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  Serpent's Kiss

  ( Elder Races - 3 )

  Thea Harrison

  In the latest Novel of the Elder Races, a Queen on the brink of sanity has no one to rely on except the Wyr warrior whose conviction is every bit as strong as his passion.

  In order to save his friend's life, Wyr sentinel Rune Ainissesthai made a bargain with Vampyre Queen Carling—without knowing what she would ask from him in return. But when Rune attempts to make good on his debt, he finds a woman on the edge.

  Recently, Carling's Power has become erratic, forcing her followers to flee in fear. Despite the danger, Rune is drawn to the ailing Queen and decides to help her find a cure for the serpent's kiss—the vampyric disease that's killing her.

  With their desire for each other escalating just as quickly as Carling's instability spirals out of control, the sentinel and the Queen will have to rely on each other if they have any hope of surviving the serpent's kiss.

  Serpent's Kiss

  Elder Races - 3

  by

  Thea Harrison

  Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.

  The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

  For the Elder Races, this generally involves bloodshed of some sort and a spate of funerals.

  —AMBROSE BIERCE ON REVISING THE DEVIL’S DICTIONARY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Once again, I have a lot of people to thank:

  To Luann Reed-Siegel, who has done an amazing job on copy-editing.

  To publicist Erin Galloway at Penguin, who has been friendly, patient, informative, prompt, dedicated, and enthusiastic.

  To Janet and Don, who offered.

  To my beta readers Shawn, Kristin, Anne, and Fran for their prompt, intelligent feedback. You guys are awesome!

  To Lorene and Carol, as always.

  To Matt, for his continuing goodhearted, generous work on the website.

  To my editor, Cindy Hwang, and my agent, Amy Boggs. Thank you again, for everything you do.

  And last but most important, to you, the readers. Without you, none of this would be happening. I’m eternally grateful.

  ONE

  “I am a bad woman, of course,” said Carling Severan, the Vampyre sorceress, in an absent tone of voice. “It is a fact that I made peace with many centuries ago. I calibrate everything I do, even the most generous-seeming gesture, in terms of how it may serve me.”

  Carling sat in her favorite armchair by a spacious window. The chair’s butter-soft leather had long ago molded to the contours of her body. Outside the window lay a lush, well-tended garden that was ornamented with the subtle hues of the moonlit night. Her gaze was trained on the scene, but, like her face, the expression in her long almond-shaped eyes was blank.

  “Why would you say such a thing?” Rhoswen asked. There were tears in the younger Vampyre’s voice as she knelt beside the armchair, her blonde head turned up to Carling like a flower’s to a midnight sun. “You’re the most wonderful person in the world.”

  “That is very sweet of you.” Carling kissed Rhoswen’s forehead, since the other woman seemed to need it. Although the distance in Carling’s gaze lessened, it did not entirely disappear. “But those are rather disturbing words. If you believe that of someone such as I, you must acquire more discernment.”

  Her servant’s tears spilled over and streaked down a cameo-perfect face. Rhoswen threw her arms around Carling with a sob.

  Carling’s sleek eyebrows rose. “What is this?” she asked, her tone weary. “What have I said to upset you?”

  Rhoswen shook her head and clung tighter.

  Rhoswen was one of Carling’s two youngest progeny. Carling had stopped creating Vampyres long ago, except for a few extraordinarily talented exceptions she had discovered in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Rhoswen had been part of a shabby Shakespearean theatre company, with a voice of pure gold and a fatal case of pulmonary tuberculosis. Carling had turned Rhoswen when she had been a frightened, dying eighteen-year-old. She allowed the younger woman greater liberties than she did her other servants. She endured Rhoswen’s strangling hold as she thought.

  She said, “We were talking about the events that led up to the Dark Fae Queen’s coronation. You persist in believing that I did a good thing when I healed Niniane and her lover Tiago when they were injured. While the results might have been beneficial, I was merely pointing out what a selfish creature at heart I really am.”

  “Two days ago,” Rhoswen said into her lap. “We had that conversation two days ago, and then you faded again.”

  “Did I?” She straightened her back, bracing herself against the news. “Well, we knew the deterioration was accelerating.”

  No one fully understood why very old Vampyres went through a period of increasing mental deterioration before they disinte-grated into outright madness, then death. Since it was rare for Vampyres to achieve such an extreme old age, the phenomenon was little known outside the upper echelon of the Nightkind community. Vampyres lived violent lives, and they tended to die from other causes first.

  Perhaps it was the inevitable progression of the disease itself. Perhaps, Carling thought, in the end our beginning contains the seeds of our eventual downfall. The souls that began as human were never meant to live the near-immortal life that the Vampyrism gave them.

  Rhoswen’s tear-streaked face lifted. “But you got better for a while! In Chicago, and later at the Dark Fae coronation, you were fully alert and functioning. You were present for every moment. We just have to keep you stimulated with new things.”

  Carling regarded her with a wry expression. Extraordinary experiences did seem to help, as they jolted one into alertness for a time. The problem was they only helped temporarily. To someone who has witnessed the passage of millennia, after a while even the extraordinary experiences became ordinary.

