The Cursed Read online

  It was the most ridiculous and the most romantic thing she had ever heard. She started to tear up again and rubbed her eyes with her fists.

  “You do realize that you can’t blow something up every time I get emotional,” she said cautiously. “This—whatever this is—can’t work if I have to worry about the imminent destruction of all human life and property in Bordertown.”

  He scowled again, even more ferociously, and epiphany struck. Rio’s world tilted and then righted itself on a different axle. It wasn’t charm, flirtation, or big romantic gestures that would catch her heart and steal her soul, then. It was a hint of brokenness, a flash of need and longing that let her hope there was a chance for her to soothe a kindred wounded spirit and that maybe, just maybe, he would be able to offer solace in return.

  More and more, she was coming to realize that the hole in her heart was shaped like Luke. It terrified her that nobody else would ever be able to fill it.

  “I can try harder,” he promised, so earnestly that she had to fight a smile.

  “I think you’re doing just fine. Maybe we should go talk to Helga about her new van before we get lunch.”

  He cleared his throat and looked everywhere but at her. “You might want to go wash your face. You, ah, have some of that black stuff smeared around your eyes.”

  Mortified, she jumped up and ran back to the bathroom, but when she got there she started laughing so hard that she had to hold on to the counter so she didn’t fall on the floor. Why in the world was she worried about him seeing her with a little smeared mascara, when he’d seen her covered from head to toe with filth the night before? She washed her face and started over with a little bit of makeup, feeling suddenly lighthearted.

  So the nuns didn’t want to talk to her, did they? She’d go another avenue. There was more than one way to skin a duck.

  Kit had decided not to join them for lunch, if the way she blinked, stretched, and went back to sleep was any indication, so Rio left her with a bowl full of shredded chicken, a plate of spring greens, and a bowl of fresh water.

  “I’m worried about her,” she confessed to Luke. “I feel like there’s more I should be doing for her. Maybe take her to a wildlife rescue? Should she be in the forest, instead of in the middle of the city, especially a city like this one?”

  Luke glanced down at her as they walked, a gleam of amusement in his beautiful blue eyes. “I get the feeling that if Kit wanted to be in a forest, she’d be in a forest. She’s a magical creature, Rio. She talked to you and said she’s meant to be with you. If it were me, I’d go with the flow for a while.”

  “I guess so. But I really need to fatten her up a little bit. If Dr. Black catches me again while Kit is still this thin, I have a feeling that I’ll be the one she feeds to her office cat.”

  “That woman is a little scary,” Luke agreed. “I once needed her help with a shape-shifting armadillo who was stuck midshift, and I thought she was going to singe the skin right off my body with the scolding she gave me before she realized that I wasn’t the one who’d caused it.”

  They managed to talk about little things while they had soup and sandwiches in a sidewalk café, taking advantage of the unusually warm day. Funny adventures he’d had on cases; weird things that had happened to her on her bike messenger runs. Small talk and lunch, almost like normal people. Rio wanted to knock wood even as she had the thought, to keep the meteorite from smashing down on them.

  Luke made a few phone calls during lunch. In one, he profusely apologized to Madame Helga. In another, he arranged for a new van with all the bells and whistles to be delivered to her tea shop.

  Rio put down her glass of water and clasped her hands on the table. “You really have too much money if you can order vans the way most people order pizza. Also, shouldn’t you make another call and organize somebody for the cleanup?”

  “No, the scavengers will have taken care of it by now. There won’t be a shred of metal, plastic, or cloth anywhere in the alley.”

  She nodded. It was true that very little went to waste in Bordertown. The creatures who lived here were amazing recyclers. The uses they might put something to would possibly scare ten years off your life, but at least everything was reduced, reused, and recycled.

  And often eaten.

  They paid the bill and walked back to Luke’s office.

  “Maestro hasn’t returned any of my calls, so that’s a dead end for now,” Luke said.

