Serpent's Kiss (27 page)

This is crazy, he thought. It makes no sense. The time slippage is so far out of sync it is working in loops, like a serpent’s coils. She and I are drawing each other into existence. If we don’t find our way out of this, we may not survive.

He had no cunning for this, no grand plan or intelligent rationale, no established ethical protocol for time travel like out of a sci-fi movie. This was just raw, unvarnished truth, and deadly uncharted territory for how it might carve through history.

And because he had gone much too far to stop now, he gave her everything he had.

He put his lips to her forehead and said against her skin, “I will remember you, very soon after the Adriyel River. And when I do, you will come to mean everything to me. Who I am at this moment, this man who is standing in front of you—I would wait forever for you.
But you must live to get there or none of this will happen.
”

She reached to touch the place where his lips met her skin, murmuring, “It always happens by the river.”

He closed his eyes and pressed his lips to those gentle, questing fingers. “What does?”

“The beginning of a new life.” She pulled back to look at him, and the expression in hers was grave. “If there is a way for me to live to get there, I will find it.”

“There is,” he said, pushing all of his conviction into the two words. “You found it once. You got there already. But now I have come back and touched your life again, and every time I do that something else changes, and I am afraid—” His throat closed and for a moment he could not continue. “I am so goddamn afraid that by coming tonight I might have changed something else you do or decide, and you won’t be there in my life when I go back. And I have to go back, because I don’t belong here.”

Her trembling stopped. She stood steady and straight under his hands, her Power a slim, newly minted, adamant flame. She repeated, “If there is a way for me to live to get there, I will find it.”

He took a deep breath as he searched her gaze, and the tiger looked back at him, unafraid. Another realization jolted through him, and even as he spoke he knew that the words he said were true.

“This is not all on you. Everything that has happened to me, I have remembered,” said the gryphon. “I have held my place and my identity as time and space have flowed around me. The past has shifted twice for us already, and I remember all of it. If you fail somehow—if you die—I swear I will look for a way to walk through time again to find you. No matter where you are. No matter when. I swear it.”

He should have known. The joy that filled her face had a keen ferocity that would propel her forward through the centuries. Gods, what passion this mortal had. It filled the chalice of her heart to overflowing.

He thought of his Carling, sitting unprotected in the hotel suite. Time was flowing for her as well. “I have to leave,” he said abruptly. “You must take shelter. Go inside. Do not sleep. Do everything you can to protect yourself. This night, for you, is a dangerous one.”

She looked around in sharp, quick assessment and gave him a firm nod. “I will take care. It will be all right.”

This young woman wasn’t his Carling. If Rune and this young woman had the luxury of unlimited time together, realistically he wasn’t even sure if they could find anything much to talk about for any length of time. But he still could not resist cupping her soft cheek. “I will treasure the memory of meeting you like this,” he said, and he kissed her.

Carling stood frozen and focused everything she had on the touch of his mouth on hers, so fierce yet tender, and filled with the blaze of his Power. It was the first time anyone had ever touched her like that. She knew she would never allow that elderly petty king to touch her on the lips. Then Rune let her go and scooped his weapons off the ground, and she watched as he turned on his heel away from her and faded from sight.

He just faded away, like a dream. Or perhaps a spell-induced vision.

She fingered her lips. They still tingled even though he was gone.

You must live or I will die, he had said. And that could not happen, not to the one who held her soul.

I will treasure the memory of meeting you too, she thought.

And wait forever for you.

C
arling opened her eyes and gazed out the open French doors in the hotel bedroom at the rich heavy gold of the westering sun. Morning might be bright and beautiful, but it did not hold the same poignancy as the evening, that had gathered all the day’s memories and carried them into night.

She sat on the bed with her legs curled up, her back braced against the headboard. Rune stood at the open doors, facing outside. He leaned a broad shoulder against the frame, his arms crossed. His quiet, strong profile had an uncertain vulnerability she had never seen in him before. He looked proud, self-contained and braced for bad news, a god in black who claimed he was not a god, great and golden-haired and so intensely formed, his life force boiled the air around him.

He was indeed best seen in the hot bright light of day, where he shone with all the colors of creation’s fire. Copper, yellow, gold, bronze, and the warm fierce amber of those playful, ageless lion’s eyes.

