Serpent's Kiss (35 page)

He ate at her as though he could never get enough, with a patience coupled with ferocity that caused her to pull up her knees as the pleasure stabbed deep. Her climax started gently and built in intensity as he licked at her with a steadily increasing rhythm. She stroked his hair as she shook with it. Then she coaxed, “Come here.”

“No,” he said. He bit her again, hard on the sensitive skin of her inner thigh, while he rolled his thumb over her clitoris.

That one would leave a bruise. The second climax punched through her, and there was nothing gentle or sane about it. She cried out and her torso arched off the bed. He pleasured her, yet she felt so empty, and she was starving again. “Come here,” she growled.

“No, I don’t think so,” he said. He parted her flesh and suckled strongly at her.

The sensation was so piercing, and yet she was so damn empty, and
starving
, that she came up on her elbows with a hiss, and for the first time in two hundred years her fangs descended.

She rolled over to her hands and knees and prowled toward him across the bed.
“I said come here.”

Rune’s face was hard angled with desire, his lion’s eyes glittering like polished stones. He stared at her mouth, frozen. Then he purred, “You going to come take me now for real, baby? Promise?”

Insouciant alpha. She sprang at him and struck, sinking her teeth into his neck. They both groaned as the wild liqueur taste of him exploded on her tongue. She whined at the back of her throat and started to shake.

He held her with a hand at the back of her head and pushed her mouth harder against him, impaling himself on her fangs while he hauled her onto his lap. She went willingly, spreading her legs to sit astride him. He positioned his erection at her slick opening and pulled her down. Then he was filling her aching emptiness with the hard warmth of his cock as his hot blood filled her mouth. He clenched her to him and rocked in her as she drew on him and took in his nourishment.

She grew drunk again with pleasure. She was always so surprised at how generous it was, that pleasure. He filled her to the brim with laughter and constancy, and such a rare bountiful passion, her soul unfurled and flourished.

She realized he was whispering in her ear. “I will always come for you, always hold on to you. I swear it.”

The mouthful of blood she had taken was more than enough. The vitality of it already sang in her veins. She pulled out her fangs and whispered back, “I will never let go of you, never fail you. I will hold steady, no matter what.”

He began to shudder with his own climax, and he gave himself over completely to his mate again.

She held on to him tightly, with all of her heart. She had made a promise to do so.

E
arly the next evening, Rufio and Rasputin arrived. “Let’s try to get through this without anybody growling, okay?” Carling murmured to Rune as they watched the rental car pull into the driveway.

“Don’t look at me. I’ll be purring the whole time,” said Rune. He blinked at her with his best innocent look.

She tried to scowl at him. She didn’t have it in her. They had spent the afternoon dozing. She had drifted in and out of dreams with her head resting on his shoulder. It could not have been more precious or perfect.

Rune opened the front door as Rufio climbed out of the car, followed by the little brown and sable dog on a leash. Rasputin caught sight of Carling as she stood in the shadow of the doorway. He barked, high pitched with excitement, and strained at the leash until Rufio laughed and let him go.

The dog hurtled up the path with a manic grin. He danced and twirled and jumped, and when Carling bent to pick him up, he leaped into her arms and tried frantically to lick her face. Rune greeted Rufio, asked him how their flight had been, and showed him to his room so he could settle in.

When Rune returned, he found Carling and Rasputin in the kitchen. Rasputin was exploring the corners of the kitchen floor, his plumed tail wagging. Carling had pulled out a package of raw chicken breast tenders, muttering to herself as she sprayed some PAM in a skillet. She glanced at Rune. “I’m going to cook Rasputin some chicken for supper. Would you like for me to cook some for you as well?”

Rune pinched the bridge of his nose. He said, “Ah, I have to come clean about something.”

“What’s that?” Carling asked. She turned on a burner, squinted at the flames, and adjusted the temperature down.

“I don’t want to hurt your feelings,” said Rune. “To me, you are perfection personified in so many ways. But darling, you are a terrible cook.”

Carling narrowed her eyes on him. He gave her an apologetic shrug and a smile. He watched her gaze fall and her expression change. She covered her mouth with one hand.

He looked down too. The dog had come over to him and lifted its leg. A tiny stream of urine sprinkled Rune’s shoe.

