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

She made it to the doorway before she felt his hand come down on her shoulder. It was too much. She knocked him away and spat out a Power-filled word that iced the air.

 

Rune froze in midmotion, his arm still stretched toward her. Then his Power surged in response, hot like a solar flare, and even though she had put enough force behind the spell to throw half the Vampyres in San Francisco into stasis, she knew it wasn’t going to be strong enough to hold him for long.

 

She never did get around to researching what spells would be effective against gryphons. She might regret that some day.

 

Fury pulsed from him like the outward rolling blast of a thermonuclear explosion. Slowly he began to move.

 

She fell back a step, staring. Then she turned and ran.

 

At first she headed for the house. Then she thought of Rhoswen’s stifling, resentful devotion, Rasputin’s frantic adoration, and she switched directions, racing along the path far faster than a human could ever hope to run, along the path that followed the cliff toward the other end of the island and the redwood forest. The evening sunshine slanted bars of light everywhere, transforming the idyllic scene into a deadly luminous prison.

 

When she was young, she had been taught that she was composed of many parts, her souls, her heart, her shadow, name and spirit.

 

How many pieces of yourself could you survive losing? When she had been just a child, she had lost her family and her freedom, and then she had lost her name. Just a few short years later, she had lost her breath and her heart had stopped beating. Then she lost almost everyone around her, not once but many times. With each decision she made that was based on Power, expediency, politics, survival and war, she lost pieces of her souls throughout the centuries. Her spirit felt gossamer-thin, in tatters.

 

She looked at the ground. Her attenuated, nimble shadow fled before her, as if trying to escape the nightmarish haunt she had become.

 

What if her shadow was the only real thing that was left of her? Had she, in the end, become nothing more than just the exercise of Power, the will to survive? If she removed the spell of protection, she would erupt into flames, but unlike the phoenix, she would not undergo a rebirth. Like a struck match, she would simply flare out of existence.

 

She could do it. She could go out, not gently into that good night but in a brilliant sunlit blaze, with no one around to witness. Her death might be solitary, as so very much of her life had been, but it would be her choice, her decision. Hers. She would own it, like she had claimed ownership of her life.

 

A cloud passed over the sun, so dense it eclipsed her shadow. She looked up.

 

It was no cloud but a great gold and bronze gryphon, soaring overhead. She could not imagine the kind of strength it must take to keep that heavy, muscled body of his aloft, and yet he made his flight seem so effortless.

 

Her fists clenched. He was a rampant impossibility, an enormous freak of nature.

 

He was such a stubborn ass.

 

She sucked in a lungful of air and screamed wordlessly at him. A harsh wrathful eagle’s cry sounded in reply.

 

The whole damn island wasn’t big enough for both of them. Okay fine. She already swore she was going to do it, and anyway, she was perfectly capable of being the one to leave if he wouldn’t do so. She took a sharp left, picked up speed, and sprinted at full strength over the edge of the cliff.

 

The wind whistled in her ears. As she fell, she was already making plans. She would swim back to San Francisco. Julian wouldn’t like her return. They had reached an understanding, she and the Nightkind King, when she had come to the island to die. But Julian would have to adjust, and Rhoswen was perfectly capable of making the crossing with the dog on her own.

 

Carling rolled in the air to dive headfirst and watched the foaming white-capped water rush toward her. She reached out to it with both arms, anticipating the cold shock of the plunge into water with grim satisfaction.

 

Hard claws jerked her upward with gut-wrenching force just before she hit. Son of a bitch. Her head snapped back. As the universe wheeled, she caught a glimpse of the gigantic lion paws that curled to grip her by the shoulder and thigh. The edge of tremendous bronze wings hammered down on either side of her.

 

She shouted at Rune, “You did not just do that!”

 

His deep voice sounded overhead. “How is that disbelief working out for you?”

 

The need to do violence caused her fists to shake. He swooped up with her to the top of the cliff and dumped her on the ground. With a twist of her hips, she flipped onto her back and drove her fist upward as hard as she could. Before she could get the blow to full extension, he knocked her hands aside and pinned her by driving his claws deep into the ground on either side of her arms.

 

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