Yes, that was exactly how she remembered it, both so long ago and again just recently on the island. Her soul, winging out of her body, and flying irrevocably toward him.

Some instinct told her he knew very well she had come out of the fade. Why wouldn’t he turn to look at her?

She stared out the window again, and thought. The silence of ages lay heavily between them.

I will remember you, very soon after the Adriyel River. And when I do, you will come to mean everything to me. Who I am at this moment, this man who is standing in front of you—I would wait forever for you.

While she was not familiar with the details, she knew that when Wyr mated, they did so only once. Dragos, Lord of the Wyr, had just found his mate. Tiago, Wyr warlord and thunderbird, had mated with the Dark Fae Queen Niniane. Was that what Rune had meant? Was she that lucky—and he that damned?

She straightened her spine and took a breath, and began to speak. “You did not change me this time.”

His head jerked sharply to the side, as if she had struck him, but other than that he did not move and he still would not look at her.

“I cast a spell one night and had a vision of you. That was my experience of it, anyway,” she said. “I remember you warning me to take care. After that I studied defensive spells, and I put up wards when I slept. I was very careful.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Rune asked coldly.

She looked down at the fun, flirtatious outfit she wore and gently smoothed the soft material of her top. She kept her voice calm as she told him, “I’m working through what happened, and what might have been different. I remember agreeing that you needed to go back to warn me and I remember taking responsibility for that. I think we got lucky. I think we changed what we needed to change, and everything else stayed stable.”

Everything she told him was the truth. She would not lie to him. His truthsense would be highly developed, and in case, he deserved better than that. But even as her words told him a kind of truth, her soul whispered a deeper, more heartfelt one.

After the first few nights, when the blaze of excitement had died down, doubt had crept in. She couldn’t believe he had meant what she thought he had said. She had to have misheard him, or misunderstood. The years passed and gradually turned to centuries, and as she received no other message or sign, she settled into a more mature and balanced “wait and see” attitude. She would not put the entirety of her life on hold for a single spell-induced vision, no matter how vivid or compelling it might have been.

But she had never forgotten how his kiss had burned. She had never let her petty king of a husband kiss her on the mouth, ever, nor had she allowed that liberty to any of her other lovers. Not that she had taken all that many of them, considering the years of her existence. She had stopped after a few hopeful attempts, because they either fell asleep after sex or they ran away, and it was all so relentlessly banal she would rather have walked unshielded into the sun than have to endure one more meaningless, insipid love affair.

Now as she looked at his stiff half-averted form, she told him silently, I fell in love with you earlier today in the hotel lobby. And everything you once said has come to pass. But so much time has gone by. Too much time. So many tomorrows, and tomorrows, and tomorrows, that the pharaohs really do no longer exist, and all the gods have changed and everything I once knew has turned to rubble or has completely disappeared. We have come together too late.

You must live or I will die.

Now I am the one who is dying, and you cannot mate with me and hope to live. What a Gordian knot we have tied ourselves into.

And as Alexander the Great had known, the only solution to untangling an unsolvable knot is to slice through it.

She looked down at the bedspread.

“So let’s review,” she said. Her voice was under perfect control. “Because of your help, in just a few days I have learned a tremendous amount about my condition, in fact more than I have learned in the last two centuries. And now that Dr. Telemar will soon be here to consult, I am hopeful I will learn even more. I owe you a big debt of gratitude.”

He had turned to look at her. She could sense it, that tall powerful black-clad figure standing just barely at the edge of her sight. Underneath the cover of one hand, she curled the other into a tight fist.

“But we both know we can’t risk any more of these strange collisions in time,” Carling continued. “They are too dangerous for either one of us, and God only knows what we might have changed in the rest of the world.” And she knew she could not trust her younger self around him, not for a single moment. If that younger Carling saw him again, she would never be able to contain her joy and she would not know of any reason why she should. “Rune, it’s time for you to back out of this now. You’ve helped me enough. You’ve certainly done far more than anybody could have expected. I want you to go back to your life now.”

The beast that had taken over Rune studied his prey with a critical eye.

