The Cursed (League of the Black Swan)

by Alyssa Day

  But the rage that had flooded Luke when Roberts made his impossible claim needed an outlet. He could feel the darkness hovering, waiting to snatch him with jagged claws. He forced himself to fight it—Rio deserved better than that from him. She needed him, more now than ever.

  So instead he smiled, but it didn’t feel like a particularly nice smile. Chance paled and backed up a step.

  “Oh, that’s not good,” Rio said, staring at Luke with wide eyes. “Don’t even think about it, Luke Oliver.”

  “Too late,” Luke said cheerfully.

  He blasted Roberts so hard with a fireball backed by kinetic force that it lifted the demon prince, if that was really what he was, off his feet, into the air, and back out the office door. Roberts smashed into the wall of guards, and several of them went tumbling backward to the sidewalk with him.

  “I hate to be predictable, but I’m going with Bowling for Demons here,” Rio said, still apparently content to remain sitting on the floor. “Although, you do you realize you might have just hurt my brother? I wonder if the appropriate thing to do here would be to defend the family honor.”

  Her laughter had a touch of hysteria to it that Luke didn’t like at all, but he didn’t know how to fix it, so he stomped over to his office door, looked down the street both ways to be sure the coast was clear of innocent bystanders and innocent grandmotherly sedans, and then he blasted the hell out of the black stretch limo that was parked in front of his office.

  Then he turned around, reset the wards to his office with a simple hand gesture, and pulled Rio to her feet.

  “It’s probably a lie.”

  “It doesn’t feel like a lie,” she said calmly.

  But he knew her well enough by then to recognize the intensity of the terror hiding under her impressively nonhysterical surface. She was scared to death, and he didn’t blame her. He wanted to set Roberts’s skull on fire for doing this to her.

  He settled for kicking the side of his desk, leaving another dent to match all the others he’d left there in the past. “This doesn’t make sense. I have to admit, I was starting to suspect something just as impossible but nothing like this. Or, hell, actually a lot like this.”

  She looked up at him and, for the first time, he wondered if the amber in her eyes would lighten to yellow when she got angry. The realization hit her before he could say it.

  “You thought I might be related to Merelith and her missing sister.”

  He studied her face and saw what he thought were hints of resignation. “Apparently you thought so, too, because the one thing you don’t seem to be is very surprised by all of this.”

  She looked anywhere but at him, and he had a fleeting idea that she was putting on an act, but then dismissed it. She was too honest to hide from him like that.

  “There was too much,” she said. “I keep a book with me when I do bike runs. There’s always downtime, and I’m always reading. Usually mysteries. The clues in this one—the mystery of my life—well, they’ve been shouting at me for a while now.”

  “Merelith’s reaction,” he said.

  Rio nodded. “My birthday, Elisabeth and her mind-reading ability, and even how I could look into that little girl’s mind, in a way I’ve never been able to do with anyone else before, not even Clarice, and she’s my best friend.”

  “But maybe if you’re related to Elisabeth—”

  “Then it would make sense because we’d have similar thought patterns,” she said, finishing his sentence. “We have another thing in common, too. We’re both—what did Merelith call it? Halflings?—Half-breeds. Half Fae, and half something else. At least Elisabeth got a nice half.”

  “It might not be true,” he said, but even he didn’t believe it anymore.

  “Maybe it’s not. Maybe all of this is just a nightmare, and I’m going to wake up in my own bed in my own apartment and get on my bicycle and go to work any minute,” she said lightly, and everything inside him violently rejected the idea that he’d no longer be part of her life.

  “Don’t even think about leaving me,” he warned her, but she laughed at him, bizarrely lighthearted, as if he’d been joking.

  Then she put her hands on his shoulders and rose on her tiptoes to kiss him, which distracted him completely from concerns about what Roberts and his demon guard were doing outside.

