Serpent's Kiss (16 page)

“There is one thing about square one,” he said.

“What’s that?” Somehow she found herself leaning into his grip. She struggled with herself, gave up, and rested her cheek against the back of his hand.

He squeezed her lightly. “If this was a crime and I was investigating, I would be headed back to the beginning and the scene where it happened. Maybe there’s missed evidence. Maybe the information has been put together incorrectly. The crime scene needs to be reprocessed, and we need a second opinion.” He pulled at the knot resting at the nape of her neck, and her hair came loose and slid down her back.

She pushed at his thigh. “Stop that.”

“But I don’t want to.” He gathered up a long silken lock and began to twirl it around his fingers.

She lifted her head and gave him a sour look. “What are you, the emotional equivalent of a five-year-old?”

He gave her a slow lazy smile and rubbed the end of her hair against his well-cut lips. It was such a blatantly sexual thing to do, she felt her knees weaken and knew it was a good thing she was already sitting down.

So flirting with her was okay but kissing her wasn’t?

Confused, angered and more than a little aroused, she glared at him and snatched her hair out of his hands, and he chuckled. She gathered her hair and twisted it into a knot again. She tucked the ends into itself.

“Back to the beginning,” she said. “Do you mean back to Egypt, when I was turned?”

He shrugged, considering her. “Maybe that too. But we’re talking in more general terms, so I think we should consider the origins of Vampyrism itself. It was not always part of human history. Where did it come from? If we can answer that, then we may be able to define it in such a way that we can find a way to counteract what is happening to you.”

She dug the heels of her hands into her eyes. “The beginning is a legend. Vampyrism is also called the serpent’s kiss, did you know that?”

“I’ve heard that before,” he said. “I thought the term was because of the fangs Vampyres get that descend when they’re hungry.”

Listening to his rich, deep voice with her eyes closed evoked more erotic images, of him murmuring velvet words against her bare skin in the dark of a desert night. She stiffened and brought her flattened hands down on the table with a stinging slap, as she forced her mind to stay on topic. “There is that,” she said. “But it has been called the serpent’s kiss for a very long time.”

He frowned. “Was it called that in your youth?”

“Yes. Once, it was believed the bite was a necessary part of a ritual for changing someone. Now we know there’s very little possibility of Vampyre bites themselves causing the change, otherwise they would infect everyone they fed upon. To successfully spread the pathogen you need a blood exchange, and Vampyres don’t need to drink the blood of those they change, only offer their own. The human can either drink the Vampyre’s blood or let it flow into a cut. As long as the Vampyre’s blood flows fresh, and the integrity of the human’s skin is compromised, in most cases that’s all that’s needed to initiate the change. Anything added to that is just . . .” She lifted a hand in a fill-in-the-blank kind of gesture.

“Personal choice,” he said. “Superstition. Religion. Fetish.”

“Sometimes all of the above,” she said. She had already reached the point where she had stopped taking physical nourishment by the time she had turned Rhoswen and Duncan. She frowned as well as she thought back to the time when she had changed.

Those early memories were not pleasant to revisit. As soon as she had learned there was the possibility of
changing
and becoming immortal, it had driven her beyond all reason. She had needed to discover if the stories told around her campfires had any merit to them, whereas she had learned long since then that myth and legend were too often an impenetrable tangle, the stories saying far more about the people who told them than imparting any real truths about the world they lived in.

Rune stayed silent as if he sensed she needed the time to think. She sighed.

Then, because he was waiting, she said, “It started for me when I heard stories. You know the kind of thing, those tall tales told across the flicker of firelight late at night. I guess I heard something one too many times, about a stranger wandering into an encampment full of hunger and a burning gaze that mesmerized, or a caravan found with everyone dead and covered with bite marks. About a rare, strange people who avoided the sun and lived forever. About a dark miracle called the serpent’s kiss that could transform someone into a god. I began to ask the storytellers where they had heard their tale. I moved across the desert, following each thread back as far as I could. I lost the trail of most stories but was able to follow one to its beginning, and of course that was all I needed.”

