The Cursed Read online

  “Where is she?”

  He pointed to the couch, and the terrifying Fae lady transformed, for the briefest of moments, into an ecstatic aunt. Merelith shot across the room to Elisabeth in a cloud of silver sparkles, and Luke’s nose started to itch. He’d always been slightly allergic to Fae magic, and whenever they were dealing with heightened emotion, it was worse.

  The little girl, now safe in her aunt’s arms, opened her eyes and peeked up at Merelith through her tangled hair. “Can we go home now? I’m sorry I was late, Auntie Merelith, but I’m so tired now.”

  Poor kid. She was totally exhausted. Dark smudges purpled the delicate skin under her eyes, and she looked a little worse than she had when they’d found her. A thought tickled Luke’s mind, but Merelith’s icy voice shattered it before it formed.

  “Who?” she demanded, glaring at Luke. “Why? Does he or she lie dead and bleeding on the ground?”

  “I think you stop bleeding when you’re dead. No pressure to pump the blood out,” Luke pointed out. “You want to explain to me why you couldn’t find her yourself?”

  A flash of something that, in anybody else, might have been bewilderment came and went in Merelith’s eyes so fast that he almost didn’t catch it.

  “My methods are none of your concern, wizard. Payment will be delivered.” She turned to leave, but he stopped her with a touch to the shoulder.

  “She was very brave, but worried that you would be angry with her,” he said softly, glancing down at the sleeping child. “I’m really glad she’s safe.”

  Merelith nodded, and then she glided out his door to the waiting silver limo. Her voice floated back to him as she climbed into the car while still holding her niece close to her chest.

  “Do not think to distract me from the Halfling, Lucian Olivieri. We will meet again soon.”

  Luke slammed the door and glared at it. “Damn Fae always have to have the last word.”

  He turned at a noise, just in time to see Rio walking toward him carrying a fluffy towel wrapped around a wet fox.

  “Merelith?”

  Luke nodded. “She took her niece.”

  Rio shivered. “I’m just as glad not to have had to deal with her again. Maybe everything can go back to normal in my life now.”

  He doubted it, since the League was involved, but decided to keep that opinion to himself for the time being.

  “Any chance you can light a fire in your fireplace, so Kit can warm up and dry off? I didn’t see a hair dryer in your bathroom,” she said.

  “You wanted to use a blow dryer on a fox?”

  She tapped her foot, ignoring the question, so he pulled the lever to open the flue and then flicked his fingers at the logs in his fireplace to start a fire crackling. Rio arranged the fox on the towel in front of the flames, and Luke could see that the creature wasn’t gray and brown at all, but rather the more typical luxuriously deep red. The fox shook itself, throwing off a fine spray of water droplets, and then turned around clockwise three times and settled back down on the towel.

  “Lot of dirt?”

  She sighed. “You have no idea. I hope you don’t mind, but I used all of your shampoo. The forest-scented one under your sink. It seemed appropriate. I’ll go back and clean out the tub now.”

  Rio looked as tired as the child had been, and Luke inexplicably wanted to take care of her. He wondered how she’d react if he lifted her into his arms like the Fae had done with Elisabeth. Run screaming, probably.

  He’d feed her, instead.

  “Forget the tub. Let me fix you some breakfast. There are some things I need to tell you.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” she said, but she gave the fox one last gentle pat on the top of its head and followed him over to the kitchen.

  “What can I do to help?”

  He shook his head. “It’s okay. You’ve had a busy morning, and breakfast is the one meal I can actually make.”

  She didn’t argue, just nodded and sank down onto one of the bar stools. He was overly pleased at the idea of cooking for her—caring for her. It felt right in some indefinable way.

  “Coffee? I’ll make some fresh.” He set up the coffee maker and then pulled out eggs, cheese, and other important omelet ingredients, all the while wondering how to begin the discussion that he really did not want to have.

  “So. The league. What league, and why does it owe Dalriata a favor?”

