Serpent's Kiss (25 page)

“Okay,” he said. “I’m done.”

She opened her eyes. They stared at each other. His gaze dilated, fixed totally on her. He wiped the edge of her lower lip with the corner of his thumb, and breathed, “ ‘She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies, And all that’s best of dark and bright Meets in her aspect and her eyes.’ Darling, you have always been gorgeous but now you are now officially the shit.”

One corner of her mouth trembled, and lifted. “You really think so?”

“I know so,” he said, and his voice was lower, rougher than it had been before. He pulled her off the counter and turned her to face the mirror, and once again, she stared at herself. She ignored her own features to concentrate on the deft delicacy with which he had enlarged her eyes, emphasized the high cheekbones, and brightened her full mouth. He had not put a single brush stroke wrong. She looked bright and beautiful, and she glowed like a cherished woman.

Cherished.

She leaned back against his chest. He put his arms around her. Their eyes met again in the mirror, that elegant dangerous Rune and the strange new woman, and the impact of the connection was as raw as when Paris and Helen first looked into each others’ eyes and brought a world of gods and men to war.

Or maybe that was just the cyclone that roared into the bathroom to coalesce into the tall figure of a haughty prince.

Carling and Rune both turned as one to look at Khalil. The Djinn held out his hand. On the broad white palm lay a black, half-crushed length. Time had corroded it so badly it was barely recognizable as a knife.

FIFTEEN

R
une stood like stone, his body clenched.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She had watched it all with a cold, expressionless face and an aged heart that had grown so cynical it no longer believed in anything except that things always change. And then on the island, she had demanded he kneel, and he had kissed her and she was dying, and
he still had not remembered her
, and so she struck at him with all the rage and pain she had inside—

Her past may have changed and yet it was all deeper and truer than it had been before. She could even see how she must have lived her life before he had ever come into it, like shadows of reality, another Carling, much like the sketch of the island outline as it lay over the Bay’s horizon. It was so strange, how all the pieces fit seamlessly together.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What if she simply disappeared?

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

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

Gods have mercy.

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

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

“Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then Carling called Julian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He really needed to call Dragos now.

But then Carling’s Power rippled over the scene.

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

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

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

He went much more cautiously than he had the first two times. Because what happened in Vegas didn’t always stay in Vegas, baby.

H
ere Carling was, at another cusp.

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

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