Cursed Luck, Book 1

by Kelley Armstrong

  I shake my head. “Rian has been kidnapped. Right after you got him free. That’s your concern as it should be.”

  “All of it is my concern,” he says, his fingers brushing my elbow. “This is our concern. Your sister and my brother, and . . .”

  “The curse,” I whisper. “If we can’t lift it . . .”

  If we can’t lift it, my sister is cursed to endless misfortune. To eternal beauty and youth, yes, but will she want that? No. There are thousands—millions—of people who might, but my sister would not, even without the curse that dooms her to misfortune. She’s had enough of that already, both parents dead by her eighteenth birthday.

  I look around, suddenly lost.

  “Call Ani,” he murmurs.

  I give a start, as if he’s read my thoughts. Then I nod. I take out my phone and stare at it.

  “Would it be easier if I told her?” he asks.

  Easier, yes. Proper? No. I shake my head.

  “Would you like me to leave the room?” he says.

  I hesitate. When I shake my head again, he says, “You don’t need to be polite, Kennedy. I understand this is a private moment. I’m only offering to stay if it would help.”

  “It would. I-I’m not sure—I’m not sure I can do this. I might . . . I might need you to take over.” A thought hits, and I inhale sharply. “You should call your parents. Let them know.”

  “Let them know what?” Bitterness drips from his voice. “That my brother is still held captive? Hardly new information to them, considering they—”

  He bites that off. “Sorry, you don’t need that.”

  I reach over to squeeze his hand. “I’m hoping they lied about his situation to protect you and help him. But being totally selfish here, if you don’t need to tell them about the change in circumstance right away, I would appreciate a little moral support during this call.”

  “Then you have it.”

  That call. That terrible call. I would say it’s harder than any I’ve ever made, but that’d be a lie. I have a father who died in a car accident and a mother who died of cancer. I have made horrible calls and received even worse ones. This is still one of the toughest. I must tell Ani that I was in the same house as our sister—having a beer, chatting with the owner—while our sister slept under the same roof.

  Of course, I had no idea she was here. I’d have torn the place apart if I did. My guilt comes from feeling as if I should have known. Should have walked through that door and sensed her here. Should have found some way to get more information from Hope on our calls so I’d recognize the setting.

  I say all that to Ani. I can’t help it. This is my big sister, and I am a sinner at confession, blurting every possible misdeed. Connolly shakes his head and gestures and mouths rationalizations I can’t hear.

  I do hear my sister’s rationalizations, of course.

  “Hope couldn’t take the risk of saying more during your calls, K.”

  “I know, but—”

  “Even if she could, how would you possibly recognize the house from the description of her room?”

  “I know, but—”

  “You dropped everything to find us. You’ve teamed up with a stranger to find Hope. I don’t want to even know what risks you’ve taken to help her, but I know you have. You have done everything you could. The fault, clearly, lies with the person who kidnapped her. This Marius wanted to make amends by returning her? Great. An hour earlier, and we’d have had her, and what the hell did he stall for anyway?”

  I don’t answer that one. Why did Marius stall? He didn’t. He’d delayed his reveal to answer my questions, which bounces the guilt-ball back into my court.

  I haven’t told Ani that our sister was kidnapped by Ares, god of war. That’s a different conversation. To give it the space it needs would suck that space from Hope’s situation. That is our focus. The rest will come when Ani and I have had time to digest what happened to Hope.

  “You did everything you could, K,” she says.

  “I don’t feel like I did.”

  “I know,” she says softly. “I know.”

  Ani doesn’t sit still as I talk. It might be the middle of the night, and she’d been asleep when I called, but she’s up now, packing her bag.

  “You need to tell Jonathan,” I say. “Bring him with you.”

  She hesitates.

  “Seriously? Are you considering taking off to handle this without telling him?”

  “I don’t want to presume. He has work, and he’s done so much already. I’d love to have him along, but I don’t want him to lose his job, taking more time off.”

  “That won’t happen, and you know it. If wanting him with you isn’t enough, then remember that you’ll need him to help drive while you and I talk. Also, we need his research. Hope needs it.”

