Serpent's Kiss (Elder Races series: Book 3)

Rune sank to his knees, dragging Carling down with him. He clenched her so tightly that if she had been human she would have been in trouble. His body shook with convulsive shudders. He breathed in great sobbing gulps of air, like a drowning victim who had just been rescued. Other than that, he made no sound.

 

“Rune,” Carling said. She framed his wet face in both hands. He wasn’t looking at her. He was staring at something else. He wore an expression of someone looking at damnation. She dared a quick sidelong glance around. Everyone was staring either at them or the place where Rhoswen had stood. Julian strode over to pick up the sword. He looked furious.

 

The other Rune had disappeared. Had she imagined what she had seen?

 

“It’s all right,” Rune whispered. “It’s all right now.”

 

“Bloody hell,” Dragos muttered from across the clearing. “I don’t know what the fuck that was, but something definitely happened.”

 

 

 

 

 

TWENTY-ONE

 

 

Two weeks later, Rune still couldn’t speak of what had happened.

 

She realized what had to have occurred, of course. The brief glimpse Carling had gotten of Rune in two places, the sword Rhoswen had hidden underneath her cloak, the appalling state he had been in after he had killed her. It did not take a huge stretch of imagination to figure out what that meant. Carling tried a couple of times to get him to talk, but he looked so haunted and sick, she didn’t have the heart to push it. Instead she held on to him tightly when he woke in a sweat, and she teased him gently whenever he had stared into space for too long.

 

As for Rune, it felt like part of his soul would always be caught in the horror of what happened, in the loop that went around like a serpent’s tail coiling in on itself. But gradually he began to see how he could reach a point where he could set it aside and get on with the business of living.

 

After much discussion, and more argument, it was decided that Rune had not broken the laws of sanctuary that were meant to protect the Oracle and all who came to petition her. While several people besides Dragos were well aware that “something” had indeed happened, and it made everyone uniformly unhappy, no one else admitted to seeing Rune in two places for that brief moment in time, so no one understood what really had transpired.

 

Everyone agreed it was a mystery how Rune had gotten from one place to another so fast, but as Jaggar said, Rune was famous for his speed for a reason. As for Rune, he wouldn’t talk of it. At that point, Carling suspected he couldn’t. In the end they admitted that he had acted in defense of his mate. Since he did not instigate the violence, acting in defense was deemed acceptable. Meanwhile Julian swore he had no idea Rhoswen would do such a thing. Carling didn’t think many people actually believed him, but nothing could be proven one way or another.

 

They relocated to a beachside villa in Key Largo while Carling remained under quarantine and observation for three months. As far as prisons went, it was luxurious enough. Two-story windows along one side of the villa overlooked an infinity pool beside the ocean. The villa had an acre-length private beach, four bedrooms and four baths, a great room, a family room and a kitchen filled with a fortune in black granite countertops and Wolf appliances, including a Sub-Zero refrigerator and a wine storage unit. Rune cooked himself some mighty fancy-ass hamburgers and steaks in that kitchen.

 

There were two guesthouses on the property where Carling’s observers, the Demonkind Councillor Soren and the Elven Councillor Sidhiel, stayed along with a few of their attendants. Their mission was simple: to monitor Power activity in the area immediately around Carling. Often lights stayed on in either one or the other of the guesthouses, and the quiet sound of conversation drifted through open windows into the early hours of the morning. Occasionally Soren and Sidhiel ate dinner with Rune while Carling kept them company with a glass of wine, but more often than not the Councillors kept to themselves.

 

“This is much better than exile to my island,” Carling said to Rune. They were in the sitting area of the villa’s master bedroom. She was curled at one end of a couch with several books, and she had just hung up after an hour-long talk with Seremela.

 

“Hells yeah,” Rune agreed lazily. He wore cut-off jeans and nothing else, his long muscular legs and bare feet propped up on the opposite end of the couch. The sunshine loved him. Already he was burnished all over with a deeper golden tan. He sprawled on the rest of the couch, his head pillowed against her thigh as he channel surfed for cable movies on a fifty-six-inch flat-screen. “Got ESPN and SPIKE TV right here, baby. And I’m DVRing both Escape from New York and Escape from L. A. later. Snake Plissken is my man. Booyah.”

 

Carling made a note on her new iPad to remind herself to do a Google search for a definition of booyah. She told him, “I had in mind a rather different reason than cable TV.”

 

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