She looks up. “My tolerances are declining. All of them.”
I sit up. “What does that mean?”
“It means the samples I’ve been carrying for years, the ones that represent every venom I’ve built immunity to, are reacting differently when I test my blood against them. The reactions are weaker. My immunity is eroding.”
“From my bites?”
“I don’t know.” She picks up the assay stone and turns it in her hands. “Maybe. Probably. The blue-ringed compounds aredeclining fastest, and those are the closest structural match to your venom. That can’t be coincidence. But I don’t understand the mechanism.”
I do.
The understanding arrives in my body before it arrives in my mind, a cold recognition in my glands, in the need that has been surging toward her for weeks.
Every bite I’ve given her has been doing this, every small dose, every morning. Her body accepts my venom quietly, systematically replacing everything else in her blood.
I’ve been eating her a little more every day.
“It’s the bonding,” I say.
She looks at me. “What?”
“The bonding in the venom. The gold fraction on your stone.” My voice sounds wrong in my own ears, flat, the way I talk when something is too big and I make it small to hold it. “It’s designed to reorganize a mate’s body around the Ophidian’s chemistry. That’s what bonding is. The mate’s immune system rebuilds, and other tolerances get displaced.”
She’s very still. “You know this,” she says. “You’ve known this.”
“Every Ophidian knows. The elders teach it.”
“And you didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t think doses this small would be enough to start the process. I thought it required a full bonding bite. I was wrong.”
The silence in the cave is heavy.
“Every bite,” she says, her voice controlled in the way it gets when she’s holding something back. “Every morning. Your venom has been reorganizing my immune system. And you knew this was possible.”
“I knew bonding does this. I didn’t know small doses would trigger it.”
“But you knew it was a risk.”
I don’t answer, because the answer is yes.
She stands and walks to the workbench, putting her hands flat on the surface the way she does when she needs to hold something solid. “How fast?” she says.
“I don’t know. I’ve never bonded. My father died the year I was born. The only time I’ve ever seen it was once, when I was eleven.”
“Tell me what you saw.”
The words come out of a place thirty years deep. “His name was Thassren. He was old. His human mate slept at the back of their cave. He said her body rebuilt entirely around his venom.”
Ruelle doesn’t move. She’s listening with her whole body.
“I was eleven. Passing through. He let me stay a night. I watched his mate sleep. Her breathing was shallow. I asked him if she was happy.”
“What did he say?”
“He said:I eat her a little more every day. Every bite takes a piece of what she was and replaces it with what I need her to be.”
The cave is quiet.
