Thea Harrison: Serpent's Kiss

Another Power flare was building. She could sense its inevitability, like the oncoming crescendo in an immortal symphony, or the next intimate pulse of her long-abandoned, almost-forgotten heartbeat. The expression in her eyes turned vague as she focused her attention on that ravishing internal flame.

Just before it engulfed her again, she noticed an oddity. There was no sound in the house around them, no movement from other Vampyres, no spark of human emotion. There was nothing but Rhoswen’s hitched breathing as the younger Vampyre knelt at her feet, and the small contented sounds of a dog nearby as he scratched at his ear then dug out a nesting place in his floor cushion. Carling had lived for a long time surrounded by jackals eager to feed from scraps that fell from the tables of those in Power, but sometime over the last week, all her usual attendants and sycophants had fled.

Some creatures had a well-developed sense of self-preservation, unlike others.

She said to Rhoswen, “I suggest you work harder on acquiring that sense of discernment.”

Every little thing is going to be all right.

Recently Rune had quoted Bob Marley to Niniane Lorelle when she had been at a low point in her life. Niniane was young for a faerie, a sweet woman and had been a close friend of his for a long time. She also happened to be the Dark Fae Queen now and the newest entry on America’s list of the top ten most powerful people in the country. Rune had brought Bob up in conversation to comfort her after an assassination attempt had been made on her life, in which a friend of hers had been killed, and her mate Tiago had nearly died as well.

And damn if that Marley song didn’t keep running through his head ever since. It was one of those brain viruses, like a TV commercial or a musical theme from a movie that got stuck on perpetual replay, and he couldn’t find an off switch for the sound system that was wired into his brain.

Not that, in the normal course of things, he didn’t like Bob’s music. Rune just wanted him to shut up for a little freaking while so he could get some shut-eye.

Instead Rune kept waking up in the middle of the night, staring at his ceiling as silk sheets sandpapered his oversensitive skin and mental snapshots of recent events shuttered against his mind’s retina while Bob kept on playing.

Every little thing.

Snap, and Rune’s other good friend Tiago was sprawled on his back in a forested clearing, gutted and drenched in his own blood, while Niniane knelt at his head and held on to him in perfect terror.

Snap, and Rune stared into the gorgeous blank expression of one of the most Powerful Nightkind rulers in history, as he grabbed Carling by the shoulders, shook her hard and roared point-blank in her face.

Snap, and he struck a bargain with Carling that saved Tiago’s life but could very well end his own.

Snap, and Carling was walking naked out of the Adriyel River at twilight, deep in the heart of the Dark Fae land, drenched in silvery water that glistened in the dying day as if she wore a transparent gown of stars. The curves and hollows of her muscled body, the dark hair that lay slick against her shapely skull, her high-cheeked, inscrutable Egyptian face—they were all so fucking perfect. And one of the most perfect things about her was also one of the most tragic, for the lithe sensual beauty of her body had been marred with dozens of long white lash scars. When she had been a mortal human, she had been whipped with such force it must have been a ferocious cruelty, and yet she moved with the strong, sleek confident sensuality of a tiger. The sight of her had stopped his breath, stopped his thinking, stopped his soul, his everything, so that he needed some kind of cosmic reboot that hadn’t happened yet because part of him was still caught frozen in that moment of epiphany.

Snap, and he bore witness as an antique gun simultaneously fired and exploded in the forest clearing, killing both a traitor and a good woman. A woman he had liked very much. A strong, funny, fragile human who shouldn’t have lost her short precious life because he and his fellow sentinel Aryal had screwed up and left her to protect Niniane on her own.

Snap, and he saw Cameron’s face when she had been alive. The human had had the long, strong body of an athlete, her spare features sprinkled with good humor and cinnamon-colored freckles.

Snap, and he saw Cameron that final time as the Dark Fae soldiers prepared and wrapped her body for transportation back to her family in Chicago. All the pretty cinnamon color had leached out of her freckles. The exploding gun she had shot to save Niniane’s life had taken out a large chunk of her head. It was always so harsh when you saw a friend in that last, saddest state. They were okay. They didn’t hurt anymore. At that point you were the one who was wounded.

Every little thing is going to be all right.

Except sometimes it wasn’t, Bob. Sometimes things got so fucked up all you could do was send them home in a body bag.

Rune’s temper grew short. Usually he was an easy-going kind of Wyr, but he started snapping off people’s heads for no reason. Metaphorically, anyway. At least he hadn’t started snapping off people’s heads for real. Still, people started to avoid him.

“What’s up your ass?” Aryal had asked after Niniane’s coronation, when they had crossed over from Adriyel to Chicago and were en route back to New York.

They took their preferred method of travel and flew in their Wyr forms. Aryal was his fellow sentinel and a harpy, which meant she was a right royal bitch ninety percent of the time. Usually her snarky attitude cracked him up. At the moment it almost had him drop-kicking her into the side of a skyscraper.

“I’m being haunted by Marley’s ghost,” he told her.

Aryal slanted a dark eyebrow at him. When she was in her harpy form, the angles of her face were pronounced, upswept. Her gray-fade-to-black wings beat strongly in the hot summer wind that blew wild around them. “Which ghost?” the harpy asked. “The past, present or future?”

Huh? It took him a second to catch on. Then the Dickens connection happened in his head and he thought, Jacob Marley, not Bob. Aryal had gotten the Jacob Marley character and the three spirits of Christmas past, present and future all muddled up.

Time and time and time. What happened, what is, and what is yet to come.

He barked out a laugh. The sound was filled with ground glass. “All of them,” he said. “I’m being haunted by all of them.”

“Dude, give it up,” said Aryal, in a mild tone that he recognized as a conciliatory one, coming as it was from her. “Believe in Christmas already.”

The harpy looked almost delicate as he flew by her side. His Wyr form was that of a gryphon. He had the body of a lion and the head and wings of a golden eagle. His paws were the size of hubcaps and tipped with long wicked retractable claws, and his eagle’s head had lion-colored eyes. His feline body had breadth and power across the chest, sleek strong haunches, and was the dun color of hot desert places. In his Wyr form he was immense, easily the size of an SUV, with a correspondingly huge wingspan.

In his human form, Rune stood six-foot-four, and he had the broad shoulders and lean hard muscles of a swordsman. He had sun-bronzed fine-grained skin with laugh lines at the corners of lion’s eyes that were the color of sunlit amber. His even features and white smile were popular commodities, especially with those of the female persuasion, and the mane of sun-streaked hair that fell to his broad shoulders held glints of pale gold, chestnut and burnished copper.

He was one of the four gryphons of the Earth, revered in ancient India and Persia, an immortal Wyr who came into being at the birth of the world. Time and space had buckled when the Earth was formed. The buckling created dimensional pockets of Other land where magic pooled, time moved differently, modern combustible technologies didn’t work and the sun shone with a different light. What came to be known as the Elder Races, the Wyrkind and the Elves, the Light and Dark Fae, the Nightkind, Demonkind, human witches, and all other manner of monstrous creatures, tended to cluster in or near the Other lands.