire in his eyes they had glittered like yellow diamonds. His handsome face had become a carved mask, and every muscle in his body had stood in etched relief against the long masculine frame of his bones, as if he had been created by a classical sculptor.

She said, “You’re
changing
me?”

“I think what we are doing together must somehow be changing something,” he said. “Because I swear to all the gods, Carling, your back was not like this before.”

She stared at him in horror.

She had compared him to a sirocco. She’d had no idea how accurate that was. A sirocco was a hurricane that came out of the Sahara. In Egypt the hot desert wind was called
Khamsin
. It could reach speeds of up to eighty-five miles an hour. She remembered the howl of the wind at night. It was an immense, unearthly, inhuman sound. It stripped flesh off of bones, literally reshaped the land.

First she thought she would lose her life. Then she became afraid she would lose everything else. Her Power, her sanity. Her dignity.

She had not known there could be anything more to lose, that bits of her past might slough away like flesh peeling from the bones. The change was vaster and more Powerful than anything she had ever experienced, and she had never felt the difference.

She had not known she might be in danger of losing her self.

NINE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was such a
stubborn ass
.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A mysterious, magical riddle.

With that realization, she had an epiphany.

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

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

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

“Of course I am,” said the gryphon.

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

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

“Sometimes,” Rune said. “Not often.”

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

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

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

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

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

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