Serpent's Kiss (Elder Races #3)(3)

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.

Most of the Elder creatures came into being either on Earth or in the dimensional pockets of Other land. A few, a very few, came into existence in those crossover points between places, where time and space were fluid and changeable, and at the time of the world’s creation, Power was an unformed, immeasurable force.

Rune and his fellow gryphons were just such beings. They were quintessential beings of duality, formed at the cusp between two creatures, on the threshold of changing time and space. Lion and eagle, along with the other ancient Wyr, they learned to shapeshift and walk among humankind, and so they also became Wyr form and man. They had an affinity for the Earth’s between places. They could find crossover passages and Other lands that remained hidden from all others, and in early history they were known throughout the Elder Races for being fearless explorers. There would be no others like them. Creation’s inchoate time had passed and all things, even the crossover points between places, had become fixed in their definitions.

The past scrolled behind him. The future was the unknown thing that waited ahead of him, smiling its Mona Lisa smile. And the ever-fleeting now was continually born and continually died, but was never anything you could get your hands on and hold on to, as it always pushed you along to some other place.

Yeah, he knew a thing or two about living life on the threshold.

He and Aryal had returned to Cuelebre Tower in New York.

There were seven demesnes of Elder Races that overlaid the human geography of the continental United States. The seat of the Wyrkind demesne was in New York City. The seat of Elven demesne was based in Charleston, South Carolina. The Dark Fae’s demesne was centered in Chicago, and the Light Fae’s in Los Angeles. The Nightkind, which included all Vampyric forms, controlled the San Francisco Bay Area and the Pacific Northwest, while the human witches, considered part of the Elder Races due to their command of Power, were based in Louisville, Kentucky. Demonkind, like the Wyr and the Vampyres, consisted of several different types that included goblins and Djinn, and their seat was based in Houston.

Upon Rune and Aryal’s return, the first thing they did was debrief the Lord of the Wyr, Dragos Cuelebre. A massive dark man with gold eyes, Dragos’s Wyr form was a dragon the size of a private jet. He had ruled over the Wyrkind demesne for centuries, with seven immortal Wyr as his sentinels.