Serpent's Kiss (11 page)

The task was still a noxious, exhausting business, and one that she had put off doing for far too long. It was just as well she did not need to breathe. The fumes from the fire were toxic. She was soot-streaked and cranky by the time the bookburning was over.

Rune had made an excellent point. She had to think with a robustness that would help her fight to live. She must also act as if she were about to die. The black magic books were too dangerous to leave without a guardian, and she didn’t trust anyone else enough to keep them without eventually giving in to the temptation to use them.

If she did nothing, sooner or later their magic would eat through the bindings she had carved into the cabinet. Either that or some damn fool would find a way to get to them. There was always some damn fool who thought he was strong enough to handle using black magic without letting it suck him in. Hubris, cruelty, greed and stupidity. They were the reasons why black magic had survived for so long. Dark Powers dined on those qualities as though they were the finest hors d’oeuvres.

She had built the fire with cedar for more purification, and she stoked it with Power so it burned unnaturally hot and fast. When the last of the books had crumbled to ash, she stripped off her caftan and the gloves and threw them into the fire as well. Then she took the pitchers of water she had set out under the witch’s moon. She poured one pitcher of the moon-filled water over the ashes, so they were purified three times over, by salt, and fire, and water.

Finally done, she took the other two pitchers into the cottage’s bathroom. She washed away the soot from her hair and body with handfuls of soft soap she had made for just such an occasion, with eucalyptus, frankincense and lavender. She emerged from the bathroom wearing a clean cotton caftan and smelling rather pungent, but at least her skin was clear of any hint of lingering dark magic.

After checking the soggy ashes one last time, she left the cottage open so that it could air out and walked back to the main house.

The night had almost passed. Predawn was lightening the sky in the east. In the kitchen, she found Rasputin sound asleep on a cushion and Rhoswen drinking bloodwine. There was no sign of Rune, but then she hadn’t expected any. He would have known better than to interrupt her as she burned the books, but if he had returned, he would have been waiting just outside the cottage.

She left the kitchen door open as well. Cool, fresh air wafted into the house as she sat at the table. A sleepy Rasputin roused and puttered over to lie across her bare feet. She picked him up, and he curled on her lap with a grunt, tucking his narrow nose under his fluffy tail.

Then she smiled at Rhoswen and said, “You have given me more than I have ever had the right to ask, and far more than I ever expected. Thank you for your devotion, and for everything you’ve done. I need you to do one more thing.”

“Of course,” Rhoswen said.

“I need you to take Rasputin and go back to San Francisco. I know you don’t like to take care of him, so I want you to hire someone out of the household account. Make sure they pass all the required security checks, they get along with the rest of the staff, and they are available to stay in the town house. Then you are going to figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life.”

“No,” Rhoswen said. Tears sprang to her eyes.

“You should take your time,” Carling said quietly. “I know what a big lifestyle change this will be for you. I have told Duncan to set up an account with plenty of money. He should have it ready by now.”

“I won’t go.”

“Yes you will,” Carling said. She kept her eyes and voice gentle and yet adamant. “It’s past time, Rhoswen. You have not been happy for quite a while, and I have been selfish and let you stay with me for too long.”

“But I can’t go,” Rhoswen said. “I love you.”

“I love you too,” said Carling, and she was surprised to find that she meant it. “But you have used me as an excuse to avoid living your own life, and I never gave you permission to try to curtail what I do or to control how I choose to do it. And I never promised that you could be with me for everything. I have some things I need to face on my own right now, and so do you.”

“Please, don’t make me leave,” said Rhoswen. “I swear I can change. I’ll look after the damn dog for you. You just said you needed me to hire somebody anyway.”

“No, Rhoswen,” said Carling. “That would not be the right thing for you, and I have been selfish for long enough. I’m sorry.”

“You can’t do this to me,” said Rhoswen. “You can’t just discard me like this, not after everything I’ve done for you.”

“I am not discarding you,” Carling said. She kept her voice even with an effort. Why did this have to be as much of a struggle as everything else had become with Rhoswen? “I am setting you up well and giving you plenty of time to adjust.”

The next half hour was as difficult as she knew it would be, but eventually it had to end because she wouldn’t budge no matter what Rhoswen said or how she pleaded.

Finally Carling’s patience came to an end. Her voice, edged with command, cut through the last of Rhoswen’s protests as she said, “That’s enough.” She sent Rhoswen, along with the dog, off to bed.

The younger Vampyre fled, and Carling sagged in relief as the atmosphere in the kitchen lightened considerably. Then she opened a bottle of cabernet sauvignon and poured herself a glass. She could no longer tolerate blood or bloodwine, and Vampyres remained unaffected by alcohol, but she could at least enjoy the taste. She sipped a glass and listened as the birds outside started to bellow with early-morning exuberance.

Then they fell abruptly silent, and she heard a giant rush of wings. Her spirit leaped at the sound. Moving with deliberation, she set her glass of wine on the table and stood to face the open door.

Moments later, Rune filled the open doorway with his long rangy body and hot sunlike presence. At some point he had shaved and changed into a black T-shirt that molded to his long muscled torso and another pair of faded jeans that were torn out at the knees. His hair was windswept, and he smelled like healthy male and the ocean’s salty air. His lion’s eyes met hers with a shock of connection she felt to her bare toes.

She remarked to no one in particular, “I notice that ten minutes was over quite some time ago.”

From several feet away, she heard his heart kick into a faster rhythm, fueling the fierce energy of his body in hard, powerful strokes. Rune said, “Apparently I needed more than ten minutes.”

She raised an imperious eyebrow. “Have you been sulking about something?”

“No,” he said. “I have been thinking.”

“That took you the rest of the night?”

The sun-bronzed muscles in his biceps bunched as he crossed his arms. He tilted his head as he regarded her. “Thinking,” said Rune in a deliberately even tone of voice, “requires a great deal of thought.”

“Well, that certainly is very Cheshire Cat–like of you. Along with your apparent knack for disappearing at times that are inconvenient for everyone else but yourself.” She tried out a scowl. It seemed to be an appropriate expression for such a morning.

“Are you trying to pick a fight?” he asked. He gave her a sharp smile that showed the edge of his white teeth. “If so, cool.”

“I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet,” she said.

He prowled into the kitchen. “Make up your mind. I like a good fight.”

She began to tap a bare foot, and his gaze dropped to track the movement. His face went still as he focused on the moment with a predatory laziness, like a lounging cat that was too comfortable to pounce but was liable to change its mind at any minute. She said, “You left when we were in the middle of a conversation.”

His smile vanished. “I’m well aware of when I left.”

“It was a conversation that interested me,” she informed him.

His mouth drew into that hard unhappy line from earlier. “It was a conversation that interested me as well, I promise you.”

“I am particularly interested in all the things that were left unsaid,” she said. “Why you were so upset, and why you had to leave so abruptly. You were also upset when I woke up. I had forgotten that until after you left. You were full of aggression, like you wanted to fight someone then too. I would like to know why that was, and who put you in that state.”

“I have things I need to say to you,” Rune said. “They won’t be easy to say and they won’t be easy to hear.”

“All right.” She gave him a curt nod and muttered a line from
Macbeth
. “‘Then ’twere well it were done quickly.’ ”

SEVEN

S
he 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. Rhoswen 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.”