A sunny morning shone outside. The kitchen where Carling worked was a large foreign-feeling stone-walled area, with long wooden tables and granite counters, industrial-sized sinks, and a fireplace that was big enough to roast a pig in. Bright yellow sunshine spilled in from metal-paned windows. The kitchen was a peaceful quiet place without chattering sycophants populating it. She liked it much better now that it was nearly empty.
A small dog whined at Carling’s feet. Rhoswen sulked nearby, well away from the spill of sunshine. “I don’t understand why you insist on doing this,” Rhoswen grumbled. “We have cans of dog food that it loves. Quite good, expensive premium dog food. I checked personally with its vet.”
“I do not require you to understand,” murmured Carling. She peered at the organic material in the skillet. It had started to sizzle. The red flesh was turning white. “What are we cooking again?”
“Chicken,” Rhoswen said. “We are cooking chicken for incomprehensible reasons.”
“Yes,” Carling said.
She nudged the flesh around in the skillet. This is food. A warm scent filled the air. She sniffed it. Living creatures consider this scent aromatic, appetizing. They salivate, and their stomachs rumble.
The small dog barked.
Yes, and some of them yap.
The chicken must become white all the way through. It is okay if the outside becomes brown. In fact many creatures prefer it that way. With a sense of satisfaction, Carling removed the skillet from the heat. She used the implement to scrape the steaming material onto a plate for a tiny living creature.
She regarded the dog. It regarded her in return. She remembered the details from the vet’s report. The dog was a six-pound Orange Sable Pomeranian. It had an exploding puffball double coat of hair that was brown and sable, with a touch of cream in its ludicrous curl of a tail. It had bright button-black eyes and a foxy narrow muzzle with a button-black nose. When she gave it her attention, it stood on its hind legs and twirled. Such happiness and excitement over a thing called breakfast.
She checked the last step on her list of instructions. Wait until the meat is cool enough to consume safely before placing the plate on the floor.
She looked at the steaming material on the plate. She looked back at the dog. It gave her a thrilled canine grin, pink tongue lolling to one side as it hopped on hind legs and pawed at the air. She spoke a word filled with Power. For a moment the air around the chicken shimmered. When she touched a finger to the meat, it was perfectly cool. Ah, that was much better.
A bell tolled on the ocean side of the sprawling stone house.
Both she and Rhoswen lifted their heads to look toward the sound. She told Rhoswen, “Go let the sentinel in.”
The younger blonde Vampyre inclined her head and left the kitchen.
Carling twitched aside the hem of her black Egyptian cotton caftan as she crouched to set the plate of chicken in front of the dog. The next bit always puzzled her. She had witnessed many forms of greed over the centuries. But no matter how much the smell of the cooking chicken sent him into frenzy, when she set the plate of food in front of the dog, he always paused first to look at her before he fell on his meal to gobble it down.
Carling was a succubus, a Vampyre who could sense and feed off of emotions from living creatures. The little dog had emotions. They were bright colorful sparks that winked like fireflies. She knew what he felt when he gave her that look.
It was passionate gratitude.
Rhoswen returned after a few minutes. Carling looked up from the dog. He had finished his meal and draped himself across her bare feet. Rhoswen told her, “The Wyr is awaiting an audience with you in the great hall.”
Carling nodded. She nudged the sleepy animal off her feet and pushed through the kitchen’s double-swing doors before the dog could follow. Ignoring its complaining bark, she walked along the large silent flagstone-floored corridor to the great hall, the only sound a whisper of cloth as her caftan swirled around her ankles.
The house followed the general pattern of a medieval manor, with the kitchen, buttery and pantry off to one side, the two-story great hall with a massive six-foot-tall fireplace and its carved stone overmantel and more private apartments and rooms branching off the other side. Unlike a medieval manor, the great hall and the other oceanside rooms had floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the bluff upon which the house sat.
The house was bordered with a waist-high fieldstone wall that followed the furthermost periphery along the edge of the bluff. The land within the walls was cultivated with a dense profusion of flowers, yellow goldenstars, scarlet mariposa lilies, coast sunflowers, stream orchids, seaside daisies and island snapdragons. Climbing roses swarmed up a trellis that framed the front doors, their immense blooms drenched in fragrance.
The island itself was kidney-shaped and over four miles long. The house on the bluff was located in the inner curve of the kidney. A narrow path zigzagged down the side of the bluff to a wide beach where a couple of sailboats were moored. There were several other, smaller houses that dotted the area around the large stone manor house, but currently those stood empty. A redwood forest towered on the farthest end of the island, the gigantic trees thousands of years old, their upper heights fed from the mists that rolled in off the ocean. Shy, secretive winged creatures lived in the uppermost branches of those ancient redwoods. They hid whenever other creatures came near.
Carling felt the Wyr before she stepped into the hall and laid eyes on him. She paused at the kitchen entrance to the hall to absorb the shock of his presence.
He stood hipshot in front of the windows, with the kind of ease that came from someone who had everything going for him and nothing to prove. His back was to her, his hands in the rear pockets of torn faded jeans as he looked out toward the ocean. His hair tumbled damp and tousled to broad shoulders. She caught the smell of brine and the warm virile scent of a healthy Wyr male. Thousands of years ago he had towered over humans, a strange gigantic, fierce god. Even now he stood taller than most men, the long strong lines of his body epitomizing masculine strength and grace.
More than just the impact of the physical, however, was the punch of the aetheric force around him. Even standing at rest, he radiated a ferocious vitality. Energy and Power boiled off of him in a corona of rippling waves that were invisible to most people, but she could see them pouring off of him like heat waves rising from a sun-baked highway in the desert. All of the immortal Wyr that had come into being at the time the earth was formed had this same primal life force. They carried within them sparks of creation’s first fire.
Carling took a deep breath, an anachronistic throwback to an ancient time. She took note of her body’s involuntary response to the onslaught of Rune’s presence, even as his head cocked to one side at the small telltale sound. He turned to face her.
Then there was the other shock to the system as she looked upon the strong, bold clean lines of his face. His facial bone structure had a refinement that was echoed in the frame of his body, a masculine elegance that caught at the eye and tugged at the heart. He had a beautiful mouth, with sensually carved, mobile lips, but his capstone feature was his worldly, knowledgeable lion’s gaze.
Those breathtaking eyes were smiling at her now. They pulled her across the room toward him.
“You’ve got an awesome crib here,” said Rune. “Way to be all-over gothic, Carling. What happens if you sail away from the island?”
“Eventually after you lose sight of the island, you end up sailing back toward land. This is just a small pocket of Other land with only the one underwater crossover point. There is nothing else here but the island and ocean.”