Serpent's Kiss (Elder Races #3)(50)

Listening to his rich, deep voice with her eyes closed evoked more erotic images, of him murmuring velvet words against her bare skin in the dark of a desert night. She stiffened and brought her flattened hands down on the table with a stinging slap, as she forced her mind to stay on topic. “There is that,” she said. “But it has been called the serpent’s kiss for a very long time.”

He frowned. “Was it called that in your youth?”

“Yes. Once, it was believed the bite was a necessary part of a ritual for changing someone. Now we know there’s very little possibility of Vampyre bites themselves causing the change, otherwise they would infect everyone they fed upon. To successfully spread the pathogen you need a blood exchange, and Vampyres don’t need to drink the blood of those they change, only offer their own. The human can either drink the Vampyre’s blood or let it flow into a cut. As long as the Vampyre’s blood flows fresh, and the integrity of the human’s skin is compromised, in most cases that’s all that’s needed to initiate the change. Anything added to that is just . . .” She lifted a hand in a fill-in-the-blank kind of gesture.

“Personal choice,” he said. “Superstition. Religion. Fetish.”

“Sometimes all of the above,” she said. She had already reached the point where she had stopped taking physical nourishment by the time she had turned Rhoswen and Duncan. She frowned as well as she thought back to the time when she had changed.

Those early memories were not pleasant to revisit. As soon as she had learned there was the possibility of changing and becoming immortal, it had driven her beyond all reason. She had needed to discover if the stories told around her campfires had any merit to them, whereas she had learned long since then that myth and legend were too often an impenetrable tangle, the stories saying far more about the people who told them than imparting any real truths about the world they lived in.

Rune stayed silent as if he sensed she needed the time to think. She sighed.

Then, because he was waiting, she said, “It started for me when I heard stories. You know the kind of thing, those tall tales told across the flicker of firelight late at night. I guess I heard something one too many times, about a stranger wandering into an encampment full of hunger and a burning gaze that mesmerized, or a caravan found with everyone dead and covered with bite marks. About a rare, strange people who avoided the sun and lived forever. About a dark miracle called the serpent’s kiss that could transform someone into a god. I began to ask the storytellers where they had heard their tale. I moved across the desert, following each thread back as far as I could. I lost the trail of most stories but was able to follow one to its beginning, and of course that was all I needed.”

“What did you find?” Rune asked. He watched her with close fascination.

She gave him a wry smile. “A Vampyre, of course. She was a hermit living in a corner of a huge cavern, with the remains of a settlement nearby. She talked of a serpent goddess who had once lived in the cavern and honored her with the kiss of life that was also death.”

“Serpent goddess,” Rune repeated. His eyes narrowed.

She nodded. “The settlement had been filled with worshippers of this serpent goddess. According to the woman, the settlement had gradually died out when the goddess had left. Either all the humans had been killed or they ran away, and the Vampyres had abandoned the place, all except for this last priestess who had stayed, hoping her goddess would return.”

Rune thought of Rhoswen, existing on the bloodwine. But bloodwine hadn’t been invented that long ago. He asked, “How did she survive by herself?”

Carling shrugged. “As best I could guess, she lived off the blood of rats and other small desert mammals. Animal blood doesn’t have the same nutritive value for us as human blood, so she had to have been malnourished. I took everything she said with a healthy dose of skepticism, because she was quite mad. I might have dismissed her stories completely except for the things my people found in the settlement itself, like the empty sarcophagi in the houses, and the strange carvings on the cavern walls depicting a huge, part-serpent, part-human creature. Then the woman showed me how her fangs descended when she hungered, and how she burned in the sun, and I was hooked. In retrospect I had to be more than a little crazy myself to let her bite me, let alone consent to a blood exchange, but I was still young, and the young are always crazy.”

Rune’s eyebrows rose. “Could you draw what the carvings of the creature looked like?”

“Not from memory, not after so long,” Carling said. She watched his wide shoulders sag. Then she smiled. “So I guess it’s probably a good thing I drew lots of sketches at the time.”

His gaze lit with a fiery expression that spread to his face. “You didn’t. Did you? Where are they now?”

She nodded toward the hall. “In the other room.”

“They’re here?” He smiled. “You’re a wicked tease. I like that about you.”

She smiled back. “I’m learning it from an expert.”

His smile widened. “Come on. Don’t just sit there.”

He grabbed her by the hand and yanked her out of her seat before she realized what he meant to do. Laughing, she led the way down the short hall to the part of her library that held the oldest scrolls. There, back in one corner of the room, she went to her knees to look along the row of cubbyholes that held scrolls of papyrus so old they had to be spelled in order to keep them from disintegrating.