He took a deep breath and shook his head.
No. I haven’t forgiven him for the last conversation we had. I also think he’s yanking everybody’s chain right now. I don’t believe he would let me go back and pick up my duties as his First with you as my mate. He would always wonder if having you in my life skewed my motives, and he would be right. Maybe he and I can repair our friendship over time, but for now I think the only thing you and I can really do is start somewhere fresh and new.
She smiled up at him.
What in the world are we going to do with ourselves?
The thought of the unknown was exhilarating and frightening. There was her good friend again, the spook house/roller coaster.
Rune’s face lightened and he smiled back.
I have no clue. It’s going to be fun to figure it all out.
As long as they could buy themselves time.
She squeezed his hands.
I have a few things I need to say to a couple of people.
She watched as he struggled with himself. There were too many Powerful and dangerous people around, and they had skated too close to the edge for him to let go of her easily. But he had to know it was not a good thing to try to hold on to her too tightly, because his grip loosened.
All right.
She turned and walked over to her wayward children, Rhoswen and the Nightkind King. They stared as she approached, noting the changes in her hair and dress. Julian asked in a low voice, “Did you really do it? Did you find a cure?”
Carling let her gaze travel over Julian’s rough, intelligent features one last time. They had been close friends once, long ago, and political partners for far longer. He was another one like Rune, an alpha male born to command. Perhaps she had simply ruled him for too long. Maybe like Rune and Dragos, when this anger of hers had died down, they could achieve peace, but she wasn’t going to hold her breath.
“That question may grow to haunt you over the next thousand years or so,” she said. “But you’re going to have to find your own salvation.”
She turned her attention to Rhoswen, who grew more and more agitated under her steady regard. “You went straight to Julian, didn’t you?” she murmured, low enough to keep her words from everyone else but not so low that Julian couldn’t hear. “What did you tell him—how unstable I’d become, how dangerous I was, how it made no sense that I would send my most loyal and devoted servant away and latch on to that manipulative Wyr? I know what you told him. You told him everything he wanted to hear to justify doing the things he did. Then you told the same things to the tribunal.”
Rhoswen straightened and held her head high, while her eyes glittered with angry tears. “I spoke my truth.”
Carling’s contemptuous expression never wavered. “What a poisonous little snake you turned out to be,” she said softly. There were too many fractures in Rhoswen’s behavior. Carling no longer believed the younger Vampyre was stable. If they were anywhere else, Carling would have taken her head. But Rhoswen was not worth breaking the laws of sanctuary over. Carling and Rune had come too far, through too much, to throw it all away.
As she turned away, she said to Julian, “She’s your problem now.”
She watched Julian’s face undergo a drastic change even as she felt a sharp stabbing pain in her back. She arched and tried to turn away, to keep the blade that was sliding into her body from striking a critical, mortal blow to her heart.
But then Rhoswen’s arm came around her neck. The other Vampyre was so much younger than she, so much slower and weaker, but Rhoswen didn’t have to hold her in place for long. She just had to hold her in place for long enough.
“I loved you,” Rhoswen hissed in her ear. “I gave you everything.”
The blow hit home.
Rune
, Carling said, and even though he was twenty feet away talking with two Councillors, he could still hear her.
He spun. The shock and horror that filled his face and emotions saddened her terribly.
She still had so many things to say to him. She reached toward him and watched her own hand dissolve.
She still had so many things . . .
R
une
, Carling said.
And he turned to see the tip of a short sword burst through her chest, just like the spear he had once watched burst through her father’s body. Behind her, Rhoswen was crying even as she thrust the sword. Julian had lunged forward, but there was nothing the Nightkind King or anyone else could do.
All Carling had time to say was his name. She looked so sad, so loving, and it was
Carling
that looked that way. That was his look; that look was for him.
She had shone so brightly, for so long. Then she crumbled to dust. And everything in Rune’s fierce, remarkable soul began to scream.
E
very little thing is going to be all right.
Except sometimes it wasn’t, Bob. Sometimes things got so fucked up you couldn’t even send them home in a body bag.
S
creaming.
Wait, I’m confused.
Hasn’t she died yet?
Why have you not gone back to save her?
Have you seen Schrödinger’s Cat? Like Schrödinger’s Cat, I am both dead and alive.
S
creaming.
I cannot live in this universe. I cannot live this way.
If you die, I will find you.
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.
E
ach moment in time was the tiniest of things, the most precious of things. Each moment held the potential for change, a turnaround that led to a different page. It rested on a singular point that was so precise, it would be so easy to lose track of that one miniscule place, that single moment, in the infinite cascade of all the other moments in time. Each turnaround melted away, as every moment in the present slipped into the past.
Every moment slipped away until he reached back, not too far, just far enough, reached for the last definitive place when she was
there
instead of
not there
, and he threw all of his screaming soul at her.
And there it was.
The keystroke password to an unbreakable code.
A
s Carling turned away from Rhoswen, she said to Julian, “She’s your problem now.”
And suddenly the golden monster was in front of her. He was
right there
, even though Rune also stood twenty feet away talking to two Councillors.
The golden monster contained a nightmare that was so far beyond emotion, it whited out Carling’s senses. He yanked her to him while at the same time he lashed out with all his killing claws extended.
Rhoswen fell, her body in ribbons. Everyone in the clearing spun around to stare as she crumbled to dust, until all that was left was the short sword that had fallen from her hand.
Rune sank to his knees, dragging Carling down with him. He clenched her so tightly that if she had been human she would have been in trouble. His body shook with convulsive shudders. He breathed in great sobbing gulps of air, like a drowning victim who had just been rescued. Other than that, he made no sound.