Rune angled out his jaw. Both he and Carling squatted down to regard the Pomeranian thoughtfully. Rasputin sat and scratched energetically behind one ear.

“What do you suppose he’s feeling right now?” Rune asked.

“I don’t have any idea,” said Carling. Her face creased with laughter, her long almond-shaped eyes dancing. She looked completely alive, completely happy. “But from now on, you’re taking him out.”

Click here for more books by this author

Turn the page for a special preview of the next Novel of the Elder Races by Thea Harrison

ORACLE’S MOON

Coming March 2012 from

Berkley Sensation!

G
race dreamed she was running along a dark paved road. The night was full of shadows, the new moon hidden from the naked eye. The full moon at its zenith was a witch’s moon, a time for incantations and Power. The new moon, at its darkest, was the Oracle’s moon, a time when the veil between all the worlds and all the times thinned. A brilliant spray of white stars like Djinn’s eyes pierced the dark purple sky, and the wind whispered secrets to the shadowed, swaying trees.

Her running shoes slapped the ground rhythmically, striking a pagan tempo for the song in her coursing blood. She loved how her body felt, sleek and strong as it moved smoothly along the paved road. Perfect. She felt perfect.

A gigantic black panther ran along beside her. His broad shoulder was as high as hers, and his long powerful body ate the distance with effortless fluid grace. As soon as she became aware of him, the panther turned his head and looked at her with strange diamond eyes that were as piercing and shining as the stars. Shocked, she jerked and stumbled—

And she slipped into another dream. This time she climbed the side of a steep rocky bluff. She had to use her hands sometimes, and the burn in her muscles felt good. The sun was high in the sky and beat down on her head, and she was so hot she dripped with sweat.

An immense black dog climbed at her side. He was easily twice the size of a mastiff, all muscle and power, yet he climbed up the side of the bluff with impossible grace. As she stared, he turned to look at her with radiant diamond eyes that startled her so badly, she lost her grip on the rocks.

Gravity yanked her. She fell, and the ground hurtled toward her.

She woke with a start, her heart hammering. Her T-shirt and flannel pants were clammy with sweat. The sun had shifted, and she was alone in the living room. The television was off. There were so many things that were not right with the scene, but before she had a chance to panic, she heard Max and Chloe giggling in their bedroom.

“I want you to be a doggie now,” Chloe said.

A male voice said, “But at the moment I am a cat.”

Grace knew that voice. She had only heard it for a brief time, but she would never forget it. It was the voice of the Bane of Her Existence, deep and clear with a kind of purity that somehow hurt the heart, and it held the Power of a cyclone.

And it belonged to a creature that was visiting with her kids.

She was off the couch and moving down the hall before she fully knew what she was doing.

Chloe said, “I want to ride the doggie!”

“I believe what you want would then be called a horse,” said the Bane.

Max shrieked, a happy sound that escalated so high it could shatter glass.

Sharp pain shot up her leg. Just as it threatened to give out from underneath her, she reached the children’s bedroom and grabbed on to the doorway as she looked inside.

Max stood in his crib. He couldn’t walk on his own yet, but he could stand when he held on to something. The single wisp of dark brown hair at the top of his head waved as he bobbed up and down. He was grinning from ear to ear and watching Chloe, who sat on the floor along with a black cat, who sat in front of her.

The cat had to be the Bane of Her Existence. The Djinn. Khalil Somebody Important. Visually, it looked like a normal, fairly large cat, perhaps twenty pounds or so, but to her mind’s eye, it felt immense with a smoky, dangerous Power.

The cat said, “For something so small, you emit a great deal of noise.”

Chloe grabbed the cat’s tail and yanked on it. “Doggie!” Chloe shrieked. “Doggie! Doggie!”

“That is my tail,” the cat remarked. The little girl stabbed at his furred face with a plump finger. “Now you have discovered one of my eyes. Oh look, you have discovered the other one. I think you have awakened your aunt. I told you we should be quiet.”

The trio turned to look at her as she stood frozen. Two delighted children and what appeared to be a normal black cat but was instead an alien, enormously Powerful, infinitely dangerous being.

“Look, Gracie!” said Chloe. “It’s the doggie-cat! You said we can keep him.”

The cat’s strange, wrong eyes narrowed. “Did you?” he said. His triangular face looked distinctly unfriendly, whiskers held awry. “That wasn’t what you told me earlier.”