  “I need you to know something, Lucian Olivieri,” she said, her voice low and fierce. “No matter what happens, I need you to know that being brave enough to spend this time with you was the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

  Her kiss was long and hard and drowning deep, as if she were pouring all of her desperation at the situation directly into his heart by way of her lips.

  “Now go take that medicine to Elisabeth—to my cousin—right now before it goes bad and you have to start over.”

  He blinked at that, still a little stunned both from what she’d said to him and from that kiss. His body had kicked into some weird adrenaline thing—a fight-or-flight-or-fuck reaction—and so it took him a fraction of a heartbeat longer than it should have to realize what she was up to, and by then it was too late.

  She was running out the door.

  He leapt after her a split second after she made it outside, but a dozen or so of the guards were ready and waiting. They let Rio slip between them to get to Chance, who was safely behind the wall of war guards, but then they blocked Luke, hard. Kit, who’d followed, hot on his heels, hurled herself at the guards but bounced back, snarling, when one of them smashed his shield into her.

  Roberts had been waiting for Rio. Luke saw him take her hand and help her into the waiting chariot. Luke wanted to blast him, but he couldn’t take the chance of injuring Rio, so he stood there helplessly while the four flame-red horses leapt into the sky and took the chariot, the demon prince, and Luke’s entire world with them.

  He threw back his head and howled, and Kit stood next to him and did the same. Then he rolled up his sleeves, because his magical fire was climbing his arms and smoldering hotter than he’d ever felt it before in the centuries of his curse, and the shirt was already beginning to char.

  “Where’s Miro? Somebody had better alert him that there’s about to be barbecue over here.” He counted off the number of demon guards who’d dared to stand between him and his woman. A full dozen. “A lot of barbecue.”

  The berserker rage took him after that, and he didn’t stop fighting until all the demons who wanted to fight back were either groaning in pain or running away. When Luke came back to his senses, he was sprawled on the ground, alone, and Kit, back to her normal size, was waiting anxiously and nudging his face with her cold nose.

  “We’ve got to go get her,” Luke told Kit.

  Kit whined again, and then she nudged him in the chest, and Luke felt something poking him. Reason returned fully as he remembered that it was the vial of Elisabeth’s antidote, miraculously unbroken. A black chasm of unwanted choice opened up before him. There was still time to take the potion to Merelith before it started losing efficacy. On the other hand, every minute he delayed was another minute that Rio was with Chance Roberts in Demon Rift.

  How could he possibly choose between two horrible options? Which one of them would he leave in danger even a single minute longer?

  Kit nudged at his chest again, and Luke sighed.

  “I know, I know. You’re right. There’s really no choice at all. If I take any possible risk with that little girl’s life, Rio would never forgive me. We’ll get the cure to Elisabeth, and then we’re going to give Demon Rift a surprise the likes of which they’ve never seen before.”

  He stood up and brushed himself off. “So, Yokai. Have you ever traveled through Shadows?”

  CHAPTER 23

  She hadn’t fallen apart. Rio wrapped her arms around herself to keep from shattering into a million tiny pieces, and she kept reminding herself that she hadn’t fallen apart.

  She’d spoken so calmly about Chance’s revelation that Luke had bou
ght into her façade, and he’d even talked to her about his suspicions about Merelith, having no idea that everything Rio had been saying to him was a load of unbelievable duck shit.

  She’d had suspicions that she might be related to the freaking queen of the freaking fairies? Not in a million years, she hadn’t. Rio hadn’t known much about the story of the Fae princess who’d loved a demon prince, and certainly nothing she’d ever done, seen, or heard had in any way—not even the slightest possible way—led her to believe that she might be involved with the story.

  She was human. She’d always been human. Sure, with a little extra, but most people in Bordertown had that. How was it that nobody had ever recognized her as a kindred creature in all of her years of living among the many and varied Fae and demon residents of the city?