“Rune,” Carling said. She framed his wet face in both hands. He wasn’t looking at her. He was staring at something else. He wore an expression of someone looking at damnation. She dared a quick sidelong glance around. Everyone was staring either at them or the place where Rhoswen had stood. Julian strode over to pick up the sword. He looked furious.
The other Rune had disappeared. Had she imagined what she had seen?
“It’s all right,” Rune whispered. “It’s all right now.”
“Bloody hell,” Dragos muttered from across the clearing. “I don’t know what the fuck that was, but something definitely happened.”
TWENTY-ONE
T
wo 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-sixinch 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.
And just that afternoon she had taken a half-hour nap. It was such merciful refreshment, she woke with tears in her eyes. Rune stretched out on the bed beside her, his head propped in one hand, watching her as she slept. She turned to him and surprised a look of such tenderness on his face, her eyes watered more than ever. They moved at the same time, and held each other tight. He rocked her a little, his face buried in her hair.
Maybe it wouldn’t last. Maybe it was just a reprieve, and her symptoms would return. Neither one of them wanted to take the ghost of crazy Python’s word for anything. The wisest, most prudent thing they could do was continue to pursue all avenues of research, which was why they wanted to recruit Seremela to work on the project full-time. But for now they were holding steady, against time and everyone else. They held their own.
Other people got in touch. Carling had Duncan petitioning Julian to allow him to oversee the safe removal and transport of her library. She was almost certain she had managed to coax Duncan into opening a law office in Miami. She might even convince him to relocate. She was talking to other people too. She suspected Julian would miss several highly talented people from his demesne very shortly.
Aryal called Rune daily to tell him how much ass he sucked, and how much she hated him. Once she called to tell Carling how much ass she sucked too. Carling laughed and invited the harpy for a visit. The other sentinels called, sometimes to ask work-related questions and sometimes just to shoot the shit. Dragos never called, and Rune never called him.
Carling watched Rune carefully as he talked and laughed with the sentinels who were his friends. She ached that she couldn’t make that better for him. But no matter how much she looked for it, she never saw a hint of anything other than what he had told her. He missed his friends but he really did have no regrets.
Still, it would be good to get a better picture of what they might do next. As Rune told Constantine one day with a grin, “I think I might have to buy a Don Johnson suit while I’m down here. You think you’re suav-ay, brother? Johnson was suav-ay. You don’t hold a candle to him.”
Carling was not a big fan of TV, so she had to Google that reference too. She found herself chuckling at the photos of the 1980s
Miami Vice
series. Then she turned thoughtful.
For now she set aside her iPad and her books, and she ran her hand down Rune’s arm to ask silently for the remote. He handed it to her, tilting his head back to give her a sleepy-looking, sexy smile. She turned off the flat-screen and asked him, “Are you all right?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“We’ve both had quite an abrupt change of lifestyle,” she said carefully. “It’s a lot to adjust to.”
“I know. It’s going to take a while. The answers will unfold over time.”
“I just want to be sure they unfold fast enough for you,” she said.
“Are you kidding? This is the best vacation ever. It’s too bad we’ve only got the villa for two and a half more months. I could use a good six months more of this. Besides, we’ve figured out a lot already. We should start looking at houses in the greater Miami area, and we’re going to open up a research facility and coax Seremela to come on over to the dark side. You’ve already got your baby boy Duncan half-convinced he needs to move out here, and Rasputin and Rufio are arriving tomorrow evening. As for me . . .” He shrugged and ran his fingers along her arm. “I might look into consulting opportunities with the local police force as a temporary gig while we sort everything else out. That won’t hold my interest forever, but it will be enough for now, so stop fretting.”
Her gaze narrowed. “I do not fret. I consider all angles.”
He started to laugh. He tugged at the shirt she was wearing. “You’re so full of bullshit sometimes. You’re fretting, darling Carling. It’s cute. You also swore you would never wear a T-shirt with a hairy, bespectacled man on it.”
She looked down at herself. She was wearing his old Jerry Garcia T-shirt, a pair of panties, and nothing else. “This is the ugliest item of clothing I have ever seen,” she said. It had also become her most favorite item of clothing. “It’s a good thing I don’t have to look at myself very often when I wear it.”
“It looks much better on you than it ever did on me,” he told her, his voice turning husky.
“We’ll have to agree to disagree on that.” She set the remote on the back of the couch and ran the palm of her hand over his hard muscled chest. His skin was always so gloriously warm.
Hunger stirred, both sensual and otherwise. Her gums tingled. He raised himself on his elbows and lifted his face as she bent over to kiss him. She whispered against his mouth, “I want to bite you so badly.”
Raw sexuality flared hot in his aura. “So bite me,” he murmured.
Her eyelids felt too heavy. They drifted closed as she drew her lips along the side of his neck. She nipped gently at his skin and got a frustrated growl in response.
“You call that a bite? That’s not a bite.” He rolled off the couch and yanked her to her feet. He muttered, “I’ll show you a bite.”
She started to laugh. She felt drunk again, and saturated with his presence. She put her arms around his waist, cuddled against his bare chest and nipped at his nipple. “Promise?”
He put his hand under her chin to turn her face up to his for a scorching kiss. Then he led her to the bed. She pulled away long enough to drag his T-shirt over her head, and then he was on her.
She fell back on the bed as he came down on top of her. He tore off her panties in one impatient yank. Then he started biting her.
He suckled at her beautiful breasts, tugging at the plump gorgeous flesh of her distended nipples with his teeth, while he fingered the juicy softness of her labia. His hands were shaking. He moved lower and sank his teeth into the soft flesh of her side, just under her rib cage, biting sharp enough to sting but not enough to bruise.
Hunger and arousal pulsed through her. She was becoming accustomed to their companionship. She had forgotten how much the appetites of the flesh were also things of the spirit. They twined up her body, as Rune settled between her legs and put his mouth to her.