  “What a shocker. You politely threaten to rip someone’s bones apart while he’s still alive and awake to feel it, and he doesn’t call you back. Who could have predicted that?”

  Luke made a growling noise but otherwise didn’t answer her, and she decided to accept that as agreement. When they got to the office, a woman was standing in front of the door. She was maybe early thirties and serious looking, with short dark hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Her thin face was pale and drawn, and there were dark shadows under her eyes.

  “Are you Mr. Oliver?”

  Luke nodded and unlocked the office door, motioning her in.

  “Hi. I’m Rio Holmes,” Rio said, holding out her hand. “I’m Mr. Oliver’s associate. How can we help you?”

  Luke rolled his eyes. “Wouldn’t Rio Watson have been better?”

  The woman blinked and glanced back and forth between the two of them, wringing her delicate hands.

  “I’m Janet Evans. I left a form? About my puppy? Nobody called me, and I just—I wonder if you’d had a chance to look into it,” the woman said, her lower lip trembling. “I realized I forgot to leave a picture for you, and I’ve heard about the wizard thing, I mean the locator thing, so I brought Penelope’s weekend collar.”

  Luke had started banging around in desk drawers, but he looked up at that. “The dog has a weekend collar? What the hell is a—”

  “We were just getting ready to call you,” Rio said, interrupting Luke’s sparkling customer relations skills. “Tell us all about it.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Three hours later

  When the smoke cleared, Luke found Rio on the floor, one knee dug into the back of Janet’s scumbag ex-boyfriend, cradling the stolen puppy in her arms. He looked around at the destruction of the auto repair shop and realized he might be in trouble.

  “Wow. Really? How many times are we going to have to have this conversation?” Rio asked, glaring at Luke.

  The man she was holding down started swearing, his voice muffled by the simple fact that it was pressed into the cement floor, and she reached down and smacked him in the side of the head.

  “That’s for locking this poor baby up in a closet and for the disgusting plans you had for her.”

  Luke grinned, and she shot him a forbidding look. “Don’t even think we are done with this conversation. I told you I had it under control. I looked around the shop and found the puppy while he checked out the problem I claimed to be having with the brakes on your Jeep. It was a perfect plan.”

  Luke folded his arms across his chest to keep from snatching her up and away from the asshole. “He touched you. He put his hands on you and started shaking you. He’s lucky to be alive. I don’t know why we’re even talking about this.”

  The man’s moans abruptly stopped.

  “We are talking about it because you can’t just blow something up every time you think I have a problem. What about that sedan that was in the next bay over from your Jeep? Look at what’s left of it! It looks like a car that somebody’s grandmother used to drive, and I say ‘used to drive’ on purpose because nobody will ever drive that car again.”

  Luke was honestly baffled. He didn’t understand women at all. How could she possibly expect him to stand by and do nothing when that thug started manhandling her?

  Suddenly, what she had said penetrated, and he exhaled in relief. “Oh, I get it. It’s the car. The car and the grandma. Don’t worry about it. I’ll buy her a new car. It was probably a piece of shit anyway, or it wouldn’t have been in this low-rent gara
ge. Grandma will be happy to have a new one. It will be like the lottery, but with sedans.”

  Rio made a noise that sounded like a cross between a laugh and scream, but before he could pursue the topic Janet came running up.

  “My baby,” she shouted, and the little dog leapt out of Rio’s arms and ran for her owner.

  Janet rained kisses all over the pup’s silken little head, alternately laughing and crying. “You found her. You found her. Oh, Mr. Oliver, Rio, I can never thank you enough.”

  When she finally looked up and realized Rio was still pinning the dognapper to the floor, Janet hissed.

  “If I ever catch you anywhere near Penelope again, I will have you arrested. No, scratch that, I will have you shot. First, I will have you boiled in oil, and then I will have you shot,” Janet told her jerk of an ex, but she didn’t yell at all. Instead, it was the quiet menace in her voice that convinced Luke she really meant business.

  “I’d believe her, if I were you,” he advised.