  She sighed and admitted, “I had a couple of episodes I did not share with you.”

  The grief that filled Rhoswen’s expression at that was positively Shakespearian. Carling’s sense of wryness deepened as she looked upon the face of fanatic devotion and knew she had done nothing whatsoever to deserve it.

  She had been born into obscurity so long ago the details of that time had faded from history. She had been kidnapped into slavery, whipped nearly to death and given as a concubine to an aging desert king, and she had sworn she would never let anyone take a lash to her again. She seduced the king into making her a queen and squandered an almost unimaginably long life in the acquisition of Power. She learned poisons, and warfare, and sorcery, how to rule and how to hold a grudge with all of her heart, and then she discovered Vampyrism, the serpent’s kiss that had given her near immortality.

  She had played chess with demons for human lives, counseled monarchs and warred with monsters. Throughout the unwinding scroll of centuries she had ruled more than one country with unwavering ruthlessness in her slender iron fist. She knew spells that were so secret the knowledge of their existence had all but passed from this earth, and she had seen things so wondrous the sight of them had brought proud men to their knees. She had conquered the darkness to walk in the full light of day, and she had lost, and lost, and lost so very many people and things that even grief failed to move her much anymore.

  All of those fabulous experiences were now fading into the ornamented night.

  There was simply nowhere else to take her life, no adventure so compelling she must fight above all else to survive and see it through, no mountaintop she had to scale. After everything she had done to survive, after fighting to live for so long and to rule, she had now become . . . disinterested.

  And here was the final of all treasures, the last jewel in her casket
of secrets that rested on top of the others, winking its onyx light.

  The Power she had worked so hard to accumulate was pulsing in rhythm with the accelerating deterioration of her mind. She saw it flare all around her in an exquisite transparent shimmer. It covered her in a shroud that sparkled like diamonds.

  She had not expected that her death would be so lovely.

  She had lost track of when it had begun. The past and the present intermingled in her mind. Time had become a riddle. Perhaps it had been a hundred years ago. Or perhaps it had been the entirety of her life, which held certain symmetry. That for which she had fought so hard, shed blood over, and cried tears of rage would be what consumed her in the end.

  Another Power flare was building. She could sense its inevitability, like the oncoming crescendo in an immortal symphony, or the next intimate pulse of her long-abandoned, almost-forgotten heartbeat. The expression in her eyes turned vague as she focused her attention on that ravishing internal flame.

  Just before it engulfed her again, she noticed an oddity. There was no sound in the house around them, no movement from other Vampyres, no spark of human emotion. There was nothing but Rhoswen’s hitched breathing as the younger Vampyre knelt at her feet, and the small contented sounds of a dog nearby as he scratched at his ear then dug out a nesting place in his floor cushion. Carling had lived for a long time surrounded by jackals eager to feed from scraps that fell from the tables of those in Power, but sometime over the last week, all her usual attendants and sycophants had fled.

  Some creatures had a well-developed sense of self-preservation, unlike others.

  She said to Rhoswen, “I suggest you work harder on acquiring that sense of discernment.”

  Every little thing is going to be all right.

  Recently Rune had quoted Bob Marley to Niniane Lorelle when she had been at a low point in her life. Niniane was young for a faerie, a sweet woman and had been a close friend of his for a long time. She also happened to be the Dark Fae Queen now and the newest entry on America’s list of the top ten most powerful people in the country. Rune had brought Bob up in conversation to comfort her after an assassination attempt had been made on her life, in which a friend of hers had been killed, and her mate Tiago had nearly died as well.

  And damn if that Marley song didn’t keep running through his head ever since. It was one of those brain viruses, like a TV commercial or a musical theme from a movie that got stuck on perpetual replay, and he couldn’t find an off switch for the sound system that was wired into his brain.

  Not that, in the normal course of things, he didn’t like Bob’s music. Rune just wanted him to shut up for a little freaking while so he could get some shut-eye.

  Instead Rune kept waking up in the middle of the night, staring at his ceiling as silk sheets sandpapered his oversensitive skin and mental snapshots of recent events shuttered against his mind’s retina while Bob kept on playing.

  Every little thing.

  Snap, and Rune’s other good friend Tiago was sprawled on his back in a forested clearing, gutted and drenched in his own blood, while Niniane knelt at his head and held on to him in perfect terror.

  Snap, and Rune stared into the gorgeous blank expression of one of the most Powerful Nightkind rulers in history, as he grabbed Carling by the shoulders, shook her hard and roared point-blank in her face.

  Snap, and he struck a bargain with Carling that saved Tiago’s life but could very well end his own.

  Snap, and Carling was walking naked out of the Adriyel River at twilight, deep in the heart of the Dark Fae land, drenched in silvery water that glistened in the dying day as if she wore a transparent gown of stars. The curves and hollows of her muscled body, the dark hair that lay slick against her shapely skull, her high-cheeked, inscrutable Egyptian face—they were all so fucking perfect. And one of the most perfect things about her was also one of the most tragic, for the lithe sensual beauty of her body had been marred with dozens of long white lash scars. When she had been a mortal human, she had been whipped with such force it must have been a ferocious cruelty, and yet she moved with the strong, sleek confident sensuality of a tiger. The sight of her had stopped his breath, stopped his thinking, stopped his soul, his everything, so that he needed some kind of cosmic reboot that hadn’t happened yet because part of him was still caught frozen in that moment of epiphany.

