Serpent's Kiss (Elder Races #3)(49)

“I’m sure,” he told her. “At least I’m sure of what I sense. Wyr have highly developed instincts and senses—and the older the Wyr, the more sensitive they are. The older Wyr can smell sickness and infections, tainted food, and many poisons undetectable to others. To me, you do not carry any scent of disease. You have the characteristic tinge to your scent that all Vampyres have, but I do not register that as an unhealthy scent.”

“If you’re right,” she said, staring at him. “Everything I’ve done—or anybody else has done in the last hundred and thirty years—has been based on a false premise.”

“Yes,” he said.

Not a disease. If he was right, no wonder her research kept stalling. All the vaccines she had tried to create, all her experiments, had been wasted effort. She coughed out an angry laugh. She whispered, “All that time.”

She had lived for so long, she had forgotten what a precious commodity time was until now, when it had nearly run out. She turned to walk back toward the cottage.

He fell into step beside her. “I’ve had several more hours to process this than you have,” he told her. “And I still don’t know what to make of it. I did think about all the physicians you listed that you worked with. Were any of them Wyr?”

She shook her head, frowning. “No. In fact I don’t know of any Wyr pathologists who have made Vampyrism their subject of research. Humans and Nightkind are the ones who study the subject in any real, serious way. We’re the ones with the vested interest.”

He nodded. The day had melted into early evening. The slant of the sun picked up the gold glints in his hair. “There’s a chance even a Wyr physician wouldn’t have caught this, especially if he or she were a younger Wyr with less developed experience or senses, because Vampyrism does have so many characteristics of a blood-borne pathogen. I had to get right up to the subject and consider it in depth, read about all your blind alleys and dead ends and get puzzled as to the why of it—and then also come into very close contact with you repeatedly before it ever occurred to me.”

“God, the implications,” she muttered.

“So what do we have?” Rune asked.

She said bitterly, “We’re back to square one and we’re running out of time.”

“No,” he said. He threw her a chiding look. “You’re still reacting. If you wiped out all the research, you would be wiping out all the realizations that came from it, including this one. A negative answer is still an answer.”

“Fine.” She gritted her teeth, and forced herself to think beyond feeling poleaxed. “If the research didn’t exist, logic would still have us deducing that Vampyrism is a disease.”

“So we’re not back to square one.” They reached her cottage, and he held the door for her and let her precede him. “We’ve reached some other square where no one has ever been before. Now we’ve got to figure out what to do next.”

She sat at the table and put her head in her hands. Immortal Wyr, interacting with aged Vampyre, made for one shaken cocktail. On the rocks.

Rune leaned against the table beside her. Naturally. The other chair was too far away on the other side of the table, and apparently he couldn’t be bothered to retrieve it. She was already expecting it when he placed his hand on her shoulder, expecting and looking forward to his touch.

“There is one thing about square one,” he said.

“What’s that?” Somehow she found herself leaning into his grip. She struggled with herself, gave up, and rested her cheek against the back of his hand.

He squeezed her lightly. “If this was a crime and I was investigating, I would be headed back to the beginning and the scene where it happened. Maybe there’s missed evidence. Maybe the information has been put together incorrectly. The crime scene needs to be reprocessed, and we need a second opinion.” He pulled at the knot resting at the nape of her neck, and her hair came loose and slid down her back.

She pushed at his thigh. “Stop that.”

“But I don’t want to.” He gathered up a long silken lock and began to twirl it around his fingers.

She lifted her head and gave him a sour look. “What are you, the emotional equivalent of a five-year-old?”

He gave her a slow lazy smile and rubbed the end of her hair against his well-cut lips. It was such a blatantly sexual thing to do, she felt her knees weaken and knew it was a good thing she was already sitting down.

So flirting with her was okay but kissing her wasn’t?

Confused, angered and more than a little aroused, she glared at him and snatched her hair out of his hands, and he chuckled. She gathered her hair and twisted it into a knot again. She tucked the ends into itself.

“Back to the beginning,” she said. “Do you mean back to Egypt, when I was turned?”

He shrugged, considering her. “Maybe that too. But we’re talking in more general terms, so I think we should consider the origins of Vampyrism itself. It was not always part of human history. Where did it come from? If we can answer that, then we may be able to define it in such a way that we can find a way to counteract what is happening to you.”

She dug the heels of her hands into her eyes. “The beginning is a legend. Vampyrism is also called the serpent’s kiss, did you know that?”

“I’ve heard that before,” he said. “I thought the term was because of the fangs Vampyres get that descend when they’re hungry.”