Curse of the Black Swan Read online

  “I’ve told you about the curse, at least the short version. Let me give you more than the headlines,” she said, handing him the largest sandwich she’d ever made in her life.

  He glanced at it and grinned. “You must think I really worked up an appetite.”

  “I sure did,” she blurted out, and then she felt her face go scarlet. “Stop it. Eat your sandwich.”

  He laughed, but he picked up his sandwich. After a few bites, he glanced across the tiny kitchen table at her. “Maybe give me the full version?”

  So she did, neatly folding her napkin and placing it next to her plate, and then telling him about the peasant girl, and the king, and the moon’s bargain. When she finished, she waited for him to show his disappointment or, worse, his revulsion at the thought of becoming involved with a woman who was destined to doom her own daughter to the curse of the black swan.

  His face was cast in hard lines, and he crumpled his own napkin into a ball in his fist. “What a bitch,” he said grimly.

  She blinked, utterly confused. “What? Who?”

  “The moon. Or the moon goddess, depending on your beliefs. Whoever or whatever made that bargain was not playing fair. One saved life in exchange for a thousand years of servitude? I don’t think so.” He slammed his fist on the table, rattling the salt and pepper shakers. “We have to find a way to break the curse.”

  She sat back in her chair, nonplussed. Of all the reactions she’d expected, this wasn’t even on the very bottom of the list. Break the curse? Nobody had even considered that, as far as she knew, in the entire history of her family.

  “It’s the moon,” she said, enunciating carefully. “How do you break a curse cast by the moon?”

  He shrugged. “You find a witch who’s bound to the moon goddess and ask him or her. This is Bordertown. I’m sure we can figure it out.”

  She was already shaking her head. “I don’t want you to have false hope. The moon is too powerful. I plan never to have children, because I don’t want to do this to my daughter. The curse will stop with me.”

  “Okay,” he said blandly, and then he picked up his sandwich and took a huge bite.

  “Okay? What do you mean ‘okay’?”

  After he swallowed and took a drink of water, he grinned at her. “Okay. We’ll find a way to break the curse, or we won’t. Either way, I’m not planning to let you out of my life, so just deal with it.”

  “Deal with it?” Her voice came out sounding unnatural, and she realized she was echoing him like a stupid parrot.

  “You forget, we have something that your ancestors didn’t have all those years ago,” he said, his rich brown eyes sparkling with humor.

  “What is that?”

  “Birth control.”

  Her mouth fell open. “I know we have birth control, you idiot. But I couldn’t ask you to be content with a woman who can never give you children.”

  “I want you, Brynn Carroll,” he told her, shoving his chair back and rounding the table to pull her up and into his arms. “We’ll figure out the curse and the children later, and in the meantime we can adopt a dog or three. They’ll be the cleanest, best-groomed dogs in Bordertown.”

  “But—”

  * * *

  Sean stopped her by the simple means of kissing her until she gave up and kissed him back, but his conscience prodded him with its sharp blade until he reluctantly pulled away from her.

  “There’s something else, though,” he said, steeling himself to tell her the truth about his fire demon heritage, hoping that she could understand and accept him.

  Hoping she wouldn’t run screaming or throw him out of her house.

  Before he could figure out a way to begin, the antique rotary phone on her counter rang, and they both looked at it as if it were an alien artifact.

  “I should answer it,” she said apologetically. “It’s the number I give out for customer emergencies.”

  “Like wolverines in the pickle vat?” He grinned at her. “Skunk encounters?”

  “Exactly.” She picked up the phone and had a quick conversation about, from what he could decipher, a garage mechanic’s dog who’d rolled around in automotive oil. The owner couldn’t get it out and was worried.

  “Yes, I’ll be glad to come in early. I’ll meet you at my shop in twenty minutes,” she said, ending the call.

  “You have to go,” Sean said, resigned and more than a little relieved. A reprieve, then, until he had to admit that half of his DNA came from the most hated and feared species of creature in Bordertown.

  “I have to go,” she confirmed, already cleaning up and getting ready to leave.

  He stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. “I need to tell you a secret of my own, Brynn, before we go any further.”

  She frowned. “If you tell me that you’re married—”

  He laughed. “Are you kidding? My mother would have skinned me alive if I had a wife and brought a date to her house.”

  “Okay, well, tell me this evening. After work,” she said, a slight frown shadowing her beautiful face.

  “Can’t. I have to work tonight, too,” he said.

  “Then come by when you get done, even if it’s the middle of the night,” she said. “Whatever it is, it can’t be worse than my curse, right?”

  Her attempt at a smile faded when he didn’t return it. She squared her shoulders. “Okay,” she repeated. “We’ll figure this out.”

  They finished cleaning up in silence, and then they both headed for the door and their respective days. He’d just stepped out onto the porch when she stopped.

  “I forgot my keys,” she said. “You go ahead, and I’ll see you later.”

  Sean hesitated, but he did want to check up on his mom before he went to work. He pulled Brynn close and kissed her again, taking his time about it, right there on her porch.

  “I’ll see you tonight,” he promised. “Good luck with the oil emergency.”

  She smiled. “Thanks. All in a day’s work at Scruffy’s.”

