The Cursed Page 29

  If they got out of there.

  The baby turned startled, reddened eyes up to Sean in the instant before he swept her into his arms, and then she waved one pink-pajamaed arm at him and gurgled.

  “We’re out of here, princess,” he told her, and then he picked up the room’s only chair, a wooden rocking chair, and hurled it at the window while shielding the infant.

  The glass shattered outward, as planned, and Sean headed for the window. A jump from the second story was an easy one for him to make, especially carrying only a tiny baby instead of a large, screaming adult, which he’d had to do before, so he had this one in the bag.

  No sweat.

  And then the dog barked, reminding him that Petunia was not going to make it out alive on her own. Sean looked down at the dog’s hopeful face and slowly wagging tail. Petunia had stayed in that room to protect her precious charge, and she’d even pulled a Lassie on Sean’s leg to get him to find the baby.

  Screw the rules. There was no way in hell he was going to leave that dog to burn to death.

  “You’re going to have to trust me, girl,” he said, crouching down in front of the dog, but keeping an ear out for the shift in sound that would tell him that the entire apartment was about to collapse. It was close.

  Too close.

  The dog’s big eyes looked worried, but she lifted one paw as if to shake, and Sean took that for a yes. He lifted her into the arm that wasn’t full of baby, took a running leap for the window, and leapt out into the blissfully cool darkness of the autumn night.

  Minutes later, he’d reunited the baby with her mother, who’d been missing after she’d run down to the building’s laundry room while her child was napping. The exploding water heater had shaken debris loose from the walls and ceiling of the basement, and a big chunk of something had hit the woman and knocked her out. She was one of the people Zach had rescued, and by the time they roused her to consciousness, the EMTs were administering oxygen to her baby right next to her, so she never had even a moment’s fear that her child was dead. Petunia, also wearing an oxygen mask and getting checked out, tried to wrap her furry body around her entire small family all at once.

  Sean, as always, made sure to disappear before the thank-yous started and the media showed up. Bordertown’s lead crime reporter, Jax Archer, was a disgraced Fae lordling who just happened to be a living, breathing lie detector, so Sean preferred to stay out of his way.

  “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” the fire chief shouted at him, crossing behind the hoses toward Sean while everyone else, exhausted but on the alert, watched the powerful streams of water battle the magically created fire.

  “Avoiding reporters,” Sean said bluntly, too tired and worried to care about playing nice with the new boss, who was turning out to be quite an asshole.

  One of the reporters Sean could actually tolerate picked that moment to round the corner behind the truck. Spotting Sean, she headed straight for them.

  “Pierce Holland, Bordertown Gazette,” she said unnecessarily, thrusting her microphone in Sean’s face. “Do we know what caused tonight’s fire? Also, I heard you brought out a baby and a dog after everybody else evacuated, O’Malley. Care to comment?”

  “I don’t think you’ve met the new chief, have you, Pierce? He was the one who convinced me to go back in for that baby,” Sean said, lying through his teeth. He pounded his boss on the back, only a little too hard. “Excellent instincts, this guy. Going to make a great chief.”

  The chief’s eyes widened, but before either of them could say another word, Sean smiled at them and ducked behind the truck. By the time his overactive hearing picked up the beginning of the chief’s response to the reporter, Sean was a block away and moving fast, stripping off his gear as he walked.

  Another couple of blocks, and he made it to Black Swan Fountain Square, his favorite place for relaxation and quiet contemplation in the middle of the night. There wasn’t much room in the rest of his life for peace or quiet. The family business, O’Malley’s Pub, was always full of loud talk, laughter, music, and merriment.

  It was enough to piss a man off.

  Especially when he was sick with worry about his mother’s unexplained “little tests,” which had left her drained, weak, and nauseous for more than three weeks now. She’d refused to talk about it that afternoon, so Sean had been having a bad damn day even before his fire station had gotten the call that the arsonist had struck again.

  He stared blindly at the black marble sculpture of the beautiful young woman and the swan in the center of the fountain, so tired that he didn’t really notice the actual live swan floating serenely in the water until the second time it came around. When he did notice it, he blinked, and then a flurry of movement in the water boiled up into a cloud of sparkling mist that he hadn’t been expecting, Bordertown or no.

  So he figured he could be excused for rubbing his smoke-wearied eyes when the iridescent shimmer dissipated and the bird flapping its wings in the swan fountain turned into a naked woman.

  A beautiful naked woman.

  Maybe that hit he’d taken to the head had been harder than he’d thought and he was hallucinating. He didn’t have long to believe that one, since the hallucination started talking to him.

  “Really? Are you just going to sit there and stare at me?”

  “Well, I was here before you turned naked, ah, turned human, I mean you didn’t—”

  “Right. Chivalry. Dead. Insert appropriate cliché.” She pushed her long masses of dark curls out of her face and stalked over to him, not the least bit embarrassed that she was incredibly and gloriously naked. When she crouched down next to him, his breath got stuck in his lungs in a way that had nothing to do with fire but everything to do with heat.

  She glanced up at him while reaching under the bench with one hand, and some of what he was feeling must have shown on his face, because she grinned.

  “Relax, hot stuff. I’m just getting my clothes.”