  Never once had anybody told her she reminded them of someone. Never once had she looked up to see any of the Fae or any demons staring at her suspiciously. None of the magic detectors in the hundreds of buildings she’d entered for her own job had ever registered her as anything but garden-variety human.

  But she wasn’t. Human. Which led her to wonder—what exactly was she? Fae-demon pairings were so rare that she’d never actually seen or heard of one, even in Bordertown. Even the idea of a child of such a union was pretty much universally reviled.

  If any of this crazy story was true, did that make Rio a freak? A mutant? Was it a good thing? Bad? Was she the next step up the evolutionary chain or the living, breathing equivalent of a defective product?

  She glanced at the man who’d claimed to be both a demon prince and—even more fantastically—her brother. What happened next? Was he taking her to Demon Rift to meet the family—or to be destroyed?

  Dodging Luke to climb into the carriage had been probably the stupidest thing she’d ever done, and she knew it, but she hadn’t leapt into the situation—or the carriage—totally out of the blue. Luke might violently disagree with her reasoning once he heard it, but she’d reacted with at least as much intellect as instinct.

  The thing was, alone among all of the players in the bizarre drama that her life had become, Chance had told her the truth. Sure, it had taken him a while, but he’d come right out and said that she was his sister. Nobody else had come close.

  Maestro had said he knew who her parents were, and he’d chosen to play stupid games with that vision and the cake. Merelith had hinted around the subject but never told Rio a damned thing, even when Rio had pretty clearly demonstrated that she could be trusted.

  That had been Rio’s cousin she’d helped rescue. Her cousin, who’d known a kindred soul from the minute the electric spark of recognition had traveled between them back at Dalriata’s lair. She shivered at the thought of the man’s fate, but she was angry on her own behalf, too. Merelith had obviously had time to organize a massive strike against the enemy, but she hadn’t taken five minutes to tell the truth to her long-lost niece who’d been standing in the same room with her.

  Rio decided to quit wasting time mentally justifying her actions to Luke, since he wasn’t even there, and even as she had the thought, another one slammed into her with the force of a tornado: Luke could never be part of her life again. Dealing with the Fae and the demons—trying to balance his protective instincts against Rio’s need to learn about her two very different heritages—had enormous potential to send him crashing over the abyss into the darkness of his curse.

  In order to protect him, she needed to leave him.

  The realization threatened to shatter both her heart and her ability to function, so she fought ruthlessly to push it down and away and concentrate on the here and now. She was riding in a flying carriage with her demon brother.

  She was a demon. Half demon. Demoness?

  She’d never been so close to losing it, and talking would be impossible, so she dug her fingers into her legs through her jeans and looked out the window. The view was incredible. She’d never flown in a plane or helicopter, or even in a balloon. The sensation was dizzying and joyous all at once, and she wanted to laugh or sing at the amazing feeling of freedom from all of her Earth-bound worries.

  She couldn’t help it, and she knew it was more of the country mouse stuff, but she’d never been inside Demon Rift, she’d never ridden in a flying carriage pulled by demon steeds, and she’d certainly never been told that her brother was a prince.

  A demon prince who just happened to be one of the richest men in the world.

  She started laughing.

  Chance, who’d been silently staring at her with those glowing yellow eyes, tilted his head in an abrupt, almost animalistic movement. Kit had a habit of tilting hers in that exact same manner.

  Her . . . brother . . . frowned at her. “What is funny?”

  “This entire situation is funny, don’t you think? Speaking specifically, however, I was thinking about the times I’ve had to eat macaroni and cheese for a week because bike runs were slow and I had to make the rent. If only I’d known I had Mr. Super Billionaire for a brother, I could have hit you up for a loan.”

  She leaned back against the seat and then jerked forward and stared at it, suddenly hoping that it was cow leather and not some weird skins-of-my-enemies demon upholstery.

  In the back of her mind, a constant refrain was pounding at her:

  Luke Luke Luke Luke.

  She pushed it away, determined not to let pain shatter her when she was about to enter the demon realm for the first time in her life. She needed to be on the alert for danger, not falling apart.