  He cracked eggs into a bowl and then looked up at her. “You’re really good at that. Cutting to the heart of the matter. Is it a side effect of your talent?”

  Her face closed up, like a storm shutter being slammed down over a window in defiance of impending destruction.

  “I’m not sure I understand what you mean,” she finally said.

  Luke poured the eggs into the pan he’d been warming, arranged the other ingredients, and washed his hands before he looked at her.

  “You know exactly what I mean. I think maybe we’re beyond the point of polite prevarication by now, don’t you?”

  She smiled a little. “Ooh, good word. Points for prevarication.”

  “Hey, I read. I know plenty of big words. Like dilatory,” he said, and then he watched, fascinated, as those golden sparks appeared in her eyes again.

  She toyed with the turtle-shaped salt and pepper shakers that a grateful client had once given him, and then she nodded.

  “You’re right. I’m delaying that conversation. But can we just let it go for now? We have more important things to talk about, and I still get flashbacks to being locked in the attic whenever I talk about my . . . gift.”

  If her face had been closed before, it was locked down and on high security alert now. He realized his hands had clenched into fists at her mention of being locked in an attic, and he forced his fingers to relax. She’d brought it up, but she’d also shut down the subject as a topic of conversation. He’d respect her wishes.

  For now.

  “What do you know about Bordertown?” He poured two mugs of coffee and pushed one across the counter to her.

  “Pretty much what everyone does, I guess. Bordertown is made up of several square miles of territory that don’t show up on any map.”

  She took a sip of her coffee, and Luke got distracted by watching the muscles in her lovely throat work, but the sizzle of frying eggs alerted him to a possible tragedy, and he flipped his omelet to save it from turning to charcoal.

  “Right. Do you know the human New York?”

  “A little. I try to avoid it,” she confessed. “I always get a terrible migraine when I try to leave Bordertown, so I’ve never really crossed over.”

  “We’re on the west side of Manhattan, bordered by the humans’ High Line park. The magic here is native to the spot; the middle of B Town rests on the spot where the strongest ley lines in the northeast United States intersect. The place was a hub of dark forces and a haven for nonhumans long before the Dutch West India Company founded New Amsterdam.”

  “Were you around for that?” She glanced up at him from beneath her long lashes, and he almost thought she was flirting with him, or at least teasing him a little.

  He liked the idea more than he wanted to admit.

  “No, although I’ve been around longer than you might expect,” he said wryly.

  “How much longer?”

  He plated the omelet, dividing it onto two plates, and gave her one of them, and then a fork and napkin.

  “Too long. Back to my story. According to para-archaeologists and historians of magic, a violent tectonic shift that happened thousands of years ago caused reality to fold over on itself twice, making Bordertown the one place on earth where the human, Fae, and demon realm all collide.”

  She put her fork down on her plate, swallowed, and shot a skeptical glance at him. “There is no way anybody can know what happened to reality thousands of years ago, not to mention that a collision like that would almost certainly have caused a massive three-way war. By the way, this is delicious. Tha
nk you.”

  “Thank you. And who says it didn’t cause a war? From what I’ve heard and read, there was a massive war. The Fae and the demons slaughtered each other first and then went after the humans. That war lasted nearly a hundred years and almost decimated the continent.”

  Rio blinked. “Yeah, a century-long war between the Fae and the demons would do it. How do you know all this again?”

  “I’m friends with some scholarly types, and Fae histories go back a very long way.”

  He took a break to dive into his omelet and made short work of it. Then he pulled four bottles of water out of his refrigerator, handed her one, and drank the other three in rapid succession. She watched, tilting her head to one side.

  “Expecting a drought?”

  He tossed the empty bottles into the recycling bin under his sink and laughed.

  “No, but it would feel like my insides had fried if I didn’t replenish after using fire magic like that.”

  He almost saw her ears perk up at that, but he shook his head. “Now it’s my turn to tell you we’ll talk about something later. For now, Bordertown. I’ve told you about the history, at least as far as I know it, and now we should talk about the kind of people who live in a place like this.”

