The Cursed Read online

  Oh, no, we’re so not going there.

  She backed up until she hit the wall and couldn’t go any farther, but he kept on coming. Her breath caught in her throat at the determined gleam in his eyes, but she found her backbone and held out her hands in the universal “stop” position.

  “No, Luke. No, no, no. You don’t get to act all sexy and flirty after you so rudely refused to even have coffee with me. I need your help now. That’s all. There is a little girl who needs us out there, so snap out of it and let’s figure this out.”

  He stopped dead in the middle of the room and scrubbed at his eyes with his fists. “I’m sorry. I think that damn venom is still working on me. Most venoms and poisons have zero effect on my system, so I wasn’t careful enough about staying out of range of its claws.”

  Rio shook her head, suddenly shaking with exhaustion. “It’s okay. I understand, but we need to figure out what we’re going to do. I just want to try to help that girl, if it’s not too late.”

  “If the guy who kidnapped her hasn’t already hauled her into one of the demonic realms,” he pointed out.

  “No, I don’t think so. I got the impression he was here in Bordertown—permanently. Just fragments of thoughts; I didn’t really put it together at the time, but . . . I don’t know,” she said, sighing heavily and sinking into his leather chair. “Maybe I’m just crazy. How could I get all that from a few minutes’ contact with his bizarre thought patterns?”

  Luke crouched down beside her and put his hand over hers where it rested on the arm of the chair. “You’re not crazy. We’ll figure this out, I promise you.”

  She smiled a little, even as she carefully pulled her hand away. “I knew I could count on you. Help me find her, and then I’ll be out of your hair forever.”

  Luke’s expression went from warm to wary in half a heartbeat, and his fingers tightened until he held her hand in a firm, unbreakable grip. “Oh, no, Rio. You’re not going anywhere. At least not until we figure out what the League of the Black Swan wants with you.”

  Luke wondered how he was still relatively upright when the inside of his skull was on fire. He hadn’t let anger like that escape his tightly leashed control in more years than he could remember. The mere idea that Rio would leave him had set long-buried primal instincts raging.

  Want.

  Need.

  “Hulk smash,” he muttered, disgusted, as he shoved a hand through his hair.

  Rio edged back in the chair, her beautiful dark eyes so wide he could see tiny flecks of gold and green shimmering in their dark amber depths.

  “Luke, are you—and I ask this in the nicest way possible—are you nuts?”

  She fidgeted with the end of her braid, and he was suddenly entranced with the delicate skin on the inside of her wrist. In the golden light from the lamps, he could just make out the faint blue tracings of her veins, beautifully curved as if drawn with gentle strokes by a master calligrapher.

  Or maybe he was fucking nuts.

  He stood up so fast that the room swirled around him in a spiraling haze of gilt-edged shadow, and it all clicked as he remembered. Again.

  “The venom,” he said. “It must be messing with my short-term memory, too, because I keep forgetting it’s affecting me.”

  Her shoulders relaxed a little. “Oh. Of course. You should probably rest, but I need to tell you something first. Why I’m here.”

  She shifted her legs and then winced, raising her foot, and he remembered that she was injured.

  “First, I’ll get you some ice for that ankle and make coffee,” he said, heading for the tiny kitchen off the back of the office space.

  He walked straight to the sink, ducked his head under the faucet, and ran icy water on his head and face for a half minute or so, until the almost drunken disorientation from the venom faded a little. He toweled off, started the coffee, and then put ice in a clean towel and returned to face the woman who’d danced through his dreams on more than one occasion.

  He could do this. He’d faced down a Grendel.

  But when he walked back into the office, Rio looked up at him and smiled, and the entire world shifted underneath his feet.

  Worse—he didn’t think he could blame it on the venom this time.

  “Luke? Ah, is that for me?” She bit her lip and he stared, fascinated, at her mouth.

  Her wicked, sensual mouth.

  “I want to kiss you,” he blurted out.

  She blinked and froze, like a startled woodland creature, and he did the only thing possible.

