Serpent's Kiss (Elder Races #3)(83)

Rune force-fed that thought to the insane creature that tried to take over his head again, and this time he managed to keep the creature contained. He was glad he didn’t have to face Julian at that moment, because if the other male had actually been present, Rune didn’t think he could have.

“Julian,” Carling said. A pause. Her voice turned icily meticulous. “I am well aware of what we had agreed, but things have changed. The Wyr sentinel Rune and I are pursuing a line of research that is proving to be fruitful—”

Rune gripped the ends of the knife in both hands at the silence that followed.

When Carling next spoke, the iciness in her voice had turned into a whip. “You are my child,” she said to the King of the Nightkind. “My creation. I am not yours. I am not coming to you for permission to do anything. You may support me in this last endeavor or you may choose to believe I am chasing desperate dreams to my death. I don’t give a f**k either way. What you may not do is interfere with me or try to dictate my actions.”

He could hear the quiet click in the other room as Carling gently placed the phone receiver back in its cradle.

Rune lived in a brawl of an atmosphere where profanity was casual, used often and ignored for the most part. Hearing profanity come from Carling, who almost never swore, was somehow shocking, and it lent an odd, raw kind of intimacy to the conversation.

The knife snapped in his hands. He looked down at the pieces. He had bent it so much the time-stressed riveted joints had broken.

It wasn’t enough violence for him. He wanted to do damage to something else. Preferably to something with an aquiline Roman profile that said ouch.

He looked out the open French doors as he waited for Carling to step out of the bedroom. She didn’t. It was turning to early evening. Icarus had once again caught fire and was falling to the western horizon. Outside, much of the mist from earlier had burned away. What was left behind was a heavy haze that blanketed both land and sea, and turned the peaks of the Golden Gate Bridge into unearthly spires. Rune knew of an indigenous people who believed that when it was foggy, the veil between worlds became thin, and the spirits of ancestors and other things walked more freely on this land. Maybe they were right. Maybe he was one of those spirits, walking between the worlds.

He really needed to call Dragos now.

But then Carling’s Power rippled over the scene.

Instead of daylight, this time the passageway opened to a dark velvet sketch of night that overlaid the bright sunlit suite like a nightmare. He caught the heavy, humid scent of the river and the acrid hint of burning incense.

He stood and stared at the open bedroom door, his hands knotted in fists. Then he grabbed his sheathed knives. He walked to the bedroom. He studied every step he took, every nuance of the experience. He reached the bent place in the crossover passage, the turnaround that led to a different page. It rested on a singular point that was so precise it felt smaller than the tip of a pin. It would be so easy to lose track of that one tiny place, that single moment, in the infinite cascade of all the other moments in time. He tried hard to memorize the turnaround place, just in case he needed it in order to get back.

That is, if he could figure out how to use it. To his frustration, the turnaround place melted away from him, just as every moment in the present did when it slipped into the past.

He went much more cautiously than he had the first two times. Because what happened in Vegas didn’t always stay in Vegas, baby.

Here Carling was, at another cusp.

Each time she reached one of these places, she lost her life. The first time was her childhood life by the river. It always happened by the river.

The second time, she lost her life as a slave, and she went down on her knees every day to offer incense and say prayers of thanks to the strange golden god who claimed he was no god. But he had a sigil for a name, and with a murderous blow and a kiss to her forehead, he had killed the slave Khepri and remade her into Carling, the treasured goddaughter of one of the most powerful priests in the two lands.

Because of Rune’s edict, she had enjoyed much more time to herself than almost any other woman she knew, and her father-priest Akil was as good as his word and educated her as well as any man. At twenty-two summers, she had studied maat, the order of the universe, and the three types of sentient beings that were made up of the gods, the living, and the dead. She had been privileged to study heka as well, or “the ability to make things happen by indirect means,” and because she had access to temple libraries, she learned many of the spells that were formally known only by the priests.

Many of those priests were pompous, politically dangerous windbags. She watched them utter spells and perform religious rites, and they seemed like ridiculous buffoons. Sometimes they yelled the spells at the top of their lungs, as if shouting and waving their arms would draw the gods’ attention.

She could have told them: no matter how loudly or theatrically they prayed, the spells did not work if they did not have kneph, the sacred breath that breathed life into things and gave them form. Only when one had this Power could one awaken the true movement that lived in the spells and hope to call on the gods.

Carling had always had kneph, although she had not always known what to call it. When she cast a spell, it worked, although as a woman, it was heretical for her to claim as much, so she kept her studies on a scholarly note and the knowledge of her abilities private. And even though she was treated as a favored goddaughter, she was not a female of noble birth, so she could not become a Servant of God.