  “People like me,” she said bitterly. “People nobody else wants. People who have no place else to go.”

  Something in his chest twisted a little, both at her words and at the way her body had slumped when she said them. Somebody—or lots of somebodies—had hurt this woman.

  Someday soon, Luke would see about tracking those people down.

  He started to speak, wondering what in the hell he could say to that, when her eyes widened and her head lifted. Her head whipped to the side and she stared at the fox, who’d woken up and was watching them.

  “Kit is really hungry. Starving, in fact. Would it be okay if I gave her the rest of my omelet? I seem to have lost my appetite.” She made an apologetic face at her plate, which still held most of her breakfast. “It really is delicious, though, and I can’t remember the last time anybody ever made breakfast for me. Thank you again.”

  Her wistful expression gutted him. How was it possible nobody cooked for this woman? And, hard on the heels of that thought, savage satisfaction that nobody else cooked for this woman.

  He took the plate, cut the eggs into bite-sized pieces, and walked over to the fire. Anything to calm down from the conflicting, unexpected emotions that kept buffeting him where Rio was concerned.

  Crouching in front of the fox, he set the plate down and nodded to the creature.

  “You say her name is Kit? And you know this how?”

  The fox tilted her head in an uncanny imitation of Rio’s gesture, and stared at him, making no move to touch the food.

  Rio shrugged and walked over to join them. “She told me. She asked me to accept her as my ‘guilt gift’ from Dalriata, and she said we were meant to be together.”

  “She told you this how, again?”

  “Mentally. It was a kind of telepathic conversation, which shouldn’t be all that surprising considering my . . . ability.”

  Rio nudged the plate closer to the fox. “Please eat. It will help you get your strength back, and then we can decide what to do. I think we need to find a veterinarian for your leg.”

  The fox daintily began to eat the eggs, ignoring Luke completely.

  “Is she talking to you now? Commenting on the deliciousness of my eggs, for example?”

  Rio smiled, and Luke thought he would be happy to talk about silly things like eggs for the rest of the day, if she would keep smiling.

  “No. I don’t think the communication is easy for her. I got the impression that she was extending an enormous amount of effort to talk to me in Dalriata’s office.”

  The fox glanced up at Rio and then continued to eat.

  “Kit? But you called her something else in the car.” Luke continued to study the small animal, who probably had barely weighed forty pounds soaking wet. She was beautiful, in spite of being thin and starved-looking. Probably young. The magic, though—that was something he needed to figure out.

  “She said her name was Kitsune, actually. Like Kit-soon-eh.” Rio gently ran her hand down the fox’s flank, apparently not worried at all that the animal would bite her.

  Of course, she’d just given Kit a bath, so evidently the biting danger was over. Most wild animals appreciated baths about as much as your average teenage boy did.

  Rio moved to the couch and curled up on one end, so Luke took his cue from her and sat down on the other end.

  “You know Kitsune just means ‘fox’ in Japanese, right?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Sorry. My Japanese is a little rusty.”

  Kit opened her mouth and let her tongue loll out to the side a little, as if she were laughing.

  “Okay, fine,” Luke said. “We have a long list of things to figure out before we get to your magical, sometimes-talking, Japanese fox.”

  “Like the origins of Bordertown, apparently,” Rio said, pulling a pillow onto her lap and hugging it to her.

  “No, now we’re on to the people.” Luke stretched his legs out toward the fire and thought about how to proceed. Here he was on his couch, in front of a fire, with a beautiful woman, and he was going to give her a history lesson instead of make love to her for six or seven hours.

  Something about that was very wrong.

  “Luke?”

  He sighed. “Yeah, yeah. The people and creatures who live in and on the edges of Bordertown are generally those with a reason to avoid the mainstream—in any of their worlds. Here, disinherited Fae royalty mingle with mercenaries who were banished from the demonic realm and humans who either don’t know any better or, as you said, have no place else to go.”

