The Cursed Read online

  “I don’t have a passport,” Rio said, wondering why the idea of leaving town was freaking her completely out.

  “I’m a wizard, Rio. I can manage a passport.” He pulled the quilts away from her, then grinned wolfishly at the sight of her breasts. “You know, we might have a little more time.”

  “No! I’m up, already.”

  She escaped to the bathroom and the shower. By the time she was clean and dressed, the idea had caught fire in her imagination. More important, she’d woken up enough to appreciate the full extent of what he was offering her.

  Luke was willing to give up his entire life for her. How could she not be willing to do the same?

  “Let’s leave now,” she said, when she found him in his office, sorting through potions and powders. “Or as soon as you’re done with what you need to do. The sooner we’re gone, the sooner we can start over somewhere else.”

  Luke nodded, still sorting, and she went to find Kit.

  “Sleeping in Alice’s room? Do you think that will be okay with her?”

  Kit was curled up in a snug little ball in the middle of a gorgeous jade-green silk comforter. She stretched her head up to have her ears scratched, and then she stared at Rio with her beautiful emerald eyes.

  Are you leaving?

  “Yes, we’re leaving. If I stay, my families will tear me—or all of Bordertown—apart trying to control me.”

  Rio stroked Kit’s silky fur and realized she didn’t know if the little Yokai would be willing to go with her. She swallowed, hard.

  “Kit, I’d love it if you’d come with me. I know foxes can’t roam around in human places as easily as they can in Bordertown, but we can buy you a pretty collar and pretend you’re a pet, some kind of dog. I think an Akita looks like a fox.” Rio was babbling, but she was afraid that if she stopped talking, Kit would have a chance to tell her no.

  My task is not done, but I am still not sure what it is. I will remain with you for now.

  Rio hugged Kit, and Kit allowed it, and then the two of them went to find Luke so they could begin their new life together.

  Luke finished sorting through the most important bottles in his collection, selecting some to go with him and carefully boxing more up for Alice to send. Now he could leave his office, secure in the knowledge that nobody who might manage to break in after his wards had faded would be inadvertently poisoned.

  Rio appeared, carrying only the backpack she’d first arrived with, and Kit trotted along at her heels.

  “We’re going to need a collar. Green, I think,” Rio said, grinning down at Kit.

  “I’m glad you’re coming with us, fur-face. I need your superior help to keep Rio safe, after all,” Luke said, and for the first time, he heard Kit’s voice in his mind.

  I know.

  Luke’s mouth fell open, and Kit laughed her little fox laugh at him, with her tongue hanging down from the side of her mouth.

  “She talked to me,” he sputtered. “Smug little—”

  “I heard her,” Rio interrupted, grinning. “You two deserve each other. Stupid arrogant wizards and Yokai.”

  “We should go. Now,” he said. “The best exit from Bordertown to the human side of things is through the High Line park. Also, the park was built out of an old abandoned railroad line, so the Fae can’t get anywhere near it because of the metal.”

  “That’s half of my relatives, at least. Strange that I never had a problem with metal. Must be my demon half.” Rio forced a smile, and he appreciated the attempt. “I guess we’ll worry about Chance and the demons when they show up.”

  Within five minutes, they’d locked up the place and were in the Jeep. Rio kept glancing nervously around, and he wanted to reassure her but knew she’d only feel safe once they made it out of Bordertown. He pulled into a parking lot owned by a black bear shifter who owed him a favor, tossed the attendant the keys, and told the boy that Alice would pick it up. He thought the kid would wet himself at the news, but Luke managed to wait until he and Rio had walked a half block away before he started laughing.

  “So everybody knows Alice,” Rio said. “Someday I’d like to hear more about her.”

  Luke took her cold hand in his. “I’ll tell you all I know. She’s one of the most secretive people in the world, I think.”

  He gestured. “There’s the entrance to the park.”

  She stopped and stared for a moment. “Oh, Luke, it’s gorgeous. Is that hotel actually stretched over the top of the park?”