“What did you find?” Rune asked. He watched her with close fascination.

She gave him a wry smile. “A Vampyre, of course. She was a hermit living in a corner of a huge cavern, with the remains of a settlement nearby. She talked of a serpent goddess who had once lived in the cavern and honored her with the kiss of life that was also death.”

“Serpent goddess,” Rune repeated. His eyes narrowed.

She nodded. “The settlement had been filled with worshippers of this serpent goddess. According to the woman, the settlement had gradually died out when the goddess had left. Either all the humans had been killed or they ran away, and the Vampyres had abandoned the place, all except for this last priestess who had stayed, hoping her goddess would return.”

Rune thought of Rhoswen, existing on the bloodwine. But bloodwine hadn’t been invented that long ago. He asked, “How did she survive by herself?”

Carling shrugged. “As best I could guess, she lived off the blood of rats and other small desert mammals. Animal blood doesn’t have the same nutritive value for us as human blood, so she had to have been malnourished. I took everything she said with a healthy dose of skepticism, because she was quite mad. I might have dismissed her stories completely except for the things my people found in the settlement itself, like the empty sarcophagi in the houses, and the strange carvings on the cavern walls depicting a huge, part-serpent, part-human creature. Then the woman showed me how her fangs descended when she hungered, and how she burned in the sun, and I was hooked. In retrospect I had to be more than a little crazy myself to let her bite me, let alone consent to a blood exchange, but I was still young, and the young are always crazy.”

Rune’s eyebrows rose. “Could you draw what the carvings of the creature looked like?”

“Not from memory, not after so long,” Carling said. She watched his wide shoulders sag. Then she smiled. “So I guess it’s probably a good thing I drew lots of sketches at the time.”

His gaze lit with a fiery expression that spread to his face. “You didn’t. Did you? Where are they now?”

She nodded toward the hall. “In the other room.”

“They’re
here
?” He smiled. “You’re a wicked tease. I like that about you.”

She smiled back. “I’m learning it from an expert.”

His smile widened. “Come on. Don’t just sit there.”

He grabbed her by the hand and yanked her out of her seat before she realized what he meant to do. Laughing, she led the way down the short hall to the part of her library that held the oldest scrolls. There, back in one corner of the room, she went to her knees to look along the row of cubbyholes that held scrolls of papyrus so old they had to be spelled in order to keep them from disintegrating.

Rune watched Carling kneel on the floor and run her fingers along the bottom row of cubbyholes. He found every aspect of her scholarship fascinating, from her scientific research to the neat notations she had made on the labels over each cubbyhole. More than fascinating, he found it endearingly nerdy, refreshingly efficient and sexy as hell.

He rubbed his mouth. Of course he found everything about her as sexy as hell.

She murmured something to herself and pulled out a scroll. “Here it is. We have to be careful. I haven’t bothered to renew the protection spells on these in a long time. It looks like the humidity is starting to get to them.”

He knelt in front of her. “I’m just amazed so many of these have lasted as long as they have. It must be your penchant for keeping your libraries and workshops in quiet, out-of-the-way places.”

“I’m sure that has helped.”

He gently took hold of the corners of the scroll she indicated, watching as she eased it open with slender fingers.

Then he stared down at the faded lines that had been drawn in some unknown ink, at a face and form he had not seen in a very, very long time. It had four short muscular legs with powerful, gripping claws and an elongated, serpentine body. Its tail wound in coils, and its neck rose up from the two legs into a cobra-like hood that framed a distinctly humanlike, female face.

“Hello, Python,” he said softly. “You crazy old whack-job, you.”

TEN

I
t was Carling’s turn to stare at him. “This is someone real?”