Her facade could not have been better. She had no pulse for him to gauge, and she would not show him the look in her eyes. Her beautiful body was arranged just so against the pillows on the bed, like a posed still life, all artifice and composition. She was cool, controlled, rational perfection. She appeared to be a completely different creature than the fierce, eager young tiger he had left just moments ago, and why wouldn’t she be a different creature, when that moment was, for her, thousands of years ago?

But her facade was too perfect, and that was her fatal flaw. She should have been reacting more to what had happened between them this afternoon, all that magnificent crazed passion, their laughter and the moments of real intimacy. The memory of what had happened in the fade should have unfolded naturally, as it had the first couple of times. Instead that was the first thing she offered him, only to coolly negate it.

Fury swept a firestorm through him. He sprang across the room, knocked her flat and slammed down on top of her. Shock bolted across her expression as he gripped her lovely throat with long, claw-tipped fingers.

The beast hissed in her face, “
You’re such a fucking liar
.”

SIXTEEN

C
arling stared at the monster crouching over her. His face blurred from the tears that had filled her eyes that she refused to shed. His feral gaze tracked every telltale flicker on her face. He knelt over her prone body, his knees on either side of her hips. His bones were all wrong, in his face, across his wide chest, in the sinewy muscular arms. He looked more lion than eagle in this half shift. She could feel his claws against her jugular as he pinned her by the throat. He had driven the claws of his other hand deep into the mattress beside her head.

The monster’s powerful body vibrated with violent tension, but while he held her in an unbreakable grip, the heel of his hand pressing down on her collarbone, he hadn’t caused her so much as a paper cut.

When Tiago had been like this, he had gutted himself for his mate.

She had done this to Rune. They had done it to each other.

She stroked his strange, beautiful half-lion face, and he snapped at her. His strong white fangs closed around her hand. He could have crushed every bone in her hand in his powerful jaws, but he held her so gently, those sharp fangs would not have cracked an eggshell.

“You know very well I’m not lying to you,” she said to him. She had no idea how she kept her voice calm. “We have been on a weird, wonderful journey together. And I am privileged that you chose to stay and experience it with me, but you must leave, Rune.”

Do not presume to tell me what I can and cannot do
, the gryphon whispered in her head.
I have not given you the right to send me away.

I have not given you the right to stay
, Carling said, very softly.

An infuriated growl ripped out of him. With a snap of his head, he gave her hand a quick hard shake in reprimand.
Tough shit. I’m not your servant that you can dismiss when things don’t suit you. I’m your lover, Carling.

“And I’m still dying,” she said. “I promise you that I will fight and look for a cure until the very last moment I can, but the fact remains, I still might die.”

His gaze was fiercely determined.
I get to share this part of the journey with you too. I get to fight for your life too. I get to tell you what I think about it, and how I feel. And if it ever comes to that, I get to hold you at the end and share every last precious moment with you.

To hold on to him and never let go, no matter what. The thought was so beautiful and terrible, and it caused such a huge swell of feeling in her, she closed her eyes. Two tears slipped away. Once the dam in her emotions cracked, there was no stopping the leaks. Cry me a river.

It always happened, by the river.

She felt the rigid tension in his body soften. His jaws loosened and he let go of her hand, and the pressure at her throat eased. He stroked her temples, wiping the tears away gently with the backs of his fingers.

She twisted at the hips, slipped a knee between them, and rolled to heave him off her. He landed with a crash on the floor against the closet door. She leaped off the bed and strode for the living room. “We fucked,” she said between her teeth. “That’s all. It was a lot of fun and a nice diversion, but you need to get over it and move on.”

Sure he should, just like she had moved on so easily every time she had encountered him. All she had gotten was one kiss, one promise from him back in the distant mist of her youth, and she had never let anyone kiss her again. Not for thousands of years, past all logic or reason. Even when she had moved on in every other aspect of her life, she had held on to that one thing, because he had once looked into her eyes and said to her,
I am waiting for you with everything I am
. Now, no matter how she wanted to, she should not let him stay.

A freight train hit her in the back. It sent her into the wall in front of her with such force she cried out. Before she could react in any other way, Rune had yanked her hands over her head, holding her by the wrists as he kicked her feet apart. He pinned her body against the wall with the hard length of his own, his feet braced between hers, and just like that he had her caged, using only leverage, and his superior speed and strength. His pulse beat pounded against her senses like a sledgehammer, and the blaze of his heat surrounded her.