  Sean sauntered down the steps and headed for his car. It wasn’t until he’d traveled halfway to his mother’s house that he realized he was whistling. They’d figure it out. She’d be okay with his secret.

  He refused to let things turn out any other way.

  TWELVE

  Brynn rushed to her bedroom to get her keys, but before she could make it back to the front door, it started to swing open, and sheer, effervescent joy bubbled inside her. He hadn’t been able to leave without another kiss, maybe.

  “Back so soon,” she teased, but the large man who entered her house wasn’t Sean.

  She stumbled back a step, but she wasn’t really worried, not yet, even though he was entering her house uninvited, because he looked familiar to her for some reason.

  “Can I help you?”

  The man raised a closed fist to just in front of his mouth, opened his hand, and blew. A shower of fine gray dust shot forward into Brynn’s face before she could duck or dodge away.

  “What—” she managed, but the rest of the sentence died away as the poison entered her system. The room spun, and her vision funneled down to black, except for sparks of light from the matches her attacker was lighting.

  Matches? But why—?

  Her last thought before unconsciousness claimed her: Sean.

  THIRTEEN

  Sean heard the alarm when he was still halfway down the block from the station, and he started sprinting. The arsonist had taken a few days off, but even though Sean and the rest of his crew hoped the scumbag had fallen off a cliff or, more fitting, set himself on fire and was now out of commission, nobody was relaxing. This could be him again, and—worse—he could be escalating. People could die.

  Please let it be a normal, boring backyard grill out of control.

  “House fire,” Sue told him, when he started gearing up. “We don’t know if it’s him or not.”

  “Where is it?”

  She rattled off the address and Sean dropped his
helmet, whirled around, and grabbed her. “What did you say?”

  She blinked and glanced quite deliberately at his hands on her shoulders. He immediately released her.

  “I’m sorry, Sue, but I need to hear that address again right now,” he demanded. Terror sliced into him with a scalpel’s edge, and rage wasn’t far behind.

  She repeated the address.

  It was Brynn’s house.

  He pulled out his phone and started running.

  “Scruffy’s Pet Spa,” he snapped, and the computer handling information repeated the name and then connected him to a phone that rang and rang, six long rings, before the voicemail picked up and informed him that Brynn had gone home for the night.

  She’d never reset her message today.

  She wasn’t answering the phone.

  She might be in that house.

  He ran faster.

  * * *

  Sean arrived before the truck and crew, and he was still too late. Brynn’s tiny house was an inferno, and there was no way anyone could possibly be alive inside. He threw back his head and roared out his anguish and rage, and the heritage he’d spent so long denying rushed to answer his call.

  Every inch of the surface of Sean’s body blazed into flame. The fire was so intense and the temperature so high that his clothes and the gear he’d managed to don instantly disintegrated into ash. Unexpectedly, the fire didn’t hurt him at all; not that he would even have felt the physical pain. The neighbors and other mindless looky-loos who always gathered at fires started screaming and running, probably to get away from the terrifying fire demon, but Sean didn’t give a damn about any of it.

  Not that he’d outed himself, not that he was scaring the populace, not that he didn’t know if he’d survive what he was about to do. He hit the front of her house running and used his body as a battering ram to hurl himself through the front windows, not bothering with the door. He expected the lash of back draft that hit him, hard, but it didn’t matter. None of it mattered.

  No fire could compete with the blazing heat of a fire demon.

  He shouted her name, over and over, but heard nothing in response except the roar of the fire. The magically created fire.

  The arsonist had struck again, and this time he’d made it personal.

  Sean crashed through crumbling, fire-engulfed walls until he reached the black and ruined hull of the kitchen that he’d sat in only hours before, promising Brynn that they’d find a way to be together.

  Now she was gone, and the fiery monster who was all that was left of Sean could feel nothing but agony.

  Could want nothing but revenge.

  He finally stumbled out of the inferno. She wasn’t here. There hadn’t been any evidence of a . . . body.

  Brynn hadn’t been in the house.

  Castilho was on the lawn, using his magic to combat the blaze. He saw Sean burst out of the house in full fire-demon mode and flinched, but to his credit he didn’t back away.

  “Sean. Is that you? What the hell? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Sean slowly approached, unsure of his new abilities—he had no idea how close he could get to a human being without setting the person on fire.

  “Didn’t want you to fear me,” he told the witch, whose eyes widened when he heard Sean’s voice coming from the demon’s mouth.

  “Well, hell, if you’re a fire demon, then they can’t be all bad, can they?” Castilho grinned at him, and then turned his full attention back to the complicated magic he was working to help contain and extinguish the fire.

  Sean didn’t know how to react to the man’s easy acceptance and, what’s more, he didn’t really care. He had to find Brynn.

  Sue came running across the lawn, waving her phone at him. “Sean, it’s Zach. He says he needs to talk to you.”

  He snarled at her. “No time. Have to find Brynn.”

  Sue was paler than he’d ever seen her, and he’d been shoulder to shoulder with the veteran firefighter when she’d battled the worst of the worst blazes.