  “Yes, that’s the Standard Hotel. There are a couple of other buildings that cross the park, too.”

  “It used to be a railroad?”

  “For freight. It was an elevated line that brought freight cars directly to factories and warehouses. Once it was abandoned, it became a horrible urban eyesore. In fact, the Manhattan city government wanted to tear it down.”

  She started walking again, still admiring the sight of the oasis of plants that existed not only in Bordertown, where such things were magical and common, but in the steel and concrete jungle of Manhattan, where the humans seemed to systematically destroy all plant life so they could build more and more buildings.

  “What happened? Did Bordertown take it over?”

  Luke laughed. “No, we had little to do with it, other than some discreetly disguised contributions. This was all done by the humans. A talented team of landscape architects and traditional architects worked together with a lot of volunteers and donors to make this a remarkable place.”

  She glanced up at him. “Sounds like you come here a lot.”

  He shrugged, feeling sheepish at being caught out. “The view over Tenth Avenue is a good place to sit and think and eat my lunch, sometimes.”

  “Sounds . . . normal,” she said wistfully.

  “The view over the Seine is pretty incredible for picnics, too,” he told her. “When we get to Paris, I’ll take you—”

  “I don’t think you’ll be taking her anywhere.” The voice came from behind them, and Kit’s snarled warning came too late.

  Luke whirled around, already reaching for fire. “Maestro. Nice of you to return my calls.”

  The man looked more exhausted than Luke had ever seen him, but he ruthlessly repressed a twinge of sympathy. The maestro had put Rio through hell. He deserved whatever bad things happened to him.

  “What? No cake?” Rio’s face was harder and colder than Luke had ever seen it. “No fancy roulette wheels?”

  “I’ve been in Europe, trying to buy us time,” Maestro said wearily. “The Fae are arming for war, but this time it’s against each other. Internal factions are ripping the courts apart, and the only chance I can see of stopping it is to find a ruler powerful enough to control all of them.”

  His gaze traveled to Rio and stopped.

  “Oh, no,” she said, her eyes enormous. “You’re out of your mind if you think that I’ll have anything to do with this.”

  “You’re not using her, Maestro. I’ll kill you and any of the League who even try.” Luke didn’t raise his voice, and the man knew what that meant.

  “Still okay to touch silver?” Maestro held out a hand, and it was suddenly holding a silver knife. “Want to try mine again and see?”

  Before any of them could move, Kit’s jaws fastened on Maestro’s wrist, and there was a distinct crunch as she snapped his bones. Maestro shouted, Rio caught the knife before it hit the ground, and then suddenly Kit vanished and then reappeared safely behind Luke.

  “Nice job, Kitsune,” Luke said, drawing out her name so Maestro would know what he was up against.

  The man had already healed his own wrist, so it wasn’t a permanent injury or even one that delayed him much, but Luke figured it had proven a point.

  “The Yokai doesn’t like me much.”

  “None of us like you much. Don’t mess with us,” Rio said, steely-eyed. “I’ll just keep this knife as a souvenir of what happens to people who try to mess with my family.”

  Luke’s heart leapt
in his chest. She’d called him her family.

  “We can help you,” Maestro said.

  “You just want to use me,” Rio countered.

  “Everybody wants to use everybody, child,” the old web spinner said wearily. “Right now, I only want to protect you and Bordertown from what’s going to happen to you at midnight.”

  Luke backed him up against the wall of the building. “You know something, don’t you?”

  “I know many things. Come with me to our offices, and I’ll tell you.”

  Rio shook her head and pointed to the High Line. “No. Tell me there, in the park, or don’t tell me at all.”

  Maestro contemplated her for a moment and then nodded. “Yes. That will work.”

  “Fine.” She turned and headed for the park entrance, Kit at her side, leaving them to follow, but then she glanced back over her shoulder. “We need food. Don’t forget Kit.”

