Cursed in Love (Nora Moss Book 1)

by Zoe Ashwood

  I remember that other spell, the most difficult magical work I’ve ever done, when I cursed Raphaël. The amount of power it took nearly wiped me out. It had taken me weeks to recharge afterward, and I’d had to claim that I’d caught the flu so I didn’t have to attend the coven’s circle where someone might have questioned my lack of magic.

  It’s possible I’ll see Raphaël today. After all this time, the idea is terrifying, no matter what I told Levi. He’s been so understanding, but there’s—

  “Hey,” Levi says quietly from beside me, breaking my focus.

  Opening my eyes, I glower at him. “What?”

  He points at the map. The corners of the paper are smoking, curling inward and glowing orange. The water has completely evaporated.

  “Crap!”

  I slap my palm over the spots. My fingers come away smudged with ash, and my cheeks feel hot enough that I might burst into flame, too.

  “Sorry,” I mumble. “I’ll, um, try again.”

  Levi surprises me by taking my hand. “Relax.” He jerks his chin at the paper. “What are you using to track him anyway? Do you have something of his?”

  “I’m tracking my own magic. You know, the spell.”

  Levi gives me the same odd look that he uses whenever I do something with my power that’s outside of what we’ve learned from our parents. He does his own brand of magic, too, complex workings that I can’t even track sometimes.

  “If you were evil, you’d be fucking dangerous,” he murmurs, half to himself.

  All I can do is offer him a fixed smile. I don’t want to explain that I’ve also placed a small—tiny—tracking spell on him, too. I did it back when we first started working together. It’s just a precaution, because we might get separated during our missions, and I wanted to have a way to locate him in case he fell down a cave shaft or something.

  You never know what could happen in this line of work. I’ve never had to use it before, and I hope I never will.

  I take another deep breath, pour another drop of water on the paper, and focus on the map again, calling out to my magic. It’s like a witchy version of Marco Polo, where my magic, no matter how far removed, answers me like an eager puppy. It calls to me, and I send my thoughts after it, pinpointing its location.

  Now that we’re so much closer to Raphaël, it’s easier. In Scotland, I only felt a small flare of my magic when I preformed the spell. Whenever I did this in the States, it seemed even more remote, which is how I knew Raphaël had left the continent altogether. Not that I did this often. Every couple of months, tops, just to be absolutely certain that Levi wasn’t in any danger.

  I open my eyes and glance down at the map. A circle of water has formed around a cluster of narrow streets about three miles from our apartment. It’s not exact, but it’s a good place to start. If nothing else, I’ll be able to perform the spell again when we get there, without a map, as we’ll be right on top of him then.

  Levi pulls a pen from his backpack and redraws the circle in blue ink. “There.”

  I release my magic, then shake the water off the map. “Awesome,” I chirp with more enthusiasm than I really feel. “Let’s go.”

  Those three miles take us almost two hours to walk. It’s impossible not to get sucked into the charm of Montmartre. You’d think they have witches working on their branding and general air of irresistibility, but I suspect it’s just that food and art are the most perfect combination known to man.

  We stop to peer into shops selling everything from fine art to artisanal wooden bowls, Christmas ornaments to pottery. We buy a crusty baguette at a boulangerie that announces itself with a mouthwatering aroma of freshly baked bread long before we actually see it, and a slice of blue cheese from a fromagerie that sells upward of a hundred types of cheese. I’m in heaven, and when Levi trades a couple of Euro coins for a brown paper bag of crisp, sweet apples at a small outdoor market, my day is complete.

  “When we finish this,” I mumble around a mouthful of still-warm baguette, “we’re taking a vacation in France. We’re going to stay right here in Paris and just eat all day.”

  Levi laughs, leaning back against the bench. “What, you’d miss out on visiting the Louvre?”

  I nod enthusiastically. “For sure.”

  “You’re weird, Nora Moss.”