  He smacked himself in the forehead with the towel full of ice.

  “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he gritted out. “I don’t know why this damn venom is having such an effect on me. Poisons usually race out of my system in seconds. The longest I’ve ever been affected is a few minutes, and I . . . Oh.”

  He shoved the ice at Rio, spun around and went for the silver dagger he kept in plain sight out on his desk. His clients thought it was a letter opener.

  Only Luke knew it was a crucible.

  With barely the slightest trace of hesitation, he forced himself to reach out and take it, closing his fingers rapidly around the sleek surface of the silver handle.

  Which didn’t burn him.

  Not even a little.

  He exhaled a long, slow breath, and Rio cleared her throat.

  “Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”

  He shook his head. “No. Not now. Later, maybe. Your turn to talk. Tell me more about the child.”

  He shook his head to clear it and then turned to face her. She was still holding the ice in her hand, her brows drawn together as she stared at him. He dragged the beat-up red leather ottoman over to her chair and sat on it, gently lifting her injured leg into his lap.

  As he took the bundle of ice out of her hands, he tried a smile, since she was looking at him like he was a deranged and possibly dangerous criminal.

  “This works better if you actually put it on the hurting part.”

  She flinched a little when he moved her pants leg up and put the ice next to the swollen side of her ankle, trying not to let his fingers linger on the silken smoothness of her skin. Since she was in pain, he forced himself to ignore the fact that his pants suddenly felt too tight, just from her calf resting on his thigh.

  He was pathetic. Pathetic and aroused. Bad combination.

  And still a little woozy, probably, because he leaned forward and tucked a loose strand of her hair behind her ear. She caught her breath when his hand touched her cheek, and he almost thought she trembled, but when his gaze flew to hers, she looked away.

  “Ankle hurts,” she whispered. “I’m not very tough, I guess.”

  “You managed to get away from three Grendels. That’s pretty tough.”

  A smile curved her lips. “Maybe two Grendels and one of something uglier. Miro must have taken care of the other two.”

  He whistled. “It’s a good thing they didn’t catch you. You’d be dinner by now.”

  “They didn’t want me for dinner,” she said, her smile fading. “They wanted me for their boss. ‘The boss only wants to talk to you,’ they said, or something like that.”

  “Did you pick up who the boss was? He must be the kidnapper, right?”

  “I don’t know. Their thoughts were too one-dimensional for that. One of them wanted cake, one had indigestion, and the third—” She stopped and took a deep, shaky breath. “The third wanted to play with me.”

  Luke’s hands stilled on the ice that he’d been rearranging around her ankle, and he had to close his eyes and count to three before he could fight back the searing rage burning through him at her words.

  “You’re safe now,” he finally said. “They’ll never get their hands on you.”

  A cold wet sensation tingled on his thigh, and Rio’s eyes widened as she pointed.

  “Luke! Your hands—you melted the ice.”

  He looked down and, sure enough, his hands were glowing with blue fla
me. The towel was charred, and the water spread across his jeans and ran down his leg.

  She was safe. But maybe he wasn’t safe—from her. He could tell the League to go stuff their mission; he’d gone into this knowing it. How could he tell Rio that he couldn’t—wouldn’t—help her?

  He stood up, too quickly, and the room whirled around him in a carousel of spinning lights. Rio pushed her way up off the chair, balancing on one foot, and awkwardly put an arm around his waist. Her lips were pressed in a firm line, like she’d rather be doing anything rather than helping him, and he could see the pain etched in her face.

  “This isn’t helping anyone,” he said carefully, feeling around for words that wouldn’t make her want to leave. The certainty that if she left, she’d never come back pressed in on him, magnified by whatever the venom was doing to his mind. “Not that little girl, not you, and not me. We need to get some rest; it’s the middle of the night and I’ve been up since dawn. Even if I didn’t have Grendel poison floating around in my bloodstream, I’m not sure I’d be making much sense.”

