Serpent's Kiss: A Dragonfire Novel by Deborah Cooke Page A

made, a whole new firestorm. The silver flame that danced between them burned with the same vigor and brilliance, turning her features to silver.
    “Surely dragons aren’t afraid of temples,” she said as he took a step toward her, and he realized that her voice was lower, too.
    Sultry.
    Almost familiar. Thorolf frowned, trying to grasp an elusive memory. Did he know her already?
    “Which is the real you?” He had to ask. “This form or the other?”
    The question seemed to amuse her. “Which is the real you? The dragon or the man?”
    “Do you always answer questions with more questions?” he demanded in frustration and she laughed. He smiled in return, liking how laughter made her look carefree.
    He’d make her laugh when they satisfied the firestorm.
    He smiled, knowing just how he’d do it.
    She blushed in a most satisfactory way, as if she’d guessed his thoughts.
    “Sometimes there are no easy answers.” She glanced at the doorway. “Unless you look in the shadows.” Again there was a dare in her expression and her tone. “Sure you’re not claustrophobic? Or afraid of the dark?” She didn’t wait for his denial, but stepped inside, disappearing so completely into the shadowed interior that it could have been a portal to another realm.
    Thorolf shivered, not liking that thought one bit.
    While he hesitated, eyeing that face and the vines that looked so much like snakes, the falcon flew over his head and into the darkness.
    That decided it. He wasn’t going to look like a chicken beside a falcon.
    Not in front of his mate.
    Thorolf ducked his head and stepped through the doorway. To his relief, he found a small space inside, not a yawning portal to another realm. Chandra was standing to one side. She’d put on a quiver that was full of arrows and held a loaded crossbow. She must keep her weapon in this place, which hinted to Thorolf of its importance.
    The interior was far creepier than the smiling face over the door.
    There were skulls stacked in rows all around the walls. They gleamed white, as if bleached, their teeth bared in empty smiles and their eye sockets dark. They lined the entire structure, row after row of skulls, grinning back at Thorolf like a silent audience of thousands. They were stacked all the way to the top of the circular structure, and he wondered how many rows deep they were. Then he wondered what had happened to the rest of the bones from each body. Had she found this place or created it by gathering the skulls and arranging them? Thorolf shivered, not sure which answer was worse.
    He was pretty sure that if he asked, she wouldn’t tell him.
    There was a small hole at the top of the dome overhead, showing a tiny speck of the sky overhead. The interior of the building was illuminated by the silvery light of the firestorm, which only made the skulls look cold. Dead. The falcon had landed on a skull opposite the doorway, its claws clutching the cracked crown as it watched him.
    “This would be where the ghosts come from?” he asked, trying to sound as if he weren’t freaked out. His voice caught, though, giving him away.
    “I don’t know.” Chandra was calm and composed, exactly as he wasn’t. “Maybe.”
    “For someone who likes to know the answers, you could know a few more,” Thorolf said and Chandra laughed again.
    “Wouldn’t that be wonderful?” she mused. “But the world is full of more questions than answers.” She looked him up and down. “Is that what you’re afraid of? Dying?”
    “Isn’t everybody?”
    Chandra shook her head. “Some of us are afraid of living.” Her confession seemed to startle her as much as it did him.
    “Excuse me?”
    “Comes with the territory,” she said quickly, as enigmatic as ever, then gestured to the skulls. “Trust me. They’ll tell us something.”
    “How?”
    Her eyes shone, as if she could read his thoughts. Certainly she had to sense his trepidation. His heart was racing, as if he’d run a couple of miles,