  She pauses. A knock comes through the phone. Then, “Ani? Is something wrong?”

  “He was sleeping downstairs?” I say. “Of course he was. You were kidnapped—he’s not leaving you alone.”

  Outside our door, heels click through a distant hall.

  “Marius?” Vanessa calls.

  Connolly and I look at each other.

  “May I take this?” he mouths.

  I nod, and then continue talking to Ani while he goes to meet Vanessa.

  When I end my call a few minutes later, Vanessa enters, as if she’d been just outside the door. I glance over her shoulder for Connolly, but she shakes her head.

  “Aiden is helping Marius,” she says. “He found one of his employees in the barn. Dead. I understand the man betrayed him, but it is still . . . difficult. They’re handling the body.”

  She comes inside and closes the door. Then she motions to the sofa. “May we?”

  I nod. This isn’t what I imagined. I told Marius I wouldn’t treat Vanessa any differently, and I meant that, but with everything that just happened, I’m not myself, and I’m painfully aware that my distraction and silence might seem as if I’m seeing her with new eyes. Seeing her through a different lens, one she doesn’t want.

  “Marius explained,” I say awkwardly as we sit. “That’s all . . .” I wave my hands. “That’s all fine. Sorry. I’m just not myself right now. It isn’t you.”

  “You’ve just discovered that Marius kidnapped your sister, and now she’s been taken again and also cursed. I don’t expect you to be thinking about me at all, Kennedy.”

  I nod.

  “He wants to explain,” she says. “But I don’t think you’ll want to talk to him right now.”

  I nod again.

  She continues, “The short version is that yes, he tried to hire Hope and then did something incredibly stupid when he couldn’t. As for his deal with you, by that point Havoc had given Rian to Hector, and Marius knew it—Hector had taunted him with it. To foil Hector’s plans to get the necklace, he inserted you with Aiden.”

  “So Hector would believe he had a curse worker—I was working with Aiden, who was trying to free Rian. Except, if I was only pretending to work with Aiden, that left Hector’s team without a curse worker.”

  “Also, I believe, it was to keep someone worse—like Havoc—from hiring you, but that’s no excuse. He did many, many stupid things. And now, moments after recognizing that, I’m going to do something incredibly selfish. First, we will fix this. I am at your disposal, as is Marius. He owes you, obviously but . . .”

  She inhales. “Here is the selfish part. I’m going to ask you to accept his help, however furious you are with him. I’m also going to ask you . . . No, I was going to ask you not to judge him too harshly, but that goes too far. Judge him as you will. I just want to say that . . .”

  She flutters her hands and leans back with a sigh. “There is no right way to say this. No way that won’t seem like me defending a man I love because that is exactly what I’m doing. No one in the world is more important to me than Marius, and whether we share a roof or not, a bed or not, it doesn’t change that. He did something incredibly though
tless here.”

  I choke on a snort. I can’t help it.

  “Yes,” she says. “Thoughtless seems like a ridiculous word under the circumstances, but that’s exactly what it was. His crime is lack of consideration. He’ll tell you that he did everything he could to make your sister comfortable, and that will mean nothing to you because he kidnapped her. It just . . .”

  “Doesn’t mean the same to him because we’re mortal?”

  “Doesn’t mean the same to us because we’re immortal. You and your sister were a means to an end. He wouldn’t hurt either of you. He was moving pieces on a chessboard. You were pawns. Then he met you, and he realized he was hurting people. You can be as furious as you want with him. That’s understandable, and no one will deny you that right, least of all Marius. Just, whatever you decide, don’t turn down his help.”

  I want to. I want to storm out of here. Work with my sister’s kidnapper? Never. But that would be cutting off my nose to spite my face. If he can help, then he does owe me, and I’m going to need all the help I can get.

  Marius is subdued when I see him again, and I’m sure it’s partly the awkwardness of being my sister’s kidnapper, but it’s also from what he found in the stable. As loyal as the man had been to his boss, he’d also been loyal to his former underboss, and that would be Havoc. He’d been with Marius for centuries, and despite the man’s betrayal, Marius is grieving.