  Luke grinned and then headed after her, in case any of her demon family had decided to hang out at the park today.

  “You’re buying,” he told Maestro. “I have to go after my woman.”

  “It’s a mistake, you know. You and her,” Maestro said quietly, almost under his breath.

  “Save it,” Luke advised, not bothering to slow down.

  This “mistake” was going to last for the rest of Rio’s life.

  CHAPTER 27

  Rio waited for Luke in the park, but the stunning surroundings didn’t match her mood, the situation, or the conversation they were about to have. Kit, still walking next to her, had transformed again, and now she looked like a pint-sized collie.

  The people they passed—although now perhaps Rio needed to say the humans they passed, since she was no longer one of them—didn’t see anything but a lovely dog when they looked at Kit, judging by their compliments and comments, so that was good.

  Rio nodded her thanks but didn’t stop to engage in conversation. There was no point in trying to make friends or strike up acquaintances now, when she might never see this park or anyone in it ever again.

  Melancholy struck, hard, and Rio tried to swallow her fears, but the lump in her throat and the pain in her chest were making it tough. What if she never made it back? What if she’d never see Clarice again? And Chance . . . Although he hadn’t done much to impress her yet, she’d had the feeling that there might be hope for the future. Elisabeth, Miro, even Mrs. G, who’d probably had no choice but to do what she’d done.

  She headed toward the Manhattan side of the stretch of park and made it about halfway across the path, inhaling deeply to enjoy the delicious aroma of flowers and foliage, when the headache and then the first tingle hit. She ignored both and took another step, and bam, the sensation struck again. It was a shiver across her skin, like static electricity that had somehow dispersed from an isolated shock into a full-body assault.

  Kit started to whine, softly at first and then more loudly. When Rio tried to take another step as a sort of experiment, Kit sank her teeth into Rio’s pants leg and pulled, bracing her small body with stiff legs, and her voice sounded loud and clear in Rio’s mind.

  No.

  “Looks like she doesn’t like that side of the park,” Luke said, approaching from her left. When she turned to face him, she inadvertently brushed her right shoulder against the electric fence or whatever it was, and Luke’s face went slack with fear.

  “Rio, no,” he shouted.

  He leapt forward toward her at the same time that Kit yanked especially hard, and between the two of them, Rio fell back and away from the bizarre electrical current and sprawled on her butt on the path right there in the middle of the High Line.

  “What the hell was that?” Luke muttered, stalking up and down the path in the exact spot where Rio had first felt the unpleasant electric charge.

  Kit took up a position in front of Rio and barked at her when Rio tried to stand up.

  “What is it?” Rio asked the Yokai, frustrated beyond belief that everybody was overreacting because she’d stepped into a freak electrical current.

  Luke returned and crouched down next to her, taking her chin in his hand and staring intently at first one, and then the other side of her face.

  “What?” she demanded.

  “Rio, you started to disappear,” he said, and he was visibly shaken.

  She swallowed whatever smart-ass remark she’d been about to make, because he looked like he’d seen a ghost, and the ghost had been Rio.

  “It was like nothing I’ve ever seen before. You started to fade in sections; not like traveling through Shadows, or jumping the way Kit leaps through space, or any kind of magical transport I’ve ever seen or heard of,” he continued, compulsively running his hands up and down her arms, as if to make sure she didn’t disappear again.

  He finally pulled her up from the ground when they started to get strange looks from passing humans, but he and Kit walked between Rio and the danger zone all the way to the other side—the Bordertown side—of the park.

  Maestro waited there, seated on a bench with bags of food at his side and his hands folded together in his lap.

  “I’m guessing you’ve discovered the truth now,” he said.

  “What truth is it this time? That I’m strangely sensitive to human-built electrical currents?” Rio rolled her eyes. “You’re all overreacting.”

  “No, child. The truth that you will never be able to leave Bordertown, at least not by way of the human world. Demon Rift and the Fae realms are open to you.”

  She sat down, hard, on the bench next to him. “What?”

