The Viper, page 8
“You’re not as meek as you make out.”
“And you need me. Unless you want to service their bedpans and ensure that you don’t overdose them when it is time for their medications again, you better leave me to do my job.”
The head of the guards twisted her arm such that Nadya had to release her hold.
“One of them dies,” the female said, “and I will kill you myself—even if I have to find someone else to do your job.”
Nadya inclined her head. “You were quite clear the first time.”
* * *
In the midst of the sound of the river he could not see, Kane could find no clarity at all.
As he lay there with the seconds ticking by, the sand running through his last-hour hourglass, he had expected relief with his decision made. When that didn’t come, he decided resignation was more what he needed to feel. Finally, he just waited, once again, to see the white landscape he’d heard about. Surely, that white door would be rushing up to him soon, the knob prepared for his palm.
He did not see white. He saw dark brown.
It was a memory of robing the color of mahogany. And then, as if his mind’s eye was a camera lens that widened, he recalled the clinic with its lineup of empty, precisely made-up beds, and its forest of shelving, and the dust-covered boxes and long-forgotten items and the chipped desk. It was all so makeshift modest, so threadbare and worn. But it had been created by Nadya to care for others with limited supplies, and with that noble purpose, it was a palace.
He had never thought to ask her how she had ended up with the rest of them, for it was impossible to imagine her as a criminal. No one with that good a heart could hurt somebody—
Kane opened his eyes. “I have to go back for her.”
The old female in the red beaded dress smiled at him. As if she had known all along he would change his mind.
“I can’t leave her in that hell,” he said roughly.
“If you choose to stay, you will not be as you are—”
“Hurry.”
“—you will be changed forevermore—”
“Hurry.”
“You will not be the same—”
“Whatever it does to me, I don’t care!” Less than two minutes left, nearly a minute to go. “Just do it!”
The female nodded. “I am so sorry.”
There was no reason to ask what for. Kane didn’t care. He just didn’t want to run out of time—
All at once, the coffin’s walls fell away, and as he looked to the side, he saw the stream that ran through the hut, its rock bed snaking around the fire—surely it was not going under the flames?—the dark gray stones gleaming and mysterious where the water coursed over them. Though nothing struck him as particularly miraculous about the little river, he couldn’t look away, and the longer he stared, the more he realized that there was no bottom to the tributary. In fact… it wasn’t a river at all. That was not water.
It was a metaphysical divide that seemed to penetrate deep into the earth—and the fire suddenly struck him as odd as well. The flames had no kindling or wood to feed their hunger. As with the not-real-water, they seemed to just exist.
“The energy that needs a host is a fundamental and comes from the center of everything,” the old female said as she stepped to the end of the coffin.
No, there was no coffin. He was lying directly on the ground, not even on the handspun rug, the earth underneath him neither hard nor soft. And with the connection between his broken body and the soil, the unnerving charge that vibrated up from beneath him passed directly into his flesh—
The river was suddenly under him, a diversion instantly rerouting its flow, and yet he felt none of the rush nor any dampening. Instead, he was suffused by warmth and an easing of pain that was not drugs, but something far more elemental, as if his nerves were being brushed with compassion and calming as a result.
“It has accepted you,” the old female murmured. “This is good.”
As if her pronouncement started some kind of process, he began sinking, or maybe the level of the energy was rising; either way, as he looked down at his body, he was in the river now, the flow, now dark as night, coming up and over his knees and thighs, his hips, his chest.
“Be not afraid—”
The black rush claimed him, the submersion as if he were drowning, a weight upon him compressing his body under the—
Snakes.
The flow was not water, and it was not raw energy, it was hundreds of black vipers… a thousand of them… an infinite number.
A burst of fear animated him, but as he tried to sit up, he was trapped, held in place by the slick serpents that coursed over him. Instinctively, he struggled to shove them off, kick them free, his body bucking and twisting. The reptiles just continued to slither over him, coating his corporeal form, a teeming blanket that moved against him as if it were trying to find a way inside.
In the midst of his panic, he somehow looked outside of the vipers, and what he saw of the old female made as much sense as the river of snakes. Her face had become youthful, her beauty glowing with an otherworldly beneficence, sure as if that which appeared aged was but a mask, and that which was underneath was the true, infinite essence of her.
And as if she had waited for him to look up, she stepped free of the body she had presented herself to him in, becoming nothing but a glowing shape that had a hazy form and the contours of a female, although no true substance.
As her ghostly hair swirled around her like platinum flames, it was as though a wind source from within the earth was finding her and her alone. “Be not afraid.”
Why was it when someone said that to you, it always made things worse—
Her “arm” extended out five, six, seven feet, until it entered into the flow of serpents, the life-force that was her penetrating the tangle of vipers… and coming back out with something in her grip. The long black snake emerged tail-first from the twisting mass, and as the female pulled it free, its tremendous length wrapped around her all the way up to her shoulder, the movement so sensuous, so accepted and expected, it was a gesture of familiarity.