Shocked arousal roared through her. It pooled between her legs in a liquid gush. She looked up at his hands shackling her wrists and fought as hard as she could to get free. No matter how she struggled, she couldn’t budge him.

As long as her mouth wasn’t covered, she was not helpless. She could whisper a spell that would at least freeze him temporarily, if she didn’t choose something more offensive that might cause actual injury.

And he knew it. He remembered how angry she had been when he had pinned her down, and so he caged her but he left her a way out. The realization that he took such care with her, even in his frenzy, even after she had been so violent with him, pounded in her head. She opened her hands wide to push at the air, as she strained to find the strength of will to whisper the spell that would stop him for those few critical moments while she slipped away. The words were gone, her mind a blank. The sirocco had taken them away.

He was breathing heavily. The thick heavy length of his erection pressed against her ass. As she struggled, he emitted a harsh groan and shoved his hips against her, and another wave of intense arousal sideswiped her. Normally so cool, she felt feverish and started to shake.

He put his lips to her neck and nuzzled the sensitive skin at the nape of her neck, and the strength left her knees. If he hadn’t been holding her in place, she would have fallen.

“Here’s the thing,” he whispered. “I love you. I didn’t want to. I fought it. I put up barriers, and they all came crashing down one by one. It wasn’t just one thing. It was everything you did, both here in the present and back in the past. It’s everything you were, and everything you are. So I just fucking love you, and you are going to have to fucking deal with it. You got that?”

She started to shake her head. She realized she was breathing hard too, great gasps of air as if she had been running hard for a long time.

Rune sank his teeth into the back of her neck, pinning her even further so that a raw incoherent sound spilled out of her. Her mouth tingled again. She bared her teeth. She needed to bite him back and get drunk on his rich, ruby liqueur, but her goddamn fangs wouldn’t descend.

He said in her head,
And here’s the other thing
.
I know you love me too. You had a good hand but you played it all wrong, so you might as well admit it.

“I don’t have to admit anything to you,” she said.

“Yes, you do,” he growled. She had given him all the clues and taught him all her tells, he just had to use them, because she really never did go gently anywhere, and if he had to claw and tear his way into her life, why then, so be it. She needed both his dominance and his tenderness; he knew it, like he knew his own soul. It was just another way in which they fit. “If you don’t owe me anything else, you owe me the real goddamn truth.”

She cried out again as he yanked her wrists together and held them locked in one hand. She twisted her wrists, trying to break his hold, but his long fingers were like iron. Hunger was not the ache she remembered. Or maybe she had never felt this before, this searing, driving force. She didn’t recognize her own voice. She didn’t recognize anything about herself. He put his hands on her, and she turned into a crazy person.

With his freed hand, he stroked down her body. He massaged her breast and pinched her nipple hard enough to sting. Then he cupped her crotch in a strong grip, where the need in her spiked the worst, and he yanked her back against him as he pushed his hips harder against her ass. He kissed the graceful bone just behind her ear and whispered, “What we did was more than just fucking. Say it.”

A sob came out of her, all the more shocking because she had no control over it. “Yes.”

He found the fastening of her jeans and undid them. His voice was as rough as his hand was gentle. “You love me.
Say it
.”

She leaned her hot cheek against the wall. “Yes.”

He held still, crushing her back against him, his face pressed into her neck. Then he let her go. She almost slid to the floor but then she managed to lock her knees into place. Leaning against the wall for support, she turned to look at Rune in confusion.

He leaned his forearms on the wall, on either side of her head, his hard, intent face angled down to her. “I know what you’re doing,” he said. “You’re still preparing to die.”

She put her hands on his chest. Half-angry, half-despairing, she said, “You can’t mate with me and hope to live. I’m trying to save your life!”

The irony of the moment was not lost on him. She was trying to drive him away to save his life, just as he had tried to save Tiago from mating with Niniane. Tiago had said to him,
One of these days
,
you’re going to find your mate
.
And maybe she’ll be Wyr but maybe she won’t. Then you will understand just what you almost did to me.

I get it now, T-bird. I understand.

An eternity of life didn’t matter, if he lost her and it became an eternity of desolation. He would trade all of that time away for one day with his mate.