  His words may be teasing, but his voice is so warm, my cheeks flush with pleasure. I take one last bite of the baguette and crumple up the empty bag.

  “We should get going,” I say reluctantly. “We can’t afford to play tourists, not really.”

  “Eh. We should definitely try to have fun while doing this crazy thing.”

  Levi stands and dusts breadcrumbs from his jeans. A flock of daring sparrows that have been eyeing our food since we sat now descend with angry chirps.

  I toss the trash in the bin and join Levi as he studies the map. “Not far now.”

  He gives me a sharp look but doesn’t comment. He hasn’t said anything as I dipped in and out of shops all this time, made detours from our path to ‘just check out that little church over there,’ and took selfies with views that screamed France to send to my sister.

  And yeah, I’ve been stalling. I know that. But the clock is ticking—or the sand is flowing, as it is—and we can’t afford to squander any more time. If we’re going to find Raphaël, it has to be today.

  So we set off down the narrow street, and I ignore the urge to visit just one more shop or peer into one more church. Gritting my teeth, I follow Levi through the afternoon crowd.

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you something,” I call after him when he hurries around a group of Russian tourists whose guide carries a microphone and jabbers excitedly while pointing at a building.

  Levi slows to allow me to catch up with him. “What is it?”

  I loop my arm through his to avoid being pulled away from him and lower my voice. “When I danced with that Icelandic guy, Isak, I hit him with that taser spell Mom taught me.”

  Levi suddenly stops in the street, earning us an outraged exclamation from a local. My French isn’t good enough to understand him, but I’m sure he’s cursing American tourists.

  “What did that prick do?” Levi forces out through gritted teeth. “Did he hurt you?”

  My eyes widen at the urgency in his voice. Impulsively, I place a palm on Levi’s chest to calm him. His warmth seeps into me through his t-shirt, so damn inviting.

  “No,” I breathe. “It wasn’t like that. He just refused to let go of me because he wanted to tell me to quit.”

  Levi glances over his shoulder, then drags me to the side of the street, under a shop awning.

  “Why didn’t he fall over?” he asks more quietly. “I’ve seen you drop a guy with that spell, so why didn’t it work on him?”

  “That’s the question,” I reply. “He made a sort of grunting noise, but that was it.” I try to imitate the sound Isak made, feeling silly as I do.

  Levi’s eyes darken, his pupils widening. “If he sounded anything like that, I want a hit of that spell, too.”

  He glances down at my lips, his gaze intense and more than a little feral. The air between us buzzes with a charge so powerful, I can’t tear myself away from Levi even though I know how dangerous this is. It took me years to get over my crush on him, and I can’t afford myself to be distracted, not now. And not with him—he’s my business partner. Developing romantic feelings for him would be a disaster.

  Finally, I manage to jump-start my brain and I jerk back, then start walking down the street again without checking that Levi is following. “I, um, I’m sure he was just wearing a protective charm of some sort. But maybe you could research disabling stuff like that so we can defend ourselves if we need to. We might meet him in Iceland. Though he probably went there first if he’s Icelandic, don’t you think?”

  I’m babbling and I can’t stop. Levi’s presence is like a shadow following me, and I feel the weight of his gaze on my back. He’s stalking me, and I’ve nev
er in my life felt more like prey. If I let myself face him again, I might do something stupid. Something I’d for sure regret tomorrow.

  We have to be close to Raphaël’s location now, and I search around desperately to find something, anything, to distract us both from whatever happened back there. Right now, I’d even take meeting my vampire ex-boyfriend over facing Levi again.

  We pass another bakery, a news stand, a barber’s shop, an art gallery, a New Age bookstore—wait. I stop in my tracks and retrace my steps to the art gallery. The large display window showcases a single painting of a river, similar in style to the famous French Impressionists, but with a clear modern take. Behind it, the gallery extends deeper into the building, light and spacious, unlike many of the other shops we’ve seen today, which were crammed with low-quality reproductions of classic masterpieces and cityscapes designed to capture the tourists’ eyes. This gallery is the real deal. The river painting doesn’t even have a price attached to it.