And then came the head.
The triangular apex of the serpent swung around, its red reptilian eyes locking on Kane. A black tongue licked out. Retreated. Trolled out once again. Then the head reared up.
“My dear friend is in search of a host.” The female came closer, floating over the earth as opposed to ambulating in the conventional sense. “You will find him a most hospitable guest, although he will do some redecorating. I don’t believe you will mind that, however.”
Kane’s heart started pounding. “Host?”
“You will get the rejuvenation you require. He will get a chance to see the world again. A fine bargain for both sides.”
The old female was talking, Kane knew this because sounds in her intonation were entering his ears, but he could comprehend none of her words. Staring into those reptilian eyes, a disassociation took him over, removing him from everything but that ruby gaze.
The viper began to weave from side to side, and Kane found himself echoing the sway, until they were moving in synchronization… side to side, side to side.
The lower jaw dropped and the fangs descended. The tongue retracted—
The great head reared back and hinged open, exposing long, sharp fangs.
The strike happened so quick, quick as a gasp, and yet his mind recorded the swing and the piercing contact over his heart in slow motion. It was like the culmination of a dance, a to-and-fro that claimed him, and in the aftermath, he looked down at his chest.
Two rivers of blood streamed down the raw burn wounds—
Kane gasped and arched. Then his head fell back and he crashed into a free fall, into the stream of snakes, which claimed him now in a different way.
He was one of their own.
The seizures came in waves, rattling his teeth, stiffening his every muscle, nearly cracking his spine in half as he spasmed. And as his lips opened, something entered his mouth, entered him. Choking, he fought against—
Another viper barged in, going down his throat, curling in his gut. He screamed and tried to breathe, but there was an endless number that followed. As his stomach bloated, he thought he was going to throw up, and still they continued to penetrate him, his mouth stretching wide.
No more room, he was going to blow apart—
The vipers broke out of his gut and speared into his torso, curling around his organs, distending his skin—and then they filled his arms, his legs.
When there was no more territory to take over…
… what he had felt coming arrived.
Kane screamed again as he blew apart, his corporeal form disintegrating into the ether, no part of him left intact.
CHAPTER TEN
Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.
As Lucan stared into the flames of his clan’s central fire pit, he had no idea where the hell he was. Okay, he knew he was out of the prison camp. He knew he was on the mountain. And he knew that his shellan had made it out of the fighting alive, that Mayhem was resting, that Apex was okay, and that Kane…
He glanced over his shoulder at the Gray Wolf’s hut.
Kane was under the matriarch’s care.
But that was where his yup-I-got-it ended. Then again, was there much else that mattered?
As the banked fire snapped and crackled in its seat of crisscrossed logs, and as the sweet smoke spun around to tickle his nose, he remembered being in the original prison camp, and lying back on his hard bed, cradling an old cassette player to his chest. As Duran Duran played over and over again, he would stare up at the rough rock ceiling above him and think of this exact moment right now.
Sure as if this was a destination some part of him knew he would return to.
He had had so many dreams of this circle of logs around the flat stone hearth, the conifers tall and fluffy above him, the earth padded with fallen pine needles, the boulders that peeked out of the ground stalwarts that had survived the advance and retreat of glaciers millions of years ago. And the funny thing was, no matter how much he had changed, the setting was just exactly as he remembered it, the cave entrances hidden, the females out of view for safety’s sake; the males front and center, prepared to defend the territory; the elders out on the overlook, sharing stories, at peace with the present because they lived in the past.
As the wind shifted around again, he looked up at the sky, following the soft smoke curls and heat tendrils up to the stars that twinkled, bright as penlights, in the velvet-dark heavens.
“You okay?”
At the whispered words, he tightened his hold on Rio’s hand. “I don’t know. I think so?” He glanced over. “I’m glad you’re here. I didn’t even think I’d get a chance to show you this place.”
Rio looked out into the trees, the firelight playing over her face. “It’s so peaceful.”
“And it’s safe.”
Because the irony of ironies was that this tranquility would be protected by bloodshed, if necessary. Back after the run-in with the carloads of guards, when Lucan had accepted his cousin’s submission in front of those dead bodies and free-for-the-taking SUVs, he had known that this was where they should go to recover and figure out all the what-next. And Callum didn’t have to suggest it or offer an invite. What was the clan’s… was all of the clan’s—and it looked like he was back in the family.
Wiping his eyes, he cleared his throat and looked across at Callum. The male was sitting down, it was true, but his powerful body was no more at rest than any predator’s. Though his eyes were mostly on the fire, he was constantly monitoring the perimeter, as were the other wolven.
Lucan had to hand it to the hardheaded sonofabitch. The guy had thought things through when it came to defensible positions and evasive maneuvers. After gathering all the guards’ weapons and what little was left of the ammo, they had taken the vehicles about four miles away and run them off a cliff into a ravine one by one. Then the wolven had taken his dead cousin’s body and dematerialized to a location at the base of the clan’s mountain, while Lucan had driven as fast as he dared in the Monte Carlo to meet them there.
