He started to chuckle again when he thought of her cooling the meat for him the way she did for the dog. Then he remembered how she had held herself when he had spoken of kindness, averting her face and eyes, and his laughter faded.
Both Wyr and Vampyre societies could be brutal ones. Sometimes conflict could only be settled violently. All of the sentinels were enforcers of Wyr law, but as Dragos’s First, Rune was the ultimate enforcer. If Dragos was ever actually not in a position to do so, it was Rune’s responsibility to hunt and take down even the other sentinels if they ever went renegade. The other sentinels were his friends, partners and comrades in arms. He was glad it had never come to that, but he never forgot the responsibility of his position.
For all of that, Rune was really an easygoing male most of the time, and quick to both laughter and affection. He was that rarest of creatures, a man’s man who had no problem admitting he enjoyed chick flicks and women’s fashion. They brought out things in women he adored, from the spiraling of emotions to mysterious heights and depths, to the flowering of wonder-filled feminine pleasure as a woman tried on new outfits and she discovered for the first time in the mirror that she was, in actual fact, beautiful.
From what he had seen, Carling was not quick to either laughter or affection. She did not inspire thoughts of comfort or cuddles. Had she once possessed those qualities, or had her experience of life really been that harsh and unyielding? He frowned. The scars covering her body told their own tale.
When he tried to imagine her giggling with a girlfriend, it bent his head. Rhoswen clearly worshipped her, and it was obvious Duncan felt something for her too, but as far as he could tell, those relationships were not on any kind of in-depth, equal footing. He suspected most women felt threatened by her, as well they should. Life had fashioned Carling into a sleek, lethal weapon, the double-edged kind that would cut off the hand of anyone who dared to wield it if they should try to grasp hold unwisely.
Taking that kind of weapon would take a hard, firm hand, from one who knew how and when to hold on with a strong grip, and when to let go and let the weapon free to cut where it would. No one mastered such a weapon. If one were lucky, one might gain respect, trust, alliance, an agreement to work together.
Carling was so shielded, and she had built up her personal arsenal over such a long period of time, he doubted if anything would change her at this late date. In that realization, at last he found the conceptual frame he needed in order to curb his fascination for her. There was simply nowhere for his fascination to go, and nothing for it to latch on to in any long-term way. She was brilliant, gorgeous, deadly and even quirky, but she would not allow someone to get too close, not even a dog.
Fair enough. Sometimes pinnacles were so narrow and elevated, there was only room for one at the top. If she managed to live for so long with such isolation, she must like her own company. As far as he was concerned, he was happy to help her out if he could, and he would be happy to move on when it was over. And it would be over somehow. They would either find a way for her to survive, or they wouldn’t. As Duncan pointed out, people die all the time. Sometimes old, long-lived creatures died too.
Those thoughts produced a clench in his gut, but he ignored it. One way or another, this stop on the island was just an odd blip in his road, and he would do well to keep that thought firmly at the forefront of his mind. His real life waited for him back in New York, where he had good friends and any number of people who loved him.
He read until late afternoon, when he went on the hunt for something to drink. There were two chains at the kitchen well. One was attached to an empty bucket. Curiously he hauled on the other one and brought up a stash of Corona in a metal basket. The bottles of beer were quite chilled from resting at the bottom of the well. Score one for the thirsty Wyr.
He grabbed a couple and lowered the rest back into the well then went back to his reading. Scientific journals were more Dragos’s schtick, not his. Carling’s research was undeniably difficult reading. Whenever he reached a chemical or magical equation, he simply memorized the formulas without trying to decipher or understand them at this point. But he had thought he would find slogging through Carling’s notes to be a mind-numbing chore, and that wasn’t so. The process she had gone through pulled him in, almost in spite of himself.
Many creatures, human and otherwise, approached matters of magic in different ways. Throughout history, magic had been shrouded in mysticism, and sometimes outright religion, and many of those religious or mystical practices were still in use. Others practiced magic as a matter of folk tradition, much like the herbalist lore in indigenous societies that had been passed down by word of mouth for generations.
Given her roots in early Egypt, he guessed that Carling would have originally learned her magic from the standpoint of religion. By the nineteenth century, Vampyrism was, in large part, no longer viewed as a mystical curse but as a disease, and her approach to solving the issue was correspondingly scientific.
Her analyses were cool and precise. Upon learning the symptoms of the end stages of the disease and the challenges she would be facing, her attitude was unflinching. How humans lived with the knowledge of their own mortality was beyond him. He tried to imagine what it would be like to learn he was mortal, that his time was measured and must come to an inevitable end, and he simply couldn’t. If he was ever killed, he would go into his death with astonishment and incomprehension. Among all the other reactions she elicited from him, Rune had to admit to a certain grudging admiration for Carling’s courage.
But each research path she took came to a dead end. Her attempts to isolate the infection that caused the disease failed.
So what was wrong? What logic path or experiment had she not considered? He could see nothing among the elegant lattice of thought laid out so meticulously on the pages, and yet something niggled. What was it that bothered him? He wasn’t going to try duplicating any of her processes. He didn’t have the ability to replicate any of the experiments she had chronicled. She was the scientist, the clear expert in this field. He took it as a matter of faith she had been as meticulous in her experiments as she was in her handwriting. If something failed, it failed.
So it was something else that bothered him. Was it a premise or a conclusion?
The light was fading in the kitchen when he finally admitted he needed a break. He pushed away from the table and stretched his stiff neck and shoulders. He had almost a hundred pages left to read, but he had reached a point where he was no longer absorbing the information. Some fresh air might help clear his head, and his body needed to move.
He went outside and walked through the gardens, around the house toward the cliff. It was nearing sunset, and the shadows thrown by the foliage were elongated. The twists and angles of the shadowed tree limbs cut exaggerated dark paths across the lawn.
He walked along the waist-high stone wall that bordered the edge of the cliff, and he looked out over the water. The sun was an enormous blazing orange ball. It seemed to grow larger as it neared the horizon. Like Carling, the island was wrapped in its own strange, solitary existence. This piece of Other land gave the perfect illusion that nothing else existed except for it, the cobalt ocean and the limitless sky. He took in deep breaths of the salted air and pretended he was up there, high in the air, flying over the water until all sight of land disappeared.
Then he felt something ripple, like a breeze fluttering against his skin, and everything shivered and changed. He blinked hard and stared around him, as he tried to figure out what was different.