Serpent's Kiss (Elder Races #3)(87)

Some instinct told her he knew very well she had come out of the fade. Why wouldn’t he turn to look at her?

She stared out the window again, and thought. The silence of ages lay heavily between them.

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.

While she was not familiar with the details, she knew that when Wyr mated, they did so only once. Dragos, Lord of the Wyr, had just found his mate. Tiago, Wyr warlord and thunderbird, had mated with the Dark Fae Queen Niniane. Was that what Rune had meant? Was she that lucky—and he that damned?

She straightened her spine and took a breath, and began to speak. “You did not change me this time.”

His head jerked sharply to the side, as if she had struck him, but other than that he did not move and he still would not look at her.

“I cast a spell one night and had a vision of you. That was my experience of it, anyway,” she said. “I remember you warning me to take care. After that I studied defensive spells, and I put up wards when I slept. I was very careful.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Rune asked coldly.

She looked down at the fun, flirtatious outfit she wore and gently smoothed the soft material of her top. She kept her voice calm as she told him, “I’m working through what happened, and what might have been different. I remember agreeing that you needed to go back to warn me and I remember taking responsibility for that. I think we got lucky. I think we changed what we needed to change, and everything else stayed stable.”

Everything she told him was the truth. She would not lie to him. His truthsense would be highly developed, and in case, he deserved better than that. But even as her words told him a kind of truth, her soul whispered a deeper, more heartfelt one.

After the first few nights, when the blaze of excitement had died down, doubt had crept in. She couldn’t believe he had meant what she thought he had said. She had to have misheard him, or misunderstood. The years passed and gradually turned to centuries, and as she received no other message or sign, she settled into a more mature and balanced “wait and see” attitude. She would not put the entirety of her life on hold for a single spell-induced vision, no matter how vivid or compelling it might have been.

But she had never forgotten how his kiss had burned. She had never let her petty king of a husband kiss her on the mouth, ever, nor had she allowed that liberty to any of her other lovers. Not that she had taken all that many of them, considering the years of her existence. She had stopped after a few hopeful attempts, because they either fell asleep after sex or they ran away, and it was all so relentlessly banal she would rather have walked unshielded into the sun than have to endure one more meaningless, insipid love affair.

Now as she looked at his stiff half-averted form, she told him silently, I fell in love with you earlier today in the hotel lobby. And everything you once said has come to pass. But so much time has gone by. Too much time. So many tomorrows, and tomorrows, and tomorrows, that the pharaohs really do no longer exist, and all the gods have changed and everything I once knew has turned to rubble or has completely disappeared. We have come together too late.

You must live or I will die.

Now I am the one who is dying, and you cannot mate with me and hope to live. What a Gordian knot we have tied ourselves into.

And as Alexander the Great had known, the only solution to untangling an unsolvable knot is to slice through it.

She looked down at the bedspread.

“So let’s review,” she said. Her voice was under perfect control. “Because of your help, in just a few days I have learned a tremendous amount about my condition, in fact more than I have learned in the last two centuries. And now that Dr. Telemar will soon be here to consult, I am hopeful I will learn even more. I owe you a big debt of gratitude.”

He had turned to look at her. She could sense it, that tall powerful black-clad figure standing just barely at the edge of her sight. Underneath the cover of one hand, she curled the other into a tight fist.

“But we both know we can’t risk any more of these strange collisions in time,” Carling continued. “They are too dangerous for either one of us, and God only knows what we might have changed in the rest of the world.” And she knew she could not trust her younger self around him, not for a single moment. If that younger Carling saw him again, she would never be able to contain her joy and she would not know of any reason why she should. “Rune, it’s time for you to back out of this now. You’ve helped me enough. You’ve certainly done far more than anybody could have expected. I want you to go back to your life now.”

The beast that had taken over Rune studied his prey with a critical eye.

Her facade could not have been better. She had no pulse for him to gauge, and she would not show him the look in her eyes. Her beautiful body was arranged just so against the pillows on the bed, like a posed still life, all artifice and composition. She was cool, controlled, rational perfection. She appeared to be a completely different creature than the fierce, eager young tiger he had left just moments ago, and why wouldn’t she be a different creature, when that moment was, for her, thousands of years ago?

But her facade was too perfect, and that was her fatal flaw. She should have been reacting more to what had happened between them this afternoon, all that magnificent crazed passion, their laughter and the moments of real intimacy. The memory of what had happened in the fade should have unfolded naturally, as it had the first couple of times. Instead that was the first thing she offered him, only to coolly negate it.