“I know what you had in mind,” Rune said. He reached behind his head to capture one of her hands and pressed her fingers against his mouth.
They were in daily talks with Seremela. Carling had FedExed her research to Seremela, for whatever good it might do, and Seremela was pouring over everything with a fine-tooth comb. The medusa had become obsessed with the medical puzzle they had given her, and her phone conversations were littered with her excited inquiries. She had just arranged for a vacation so she could come out to the villa for a prolonged visit.
“I think we need to lure Seremela away from her position as ME for the Cook County Morgue,” Carling remarked. She looked out the windows at the moonlight sparkling on the ocean water. “She’s underutilized there. I think she would be much happier focusing all her attention on research.”
“I think that’s a bitching idea,” Rune replied. “We could set her up in her own lab. I’d want her to be much closer though. I wonder if she might like to move to Florida?”
“We’ll have to ask her when she comes,” she said, smiling.
The Key Largo villa was a temporary arrangement for quarantine purposes, but the warm climate was so attractive to both of them, they were already talking about the possibility of settling somewhere in Florida. They just hadn’t agreed on where yet. Perhaps Miami Beach. It was on the ocean, connected to a major metropolitan area, and it was also just fifty miles away from a 720, 000-acre Everglades preserve, which was quite an attractive thing for an active Wyr to consider. The one consideration was finding a place to live—or building somewhere—that had plenty of space providing shelter from the sun.
Because it was two weeks later and Carling had not had another episode.
On Seremela’s advice, they had started out very carefully. Small watered-down amounts, sipped frequently. The first time Rune slit his finger and bled a few drops of blood into a small glass of wine. After having gone so long without drinking anything but wine, they hoped it would help Carling make a transition back to drinking blood again.
She found it unexpectedly difficult to take a swallow of the blood-infused wine, but managed after a brief struggle. It almost knocked her to her knees. She had thought his blood would taste spectacular, as burning and as intense as the rarest liqueur. It was so much more Powerful than she had imagined.
That one mouthful made her feel drunk, dizzy. She leaned on the kitchen counter, gasping. Rune snatched the wineglass out of her hand as it tilted sideways. He studied her worriedly. “How do you feel?” he asked. He put an arm around her waist. “Are you sick?”
She shook her head, and the world spun around her. Holy hell. She clutched at the counter.
“Are you going to throw up?” he demanded.
“No!” She tried to focus on him. “At least I don’t think so.”
Then euphoria hit. A wave of heat washed over her skin like a sheet of flame. When she turned around to face Rune, her eyes had gone garnet red.
His own expression flared. He whispered, “Hello, beautiful spiky girl.”
She growled, launched at him and took him down to the floor where they made love in a frenzied white heat.
Now she was able to ingest as much as a quarter of a cup of his blood at a time, mixed in a glass of wine. The Power in his blood knocked her nearly senseless every time, although she felt more energized than ever. There were side effects other than “crazed monkey sex” as Rune so eloquently put it. She was beginning to lose her ability to sense other creatures’ emotions. She also became more grounded in a way that she had forgotten. Her own Power was no longer revved at such a constant state of high velocity, and she tired more frequently. She was not able to hold her spell of protection against the sun for longer than an hour at a time. As soon as she had lost that ability, Rune had gone shopping online for cloaks, SPF + 100 sunblock, and other protective gear.
And just that afternoon she had taken a half-hour nap. It was such merciful refreshment, she woke with tears in her eyes. Rune stretched out on the bed beside her, his head propped in one hand, watching her as she slept. She turned to him and surprised a look of such tenderness on his face, her eyes watered more than ever. They moved at the same time, and held each other tight. He rocked her a little, his face buried in her hair.