  “We should leave now,” Rio said, standing up and brushing off the knees of her jeans. “Mission accomplished.”

  “You’ll send me a bill?” the grateful dog owner asked, following them out.

  They all ignored the man who was now curled up in a ball, cursing.

  Rio waved a hand grandly. “No charge. We’re just happy you’re reunited with Penelope.”

  Luke watched, dumbfounded, as Rio strode off down the street, head high and shoulders back. He was so entranced with watching her tight little ass as she walked that she almost made it around the corner half a block away before he thought to retrieve the Jeep and go after her.

  He pulled up beside her and called out the window. “Get in the car, Rio.”

  She shook her head but didn’t look at him. “No, I think it’s a nice day for a walk. Besides, you might want to explode something on the way home, and I don’t want to get in your way.”

  Luke slammed on the brakes and smashed his head into the steering wheel a few times, but no amazing bit of understanding regarding the female sex was knocked loose in the process. So he parked the car, jumped out, and went after her.

  “Okay, what you want me to understand is that you can take care of yourself,” he began tentatively.

  She looked at him and rolled her eyes but said nothing.

  “No problem. You can take care of yourself. See, that was easy.”

  She stopped walking, turned to face him, and poked a finger in his chest. Hard.

  “Words. Those are just words. How is it that last night you watched me distract a giant duck—in fact, you told me to do it—and had no problem, but today you feel like you have to protect me from some thug dognapper?”

  “Because that man wasn’t human.”

  She threw her hands in the air. “Almost nobody in Bordertown is human. What does that have to do with anything?”

  “He was an Iron Kin demon,” Luke explained, pausing to glare at a few teenagers who were walking by, laughing at them. “If he got tired of shaking you, he could have picked up the Jeep with one hand and thrown it at you.”

  Rio blew out a breath and thought about that for a minute.

  “Oh,” she finally said. “Well, thank you, then.”

  “He was dangerous,” Luke continued. “If you think for one second—”

  He stopped, confused. She’d thanked him?

  “You’re right. I’m sorry.” She put her hands on his shoulders, stood on her tiptoes, and kissed his cheek, leaving him floundering for what to say next.

  “You’re sorry?”

  “I’m not an idiot, Luke. I know my limits. Okay, I sort of know my limits. He was a mental broadcaster, so I could read his mind loud and clear. I knew he’d taken the dog, and I knew which closet he’d stuffed her into. With no water, by the way.”

  She shuddered. “I even knew that he planned to feed her to the dragon lizards that live in the sewers. I think I might be pretty good at the investigation part of private investigation, but I’m no match in strength for most supernatural creatures. That’s why we’re partners, right?”

  He shoved his hands into his pockets to keep from grabbing her and twirling her around right there on the street.

  “So now we’re partners?” he said in a mock growl. “Well, partner, we’re never going to be able to pay the bills if you keep telling people that our services are free.”

  She walked over and climbed into the passenger seat of the Jeep, closed the door, and looked out the window at him, smiling primly. “I’d feel like an idiot sending her a bill for saving her puppy after you just admitted in her hearing range that you were going to buy some random person’s grandma a new car because you’d had a temper tantrum.”

  “Temper tantrum? I thought we just agreed that I was being reasonable?”

  She waited until he swung himself up into the driver’s seat to respond.

  “No. We agreed that you were being reasonable to protect me from an angry demon. We did not agree that the way to do it was to blow up half of an auto repair shop.”

  Luke tried not to stare at her. Her amber eyes were sparkling, her cheeks were pink with excitement, she was dusty from the explosion, and her hair was a tangled mess.

  She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

  “We spent all afternoon doing that,” she said suddenly. “I hate to admit it, but I’m hungry again. How are you with spicy food? I have some friends that I’d like you to meet.”

  “I love hot and spicy,” he said, and suddenly his mind went to very different places than dinner.

