Thea Harrison: Serpent's Kiss

He steeled himself and passed his hand through the apparition. “You’re a ghost. You’re not really here.”

The woman’s smile revealed a wicked curve of fangs. “I am not here,” she said, “like a dimly seen island overlaid on the ocean. I am not here, so perhaps I am there, lost in some Other land.”

“Are you dead or aren’t you?” he demanded. Cryptic ramblings—gods help him, his head might spontaneously combust.

“Like Schrödinger’s Cat, I am both dead and alive,” said Python, coiling and recoiling her ghostly body through the cavern. “I was alive in the past. I died in the past. Who knows what I will be next?”

Carling gripped Rune’s arm before he could explode. She had turned to face the apparition too. She asked, “Are you traveling through time?”

The ghostly apparition turned to her, and Python’s smile widened. “I have traveled. I am traveling. I will travel.”

“Is that why, even though you have died, you’re not altogether gone?” Carling asked.

“Either that,” said Python, “or I’m just a crazy whack-job ghost.” That feral transparent face drew closer to Carling and softened. “You’re one of mine. My children are so beautiful. I want you to live forever. That is why I gave you my kiss.”

“Your gift has lasted a very long time, and I am grateful,” Carling said. “But now I am dying, unless we can figure out how to stop it. We came to ask for your help.”

“I can’t give you the kiss again,” said Python. “That time is past.” Her coiling and recoiling increased in speed as though she were agitated. “I took away the day but gave you an unending, gorgeous night. What you make of that is not up to me. A mother cannot live life for her children.”

“That’s not what she’s asking you to do,” Rune said. Desperation edged his voice. He hadn’t known what to expect, but he sure had not expected this. To actually be able to talk with Python was more than he could have hoped for, but it might end up being one useless, psychedelic nightmare. “She doesn’t want you to live her life for her. We’re asking you how to keep her from dying.”

“Wait,” said Python. “I’m confused. Hasn’t she died yet?” Her face came around to Rune. “Why have you not gone back to save her?”

Python’s words seared him. She’s crazy, he thought as he stared at her. She’s a crazy ghost. That’s all. He fought to find his voice and said hoarsely, “She hasn’t died, Python, she’s standing right here in front of you. But she is my mate, and she will die if we don’t find a way to stop it. So will you please, just fucking please make some fucking sense for once in your goddamn fucking life !”

The feral ghost looked at him with surprise. “Well, you don’t have to yell at me,” she said in a plaintive voice. “You’re not as far along as I thought you would be by now.”

“Where am I supposed to be?” he asked dully.

“Right here, gryphon,” said Python. “Remember what we are. We are the between creatures, born on the threshold of changing time and space. Time is a passageway, like all the other crossover passages, and we have an affinity for those places. We hold our own, steady against the interminable flow. That’s what I tried to give all of my children. That’s who you are. The Power of it is in your blood.”

“It’s all about the blood,” Carling whispered. “The key is in the blood.”

“The key has always been in the blood,” said Python. “You are perfect for each other. Nature could not have created a more flawless mating. You have everything you need to survive. If you survive.”

Python faded as they watched. The Power that had filled the cavern ebbed away.

Rune threw the flashlight to the ground and dug the heels of his hands into his burning eyes. He felt demented.

“We have everything we need to survive—if we survive?” He roared, “ What the hell did that mean, you crazy whack-job bitch! ”

Carling came around to face him. She grabbed his wrists to drag his hands away from his face. Her eyes were shining. “Rune, I think she told us everything we need to know.”

He stared at her, breathing hard. After a moment he was able to speak more or less sanely again. “Well, do you mind explaining it to me?”

“I didn’t get a chance to tell you everything earlier,” Carling said. “Seremela and I had talked about looking for ways to get me into some kind of remission, at the very least try to reach a holding pattern to buy us some time to do more research. She said it was possible that becoming a succubus had been a defense response from my immune system when I could no longer keep down the blood I drank.”

“A defense response,” he said, frowning. “When you frame it that way, the transition would not have been a good thing.” Victims of prolonged starvation ate things out of desperation, often things that had no real nutritive value. Their bodies started to consume themselves until eventually their organs began to shut down.

Carling nodded. “Seremela suggested I try to find some kind of physical nourishment that I could tolerate, in the hope that it might slow down some of the symptoms. I wasn’t looking forward to trying to drink blood again, but I’m willing to do just about anything, so I said I’d think about it. Python just said you hold your own against the flow of time, Rune, and that it’s in your blood. The key is in the blood. Those are the exact words Seremela and I said to each other.”

Gradually he calmed, stroking her hair as he listened to her. “Could you have been starving all this time?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Eventually I stopped feeling hungry, then I began to sense emotions from living creatures and started to feel better whenever I did. From everything I had heard, that sounded like a natural progression of the disease.”

“Well that might be so, but it still sounds a lot like starvation to me,” he said. “Much as I want this, I’m afraid to believe in it. It sounds too good to be true.”

“But it could fit,” she said. “Your blood could have what it takes to put me in remission. This whole strange journey you and I have been on has been as a result of your Wyr attributes coming into contact with my Vampyrism.”

He closed his eyes. “And that has never happened before,” he whispered. A sliver of hope worked its way into his chest, lightening the dull panic that had taken him over when Python had disappeared. He bent his head to kiss her, savoring the soft curve of her lips as she kissed him back. “We need to start trying this.”

“Yes.”

“We’re not going to give up if you hork a couple of times,” he said sternly. He yanked her close to hug her fiercely. “You haven’t eaten for a helluva long damn while. It may take some doing to get your system to accept anything. We’ll keep at it.”

She put her arms around his waist and leaned on him. “Agreed. We can even try giving me blood intravenously if I can’t stomach it.”

Some fifteen feet away, Grace said in a rusty-sounding voice, “I sure hope you got everything you needed from that session, because I’m cooked.”

They turned to find the human on her knees. Carling pulled out of his arms to go over to Grace. “Are you all right?”

“I think so.”

As Carling helped the human to her feet, Rune collected the flashlights and wrapped the gold mask in its protective cloth. He asked, “Do you remember what happened?”

“No. I feel like I’ve been hit over the head with a blunt object.” Grace squinted at them.

Carling said to her, “It was a very Powerful, very strange session, but hopefully we learned what we needed to.”

“Good, because I don’t think I can do that again in a hurry,” said Grace as she pulled away to stand on her own. She moved as if every muscle in her body hurt. “Let’s go.”