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 hisshellanhad 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.