“She hasn’t.”
“Then you can do it. Julian’s preparing to take Carling out, and I don’t want you anywhere near that fallout when it hits.”
“She was a good ally to you,” Rune said to the male who had just become his former friend.
“Yes she was, but the Wyr can’t be involved in this problem too. We’ve still got border tensions with the Elves, and we’ve involved ourselves too deeply in the Dark Fae problems for too long. We’re overextended, understaffed and short on political tolerance. And anyway, I don’t blame Julian. If someone was that unstable and posted that kind of threat to my demesne, I would be making moves to do the same thing. So get out of there and get your ass home.”
“No,” Rune said.
That was when the dragon’s voice got very quiet. “I don’t think I heard you correctly.”
“You heard me correctly.”
“What do you mean, no? Have you lost your fucking mind?”
“I mean no. I quit. Effective right now.”
“You can’t quit. I won’t let you.”
“Think I just did,” Rune said.
“You’re making a very big mistake,” growled the Lord of the Wyr.
“What’s that you say, Dragos? I can’t hear you. You’re breaking up,” Rune said as he crushed his iPhone.
EIGHTEEN
In the bedroom, Seremela tactfully looked out the window as Carling stripped. Carling had lost all vestige of modesty within her first hundred years of existence, but for the doctor’s sake, she slipped on a hotel bathrobe. Then she patiently put up with a very thorough medical examination.
“I’m not sure what to make of this,” Seremela murmured. “But your temperature is elevated.”
“Is it?” Her eyebrows rose. “By how much?”
“A good five degrees. No doubt you already know that Vampyres tend to reflect the temperature of their surroundings, which in most rooms tends to be around seventy to seventy-two degrees. You’re running hot at seventy-six point five.” Seremela popped the plastic off her thermometer and tucked the thermometer away in her physician’s bag.
Carling bit back a smile. “I have been in close contact with Rune for quite a while, and he’s like a furnace.”
The medusa looked down. “I imagine so. He cares for you a great deal.” There was a trace of wistfulness in Seremela’s voice, and more than a trace in her emotions.
Carling’s impulse to smile faded. She said quietly, “I am his mate. The timing is inconvenient.”
The medusa’s head came up. Her eyes had gone wide with a stricken compassion. “Oh gods, this is doubly difficult then.”
“Yes.”
Seremela sighed. “Physically you appear just fine, Councillor. Your Power is very interesting to me, but since we’ve just met, I have no way to gauge or assess it. All I know is it hasn’t fluctuated while I have been in your presence. And I wish I could take blood and do some testing, but I don’t have medical privileges at any facilities here.”
Carling said, “At its root, Vampyrism is a blood condition, so it seems highly probable that any original venom would have been hemotoxic in nature.”
“That’s what I think too,” said Seremela.
Carling said, “Ingesting blood is also the only way Vampyres can take in nourishment, at least until they hit the stage I’m in.”
“If it’s all about the blood, then my guess is that blood will also hold the key.”
All about the blood. Carling nodded thoughtfully. She knew very well that feelings weren’t scientific, but it felt right to her, felt true.
Seremela studied her. “And you haven’t taken in any physical nourishment in almost two hundred years?”
“That’s correct,” Carling said. “Drinking blood began to make me violently ill. Let me tell you, throwing up gouts of blood is not a pleasant experience.”
Seremela winced. “I imagine not. Did your succubus abilities appear before or after you lost your ability to tolerate ingesting blood?”
“Some time afterward. I went through a couple of weeks of feeling weak and lethargic, and I ached all over,” Carling told her. She set aside the bathrobe and dressed again in the jeans and flirty T-shirt. “It reminded me a little of when I was first turned, actually. I would get hungry and try to drink, and then it would all come back up again. I finally lost the desire to try. Then some time later I realized I could sense what other living creatures were feeling. The stronger the emotion, the more revitalized I felt. By then I had heard stories of the oldest of us becoming succubi, otherwise I would have been more frightened than I was.”
Seremela sat down in the bedroom’s chair. “It sounds possible that becoming a succubus was a defense response from your mutated immune system. You lost the ability to process your normal form of nourishment, and your body responded accordingly.”