He corrected her. “This
was
someone real. Our paths crossed a couple of times. She disappeared a very long time ago. Last I heard, she was rumored to have died. She was one of the between creatures.”

“What do you mean?”

Rune released the ancient sketch, letting it curl back into a scroll. “There are a few creatures who came to form, not on Earth or in Other lands but in a between place, like in a crossover passage,” he explained.

In her crouch, the angle of Carling’s eyes and cheekbones were pronounced, giving her a feline look. The urge to pounce on her pulsed through him like a drug, but he held himself in check, just barely.

She asked, “Like you?”

“Yes. Python was another one.” He stood, the urge still clawing through his system and making him antsy. “She was one of those strange, hard-to-categorize creatures. She wasn’t Wyr. As far as I know, she never developed a human form, so in modern terms I suppose we would have classified her as Demonkind.”

Carling picked up the scroll and stood as well. “I sketched the cavern walls several times and after I transitioned, I tried to find out as much as I could about her. But there were so many Egyptian gods and goddesses, and the truth was often so mangled it was impossible to pinpoint their origins. Many of them were just folktales. I was never convinced she actually existed outside of the priestess’s imagination and in the end I gave up searching for her.” She studied Rune’s face curiously. “What was she like?”

He shook his head. “Being around her was like tripping on a bad dose of LSD. Not that I would know what that was like.” He offered her a bland smile. Carling gave a ghost of a laugh, and he paused to savor the quiet, husky sound before continuing. “She was filled with as many riddles and psychoses as the Sphinx. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me the legend of the Sphinx was modeled after her. She was always getting her tenses . . .”

Rune’s voice trailed away. Carling waited, watching his arrested expression. She prompted, “What?”

He came back from where he had gone with an internal click that brought his sharp, focused gaze in contact with hers. “She was always getting her tenses mixed up,” he said. “The past, the present and the future.”

“Getting her tenses mixed up?” Carling sucked in a breath. Her hand quested out, and he gripped it with his. She whispered, “What if the beginning of Vampyrism really did start with her? She might have suffered from the same kinds of episodes.”

“Don’t get your hopes up too high,” he murmured gently.

“Her brain might have just been on permanent scramble, and anyway, she’s most likely gone now.”

She nodded, although he wasn’t sure how much she was actually paying attention. “We need to try to find out what happened to her.”

“Yes,” he said. She withdrew her hand and he stepped back, allowing her the space to move. She strode back to the cottage’s main room and he followed, watching the graceful sway of Carling’s hips moving in front of him as he explored the strange terrain they found themselves in. “About that second opinion I mentioned. There’s someone I would like to consult on all this, if you don’t mind.”

Carling set the scroll on the table and collected a few things from a nearby shelf, a couple of candlesticks, along with an empty marble mortar and pestle. She opened the scroll again and anchored it flat by using the pieces. Then she settled in her chair to study the ancient drawing in the encroaching shadows of early evening as curiously as if someone else had sketched it.

“I don’t mind, if you think it will help,” she said. “As long as whoever it is can be discreet.”

“She’s a pathologist and a medusa,” Rune said. He settled into his former position, leaning back against the table beside her. “So she has a certain point of view that I think might be useful.”

That caught Carling’s attention. She looked up. “Are you talking about that ME in Chicago that conducted the autopsies on Niniane’s attackers?”

“That’s the one,” Rune said. “Dr. Seremela Telemar.”

“I read her autopsy reports. She was quite competent.” Her mind went back to earlier in the afternoon when she had come out of the fade and she remembered something. She said, “Why were you looking for your pocketknife?”

He leaned back on his hands and kicked a foot. He said, “I lost it.”

She told him, “I distinctly remember you cutting the twine and then putting it back in your pocket.”

“I didn’t lose it then,” he said. “When I was caught in your memory, I gave it to the priest Akil.”

She breathed, “I never knew.”