  “Which are you?” She aimed a long, measured stare at him, and it tickled the hell out of him that she didn’t seem to share the fear of him that so many in town harbored.

  He grinned. “I’m always the one who doesn’t know better. Also, I needed to get out of Europe.”

  “Most people say they needed to get out of town. You say you needed to get out of Europe. It’s an interesting difference,” she said dryly.

  “I have a greater propensity to piss people off than most,” he admitted.

  Kit finished her eggs and lightly jumped up on the couch next to Rio. She curled her tail around herself and stared intently at Luke, as if she were listening to the conversation, too.

  “That’s B Town. Now, the League,” he continued. “Which reminds me.”

  He took his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed a number he’d added only the night before. “Call me. Now.

  “The League of the Black Swan contacted me last night. I haven’t heard from them in a very long time. Since 1745, to be precise.”

  Rio whistled, long and low. “1745? Exactly how old are you?”

  He sighed. Here it went. The kiss of death. Sometimes honesty sucked, but for some weird reason he couldn’t even figure out himself, he knew she deserved it from him.

  “I was born in the year 1500. You may have heard of my mother. I’m the bastard son of Lucrezia Borgia.”

  Luke hunched down farther in the couch and waited for the horrified outburst. He’d never have a chance with her now that she knew about his evil bloodline and how freaking old he was.

  But Rio surprised him again.

  She started laughing.

  CHAPTER 8

  Rio tried to stop laughing. It was probably a really bad idea to laugh at a wizard in his own home, but she couldn’t help it.

  “So you’re more than five hundred years old. That’s what you’re claiming?”

  He wouldn’t look at her but folded his arms across his chest and stared into the fire. She took a moment to admire the view. He was absolutely gorgeous. His face was all hard lines and angles, with a hint of sensuality in the curve of his lips. The muscles in his long legs were clearly defined under the blue jeans he wore
, and she suddenly had a perfectly unreasonable desire to climb into his lap and kiss the hollow in the tanned perfection of his throat. Or, conversely, curl up next to him, knowing she’d always be safe near him, and take a nap.

  Naturally, this made her want to run the other way. But she needed to know what he was getting at with this talk of origins and the League of the Black Swan, so she forced herself to stay put and keep her budding libido in firm check.

  “Okay, old man,” she joked. “Let’s say you are who you say you are, and you are as old as you say you are. It’s no weirder than a giant duck, that’s for sure. So let’s skip over all of that for now, and move on to what you wanted to tell me about this mysterious League.”

  He turned his head and caught her in the full weight of that ocean-blue gaze, nearly making her gasp. Darn it, but he was beautiful. Dark-angel beautiful. Pardon-me-while-I-tear-off-my-clothes beautiful. She had an insane, nearly uncontrollable urge to run her fingers through all that wavy black hair and almost laughed when she imagined his reaction.

  He raised an eyebrow at her grin, but she shook her head and motioned for him to continue.

  “It’s not that I want to talk about it. It’s that I need to talk about it. Because when they contacted me? It was about you.”

  A goose walked over Rio’s grave at that precise moment.

  Or—more aptly, she supposed—a swan. A black swan. The urge to smile fled.

  She rubbed her arms to keep from shivering, and Kit, as if understanding the terror that had overtaken Rio at Luke’s words, turned and rested her sleek head on Rio’s knee.

  “Why? I’m a bike messenger. This doesn’t make sense.” She absently stroked the soft, slightly damp fur on the fox’s back. “None of it makes sense. Merelith, the way she acted—I don’t understand any of this.”

  Luke made a frustrated noise. “I don’t understand it, either. All I know is that a very high-level operative in the League stopped by to give me a message last night, and the message was a picture of you.”

  “Did you ask why? Why are they coming to you, anyway? Are you in the League?” She flinched as a thought popped into her mind, and suddenly it was very hard to breathe. “Do they want you to kill me?”