Grace lunged forward to snatch up the cat, and he allowed it. His body hung boneless from her grip just like a real cat would. “I had no idea you meant this doggie-cat, Chloe,” she said, her voice hoarse. “That changes everything.”

“Which other doggie-cat could she possibly have meant?” said the cat. “You don’t exactly have a plethora of them hanging around.”

Grace growled to Chloe, “Stay here.”

Chloe pushed to her feet and whined, “But I want to play with him.”

Grace looked at the little girl. “I said stay here, young lady.”

Something in her expression must have made it clear she meant business, because Chloe kicked her toys on the floor. “You never let me do anything fun. I’m never going to live here again.”

“Fine,” Grace said between her teeth. “Just do as you’re told.”

She limped out of the bedroom. Max gave a wordless yell, clearly displeased at recent events. Chloe shouted, “Horrible! He’s
MY
doggie-cat! I found him first. You’re not fair! I hate everything and everybody!”

Grace hissed at the Demonkind. “Thank you. Thank you so much for that. There are so many things wrong with what just happened. What the hell is the matter with you anyway? Have you got no sense?”

“You are every bit as impudent and disrespectful as you were this morning,” the Djinn said in a cold voice.

The cat grew as she walked down the hall, until suddenly she was holding on to a weight that was much too heavy for her to carry. She dropped him, and he continued to grow until he was the massive black panther from her dream. A thrill of shock iced her skin. Her gaze slid sideways to look at the impossible behemoth slinking along beside her. He was the size of a small horse, and yet he still seemed small compared to what her mind insisted was the immensity of his Power.

She would not give in to what she was feeling. She would
not
.

“Stop it,” she snapped.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said the monstrous creature. He turned his head to look at her with those bizarre eyes that sparkled with malice.

They reached the living room. Grace rounded on him. She used her fury to propel her forward. She shoved at the giant creature. It was like trying to push a mountain. She shoved at him again. “You’re trying to intimidate me. Well, guess what, asshole? It isn’t going to work. This is my home. Those two kids are my niece and nephew. And I did not give you permission to spend time with them. You are trespassing and it is not okay.”

The giant panther morphed into an upright figure of an angry man, and finally she came face-to-face with the Djinn she had met so early this morning.

The form he wore this time was tall, somewhere close to six and a half feet. Long raven-black hair was pulled back from an elegant, pale face. That face had all the same things that a human face had, two eyes, a nose and a mouth. It was even lean-jawed and handsome, yet somehow it was clearly not a human face. His strange eyes were the same in every form he chose to wear, crystalline and diamondlike. He had a lean, graceful frame that matched his face, and he wore a simple black tunic and trousers, and a fierce, regal pride.

This was, as much as anything was, his real physical form. At least it was his go-to form. At his essence, he was a spirit of air and fire. No physical form could contain him in his entirety. His Power filled the house.

My gods, there’s so much of him, she thought as she stared up at his sparkling angry eyes. What a calamity he is. Standing in front of him, she felt absurdly young, very small, and stupidly, excessively fascinated.

“I offer you a gift beyond price, you foolish creature,” the Djinn said between his teeth. “And you throw it back in my face.”

“What do you think you’re offering me?” she asked. “I wake up and I find you with my kids in their bedroom. And I’ll say this again—without my permission. Do you realize how offensive that is? Maybe you don’t. Maybe that’s something Djinn would do all the time. You know what, I don’t care. And I’m not even going to get into all the wrong lessons you were teaching them. Wait a minute, yes I am. You were a talking cat with children who are much too young to differentiate between that and reality.”

His eyes narrowed. “What nonsense are you spouting, human?”

“What do you think is going to happen the next time Chloe sees a black cat?” Grace demanded. “Do you think she’s going to say to herself, oh this is not like the freaky black cat that talks to me and lets me yank its tail and poke it in the eye? No. Do you know what she’s going to try to do? She’s going to try to talk to it, and pull its tail and maybe poke it in the eye. And you know what
that
cat is going to do—because it’s a real goddamn cat? It’s going to scratch her. It might bite her. Cat bites are filthy things. Usually the puncture wounds go deep and they get infected. And then suddenly I’ll be taking a confused, crying three-year-old girl to the ER for a threehundred-dollar doctor’s visit to get antibiotics all because of your ignorant arrogance!”