  The predator inside Luke—the monster—lifted its head and growled, and he knew he was too close to the edge. He already had been forced to fight against his own savage instincts to keep from blasting the dognapping scumbag into a pile of greasy ash right there on the floor of his repair shop when the son of a bitch had dared to lay a hand on Rio.

  Mine, mine, mine, the darkness inside him had howled, and he’d felt the rage clawing its way up from the pit of his stomach. So yeah, right now he was definitely in the mood for hot and spicy. The problem was, he was fighting to keep from thinking of Rio as his main course.

  “Turn here,” Rio said, oblivious to his internal battle. “Have you ever been to Hellacious before?”

  He groaned, long and loud. “You’re taking me to a demon-owned restaurant? Now?”

  If fate was setting him a test, this was a good one. Right now, he was in the mood to blast any demon who even dared to blink in his direction.

  “We can go somewhere else,” she said, but she was clearly disappointed.

  “Oh, no. Let’s go to Hellacious. I hear they have great hot sauce.”

  When they entered the redbrick-fronted building, they headed straight for the restrooms to get cleaned up, and when they returned to the hostess station, Luke watched bemusedly as the demon couple who owned the restaurant rushed over to greet Rio and give her a hug.

  “Thank you again for throwing that baby shower for Linda,” the female of the couple said.

  “It was my pleasure, Zephyr. How are she and the baby doing?”

  And with that one magical word—baby—the two women were off and running in a conversation that lasted at least five minutes before Rio remembered Luke was standing there. He traded handshakes with the woman’s husband in the meantime, trying to be on his best behavior.

  No blasting Rio’s friends, no blasting Rio’s friends.

  “Severius, but you can call me Seven,” the demon said.

  “Luke Oliver.”

  Seven raised one eyebrow. “I know who you are. What I want to know, and what everybody wants to know, is what your platform is going to be. If you’re planning some kind of anti-demon campaign when you’re sheriff, please have some integrity and put your cards on the table now, so we can organize against you.”

  Luke groaned. “I am not running for sheriff, I do not want to be sheriff, and I don’t think there’s anybody around big enough or tough enough to m
ake me do it.”

  Rio finally stopped chatting about babies long enough to glance up at him from beneath her long, silky lashes. “I think you’d be a great sheriff,” she murmured.

  Suddenly he thought he might have to revise his thinking. She wasn’t very big, but she was pretty tough, and he’d be damned if she didn’t have him starting to rethink his position on the job. He groaned again, and Seven slapped him on the back.

  “Let’s find your table. It sounds like you need a beer.”

  “Do you have any whiskey?”

  Rio closed her eyes in utter bliss as she took another bite of enchilada and fire-roasted salsa. Say what you would about some demon restaurants and the questionable origin of their roasted meats, Zephyr and Seven really knew how to fire-roast their salsas. When she opened her eyes, a man was standing next to her table, watching her, amusement in his pale green eyes.

  Luke had gone to the kitchen with Seven to learn how to make a flaming dessert after the two of them had formed some weird male bond while talking about Quidditch. Luke had claimed the game was more fun to watch when they set the brooms on fire, and Seven had countered that the stakes were higher when the winners were allowed to drop their defeated foes over a cliff.

  “Hard to keep a league running if you keep dropping teams off cliffs,” Zephyr had observed as she passed by on her way to another table with a tray of drinks.

  The word league had been enough to send Rio groping for her own drink, and she’d downed half the glass of Demon Pale Ale without stopping.

  “It’s always nice to observe someone enjoying her food,” the man said, holding out his hand. “Chance Roberts.”

  Rio automatically started to hold out her hand in return, but then she yanked it back.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t know you. And after the past few days, you’ll excuse me if I’m a little leery of touching strangers.”

  It was a lie. Everybody in Bordertown had heard of Chance Roberts. Everybody in the freaking world probably had heard of him. He was rich. Astonishingly, obscenely rich. Not rich like I can buy people new cars when I blow them up, but rich like I just bought Wall Street.