  An expression of faint distaste crossed Chance’s handsome face too quickly for her to label it as a sneer, and she tried to remember what they’d been talking about before her traitorous emotions had tried to overwhelm her with grief.

  “Naturally, I will open the appropriate bank and credit accounts for you,” he said.

  Oh. Right. Her joke about hitting him up for a loan. Anger flashed hot, then died down to ash. She couldn’t take it personally. It was the way rich people usually thought about those who weren’t rich. Like the rest of the world was just lurking, waiting to ask for a handout. But just because she couldn’t take it personally didn’t mean she couldn’t correct his false impression of her.

  “Let’s get a few things straight, Chance.”

  He glared at her, but she leaned forward and started ticking items off on her fingers. “First, I’m not even sure I believe one hundred percent that we are related, and if we are, I’m pretty sure that you’re only my half brother, right?”

  He nodded.

  She moved on before he could start talking again and make her want to punch him. She was trying to be reasonable here, and she had a feeling that Luke was already blowing things up back at his place.

  Luke Luke Luke.

  A twinge of pain stabbed into her at the thought of what Luke must think of her for leaving like that—she definitely owed him an explanation, but she’d needed to know about Chance and his claims. Elisabeth needed the antidote, but Rio wasn’t necessary for that, and it was probably better that she didn’t go along, in case she started to feel the overwhelming urge to smack Merelith across the back of the head.

  For now, Rio was exactly where she needed to be. The countdown clock was moving faster and faster, rushing by at the speed of magic-fueled light, and now that she had some concrete information—or at least an allegation—she was going to pursue it.

  “Is there more?” Chance’s voice broke into her reverie, and she realized he’d been waiting for her to continue.

  He probably hadn’t had to wait for anybody for years.

  She smiled at him, enjoying the thought. “Second, if it turns out that you are my brother, I would like to get to know you.”

  The condescending expression on Chance’s face was replaced by one of surprise. His slightly widened eyes and flattened lips told her that it was a cautious surprise, but it was still surprise.

  “Third, you will not open any accounts for me—appropriate or inappropri
ate. I don’t want your money. I don’t want a job from you. I don’t want presents from you.”

  Now he was scowling again. Well, too bad for him.

  “Finally, and I know this is going to sound naïve, but I hope that someday you can learn to be on my side, and I can do the same for you.”

  Her voice started to tremble, and she willed herself to keep it together and finish her thought. “When I was a little girl, I used to dream about having a brother. Some of the kids would come into the convent with their brothers or sisters, and I was always so desperately envious. I know we’re not kids anymore, but if you are my brother, I hope we can be friends.”

  She had to stop then and look out the window, so she could try to get her voice under control and fight back the tears that were burning her eyes. It was stupidly naïve of her to even hope this, let alone say it out loud, so now he’d know exactly which weapon to use to get to her.

  She knew all that.

  But it was almost her birthday, and she might be able to celebrate it with a family member for the first time in her entire life. It was one of the reasons she’d stepped into this carriage in the first place.

  “I have negotiated with some of the toughest businessmen and government leaders in the world,” he said, finally breaking the silence in the carriage.

  Caught off guard by the randomness of the statement, Rio turned to look at him.

  “I have battled my way up the hierarchy of challenge every year, in order to defend my position as prince and heir to the throne of Demon Rift,” he continued, and he drummed his fingers on the edge of the seat in a nervous gesture that looked very familiar to her.

  Shock rolled over her when she realized it was familiar because it was one of her own.

  “And now, here you are. Young, small, poor, and almost powerless, and yet you have disarmed me more quickly than has ever happened to me in my life.” He lifted one hand as if to touch her but then let it fall back down to his side. “I will try to be this person—this brother—for you, although I do not know how, and my instincts are screaming at me that you will betray me. Half of you is Fae princess, and they can never be trusted.”