Rune told her, “You know the real reason why I snatched you up when you went over the cliff? I knew you were about to swim the ocean. I was just saving Tokyo, baby.”
She shrugged with a blank expression. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
His expectant expression turned to disappointment. He said, “I just called you Godzilla?”
She rolled her eyes. “Of course you did. Your reference to Tokyo made it so obvious. No doubt I should have picked up on it immediately, just as I should have known the identity of the hairy man with spectacles on that awful T-shirt of yours.”
“Clearly, this is a teasing session that has not gotten off on the right foot,” he said. “You’ve got to start watching old monster movies on TV. Oh, and football. Otherwise we’re going to run out of things to talk about.”
She raised an eyebrow. “I’ll be sure to get right on that.”
“Actually,” he confided with an intimate smile, “I was more afraid you would melt when you hit the water.”
She pointed at him. “I got that one. You think I don’t know people have nicknamed me the Wicked Witch of the West?”
He grinned and kissed the tip of her finger. “And a very accomplished lady she was too, if a bit combative.”
“You’re ridiculous.” Somehow her hand slipped, and she stroked his face. She felt like she could spend forever like this, resting against his long sprawling body, talking and laughing in the lazy, late afternoon. She might not be able to feel the warmth of the sun directly on her skin, but she could feel how it warmed Rune’s, and the heat from his body sank into hers.
The laughter in Rune’s face died away, and was replaced with an expression that was edged and raw. His gaze darkened and fell below hers, his mouth level and unsmiling. Realization pulsed. He was watching her with such hunger it was a palpable force. She licked her lips and saw in the flicker deep in his eyes that he tracked the movement.
He was going to kiss her, and she wanted it. Gods, she wanted it, full-bodied and openmouthed, both of them tearing into each other like there was no tomorrow, because there really might not be a tomorrow, and all they had was here and now.
This was such a fleeting treasure, this sense of ephemeral beauty, this gorgeous, impossible ache that came when the passions of the spirit turned flesh. This was what it meant to be alive and to be human, to cup the abundant, champagne light of a goddess’s pendant in one’s hands but never be allowed to grasp hold of it.
She took a breath and trembled.
He turned his head and looked away, and the light flowed out of her empty hands. The muscles in his lean jaw flexed. He said, “Are you ready to get serious again?”
She let her hand fall from his lean cheek. Disappointment tasted like ashes. She had done that to him. First she had struck him so hard and cruelly, she had drawn blood. Then she had knocked him away with such violence, she sent him sprawling to the ground. She had spelled and threatened him too, whereas he had shown her nothing but generosity and kindness.
An accomplished lady, she was, if a bit combative.
Really, it was for the best. She had no time for inconvenient attraction, or the luxury to explore strange new feelings or indulge in lazy sun-filled afternoons. If something didn’t happen to change the normal course of events, soon she would have no time at all.
“Of course,” she said, her voice toneless. She pushed off of his lap. She told herself she was not further disappointed when he let her go.
He stood and held a hand out to her. She took it, and he lifted her to her feet. The wind and their struggle had tangled her waist-length hair. She gathered it up impatiently, wound it into a messy knot and tucked the end into the knot itself to anchor it away from her face. Rune watched her, his hands resting on lean hips, his expression inscrutable.
“Do you remember the conversation we had just as you were fading?” Rune asked.
The question knocked her out of her preoccupation. She focused, thinking back. Oh yes. Sometimes I think I hate you, she’d said. She’d forgotten to add that to her list of things she’d done to him. She had to hand it to herself. She had quite a bag of tricks, and none of them were charms. She rubbed her forehead. “Look, I’m sorry about what I—”
He interrupted, his tone impatient. “Do you remember what I said? Because I don’t think you do. I think you were already gone.”
She shook her head, her mind a blank.
He watched her expression closely. “I told you I figured out what was bothering me. I said, what if Vampyrism is not a disease? What if it’s something else?”
“Something else?” Her eyes widened.
“Your research chronicles the history beautifully,” Rune said. “Reading through it, I got to watch it all happen in fast-forward. But you were immersed in it. You lived it all at a much slower pace. You were part of the scientific discussion in the nineteenth century with brilliant scientists who were engaged in cutting-edge medicine. It all made so much sense at the time that now virtually everybody accepts the premise to be true. Vampyrism has so many characteristics of a blood-borne pathogen, but Carling, to me you seem perfectly healthy.”
“How can that be?” She struggled to absorb what he was saying. He kept taking hold of the ground and yanking it out from underneath her, like a magician yanking away a tablecloth set for dinner. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” he told her. “At least I’m sure of what I sense. Wyr have highly developed instincts and senses—and the older the Wyr, the more sensitive they are. The older Wyr can smell sickness and infections, tainted food, and many poisons undetectable to others. To me, you do not carry any scent of disease. You have the characteristic tinge to your scent that all Vampyres have, but I do not register that as an unhealthy scent.”
“If you’re right,” she said, staring at him. “Everything I’ve done—or anybody else has done in the last hundred and thirty years—has been based on a false premise.”
“Yes,” he said.
Not a disease. If he was right, no wonder her research kept stalling. All the vaccines she had tried to create, all her experiments, had been wasted effort. She coughed out an angry laugh. She whispered, “All that time.”
She had lived for so long, she had forgotten what a precious commodity time was until now, when it had nearly run out. She turned to walk back toward the cottage.
He fell into step beside her. “I’ve had several more hours to process this than you have,” he told her. “And I still don’t know what to make of it. I did think about all the physicians you listed that you worked with. Were any of them Wyr?”
She shook her head, frowning. “No. In fact I don’t know of any Wyr pathologists who have made Vampyrism their subject of research. Humans and Nightkind are the ones who study the subject in any real, serious way. We’re the ones with the vested interest.”
He nodded. The day had melted into early evening. The slant of the sun picked up the gold glints in his hair. “There’s a chance even a Wyr physician wouldn’t have caught this, especially if he or she were a younger Wyr with less developed experience or senses, because Vampyrism does have so many characteristics of a blood-borne pathogen. I had to get right up to the subject and consider it in depth, read about all your blind alleys and dead ends and get puzzled as to the why of it—and then also come into very close contact with you repeatedly before it ever occurred to me.”
“God, the implications,” she muttered.
“So what do we have?” Rune asked.
She said bitterly, “We’re back to square one and we’re running out of time.”