  Snap, and he bore witness as an antique gun simultaneously fired and exploded in the forest clearing, killing both a traitor and a good woman. A woman he had liked very much. A strong, funny, fragile human who shouldn’t have lost her short precious life because he and his fellow sentinel Aryal had screwed up and left her to protect Niniane on her own.

  Snap, and he saw Cameron’s face when she had been alive. The human had had the long, strong body of an athlete, her spare features sprinkled with good humor and cinnamon-colored freckles.

  Snap, and he saw Cameron that final time as the Dark Fae soldiers prepared and wrapped her body for transportation back to her family in Chicago. All the pretty cinnamon color had leached out of her freckles. The exploding gun she had shot to save Niniane’s life had taken out a large chunk of her head. It was always so harsh when you saw a friend in that last, saddest state. They were okay. They didn’t hurt anymore. At that point you were the one who was wounded.

  Every little thing is going to be all right.

  Except sometimes it wasn’t, Bob. Sometimes things got so fucked up all you could do was send them home in a body bag.

  Rune’s temper grew short. Usually he was an easy-going kind of Wyr, but he started snapping off people’s heads for no reason. Metaphorically, anyway. At least he hadn’t started snapping off people’s heads for real. Still, people started to avoid him.

  “What’s up your ass?” Aryal had asked after Niniane’s coronation, when they had crossed over from Adriyel to Chicago and were en route back to New York.

  They took their preferred method of travel and flew in their Wyr forms. Aryal was his fellow sentinel and a harpy, which meant she was a right royal bitch ninety percent of the time. Usually her snarky attitude cracked him up. At the moment it almost had him drop-kicking her into the side of a skyscraper.

  “I’m being haunted by Marley’s ghost,” he told her.

  Aryal slanted a dark eyebrow at him. When she was in her harpy form, the angles of her face were pronounced, upswept. Her gray-fade-to-black wings beat strongly in the hot summer wind that blew wild around them. “Which ghost?” the harpy asked. “The past, present or future?”

  Huh? It took him a second to catch on. Then the Dickens connection happened in his head and he thought, Jacob Marley, not Bob. Aryal had gotten the Jacob Marley character and the three spirits of Christmas past, present and future all muddled up.

  Time and time and time. What happened, what is, and what is yet to come.

  He barked out a laugh. The sound was filled with ground glass. “All of them,” he said. “I’m being haunted by all of them.”

  “Dude, give it up,” said Aryal, in a mild tone that he recognized as a conciliatory one, coming as it was from her. “Believe in Christmas already.”

  The harpy looked almost delicate as he flew by her side. His Wyr form was that of a gryphon. He had the body of a lion and the head and wings of a golden eagle. His paws were the size of hubcaps and tipped with long wicked retractable claws, and his eagle’s head had lion-colored eyes. His feline body had breadth and power across the chest, sleek strong haunches, and was the dun color of hot desert places. In his Wyr form he was immense, easily the size of an SUV, with a correspondingly huge wingspan.

  In his human form, Rune stood six-foot-four, and he had the broad shoulders and lean hard muscles of a swordsman. He had sun-bronzed fine-grained skin with laugh lines at the corners of lion’s eyes that were the color of sunlit amber. His even features and white smile were popular commodities, especially with those of the female persuasion, and the mane of sun-streaked hair that fell to his broad shoulders held
glints of pale gold, chestnut and burnished copper.

  He was one of the four gryphons of the Earth, revered in ancient India and Persia, an immortal Wyr who came into being at the birth of the world. Time and space had buckled when the Earth was formed. The buckling created dimensional pockets of Other land where magic pooled, time moved differently, modern combustible technologies didn’t work and the sun shone with a different light. What came to be known as the Elder Races, the Wyrkind and the Elves, the Light and Dark Fae, the Nightkind, Demonkind, human witches, and all other manner of monstrous creatures, tended to cluster in or near the Other lands.

  Most of the Elder creatures came into being either on Earth or in the dimensional pockets of Other land. A few, a very few, came into existence in those crossover points between places, where time and space were fluid and changeable, and at the time of the world’s creation, Power was an unformed, immeasurable force.

  Rune and his fellow gryphons were just such beings. They were quintessential beings of duality, formed at the cusp between two creatures, on the threshold of changing time and space. Lion and eagle, along with the other ancient Wyr, they learned to shapeshift and walk among humankind, and so they also became Wyr form and man. They had an affinity for the Earth’s between places. They could find crossover passages and Other lands that remained hidden from all others, and in early history they were known throughout the Elder Races for being fearless explorers. There would be no others like them. Creation’s inchoate time had passed and all things, even the crossover points between places, had become fixed in their definitions.

  The past scrolled behind him. The future was the unknown thing that waited ahead of him, smiling its Mona Lisa smile. And the ever-fleeting now was continually born and continually died, but was never anything you could get your hands on and hold on to, as it always pushed you along to some other place.