“You weren’t supposed to. I told him to keep it a secret from everyone.” He regarded her with a gaze that had turned brooding. “I see two possibilities here. The first possibility is that what happened was self-contained and we changed just your reality—which, believe me, is earthshaking enough all on its own.”

She stretched her hands out on the table, on either side of the scroll. “Tell me about it,” she muttered. “Theoretically it could happen. Some spells work on the power of belief, especially illusions. You can kill someone that way, if they believe in something strongly enough.”

He gave her a thoughtful look but refrained from pursuing that train of thought. “So if you believed what happened was real, that could potentially have the power to physically change you, correct?” he asked. She nodded. He said, “Maybe it would have the power to change me too. I cannot shake the conviction that this has all felt very real when I’ve gone through it. It’s important to remember this does happen to both of us. It’s just that, for me, the events are occurring in a more linear fashion.”

“You haven’t experienced anything physically traumatic in one of the episodes either, like I have,” she murmured.

“Then there’s the second possibility,” he said. “And there’s no point in dancing around it. We might have changed the actual past, and the key to finding that out is to see if we’ve influenced something outside of ourselves.”

She searched his face. “You think you might have actually gone back in time?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “The crossover passages and Other lands have already shown us that time slips. Theoretically, time is also supposed to slow down the faster one travels. Time isn’t a completely uniform phenomenon, and we know the universe must self-correct so that paradoxes cannot happen. Maybe we’re experiencing a slippage so far out of sync, I’m experiencing it as a trip back to the past.”

Paradoxes cannot happen. The universe self-corrects. It flexes, like a breathing entity, absorbing and adjusting to anomalies. It had an automatic built-in defense mechanism. It was generally believed that no one could topple history, not even the gods. If the universe could not accommodate an event, it could not happen. Rivers of events would shift only so much to accommodate change.

“You seem remarkably calm about it all,” she said. She wasn’t calm. Maybe she hadn’t been calm since he had showed up on her doorstep. You should be careful who you invite into your home . . .

He gave her a small smile. “I’m just being clinical right now.”

“You’re good at it.” He really was an excellent investigator. She sat back in her seat and looked up at the ceiling. “And at the moment, I’m not.”

He said gently, “I know it’s scary. Thank the gods all I’ve done so far is stop to talk to a child one afternoon, and prevent someone from beating you much worse than he already had. If I had done more, the repercussions could be much worse.”

He didn’t realize the profound effect he had on her.

She closed her eyes. She thought of all the many times she had looked up at the sky, hoping against hope to see the impossible happen again, and see the strange winged lion-god fly back into her life. All of the nights she had looked at the stars, wishing upon wish to see him one more time. Whether those times had happened in history or they had happened all in her mind, they had in fact happened.

And they hadn’t before he had come to the island and met her child-self. If she and Rune were actually changing the past, something else had occurred, something other than what she now remembered, something similar enough that the flow of time had flexed to accommodate the difference.

Had she once looked at the stars in some original past, and wished for something else so passionately? It was almost impossible to imagine wishing for anything as much as she had wished to see him, one more time.

She murmured, “The knife.”

There was a pause. He said, “Yes, the knife. I told Akil to bury it in a distinctive place, somewhere that I knew would survive the test of time.”

“So aside from consulting with Dr. Telemar, we need to find out if the knife is where Akil was supposed to put it.”

“Yes,” Rune said. Something was in his voice. She couldn’t identify it. She brought her head up to look at him. He was studying her, his brows contracted. He said, “Suspend disbelief for a moment. Forget about asking why or how. What happened after I left? I made Akil swear to look after you.”

“He did,” she assured him. Or at least she thought he did. Then she did as Rune asked, and pushed all the consideration of that aside. “He gave me a new name and adopted me, just as you told him to. He gave me the best of everything he had, including the finest education, just like he promised you he would. I think he even grew to love me in his own way. At least he cherished me, if for no other reason than his god had.”

