Rune thought of Rhoswen, existing on the bloodwine. But bloodwine hadn’t been invented that long ago. He asked, “How did she survive by herself?”
Carling shrugged. “As best I could guess, she lived off the blood of rats and other small desert mammals. Animal blood doesn’t have the same nutritive value for us as human blood, so she had to have been malnourished. I took everything she said with a healthy dose of skepticism, because she was quite mad. I might have dismissed her stories completely except for the things my people found in the settlement itself, like the empty sarcophagi in the houses, and the strange carvings on the cavern walls depicting a huge, part-serpent, part-human creature. Then the woman showed me how her fangs descended when she hungered, and how she burned in the sun, and I was hooked. In retrospect I had to be more than a little crazy myself to let her bite me, let alone consent to a blood exchange, but I was still young, and the young are always crazy.”
Rune’s eyebrows rose. “Could you draw what the carvings of the creature looked like?”
“Not from memory, not after so long,” Carling said. She watched his wide shoulders sag. Then she smiled. “So I guess it’s probably a good thing I drew lots of sketches at the time.”
His gaze lit with a fiery expression that spread to his face. “You didn’t. Did you? Where are they now?”
She nodded toward the hall. “In the other room.”
“They’re here?” He smiled. “You’re a wicked tease. I like that about you.”
She smiled back. “I’m learning it from an expert.”
His smile widened. “Come on. Don’t just sit there.”
He grabbed her by the hand and yanked her out of her seat before she realized what he meant to do. Laughing, she led the way down the short hall to the part of her library that held the oldest scrolls. There, back in one corner of the room, she went to her knees to look along the row of cubbyholes that held scrolls of papyrus so old they had to be spelled in order to keep them from disintegrating.
Rune watched Carling kneel on the floor and run her fingers along the bottom row of cubbyholes. He found every aspect of her scholarship fascinating, from her scientific research to the neat notations she had made on the labels over each cubbyhole. More than fascinating, he found it endearingly nerdy, refreshingly efficient and sexy as hell.
He rubbed his mouth. Of course he found everything about her as sexy as hell.
She murmured something to herself and pulled out a scroll. “Here it is. We have to be careful. I haven’t bothered to renew the protection spells on these in a long time. It looks like the humidity is starting to get to them.”
He knelt in front of her. “I’m just amazed so many of these have lasted as long as they have. It must be your penchant for keeping your libraries and workshops in quiet, out-of-the-way places.”
“I’m sure that has helped.”
He gently took hold of the corners of the scroll she indicated, watching as she eased it open with slender fingers.
Then he stared down at the faded lines that had been drawn in some unknown ink, at a face and form he had not seen in a very, very long time. It had four short muscular legs with powerful, gripping claws and an elongated, serpentine body. Its tail wound in coils, and its neck rose up from the two legs into a cobra-like hood that framed a distinctly humanlike, female face.
“Hello, Python,” he said softly. “You crazy old whack-job, you.”
TEN
It was Carling’s turn to stare at him. “This is someone real?”
He corrected her. “This was someone real. Our paths crossed a couple of times. She disappeared a very long time ago. Last I heard, she was rumored to have died. She was one of the between creatures.”
“What do you mean?”
Rune released the ancient sketch, letting it curl back into a scroll. “There are a few creatures who came to form, not on Earth or in Other lands but in a between place, like in a crossover passage,” he explained.
In her crouch, the angle of Carling’s eyes and cheekbones were pronounced, giving her a feline look. The urge to pounce on her pulsed through him like a drug, but he held himself in check, just barely.
She asked, “Like you?”
“Yes. Python was another one.” He stood, the urge still clawing through his system and making him antsy. “She was one of those strange, hard-to-categorize creatures. She wasn’t Wyr. As far as I know, she never developed a human form, so in modern terms I suppose we would have classified her as Demonkind.”