The Djinn regarded her with a supercilious expression. “Do all your thoughts proceed in such a fashion?”

“What are you talking about?” Grace blinked, thrown off balance. “Do my thoughts proceed where?”

The Djinn gestured with a long, white hand. He made it look impossibly graceful. “To conclusions of disaster, of course. No doubt there will also be brain-eating parasites in the cat bite, or perhaps a troop of rabid monkeys will escape from a nearby zoo and cut a path directly for your house.”

She stared. “You think I’m making this stuff up? That cat bite happened to me when I was little. I have the scars to prove it. Do you know what I caught Chloe trying to do yesterday? She was climbing on top of the kitchen table. She was about to jump off and fly like Clark Kent, because we had just watched an old movie rerun with Christopher Reeve, and if Superman could fly, she thought she might be able to too. Maybe she wouldn’t have broken her leg if I hadn’t caught her, but she probably would have hurt herself somehow.”

The curve of the Djinn’s elegant mouth turned cruel. He looked around the living room, his gaze cold and judgmental. “How unfortunate then for your children that you choose to nap in the daytime instead of watching out for them the way you should.”

She flinched as if she’d been slapped, and she looked around the living room too. Her textbooks were stacked on the coffee table. Toys littered the floor. A basket of unfolded laundry sat on the floor by the armchair. Chloe had spilled some of her Cheerios on the area rug in the living room then walked over them. Crushed cereal crumbs were everywhere.

She thought of the tangle at the back of Chloe’s head that she still hadn’t brushed out. Embarrassment and fury clogged her throat so that she couldn’t speak. After a moment she managed to whisper between clenched teeth, “You have no idea what you’re talking about. You have no real understanding of me, my kids or the issues we have to face. That lack of understanding alone makes you dangerous to us.”

“How dare you?” He thrust his angry face close. “
I would never cause harm to a child
. The whole reason I stayed was to protect them!”

His rage curled around her, manifesting as black smoke. She felt as though she were staring into an inferno.

She would not flinch. She would
not
.

There was simply no point in trying to reason with him. They were too different from each other, and he was too arrogant to listen to anything she said. She dug down deep and found enough composure to say, “I get that you don’t mean us any harm. Thank you for staying this morning to make sure Chloe and Max were protected. If you don’t wish to petition for a consultation with the Oracle, I’m telling you now to leave my house.”

He scowled and opened his mouth, clearly intending a scorching reply, but a small, sad voice beat him to it. Chloe said, “No more fighting. Don’t be mad anymore, okay?”

Khalil’s diamond gaze flickered. He looked down as Grace did, at Chloe’s worried face. Then Grace witnessed a remarkable thing, as the Djinn’s elegant, malicious expression gentled. He went down on one knee so that he could look at Chloe face-to-face. The girl regarded him gravely. Something in Grace’s chest twisted. He was so enormous, and Chloe was so tiny.

“I will not be mad anymore,” Khalil said. He did something to throttle back the Power in his voice and spoke quietly.

“Promise?” Chloe asked.

His gaze slid sideways and up at Grace. He looked sour. Wow, Grace thought on a sudden spurt of hysteria, he really doesn’t want to give up on his grudge. But he wasn’t talking to Grace any longer. She raised her eyebrows and nodded toward Chloe, telling him silently, you’re answering to her, not to me.

His bizarre, unfriendly gaze pledged something to her, but she didn’t know how to read unspoken Djinn messages. With an air of decision, Khalil turned to Chloe. He said, “Yes, we both promise.”

Wait, what? Grace straightened. She hadn’t given him permission to speak for her.

“We will not fight anymore,” he continued. “It is too upsetting for small people.”

Chloe said strongly, “It’s upsetting for big girls too.”

“Indeed,” said Khalil. He held out his hand and Chloe put hers into it.

Chloe was so small, Grace thought, biting her lip. She held herself so tensely her muscles were starting to ache again. So fragile, so precious.

The Djinn brought the girl’s fingers to his lips and kissed them. Then he let her go, and straightened to his full height before he vanished.

Grace stared at Chloe, looking for some kind of reaction to the Djinn’s sudden disappearance. Other than wiggling the fingers Khalil had kissed and looking intensely thoughtful, the little girl didn’t appear to have much of one. Maybe Chloe was concentrating on trying to disappear too, and she was discovering that she couldn’t do that either.