Serpent's Kiss

The head and shoulders of a beautiful woman appeared first. Jeweled combs pinned her thick black hair atop her head. Her garments barely covered her modesty, like the garments Jyotsna’s people wore. She stood high-breasted and proud. She peered at him with the slit-irised eyes of a cat. Crimson lips parted to reveal sharp teeth. Her forked tongue slithered out to test the air.

As she moved toward Sahadeva, she rocked from side to side. Her lower half was hidden from sight by the smoke for a moment. When he saw the serpentine body that began at her waist, he tried to scream but there wasn’t enough air in the room.

From her midriff down, the woman was a snake. Glittering blue-green scales twisted as she moved. Black-and-red scales created a hard-edged pattern. In the next instant, she lunged at him and her fangs pierced his throat.

S AHADEVA WOKE to a pounding pain in his head. Blood roared in his ears. He felt dizzy, as if the world were shifting beneath him. He opened his eyes and discovered the reason for the movement.

He was in a ship’s hold. The light from a candle on a mounted sconce barely penetrated the gloom. He lay in the middle of a pool of vomit that he realized was his own. It had smeared on his clothing and made the fabric stiff. Iron manacles bound his legs to a ring set in the floor.

Where is Jyotsna? The question drove him to his feet in spite of the pain and sickness coiled in his belly. He immediately threw up again.

“Easy, now,” someone said from the darkness.

The ship tossed and turned. Timbers creaked in protest. The floor tilted so much for a moment that Sahadeva feared they were going to turn over.

Sahadeva tracked the voice and saw a man in his middle years sitting hunched against the wall. Nine others sat with him.

“Who are you?” Sahadeva asked. “What is this ship?”

“I’m a slave,” the man answered. “Like you. My name is Oorjit.”

“I’m not a slave,” Sahadeva objected.

“You lie in your own filth aboard a ship that you didn’t book passage on,” another man said. “You’re a slave. When the captain has outrun this storm, they’ll bring us up and start making sailors of us.”

“I’m afraid what he says is true,” Oorjit said. “All of us were taken in Kaveripattinam. The ships’ captains do this when they need crew and no one is willing to sign on. Lives are cheap in the city. Doubtless you were sold into captivity by someone who profited in the loss of your freedom.”

Sahadeva slumped in disbelief. His first thoughts were of Jyotsna. He’d brought her to the city and told her he could take care of her. He wept when he thought of the horrors he had doubtlessly left her to face.

The ship continued to roll. The movement grew more violent. Water sloshed around Sahadeva’s ankles and he thought it was growing deeper.

“Are you a soothsayer?” Oorjit asked.

Sahadeva looked at the man.

“The book you carried.” Oorjit tossed over Sahadeva’s battered travel pack. “I thought if you could read you were a soothsayer.”

Sahadeva couldn’t believe the pack had been left with him. He doubted the other gems and jewelry remained. He searched the bag and found he was correct. But the book lay there.

“Doubtless they couldn’t find anything in it worth stealing,” Oorjit stated. “Slavers aren’t readers.”

Sahadeva picked up the book and examined it. He’d stolen it from the treasure room in Jyotsna’s village. He knew wise men and kings often paid handsomely for such things.

It was a thick rectangle covered in some kind of hide. Sahadeva thought it was snakeskin, but he wasn’t sure. He felt the binding and made sure the thing he’d hidden there remained. He’d kept that from Harshad. Sahadeva had intended to use it to buy a business for himself whenever they got to where they were going.

Even though it remained, Sahadeva knew that the future he’d planned was gone. He replaced the book in its protective oilskin and shoved it under his shirt.

“Are you a wise man?” Oorjit asked.

“No,” Sahadeva answered.

“Pity,” the man said. “I think it would be good to have the ears of the gods in this storm.”

Sahadeva didn’t know how much time passed in the hold. The candle flame wavered as the ship heaved and rolled. Several times he felt as though the sea had pitched them into the air. As the sick fear grew inside him, he knew what was going to happen. It was only a matter of time.

Still, when it did occur he wasn’t prepared. The ship capsized. Water rushed into the hold. With his legs chained, he had no chance. Despite his best efforts and his most impassioned pleas, the cruel, uncaring sea swallowed him.

1

Annja Creed stood in a twelve-foot-deep sacrificial pit beneath a gathering storm. The storm, according to the weather reports, was hours away but promised to be severe. From the look of the skeletons on the floor of the pit and embedded in the walls, hundreds of years had passed since the last sacrifice.

The passage of time hadn’t made the discovery any less chilling. Even with her experience as an archeologist—and the recent exposures to sudden death that she thought were incited by the mystic sword she’d inherited—she still had to make the conscious mental shift from personal empathy to scientific detachment.

“Are those human bones?”

Annja glanced up and saw Jason Kim standing near the edge of the pit above her. Jason was a UCLA graduate student who’d won a place on Professor Rai’s dig along the southern coast of India.

Jason was barely over five and a half feet tall and slender as a reed. His long black hair blew in the strong wind summoned by the storm gathering somewhere over the Indian Ocean. Thick glasses covered his eyes, which were bloodshot from staying up too late playing PSP games in his tent. He came from a traditional Chinese family that hated the way he’d so easily acquired American ways. He wore a concert T-shirt and jean shorts. A tuft of whiskers barely smudged his pointed chin.

“They’re human bones,” Annja answered.

“You think they’re sacrifice victims?” Jason’s immediate interest sounded bloodthirsty, but Annja knew it was only curiosity.

“I do.” Annja knelt and scooped one of the skulls from the loose soil at the bottom of the pit. She indicated the uneven cut through the spine at the base of the skull. “Followers of Shakti favored decapitation.”

“Cool. Can I see that?” Jason held his hands out.

Annja only thought for a moment that the skull had once housed a human being. The truth was, in her work, the body left behind was as much a temporary shelter as the homes she unearthed and studied.

Jason’s field of study was forensic anthropology. His work primarily included what was left of a body. If anyone at the dig could identify the tool marks on the skeleton, it was Jason.

Annja tossed the skull up to him.

Jason caught the skull in both hands. It didn’t bother him that it was so fresh from the grave. His smile went from ear to ear. He rotated the skull in his fingers. “This is the bomb, Annja.”

“Glad you like it.”

“Think they’ll let me keep one?” he asked.

Part of Annja couldn’t believe he’d asked the question. The other part of her couldn’t believe she hadn’t expected it.

“Definitely not,” she answered.

“Too bad. Put a small, battery-operated red light inside and this thing would be totally rad. I could even have a friend of mine majoring in dentistry whip up some caps for the incisors. I’d be the first guy to have a genuine vampire skull.”

“Except for the genuine part. And you’d have to explain why the skull doesn’t turn to dust in sunlight,” Annja said.

“Not all vampires turn to dust. You should know that,” he replied.