  She glanced around the room, anywhere but up at him. “I don’t—where? I can get you to the couch, and I guess I can curl up on the chair for a while. I’m not going to be able to sleep, but you’re right. You’re no good to me now.”

  He winced, but she was right. “No, I live behind the office. We can go through that door just past the kitchen to my place, and you can bunk in one of the guest rooms.”

  Rio finally looked up at him, her eyebrows raised. “One of the guest rooms? Luke, that venom must be worse than you thought. There’s only room for a storage room behind your office. I’ve been in Helga’s Tea Room just a few doors down, and she only has room for a week’s worth of supplies in her storage room. Let’s just get you to the couch.”

  He felt the unfamiliar grin stretch across his face. “It’s okay. My house is bigger on the inside.”

  Rio just shook her head, clearly not a Doctor Who fan, but she turned toward the door he’d indicated and they started forward. The room had quit spinning, so he supported her slight form against him so she wouldn’t have to put any weight on her wounded ankle. He wanted to lift her up and carry her, but he had a feeling that wouldn’t fly—and might actually push her out of his door.

  When he touched the door to release the wards and it swung open, Rio stopped short on the threshold and whistled.

  “What in the world?”

  “I don’t exactly have the brainpower right now to explain the physics of interdimensional magic, not that I really understand it all that well in the first place,” he admitted, as she stood there staring at the spacious expanse of the first floor of his house, which took up a good thirty times the square footage of Helga’s storage room.

  “I kind of have more house than most people expect,” he said, and then the stabbing pain started in his gut, and he fell on his face.

  CHAPTER 4

  Rio crashed to the floor, too, because Luke was well over two hundred pounds of long, lean muscle, and he’d had one arm firmly wrapped around her waist when he toppled. Somehow, in a burst of creative chivalry or pure dumb luck—for her—he’d managed to twist so that he didn’t fall on top of her. Considering the noise the back of his head had made when it hit the floor, she was pretty grateful. On the other hand, she was the only person conscious in a wizard’s apartment, and there was no way that could be good. Not to mention that her traitorous body was entertaining thoughts of how delicious his long, hard body felt against hers.

  She pushed away the idea and slowly sat up, hoping there were no wards primed to burn her to cinders or turn her into a toad, and spoke somewhat hesitantly to the empty room.

  “I know that intent is important in magic, so I want to state clearly that I have no intention of harming Luke. I only want to help him.”

  She bit her lip and looked around, feeling like a fool, but nothing moved or changed. No magical, sparkly lights spelled out ENTER, but they didn’t show up and spell out GO AWAY, either, so she decided to take her chances.

  “Luke,” she said, touching his muscular shoulder. “Luke!”

  But his lashes didn’t even flutter. He was out cold on the surprisingly beautiful hardwood floor of his house that was bigger on the inside. It must have been the venom.

  “I hope it doesn’t kill you,” she whispered, suddenly feeling more alone than she ever had.

  His eyes opened, and he stared up at her, blinking, and then his forehead smoothed as he seemed to remember where he was and what had happened.

  “Need water,” he said hoarsely. “The powder—pale yellow powder in glass vial over the sink. Please.”

  She pulled herself up and limped across the open space to the kitchen area, which was part of the entire living, dining, and relaxing space. Luke’s home was restful, at least what she could see of it from here. Vibrant autumn colors that reminded her of the forest mixed with splashes of dark green and warm red. Nothing too new or flashy, but the entire effect was one of good taste and money. Old money.

  She glanced back at the open doorway, briefly wondering why his office looked like it belonged to a man desperate to pay the rent, before deciding to worry about more important things.

  She examined the several cut-glass vials standing in a neat row on a narrow shelf above the sink and quickly selected the only one with light yellow powder in it. She carried it and a glass of water back to where Luke waited, still flat out on the floor, and sank down next to him, trying not to cry out when her injured ankle twisted a little underneath her.

  “I’m so sorry,” he rasped, leveraging up onto his elbows and then into a sitting position before taking the vial from her. “I should be taking care of you, and I’m useless.”

