Serpent's Kiss (Elder Races #3)(86)

She studied his face, her forehead crinkled. “But you will remember me some time?”

This is crazy, he thought. It makes no sense. The time slippage is so far out of sync it is working in loops, like a serpent’s coils. She and I are drawing each other into existence. If we don’t find our way out of this, we may not survive.

He had no cunning for this, no grand plan or intelligent rationale, no established ethical protocol for time travel like out of a sci-fi movie. This was just raw, unvarnished truth, and deadly uncharted territory for how it might carve through history.

And because he had gone much too far to stop now, he gave her everything he had.

He put his lips to her forehead and said against her skin, “I will remember you, very soon after the Adriyel River. And when I do, you will come to mean everything to me. Who I am at this moment, this man who is standing in front of you—I would wait forever for you. But you must live to get there or none of this will happen.”

She reached to touch the place where his lips met her skin, murmuring, “It always happens by the river.”

He closed his eyes and pressed his lips to those gentle, questing fingers. “What does?”

“The beginning of a new life.” She pulled back to look at him, and the expression in hers was grave. “If there is a way for me to live to get there, I will find it.”

“There is,” he said, pushing all of his conviction into the two words. “You found it once. You got there already. But now I have come back and touched your life again, and every time I do that something else changes, and I am afraid—” His throat closed and for a moment he could not continue. “I am so goddamn afraid that by coming tonight I might have changed something else you do or decide, and you won’t be there in my life when I go back. And I have to go back, because I don’t belong here.”

Her trembling stopped. She stood steady and straight under his hands, her Power a slim, newly minted, adamant flame. She repeated, “If there is a way for me to live to get there, I will find it.”

He took a deep breath as he searched her gaze, and the tiger looked back at him, unafraid. Another realization jolted through him, and even as he spoke he knew that the words he said were true.

“This is not all on you. Everything that has happened to me, I have remembered,” said the gryphon. “I have held my place and my identity as time and space have flowed around me. The past has shifted twice for us already, and I remember all of it. If you fail somehow—if you die—I swear I will look for a way to walk through time again to find you. No matter where you are. No matter when. I swear it.”

He should have known. The joy that filled her face had a keen ferocity that would propel her forward through the centuries. Gods, what passion this mortal had. It filled the chalice of her heart to overflowing.

He thought of his Carling, sitting unprotected in the hotel suite. Time was flowing for her as well. “I have to leave,” he said abruptly. “You must take shelter. Go inside. Do not sleep. Do everything you can to protect yourself. This night, for you, is a dangerous one.”

She looked around in sharp, quick assessment and gave him a firm nod. “I will take care. It will be all right.”

This young woman wasn’t his Carling. If Rune and this young woman had the luxury of unlimited time together, realistically he wasn’t even sure if they could find anything much to talk about for any length of time. But he still could not resist cupping her soft cheek. “I will treasure the memory of meeting you like this,” he said, and he kissed her.

Carling stood frozen and focused everything she had on the touch of his mouth on hers, so fierce yet tender, and filled with the blaze of his Power. It was the first time anyone had ever touched her like that. She knew she would never allow that elderly petty king to touch her on the lips. Then Rune let her go and scooped his weapons off the ground, and she watched as he turned on his heel away from her and faded from sight.

He just faded away, like a dream. Or perhaps a spell-induced vision.

She fingered her lips. They still tingled even though he was gone.

You must live or I will die, he had said. And that could not happen, not to the one who held her soul.

I will treasure the memory of meeting you too, she thought.

And wait forever for you.

Carling opened her eyes and gazed out the open French doors in the hotel bedroom at the rich heavy gold of the westering sun. Morning might be bright and beautiful, but it did not hold the same poignancy as the evening, that had gathered all the day’s memories and carried them into night.

She sat on the bed with her legs curled up, her back braced against the headboard. Rune stood at the open doors, facing outside. He leaned a broad shoulder against the frame, his arms crossed. His quiet, strong profile had an uncertain vulnerability she had never seen in him before. He looked proud, self-contained and braced for bad news, a god in black who claimed he was not a god, great and golden-haired and so intensely formed, his life force boiled the air around him.

He was indeed best seen in the hot bright light of day, where he shone with all the colors of creation’s fire. Copper, yellow, gold, bronze, and the warm fierce amber of those playful, ageless lion’s eyes.

Yes, that was exactly how she remembered it, both so long ago and again just recently on the island. Her soul, winging out of her body, and flying irrevocably toward him.