His gaze burned. “I don’t want you to save my life. I want you to give me yours.”

“Rune—”

He interrupted her. “Do you remember what I told you? For you that happened so long ago I’ll say it again. If you fail somehow—if you die—I will search for a way to walk through time to find you. No matter where you are. No matter when. I swear it.” He had tried so hard already, but as her last episode faded he lost the connection and the past melted away again.

She closed her eyes. Those words he spoke. She remembered every one. She had held on to them for so long, they had grafted to her bones, until they had spun on an enchanted spindle into a fairy tale of devotion that happened rarely to other people in other lives. To hear him say them again after so long . . . She shuddered. “You can’t promise that.”

“Shut up,” he said. “I can promise any goddamn thing I want.” His voice was quiet, even. He watched her put a shaking hand to her forehead, but he was not tempted to relent in the slightest. His long, lean muscled torso moved as he took a deep breath. He fingered the short, untidy hair at her temple and stroked her devastated face. His expression was clear, determined. He looked as steady as a rock, and just as moveable. He said softly, “I will never leave you. I will never let you go. I will not let you fall, or fail. I will always come for you if you leave, always find you if you’re lost. Always.”

She looked more vulnerable than he had ever seen her as her beautiful mouth shaped the word in silence.
Always?

It was as if she were too afraid to say the word aloud. Everything inside of him wanted to pounce on her, to cover her vulnerability with his strength, to take her until she screamed with pleasure again. His instincts strained against his self-control.

But she was also a predator. If he did not engage those instincts in her too, no matter how he tried to hold on, eventually he would lose her. And he could not let that happen. He would not.

He whispered back, “Always. But you have to want it too. You have to own up to it and admit you want me.”

Own up to it. Like she had taken ownership of her own life. Own it, take it, claim it.

He backed away from her until he reached the bed. His hands went to the buttons of his shirt as he toed off his shoes. His gaze held hers as he stripped off his shirt and tossed it into a corner, and that was when he began to lie. “You have to take me,” he said, “or I really will give up and go find someone else.”

“You wouldn’t,” she breathed. Her gaze was riveted to the bare expanse of his broad, tanned chest. The unsteadiness left her as her body went tense. Her beautiful lips parted. She did not look hungry. She looked starving.

It was the most beautiful sight he’d ever seen. He wanted to growl in triumph. It was
his
, that expression was for him. But it wasn’t enough. He hadn’t pushed her hard enough.

Come on, baby. Get cranky.

“I would,” the gryphon lied to his witch. His hands went to the fastening of his trousers. Then they came open. He wore nothing underneath. He pushed them down over his lean hips, the long heavy muscles of his thighs flexing as he kicked them off. “There would be nothing to stop me.” He cocked his head. “Maybe after all these years, I’ve discovered I have a type. Maybe I’ll find another dark-haired, beautiful woman. One who doesn’t argue about wearing pretty fashionable clothes or wearing makeup.”

Carling hissed, and her eyes flashed that pretty, scary red.

He put his hands on his hips and stood there nude, that insouciant alpha male, and he dared to taunt her while the sight of his body drove all the reason out of her head. Her hands fisted as she stared at him. He was built for both speed and power, wide in the shoulders and long, without an ounce of extra flesh anywhere. Washboard abs rippled down to his large erection. His large, tight testicles had drawn up underneath his penis. He was beautifully formed everywhere, with a hard warrior’s body that was poetry in motion.

Rune gave her his sleepiest, most disingenuous smile. “Maybe I’ll find someone who bites.”

A scorching image flashed in her mind, of him caressing an unknown woman who took his vein. She bared her teeth and launched at him.

He fell back on the bed as he caught her, and then she was on top of him, hands planted on the bed on either side of his head as she straddled him. His hard, wild face was flushed with arousal, and lit with a bladelike smile. Carling snarled, “Do you think I don’t know you’re playing me?”

“My give-a-shit button’s broken, baby,” Rune said. He cupped the back of her head and coaxed her down toward him. “Kiss me,” he whispered. “Take me. Don’t let me go—or I’ll go.” Then he said telepathically the same words he had said to her, so very long ago.
But this man who is in front of you—I am waiting for you with everything I am.