  “Julian and Berylan made sure of that, when they warded you against discovery,” Maestro said.

  Rio knew her face looked blank, but she had no idea what he was talking about. “Who?”

  The old man’s face softened for just a split second before he resumed his usual expressionless mask. “Julian na Demon Rift and Berylan na Kythelion. Your parents.”

  Rio didn’t hear anything else, although she knew he was still talking. It was too much, finally. Too much to accept, too much to comprehend, too much to believe.

  Their names. She finally knew their names, and the sound of them had hit her hard with the force of returning memory. Something tickled at the edge of her consciousness—something to do with those names—but she couldn’t quite capture it. Luke tried to talk to her, but he was only interrupting the process, so she impatiently waved him away and turned her mind even further inward.

  Julian na Demon Rift and Berylan na Kythelion. Her parents. They’d loved each other; at least enough to have defied their parents and conceived her. They’d named her, too: El’andille na Kythelion na Demon Rift. Even the sound of it was beautiful and regal and elegant—everything that Rio was not.

  She’d never felt the lack of those qualities so keenly before today.

  And now she’d learned, from the very person who’d put the Ruin Rio’s life plans in action, that her own parents had damaged her in some way. Cursed her to a life lived only in Bordertown and her families’ realms. The same families who had treated her parents so badly. It didn’t make sense.

  She looked at Luke and started to laugh. The two of them were almost fated to be together. They were two of a kind—the cursed—both of them trapped in fates designed by the cruelest possible architects: their own parents.

  “Tell me,” he said, watching her from eyes darkened with concern.

  “I will. Later,” she promised.

  Maestro stared at the flowering bushes nearest the bench. “These do not bloom on the human side of the park. Perhaps there is a bit of wisdom there, El’andille. Some of us need magic to bloom, and you have not begun to reach or understand the full extent of your powers.”

  “El’andille,” Luke repeated softly. “It’s a beautiful name, Rio.”

  “I prefer Rio,” she said quickly, not even knowing yet if it was the truth for always, but it was absolutely the truth for now.

  El’andille was a person she didn’t k
now yet and might not have the opportunity to get to know. Rio was the woman who could stand up for herself against Fae princesses, demon kings, and enraged mama ducks. El’andille might have magic, but Rio had guts.

  Right now, she needed guts.

  “Tell me,” she told Maestro. “Everything you know.”

  He nodded. “They met at a formal function, during which they were meant to offer the usual glib reassurances that the wars of the past would never happen again, that both realms lived for nothing but peace, et cetera, et cetera.”

  “But it didn’t work out that way, I guess,” Rio said.

  “No, it did not. Three oracles took to their beds after that night, never to rise again, and another six hung up their shingles and took work in shops. It was always said that nobody could ever have predicted it, but the truth was that anybody who saw them dance that night should have known exactly what would happen next,” Maestro said, and he smiled as if remembering the sight.

  “Your mother was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, and your father was her match, with the sharp-edged masculine beauty that only the Demon Rift royal family has ever displayed.”

  Luke sat down next to Rio and handed her the other half of Kit’s sandwich.

  “Hey, I look okay in a tux,” he said, sounding vaguely disgruntled.

  She smiled and kissed his cheek. “I’m looking forward to seeing that.”

  Maestro frowned. “Do you want to hear this or not?”

  Rio sighed, not sure if she did, but she nodded.

  “There was nothing for either of them, after that, but each other. The royal families nearly went to war over it. In the end, both were disinherited, disowned, and driven from their respective realms. They came to live in Bordertown, but Berylan was already pregnant with you by that time. The pain of losing her family, combined with the fear that the demons or her own kind would find and kill them, was too much for her. She became ill and died soon after childbirth, and Julian disappeared shortly after that. You were never seen again; most assumed the baby had died, including me, I might add. I’m sorry, but that’s all I know, other than about the ward, because Julian came to me for help finding someone to set it shortly after you were born.”