The Serpent's Kiss
A Novel
Prologue
The naked man on the bed was dying and
he had no idea why.
Moonlight filtered through sheer curtains
billowing before a window next to the bed.
He smelled the ocean, moaned, and tried
to string together thoughts. But there was
neither logic nor pattern to the things that
flitted through his brain now: the canopy of
a lone tree silhouetted in a garden at
twilight; the assured, fluid rustle of an
invisible animal moving through tall grass;
the rubbery tart taste of green apple; the
musky redolence that hung in the air after
sex. Questions came to him like raindrops:
What is my name? How did I get here?
What is the fire that has replaced my
blood?
He asked himself all these things and could
not come up with a single coherent answer;
in the last hour his consciousness had
been reduced to sensory fragments. No
past. No future. Just terrifying blips of the
now.
He was aware, for example, that his vision
kept blurring yellow, then clearing and
blurring again as if he had been cast adrift
in a small boat in a sea storm, pelted in the
eyes with ... read full excerpt from The Serpent's Kiss: A Novel ebook