  “You don’t understand, Sean. Zach says he has Brynn Carroll, and if you don’t show up within ten minutes, he’s going to set her on fire.”

  FOURTEEN

  Brynn had never been so afraid in her life. The man—Zach, he’d called himself—who’d knocked her out with poison powder and set her house on fire was absolutely, certifiably, insane. Worse, he was messing with black magic.

  He’d slapped her face until she’d regained consciousness, and then he’d bragged to her about how he’d set more than seventeen fires in Bordertown and other places. The seventeen fires had claimed six victims so far, and he’d recited every single name, almost as if he were boasting, chanting the six names rhythmically like a prayer.

  Like a curse.

  When Brynn had been unable to hide her revulsion, he’d slapped her again, tied her hands behind her, shoved her over to a wooden box, and told her to sit. When she’d tried to fight him, he’d pulled out a plastic bag filled with more of the gray powder and asked her if she’d rather be conscious or unconscious when her lover arrived.

  So now she sat, hands tied behind her, and fought back the shuddering terror that Sean would run headfirst into Zach’s trap and get himself killed. She didn’t have time to fall apart. She needed to be able to think, plan, and fight back.

  Zach was planning to kill Sean, and there was absolutely no way she was going to let that happen. She took a long, steadying breath, and forced herself to calm down, look around, and think. Unfortunately, there weren’t any convenient caches of weapons or a telephone handy, because she wasn’t living in a movie. Bruce Willis wasn’t going to yippee-ki-yay his way into the building and save the day, but Sean—the man whom she now realized she loved—was going to try.

  She believed in Sean far more than any movie hero, but if she didn’t act fast, he was going to get himself killed.

  The stench of mold and garbage permeated the interior of the hulking warehouse where she’d regained consciousness. The building was made of steel and concrete—harder to burn, Zach said—and it had clearly been abandoned years before. Piles of debris hunched in corners, and Brynn was sure the movement she’d seen at the edges of the cracked concrete floor was rats.

  Zach took a break from his frantic pacing and followed her gaze.

  “Rats! Are you afraid of rats, little girl?” He chortled like a caricature of an evil villain, and all she could do was watch him in disbelief.

  “You kidnapped the wrong woman, if you wanted somebody who was afraid of rats,” she said flatly. “Why don’t you let me go, and I’ll help you catch a few of those rats so they can eat your eyes out? Then at least you won’t be able to see to set any more fires.”

  He turned his reptilian gaze on her, and she shuddered. “Watch your mouth, you slut. Dropped your pants for O’Malley fast enough, didn’t you? That’s the problem with people today. No morals.”

  “You’re an arsonist and a murderer,” she shouted at him. “How dare you speak to me about morals?”

  He whirled and threw his hands into the air, hurling a bolt of green smoke at the rats, who squealed and scurried away. They didn’t seem to be hurt, but they weren’t sticking around, either, so Brynn didn’t know how to judge the strength of Zach’s magic.

  Before she could say or do anything else, a thunderous roar sounded from just outside the door. Someone was shouting her name, and Brynn realized she was out of time.

  Sean had arrived.

  The warehouse door blew off its hinges and slammed down to the floor, and a creature she’d only heard about in rumors and fairy tales crashed into the room. Red-hot flames surrounded the shape of a big man, but they didn’t seem to be burning him. The blaze moved with him—part of him—covering him like a second skin. Heat shimmered around his body like a warped version of a halo, and she didn’t need to get any closer to confirm that her first impression had been right.

  This was a fire demon in full, raging fury and, if the stories wer
e true, its next move would be to set fire to Zach, Brynn, and everyone else within a half-mile radius of the warehouse. Despair washed through her, and she fought wildly against the rope tying her wrists behind her. She didn’t care if it killed Zach, but she didn’t want to die today, and she really, really didn’t want to burn to death.

  She jumped up off the box, but before she could take a single step the demon started running toward her, and she caught sight of its face.

  His face.

  The fire demon was Sean.

  He hadn’t been kidding about secrets.

  * * *

  Sean saw Brynn hunched over, one side of her face red and swollen, and any hope of restraint shattered. Zach had hurt her, and he was going to die badly. But Brynn was alive. She was alive.

  He roared her name again and headed straight for her, not realizing until he saw her face that she might not welcome his approach. That she might be afraid.

  Afraid of him.

  The flames engulfing him must have malfunctioned in some way, because now they were searing his heart.

  Before he could think of something to say to reassure her, he caught sight of movement in the corner and spun around, shielding Brynn with his body, and faced Zach.

  “I knew it! I knew you were a fire demon all along, or at least I’ve known ever since I started to practice black magic,” Zach said, smiling crazily.

  “You were my friend,” Sean said, low and deadly, rage and pain combining to intensify the flames surrounding him. “Why?”

  Zach tilted his head. For an instant, he looked truly bewildered, as if he didn’t understand, either, how he could have turned into such a monster, but then something evil took over and stared at Sean through Zach’s eyes.

  “Because I could,” Zach sneered. “You kept blocking me, though. You, with your super hearing and your impervious skin. I wanted that baby to die, because the power I would have gained from sacrificing an innocent would have been incredible, but you had to play the hero and save her.”