Thea Harrison - Serpent's Kiss

Two weeks later, Rune still couldn’t speak of what had happened.

She realized what had to have occurred, of course. The brief glimpse Carling had gotten of Rune in two places, the sword Rhoswen had hidden underneath her cloak, the appalling state he had been in after he had killed her. It did not take a huge stretch of imagination to figure out what that meant. Carling tried a couple of times to get him to talk, but he looked so haunted and sick, she didn’t have the heart to push it. Instead she held on to him tightly when he woke in a sweat, and she teased him gently whenever he had stared into space for too long.

As for Rune, it felt like part of his soul would always be caught in the horror of what happened, in the loop that went around like a serpent’s tail coiling in on itself. But gradually he began to see how he could reach a point where he could set it aside and get on with the business of living.

After much discussion, and more argument, it was decided that Rune had not broken the laws of sanctuary that were meant to protect the Oracle and all who came to petition her. While several people besides Dragos were well aware that “something” had indeed happened, and it made everyone uniformly unhappy, no one else admitted to seeing Rune in two places for that brief moment in time, so no one understood what really had transpired.

Everyone agreed it was a mystery how Rune had gotten from one place to another so fast, but as Jaggar said, Rune was famous for his speed for a reason. As for Rune, he wouldn’t talk of it. At that point, Carling suspected he couldn’t. In the end they admitted that he had acted in defense of his mate. Since he did not instigate the violence, acting in defense was deemed acceptable. Meanwhile Julian swore he had no idea Rhoswen would do such a thing. Carling didn’t think many people actually believed him, but nothing could be proven one way or another.

They relocated to a beachside villa in Key Largo while Carling remained under quarantine and observation for three months. As far as prisons went, it was luxurious enough. Two-story windows along one side of the villa overlooked an infinity pool beside the ocean. The villa had an acre-length private beach, four bedrooms and four baths, a great room, a family room and a kitchen filled with a fortune in black granite countertops and Wolf appliances, including a Sub-Zero refrigerator and a wine storage unit. Rune cooked himself some mighty fancy-ass hamburgers and steaks in that kitchen.

There were two guesthouses on the property where Carling’s observers, the Demonkind Councillor Soren and the Elven Councillor Sidhiel, stayed along with a few of their attendants. Their mission was simple: to monitor Power activity in the area immediately around Carling. Often lights stayed on in either one or the other of the guesthouses, and the quiet sound of conversation drifted through open windows into the early hours of the morning. Occasionally Soren and Sidhiel ate dinner with Rune while Carling kept them company with a glass of wine, but more often than not the Councillors kept to themselves.

“This is much better than exile to my island,” Carling said to Rune. They were in the sitting area of the villa’s master bedroom. She was curled at one end of a couch with several books, and she had just hung up after an hour-long talk with Seremela.

“Hells yeah,” Rune agreed lazily. He wore cut-off jeans and nothing else, his long muscular legs and bare feet propped up on the opposite end of the couch. The sunshine loved him. Already he was burnished all over with a deeper golden tan. He sprawled on the rest of the couch, his head pillowed against her thigh as he channel surfed for cable movies on a fifty-six-inch flat-screen. “Got ESPN and SPIKE TV right here, baby. And I’m DVRing both Escape from New York and Escape from L. A. later. Snake Plissken is my man. Booyah.”

Carling made a note on her new iPad to remind herself to do a Google search for a definition of booyah . She told him, “I had in mind a rather different reason than cable TV.”

“I know what you had in mind,” Rune said. He reached behind his head to capture one of her hands and pressed her fingers against his mouth.

They were in daily talks with Seremela. Carling had FedExed her research to Seremela, for whatever good it might do, and Seremela was pouring over everything with a fine-tooth comb. The medusa had become obsessed with the medical puzzle they had given her, and her phone conversations were littered with her excited inquiries. She had just arranged for a vacation so she could come out to the villa for a prolonged visit.

“I think we need to lure Seremela away from her position as ME for the Cook County Morgue,” Carling remarked. She looked out the windows at the moonlight sparkling on the ocean water. “She’s underutilized there. I think she would be much happier focusing all her attention on research.”

“I think that’s a bitching idea,” Rune replied. “We could set her up in her own lab. I’d want her to be much closer though. I wonder if she might like to move to Florida?”

“We’ll have to ask her when she comes,” she said, smiling.

The Key Largo villa was a temporary arrangement for quarantine purposes, but the warm climate was so attractive to both of them, they were already talking about the possibility of settling somewhere in Florida. They just hadn’t agreed on where yet. Perhaps Miami Beach. It was on the ocean, connected to a major metropolitan area, and it was also just fifty miles away from a 720, 000-acre Everglades preserve, which was quite an attractive thing for an active Wyr to consider. The one consideration was finding a place to live—or building somewhere—that had plenty of space providing shelter from the sun.

Because it was two weeks later and Carling had not had another episode.

On Seremela’s advice, they had started out very carefully. Small watered-down amounts, sipped frequently. The first time Rune slit his finger and bled a few drops of blood into a small glass of wine. After having gone so long without drinking anything but wine, they hoped it would help Carling make a transition back to drinking blood again.

She found it unexpectedly difficult to take a swallow of the blood-infused wine, but managed after a brief struggle. It almost knocked her to her knees. She had thought his blood would taste spectacular, as burning and as intense as the rarest liqueur. It was so much more Powerful than she had imagined.

That one mouthful made her feel drunk, dizzy. She leaned on the kitchen counter, gasping. Rune snatched the wineglass out of her hand as it tilted sideways. He studied her worriedly. “How do you feel?” he asked. He put an arm around her waist. “Are you sick?”

She shook her head, and the world spun around her. Holy hell. She clutched at the counter.

“Are you going to throw up?” he demanded.

“No!” She tried to focus on him. “At least I don’t think so.”

Then euphoria hit. A wave of heat washed over her skin like a sheet of flame. When she turned around to face Rune, her eyes had gone garnet red.

His own expression flared. He whispered, “Hello, beautiful spiky girl.”

She growled, launched at him and took him down to the floor where they made love in a frenzied white heat.

Now she was able to ingest as much as a quarter of a cup of his blood at a time, mixed in a glass of wine. The Power in his blood knocked her nearly senseless every time, although she felt more energized than ever. There were side effects other than “crazed monkey sex” as Rune so eloquently put it. She was beginning to lose her ability to sense other creatures’ emotions. She also became more grounded in a way that she had forgotten. Her own Power was no longer revved at such a constant state of high velocity, and she tired more frequently. She was not able to hold her spell of protection against the sun for longer than an hour at a time. As soon as she had lost that ability, Rune had gone shopping online for cloaks, SPF + 100 sunblock, and other protective gear.