Read Online Blood and Chrysanthemums by Nancy Baker - Free Book Online Page B

glimpsed in her eyes. “Until it kills us.” Her voice was harsh.
    “Sometimes it does,” Mark acknowledged. “I’ve lost friends to the mountains. That’s why I’m careful, why I don’t take any stupid chances.”
    The irony of it seared through her, jarred her to her feet and around the boulder to the darkness of the trees. “Ardeth . . .” She heard him rising, following her. “Ardeth, what’s wrong?” She caught the trunk of a wind-twisted tree, fought unsuccessfully against the harsh laughter clawing up out of her throat. “What’s so funny?”
    “You are. I am. You are taking the biggest, stupidest chance of your life, Mark Frye, and you don’t even know it.”
    “What are you going to do, push me off the mountain?” The jest was gentle, uncertain, meant to pull her back from the cliff he couldn’t see. He was not afraid
of
her, she realized, he was afraid
for
her. The sympathy irritated her even as it drew her.
    She should go . . . before that draw grew too strong, before she surrendered to the temptation it offered. She had already succumbed to one lure when she let him climb with her. You knew all along, a voice in her head whispered, you knew what would happen when you got to the top.
    “Ardeth,” he began again, putting on hand out to touch her shoulder. She turned and saw concern, curiosity and desire pass across his face like clouds over the moon. She could feel the heat of his hand through the thin fabric of her shirt.
    She should go. . . . 
    But it was too late. His mouth opened on her name and lost it as she kissed him. Ardeth felt herself dissolve into sensation; rough bark against her back, the scrape of his growing beard against her cheek, the rough-toughened calluses on his fingers on her skin. She gave herself up to it and to the waiting heat that pulsed wherever their bare flesh met. Emptiness opened at gut and groin.
    It was climbing gear that stopped her, dragging her back to awareness. The hooks and buckles, designed for safety, could not be undone without engaging at least part of her mind. Apart, the same sanity seemed to seize him and he drew away from her a little, as if afraid for the first time.
    Ardeth thought of Rozokov, staring alone at the stars. Shame surged through her, bitter and burning.
    “I’m sorry, I . . .” she began and saw dismay begin to replace the curiosity and desire in his eyes. As she pulled away from him, she knew there was nothing else she could say, no explanations that would make any sense . . . or any different. “I’m sorry.”
    She spun into the welcoming arms of the forest and ran down the narrow path, leaving gear and shoes and Mark’s anxious voice behind.

Chapter 8
    The stars wheeled above him, unnoticed.
    Rozokov stooped over the telescope, watching the wind ruffle the moonlit pines at the top of the mountain. The cliff face was not visible from his vantage point, therefore there was no harm in his looking. The skewed logic of the thought amused him suddenly. How easy it was to rationalize his most irrational actions. He had sworn to himself that he would not interfere, would not hover like a protective parent as his fledgling tried her wings, or her claws, on the mountain’s stone. But oaths were easier to make than to keep. The echo of his own warning to her came back to him: “We have an eternity to break our promises . . . and chances are that we shall.”
    He shifted the telescope upwards again, to catch the rivers of Milky Way stars that flowed above the mountain peaks. After their argument, neither of them had mentioned leaving again. If Ardeth had noticed his refusal to answer her questions, she was willing to ignore it. They hunted together and sampled the town’s few nighttime pleasures and slept away the day in each other’s arms . . . but the damage had been done.
    It had never been like this with Jean-Pierre, the only other vampire he had known, more than a century ago in France. But