  But that’s not what stopped me. I glance up at the gallery name. Aubert. Just that single word, made out in simple navy-blue letters on an eggshell-white background.

  “Is this…?” Levi asks quietly.

  I chance a look at him. All trace of earlier emotions is gone. Once again, he’s my business partner, focused on the task and lethal when he wants to be.

  “Yeah,” I murmur. “That’s his name.”

  People flow around us, but we remain in place for longer than is probably wise.

  I take a step toward the shop. As much as I dread the meeting, this is what we came for. But Levi grabs my hand.

  “Hey, we have to scope out the place to see if it’s safe,” he says, then pulls me to the mouth of the next alley, where we hide by ordering coffee in an outdoor café and pretending we’re tourists.

  We wait for an hour, noting the two customers that enter the gallery and exit again minutes later. Nothing suspicious happens at all, but the tension inside me builds with every passing moment until I feel like a pressure cooker about to blow all the valves.

  “That’s it, I’m going in,” I announce and stand. “I can’t take it any longer.”

  Levi grimaces, then throws a pink ten Euro bill on the table. “Fine.”

  We near the gallery again, but before we even reach the middle of the street, the door swings open from inside, and a man comes out. He locks the door and ambles in the direction we came from earlier.

  My steps falter as a wave of emotions crashes over me. Those broad shoulders. That narrow waist. That black hair, slightly too long, with just a hint of curl. I’d know that man anywhere.

  Raphaël.

  Six

  Nora

  “Nora?”

  “Mm?”

  “You’re staring.”

  A shiver runs through me, and I turn to find Levi studying me in concern. How long I’ve stood here, watching Raphaël walk farther away from us, I have no idea. Seconds? Minutes? Hours? Every emotion that I’ve kept bottled up and stowed away these past two years has exploded inside me, making a giant, painful mess.

  “Yeah,” I say, moving to the side of the sun-drenched street. “I’m fine.”

  Levi arches an eyebrow. “Sure.”

  “No, really,” I insist. “He just took me by surprise.”

  Levi cranes his neck to see past a family with two small kids on bikes with training wheels. “Where’s he going?”

  Then it hits me.

  “It’s the spell,” I whisper-shout. “He’s moving away from me because of it.”

  About fifty feet away from us, Raphaël has stopped and is looking down at his phone. I can’t see him well from where we’re hiding, but he clearly didn’t have a destination in mind, because he’s just sort of standing in the middle of the street.

  “Fuck,” I curse under my breath. “Fuck! I didn’t even think of this. But of course it works the other way around, too.”

  Levi cracks a grin. “Let’s test it out.”

  “What? No,” I protest, but he takes my hand and strides down the street in Raphaël’s direction.

  As soon as we take a couple of steps, Raphaël jerks into movement again, retreating farther away. It’s like we’re magnets with an opposite charge, and we’re pushing him away with a force field that surrounds us.

  “Damn, Nora,” Levi says, admiration in his voice. “That must have been some spell.”

  I smack his chest with the back of my hand. “Shut up! We can’t even talk to him without removing it. What the hell are we going to do?”

  He frowns. “Will he remember you if you do it?”

  I shake my head. “No. Tampering with his memories was a separate spell. We’ll just be able to come close enough for me to undo the damage. Right now, we can’t even catch him.”

  Levi stops and runs a hand over his short hair. “What do you want to do, then?”

  It takes me a moment to gather my confused thoughts. “We need to find some supplies. Candles. Herbs. I have chalk and a couple of crystals at the apartment, and I could make do with those, but if we get the rest of the stuff, it’ll be a much easier spell. For me, I mean. He probably won’t feel a thing.”