  We get a crash course in immortality from Vanessa. Broad strokes only. It’s a power like any other. A very limited power that they pass along to only some of their descendants.

  Vanessa, Marius, Hector and the other surviving “Olympians” have other powers. That’s what made them revered as gods. The dead employee had been a more recent immortal—a descendant of Marius—with no other powers. Immortal, it seems, does not mean invulnerable.

  The “lesser immortals”—my term, not theirs—tend to align themselves with the Olympians. Working for the Olympians makes their lives easier. Josephine Hill-Cabot’s eternal youth and beauty forced her to retreat from the world. The Olympians—and others like them—have carved out their own world within ours, populated with lesser immortals and mortals with magical abilities, those who’ve been brought into the fold, which I guess now includes us.

  There’s a whole lot more there to understand, and any other time I’d be like the kid at the front of class, waving my hand and bouncing in my seat, desperate for all the answers. That will come. My mind is absorbed with Hope’s situation, and all I want is information that will help me free her.

  Vanessa’s crash course in immortality isn’t meant to help us understand Marius’s grief over the dead man. It’s to help us understand Havoc.

  “She’s immortal,” I say. “But without power.”

  We’ve moved into a smaller sitting room, and I’m on one loveseat with Connolly, while Marius and Vanessa sit together on another.

  Marius takes a deep breath. “Her real name is Eris.”

  “Eris?” Connolly says. “Discord?”

  “She prefers Havoc,” Vanessa murmurs, with an unreadable look.

  “But isn’t Eris supposed to be . . .” I look at Marius. “She’s your daughter.”

  As he nods, I look between him and Vanessa. Even before Marius shakes his head, I know the answer to my unasked question.

  “Vess isn’t her mother,” Marius says. “We were on a break.”

  “So many breaks,” Vanessa says, and they share a quarter smile.

  “Yes, so many breaks,” he says. “And many children resulting from them, particularly for me. That’s the problem with being an immortal millennia before reliable birth control. The myths make it sound like we were banging everything in sight. When you live for thousands of years, though, a few dozen affairs is hardly outrageous. In our case, it wasn’t even affairs as much as flings and one-night stands while we were on our breaks. Havoc was the result of a one-night stand and a lot of wine.”

  Vanessa rolls her eyes.

  “What?” Marius says. “You know what Denny’s bashes are like. You and I had just had a fight, and you’d taken off to Macedonia. So I drank. Way too much. And I was . . .”

  “Vulnerable to the designs of an ambitious woman?”

  He makes a face but doesn’t argue.

  Vanessa looks at us. “Havoc’s mother was mortal. A minor princess who wanted more. Having the child of a god was her way of achieving it. She came from a kingdom of warmongers—sorry, proud warriors—and so she targeted the god of war. Havoc was the result and . . .” She glances at Marius, who nods that she can continue.

  “We can make this lighthearted,” she says. “A romp between the god of war and an ambitious princess. There was a myth about it, which didn’t survive. The cunning woman plying the foolish and heartbroken god with wine until she got what she wanted. Along comes a child, and the seductress turns into a harpy, demanding marriage and mansions and whatever else he can provide. Such a lark, ha-ha. There are many stories like that, and what they all ignore is that a child was involved. A child born to two strangers—a father who wants nothing to do with the mother, and a mother for whom the child is only a tool to further her own ambitions.”

  A moment of silence, as if for Eris, the child who became Havoc.

  Vanessa continues. “Havoc’s mother wasn’t merely ambitious and driven. I would understand that. She was . . .” A glance at Marius, and then she lowers her voice as she murmurs, “Monstrous.”

  He nods, gaze averted.

  “When she realized Havoc wouldn’t win her a god for a husband, she took it out on the child. Marius stepped in and negotiated to take custody. He raised her for a few years with the help of his sisters and me. It . . . did not work out.”

