Serpent's Kiss (Elder Races #3)(44)

She felt the breath leave him hard. His fingers were unsteady against her bare skin. She lifted her head to stare at the clean, spare lines of his profile. She was so close she could see the fine lines deepen at the corners of his eyes, and sense the shift in his throat muscles as he swallowed hard.

“What is it?” she asked.

She craned her neck to look over her shoulder. She could just see the ends of the long, white sinuous scars that crossed her spine like two snakes winding around a staff. She had lived with those scars for thousands of years. She knew them like she knew the back of her hand. She would never forget the night they happened, or how Rune had broken into the room to stop a third one from falling on her . . .

She stiffened. No. That hadn’t happened thousands of years ago. That had happened just minutes ago, this afternoon. What had happened before Rune took action? What had really occurred to her, four and a half thousand years ago?

“Something else happened before you showed up,” she whispered. “I don’t remember. I don’t remember what originally happened to me.”

Before Rune had burst into the room, the priest had stood over her in a rage. He had shaken out the whip. He would have struck her again, except that Rune had killed him with one savage blow.

Rune looked at her, his eyes darkened. He said in a low voice, “All I know is that a couple of weeks ago you went swimming in the Adriyel River and when you walked out, you didn’t have just two whip marks on your back. Your whole body was striped with scars.”

She remembered it well. She walked nude out of the water while Niniane and Rune waited on the riverbank. Rune had stared at her with such a fire in his eyes they had glittered like yellow diamonds. His handsome face had become a carved mask, and every muscle in his body had stood in etched relief against the long masculine frame of his bones, as if he had been created by a classical sculptor.

She said, “You’re changing me?”

“I think what we are doing together must somehow be changing something,” he said. “Because I swear to all the gods, Carling, your back was not like this before.”

She stared at him in horror.

She had compared him to a sirocco. She’d had no idea how accurate that was. A sirocco was a hurricane that came out of the Sahara. In Egypt the hot desert wind was called Khamsin. It could reach speeds of up to eighty-five miles an hour. She remembered the howl of the wind at night. It was an immense, unearthly, inhuman sound. It stripped flesh off of bones, literally reshaped the land.

First she thought she would lose her life. Then she became afraid she would lose everything else. Her Power, her sanity. Her dignity.

She had not known there could be anything more to lose, that bits of her past might slough away like flesh peeling from the bones. The change was vaster and more Powerful than anything she had ever experienced, and she had never felt the difference.

She had not known she might be in danger of losing her self.

NINE

“Get away from me.” She shoved him back and leaped out of her chair.

He sprang upright and stepped forward, hand outstretched. He said, “Not while you’re in a panic.”

She spun behind the chair, picked it up and flung it at him. She shouted, “Get the f**k out!”

With a swipe of his arm, he knocked it to one side. Determination stamped his features. “Think a minute, Carling. You’ve just had an episode. Another won’t occur for at least another several hours, perhaps even a day or more. We have time to discuss this and figure out what it means—”

She stared at him in incredulity. She could not remember the last time someone disobeyed a direct order of hers.

“Fine, goddamn you,” she hissed, “I’ll get out.”

She made it to the doorway before she felt his hand come down on her shoulder. It was too much. She knocked him away and spat out a Power-filled word that iced the air.

Rune froze in midmotion, his arm still stretched toward her. Then his Power surged in response, hot like a solar flare, and even though she had put enough force behind the spell to throw half the Vampyres in San Francisco into stasis, she knew it wasn’t going to be strong enough to hold him for long.

She never did get around to researching what spells would be effective against gryphons. She might regret that some day.

Fury pulsed from him like the outward rolling blast of a thermonuclear explosion. Slowly he began to move.

She fell back a step, staring. Then she turned and ran.

At first she headed for the house. Then she thought of Rhoswen’s stifling, resentful devotion, Rasputin’s frantic adoration, and she switched directions, racing along the path far faster than a human could ever hope to run, along the path that followed the cliff toward the other end of the island and the redwood forest. The evening sunshine slanted bars of light everywhere, transforming the idyllic scene into a deadly luminous prison.

When she was young, she had been taught that she was composed of many parts, her souls, her heart, her shadow, name and spirit.

How many pieces of yourself could you survive losing? When she had been just a child, she had lost her family and her freedom, and then she had lost her name. Just a few short years later, she had lost her breath and her heart had stopped beating. Then she lost almost everyone around her, not once but many times. With each decision she made that was based on Power, expediency, politics, survival and war, she lost pieces of her souls throughout the centuries. Her spirit felt gossamer-thin, in tatters.