  I hope. I’ve never done this before, so I can’t be sure. The last thing I want to do is cause Raphaël more pain. Seeing him, I realized that the resentment over his secrecy has long evaporated. I’m still scared of what he might do when he finds out I cursed him, but a part of me feels like I deserve it. If I could turn back time and have another go at our breakup, I’d handle it differently for sure.

  After all, I never told him I was a witch, either.

  Shame swamps me, immediate and overwhelming. I whirl away from Raphaël and Levi, making my way up the street and into the first side alley.

  Levi finds me a moment later as I crouch on the doorstep of a closed-up shop.

  “Hey,” he says. “Maybe I should talk to him. Your spell doesn’t extend to me, does it?”

  “No,” I rasp. “Why do you think I stuck to you like glue those first couple of weeks?”

  He opens his mouth, then closes it again. He probably thought I was being clingy and needy at the time, but the fact was, I was terrified Raphaël would figure out that Levi was involved somehow and attack him. Or something. I obviously wasn’t thinking clearly—as evidenced by the fact that I then escaped to Brazil right before my mom died. I still can’t think of that period of my life without cringing. It sure as hell taught me a lot, but I wish there’d been a different way to learn all those lessons.

  Levi finally finds his voice. “You were protecting me?”

  I dip my head in answer.

  “I thought…” He pauses, gritting his teeth. A muscle jumps in his jaw, and he sits down hard on the step beside me.

  “You thought what?” I prompt him.

  He seems to be struggling over the right words. In the end, he blows out a long breath and leans his head back against the old wooden door with a thunk. “I thought you were into me. The way you followed me around. You kept ‘bumping into me’ in the most bizarre places.” He makes air quotes around the words, and his voice acquires a bitterness I’ve never heard from him. “How much of an asshole do you think I am now?”

  He slants a look at me from the corner of his eye, and heat slams into my cheeks as though he’d flicked a switch inside me.

  “Levi…” I manage.

  But he’s not done. “You know, I figured you’d gone through some sort of a breakup when you showed up at my place. And I waited for weeks because I didn’t want to be your rebound. I was planning on making my move after you returned from Brazil, but then your mom passed away, and it seemed like such a bad time, so I waited some more.” He lets out a harsh laugh. “By the time you got your life back together and we started working on client cases, you’d friend-zoned me so well, I couldn’t say anything without ruining that good thing we had. I thought…” He shakes his head, grimacing. “Obviously, I thought wrong.”

  His words flow over me, but th
ey’re not making any sense. He’s not making any sense. Right when I waded waist-deep back into my own past mistakes, he’s confessing his own?

  “What are you saying?” I ask. “What do you want me to say?”

  Levi’s green eyes light with a fire I’ve never seen before. He takes my hand and squeezes it, hard. “I’m making my move. Right now. Don’t bother with that vampire. Whatever we find in Egypt, we can figure it out on our own. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you, and if you let me…”

  I stand, heartbeat pounding in my ears. “Don’t, Levi. Please.”

  I know him. I’ve seen him with countless girlfriends over the years, and none of them were ever serious. He’s not a serious guy. I can’t do this with him so he can end our ‘casual relationship’ a couple of weeks later, like he does with the others. Or maybe they dump him because he’s never all in, never committed, and they realize it sooner or later. The only thing he’s ever been committed to is our friendship, and I don’t want to fuck that up.

  He gets up slowly, inching toward me with hands raised as though I’m a skittish animal.

  “Nora,” he says, his voice grim. “I’m—”

  He’s about to touch me. If he touches me, I’m done. One caress, one kiss will be enough for me to lose my heart completely, and I can’t afford that. Not now. Not with Levi, who is the one good constant in my life that I’ve never had to worry about.

  The words and gestures come to me easily. My magic springs up in a fountain of sparks, and I grab whole fistfuls of it, pouring the illusion over myself like I’m dousing myself with water.

  A moment later, I run away from Levi, knowing that this time, he can’t follow.

  Seven