  “You can owe me one,” she said, trying to smile and failing miserably.

  Luke poured about half of the yellow powder into the glass of water, where it dissolved into an unexpected bluish-purple shade, and then he tilted his head back and drank the entire glassful without stopping.

  She watched his throat, oddly fascinated by the movement as he swallowed, and then she forced herself to look away as she took a long, deep breath. Her muscles, which had been tensed and ready to fight or flee all day, relaxed bit by bit until she wanted to curl up in a ball next to Luke and fall asleep.

  He finished the water, inhaled a long breath of his own, and then put the glass down on the floor next to him. She could almost see the color returning to his face and awareness to his eyes.

  “That’s better,” he said. “I think I’m okay now. Let’s get you something for your ankle.”

  She laughed a little bit and shook her head.

  “Come on,” he said, a half grin quirking up one side of his sensual mouth. “You’ve pretty much seen me at my worst. Fair’s fair.”

  “I was feeling a little like Alice after she fell down that rabbit hole,” she admitted. “And then you downed the Drink Me potion . . .”

  She laughed again. She was sitting on the floor, watching an injured wizard drink a magical potion, but for the first time since she’d witnessed the kidnapping, she no longer felt afraid. Something loosened in her chest at the realization, and she caught her breath at the warmth in his eyes. This man—this gorgeous, seductively handsome man—could be a real danger to her self-control.

  “How about we get some rest and find the White Rabbit tomorrow morning?” He stood up in one smooth motion, pulling her up with him. “I really do have something that can help your ankle, too.”

  “I—I don’t want to take any magic potions,” she said quickly. “I don’t mean to offend you, but—”

  “Advil,” he said dryly.

  She nodded and let him help her to one of the tall, leather-padded, wooden-backed stools on the living space side of the kitchen counter. Her ankle was throbbing miserably, and now that she was standing up, she realized that she was exhausted to the point of nausea.

  “This wasn’t how I expected today to go when I woke up th
is morning,” she offered, by way of apology for jumping to conclusions.

  “Days never go how I expect them to go, so I quit having any expectations at all,” he said, taking a green-and-white pill bottle out of a cupboard and then reaching into the gleaming stainless steel refrigerator for a bottle of water. “Smarter that way. Less prone to disappointment.”

  Rio knew more about disappointment than most, but she said nothing. Her life wasn’t an anecdote to be traded in casual chatter. She downed the pills and drank the water while he retrieved his glass from the floor near the doorway and closed the door.

  Luke put his cup in the sink and looked at her. “Now let’s find . . . Wait. Child. You said child. I’m an idiot.”

  “What?”

  “Child. You saw a child being kidnapped. Just today a client hired me to find her missing niece. I’m only now putting it together.” He clenched his hands into fists. “Damn that venom. Rio, what did that girl look like?”

  A deep gong, like that of a very old church bell, sounded before Rio could reply, and she shivered. This gong carried tones of menace rather than reassurance; foreboding wrapped up in a musical tone.

  “Luke? What—”

  “It’s the doorbell. Sort of.” He shoved a hand through his hair and sighed. “And it’s not one I can ignore.”

  He waved a hand and muttered a few words under his breath that Rio didn’t catch, and an unobtrusive door past the edge of the kitchen area glowed silver around the edges of its frame. The door slammed open, and the most beautiful woman Rio had ever seen glided into the room, moving so smoothly that it seemed as if her feet never touched the ground.

  “Hello, Merelith,” Luke said wearily. “I told you I’d call you when I had news.”

  Merelith, who was clearly Fae, glared at Luke, and Rio wondered how he had the strength to keep from falling on the floor under the power of the woman’s gaze. Icy silver hair trailed down from Merelith’s perfect head to the top of her rounded, feminine hips. She had deep red lips and eyes that glittered with an opalescent green fire. She should have been wearing a fairy gown, not simple black pants and a white shirt, Rio thought numbly.