  “Havoc is her mother’s daughter,” Marius says. “To me, she was nothing but sunshine and light. To the women in my life—both her aunts and Vess—she was cruel and dangerous. We thought we could rechannel her aggression. She was my daughter, too, after all. We’d rein in her mother’s influence with love and a soldier’s discipline. We sent her to Hippolyte.”

  “Queen of the Amazons,” I say. “And another of your daughters, right?”

  “Our daughter,” he says, nodding at Vanessa, and they share a smile. “The myths misname her mother.”

  Vanessa rolls her eyes. “Because no one could believe the goddess of love and beauty could bear such a warrior.”

  “Hippolyte is ours,” Marius says. “She is the best of both of us. Just as Harmonia was in a very different way. One a sweet and giving child, the other a fierce and wise warrior. We asked Hippolyte to raise Havoc among the Amazons. She did her best, but when Havoc reached adulthood, it became apparent that she was a danger to her sister warriors. She respected no one. Obeyed no one.”

  Vanessa clears her throat, and the look that crosses Marius’s face is an exhaustion and a frustration so deep that, for a moment, he is an old man, bowed by the weight of responsibility and miscalculations.

  “There’s an exception, isn’t there?” I say. “Her father.”

  Vanessa nods. “The one person she cares about. The one person whose opinion she values.”

  I remember the party, when we’d walked in, Havoc kneeling beside that divan, talking to Marius. Talking to him. Offering him champagne. And him lying there, eyes shut, as if she didn’t exist.

  Remembering that, my expression must render judgment because Vanessa leaps in.

  “Marius has given her what she wants for centuries, for millennia. He gave her the attention she needed. Made her his lieutenant. Took responsibility for her. He has been her guardian since Hippolyte returned her.”

  “It’s fine,” Marius says. “I accept resp—”

  “You always accept responsibility.” Her words come sharp. “She was an adult. An adult immortal, and you still looked after her, and I respected the hell out of that, Marius, even when it drove me mad with frustration.” She looks at us. “We have nearly a dozen immortal children. No matter how we ra
ised them, no two are the same. There are those, like Hippolyte, who awe us, and we can scarcely believe she’s ours. There are those, like Harmonia, who delight us, and we are honored to have them in our lives. There are a few who frustrate us, but it is the loving frustration of doting parents. There are also a couple, though . . .”

  A pained glance at Marius. “There are a couple we have lost, not through death but through the eventual realization that we cannot parent them forever. That we did our best, but we cannot be responsible for them forever.”

  “Havoc is one of those,” I say.

  “I only wish—” She stops short. “Sorry, that’s bitterness talking. Havoc doesn’t consider herself ours. I would have happily been a mother to her, but she’d rather die a thousand painful deaths. Havoc, though, is the one we kept close for as long as we could. Eventually . . .”

  “I fired her,” Marius says.

  “Fired her?” Vanessa snorts. “You set her up in business on her own. Convinced her it was time to fly the nest while giving her everything she needed.”

  “She felt fired.”

  “That’s her problem.” Vanessa looks at us. “Things hit a tipping point. Marius and I separated because of her. I couldn’t take it anymore. He did everything he could to ease her leaving, and she acted like an abandoned child. So he did the only thing he could.”

  “Last year, I told her I didn’t want her as part of my life until she treated everyone in it—Vess, my siblings, our other children—with respect.”

  “You saw Marius ignoring her at the party,” Vanessa says. “That seemed cruel. It was calculated strategy. Hundreds of years of his attention didn’t help, so he’s withdrawn it.”

  I look at her. “Basically, you’re telling us that my sister has been cursed by a bratty immortal throwing a tantrum because Daddy’s giving her the silent treatment?”

  “I’m sure there’s more to it—” Marius begins.

  “Yes,” Vanessa says, meeting my gaze. “There are side benefits to her scheme. Hurting me. Insinuating herself with Hector. Even owning Harmonia’s necklace would be a triumph to her—she hated her sister almost as much as she hates me. And then there’s the pure joy of wreaking havoc. That’s what she is—Havoc, goddess of chaos. Mostly, though, it’s a tantrum, and your siblings have been pulled into it.”