If they were really changing the past, none of that would have happened without Rune’s intervention. One way or another, it seemed she could not escape her early life being shaped by the Wyr. Something else would have occurred, something similar enough that the universe accepted the altered timeline as true. Perhaps what Rune had really given her was a kinder, gentler beginning, at least as much as he was able. Now that her panic had receded she found that she could be grateful for that.

“He gave you a new name? What did he name you?”

She whispered, “What do you think? None of us understood you at the time, none of us. We only knew that a god had touched our lives, found something of favor in me, and pronounced his decree. None of us really comprehended the things that you said.”

Rune frowned at her. He looked so puzzled, that despite all the uncertainty she faced, she had to smile. “You called me ‘darling,’ ” she said. “Remember? And we thought a god had called me something sacred.”

“Carling,” he breathed.

“What else?” she said.

Of all the shifts that might have occurred, this was not one Rune had seen coming, the possibility that the universe might flex and accommodate the intrusion of his presence into her past to such a profound and intimate extent. Before she had been the one to choose her own name, and while he had been saddened to hear of the demise of Khepri, he had understood it. Now he felt like he had stolen something precious from her, albeit unknowingly, and it sickened him. He sat frozen while Carling looked down at the table. She stroked her hands along the surface of the scroll as if to smooth out a tablecloth, smiling a strange smile that was glasslike in its fragility.

Carling had always had a poise that lay along her skin like a second spell of protection and made her look bulletproof, but now she looked more vulnerable than he had ever seen her. She looked tired, at a loss, even sad. The heavy mass of her hair lay against the graceful nape of her neck in an untidy knot. A few individual strands had escaped. They shone with ruby glints in the early-evening light.

His chest ached again. He rubbed his breastbone. When he spoke, his voice had filled with gravel. “No wonder you hate me sometimes.”

Her head tilted toward him but she didn’t look up. She kept smoothing the invisible tablecloth with those long slender fingers. “I don’t hate you,” she said. “I’m afraid of you. I wasn’t afraid of you before, but I am now. Change is hard, Rune.”

She didn’t know, he realized. Of course she didn’t. How could she? The sickened feeling increased to the point of actual nausea. He couldn’t look at her as he forced himself to speak. “You chose your own name. Before. I’m so profoundly sorry I disrupted that.”

He sensed rather than saw her quick, sharp look, the inhuman stillness of her rigid body. Then she moved and said softly, “We thought you called me something sacred, but I chose to take it as my name, Rune. I remember that distinctly. You didn’t take away the fact that I made that choice, or that I chose to keep it for all these years.”

At that he was able to breathe again. He touched the smooth skin on the back of her hand. He found every excuse to touch her. He couldn’t stop himself. Before she looked at him with outrage, bewilderment, and now she seemed to welcome it. Or so he told himself.

They sat in silence, absorbing what had happened. After a few moments, he shook his head and growled, “I still want to fight something.”

She nodded as if to herself. “Now there’s a logical reaction,” she murmured. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

He wanted to fight something and win, so he could show her there was nothing to be afraid of anymore, that everything would be all right. But he was no longer certain of that himself. She was right, monsters were easy. “You know I can’t leave you now, don’t you? No matter how you might demand it of me. I just can’t.”

Her lovely eyes flashed up to his. She sighed. “I don’t want you to leave,” she admitted. “That was my fear talking earlier. Even though what is happening is strange and frightening, it’s got to be better than coming to a standstill and waiting to die. We might actually find something in all of this mess that will save my life.” She turned her hand over and curled her fingers around his. “Because I do want to live, if for no other reason than to solve this mystery and discover what else life can be. Maybe it will become so strange, it will be interesting.”

“Living is always interesting,” he said. “You just got bored.”

He loved watching her laugh. Every time she laughed, she looked surprised. She said, “I guess I did.”

He nodded, looking at the pearl-hued ovals of her fingernails. With a brutal honesty, Rune acknowledged where he was because he couldn’t afford to do anything else.