Talk about shitty garages. The structure had looked like it was only a sneeze away from collapse, but that was only on the outside. The interior of the place was a miracle, fully stocked with everything you’d need for an evac, an attack. A meal. A nap. A holdout for several weeks.
It even had an underground bunker and an escape route.
Stashing the sedan, they’d removed and destroyed the two restraining collars, put Mayhem and Kane on stretchers, and then they’d collectively muscled the two males into the acreage. The trail was not one Lucan knew, which made him suspect it had been carved out especially for the bolt-hole, but the environs were instantly home, from the pine scent and the soft earth, to the trees looming as if in protection of the innocent, the injured, the lost, and the needy.
The journey into the heart of the clan’s territory had been forty minutes on foot, and those who hadn’t had their hand on a stretcher grip were armed to the teeth and guarding the trail from ahead, from behind, from the sides. And some of the wolven had assumed their four-footed forms, because they could be faster over the—
Abruptly, Callum rose to his full height. As everyone turned in his direction, he just shook his head and walked off to the west like it was a call-of-nature thing.
In deference to Rio, the wolven had clothed themselves while in their two-footed forms, and there hadn’t been any issue raised that she was a female among them. He appreciated the deference and the decorum, and supposed it was a sign of how much he had moved on that he found the sequestering of the clan’s females and young so strange and uncomfortable. In fact, he wasn’t even sure any of them were on the mountain at all.
Well, what do you know.
Off to the left, Apex’s eyes followed Callum even as his head didn’t move and his body didn’t shift. It was hard to know if he didn’t trust the wolven or if he just wanted to kill the male on principle. Apex was weird like that. He had his own moral standards, and if you tripped one of them? Like betraying a family member, even if amends had been made?
Big problems.
But as with where the clan’s females were and whether or not Apex was going to do something stupid, Lucan didn’t have the energy to get involved.
“What is she doing to Kane?” Rio asked softly. “The old woman.”
The fact that the Gray Wolf was neither a woman nor old in the conventional sense didn’t seem like things worth correcting, and he wasn’t sure what to say about the rest. If he replied with an “I don’t know,” it was a half-truth that sat badly. But he didn’t want to freak her out—and he reminded himself that he wasn’t exactly sure what was going on inside there—
The scream coming out of the hut was what he had been waiting for, what he had feared… and also been hoping to hear.
He glanced at Apex and prayed that the male stayed put. If there was a wild card in all this, it was that vampire, but things had been explained to him—as much as they could to an outsider, that was—and he’d eventually allowed Kane to be sequestered alone with the Gray Wolf. It was the aristocrat’s only chance, although it was one thing understanding that on an intellectual level, another thing to hear the sounds of it all.
Except it looked like Apex was staying where he was, his hands locking together and his elbows getting planted on his knees, like he was keeping his body in place by force.
Closing his eyes, Lucan remembered when he’d been growing up on the fringes of the clan, the whispers about the rejuvenation and the speculation about what exactly transpired in the hut the kind of thing that was spoken about in hushed tones. It had been generations since it had been done, and as he glanced around at the assembled wolven, the other vampire, and his human woman, he realized that the group of them were witnessing a piece of history, a wondrous event that would be passed down to their progeny, becoming that which was spoken about in quiet, reverent voices around late-night campfires, always in private, like not everybody knew—
From out of the darkness, Callum reentered the circle of firelight, and he threw his head back and let out a howl, the sound not made by the throat of what appeared to be a man, but that of the wolf that lived in every molecule of his body.
One by one, the other male wolven rose to their feet, drew in deep breaths, and released calls that rose in volume until the screaming of the vampire in the hut could not be heard at all.
The chorus of howls was the most beautiful sound in the world to Lucan, the kind of thing that turned his body into a tuning fork and made his vision go blurry from emotion—
As he felt the hold on his palm tighten, he looked over at Rio, and when she nodded, he knew what she was telling him, but wasn’t sure whether he should—
His body made the decision for him, releasing his hold on his mate’s hand and rising up on its own volition. As he lifted his eyes to the sky, he pulled in a great breath, smelling anew the pine and the fresh smoke and the scents of the lake down below.
Lucan joined his wolf call with the others of his kind.
As tears rolled down his cheeks, he felt a release in the center of his chest, a sweet, wonderful wholeness permeating him.
Even as he worried about what the hell was going to come out of that fucking hut.
* * *
Surrounded by howling wolves who looked like regular Joes, Apex sat on his log seat with the fire tanning his face and his ass going numb. In spite of all the racket the males were making, he ignored them.
He only cared about what was happening to Kane.
Running a hand down his face, he massaged his jaw—because it was the only part of him that didn’t hurt. Everything else was either aching, swelling up, or scabbing over, to the point where each of his feet had a separate heartbeat and his head was like a balloon that was only loosely tethered to the top of his skull—
