Curse of the Black Swan

by Alyssa Day

  Praise for the authors of Enthralled

  LORA LEIGH

  “Lora Leigh delivers on all counts.”

  —Romance Reviews Today

  “Erotic, fast-paced, funny, and hard-hitting.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “The incredible Leigh pushes the traditional envelope.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  ALYSSA DAY

  “Alyssa Day creates an amazing and astonishing world.”

  —Christine Feehan, #1 New York Times bestselling author

  “Hot, fast-paced action.”

  —San Francisco Book Review

  “An epic thrill ride.”

  —Romance Reviews Today

  MELJEAN BROOK

  “Meljean Brook has brilliantly defined the new genre of steampunk romance. I loved it!”

  —Jayne Ann Krentz, New York Times bestselling author

  “Smart, sexy, breathtaking, and downright addicting.”

  —Ilona Andrews, New York Times bestselling author

  “Masterful storytelling.”

  —Booklist

  LUCY MONROE

  “Lucy Monroe is one of my favorite indulgences.”

  —Christine Feehan, #1 New York Times bestselling author

  “Enthralling from beginning to end.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[A] sexy, stay-up-all-night read.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  LORA LEIGH

  ALYSSA DAY

  MELJEAN BROOK

  LUCY MONROE

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  For more information about the Penguin Group, visit penguin.com.

  ENTHRALLED

  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  Copyright © 2013 by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  “The Devil’s Due” by Lora Leigh copyright © 2013 by Christina Simmons.

  “The Curse of the Black Swan” by Alyssa Day copyright © 2013 by Alesia Holliday.

  “Salvage” by Meljean Brook copyright © 2013 by Melissa Khan.

  “Ecstasy Under the Moon” by Lucy Monroe copyright © 2013 by Lilles Slawik.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors’ rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Berkley Sensation Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group.

  BERKLEY SENSATION® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Berkley Sensation trade paperback edition ISBN: 978-0-425-25331-1

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-62248-3

  An application to register this book for cataloging has been submitted to the Library of Congress.

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Berkley Sensation trade paperback edition / July 2013

  Cover art by S. Miroque.

  Cover design by Rita Frangie.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Copyright

  THE CURSE OF THE BLACK SWAN by Alyssa Day

  DEDICATION

  PREFACE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  THE CURSE OF THE BLACK SWAN

  A League of the Black Swan Novella

  ALYSSA DAY

  This is for everyone who knows the pain of losing a parent. Dad, you left us far too soon. I hope somebody up there told you that I’ve made my writing dreams come true.

  Also, thank you to awesome reader

  Jen Cash-Cook for Brynn’s name.

  THE CURSE OF THE BLACK SWAN

  A thousand years ago, on the edge of the Fae lands, a beautiful young peasant woman was bathing in a stream, singing a song of gratitude for the golden sunshine and the magnificent day. However, unlike many who play in the daylight, the girl also sang her thanks to the moon, who rested in diurnal slumber and yet heard the lilting melody of the girl’s voice and was pleased.

  But others with darker purpose heard the girl’s wondrous song, too. The king of the land, a cold, hard man who beat his hounds, his children, and his wife with equal fervor, followed the melody to the stream and found the girl, innocent and glorious in her nudity, and he determined to attack her with his rapacious lust.

  The girl pleaded with the barbarian king, which availed her nothing. So then she ran, and she fought, as her father the woodsman had taught her, and she managed to keep the king at bay until the sun dipped below twilight’s horizon, when her strength finally gave out. The king, enraged by her defiance, stabbed her through the heart and left her to die. As the girl bled to death on the bank of the silvery stream, the night wind whispered in her ear that the moon, who had appreciated the gift of the girl’s song, had taken pity on her.

  “I will save you from this king, but you must agree never to leave me, and to become a black swan and sing to me every third night for the rest of your life, and swear also that your daughters and their daughters will continue to fulfill this promise.”

  The girl, who had lost all hope as her blood pooled near her body and then slipped into the moonlit stream, parted her lips, barely able to speak. “And if I agree, will this gift—this curse—never end?”

  The moon reigned alone over the dark night, and thus had her own measure of cruelty, but she knew well that mortals needed the promise of hope to survive, and so she offered this version of the truth in return:

  “You and each generation’s eldest daughter will be released from your vow when you meet your one true love and bear him a daughter.”

  The girl’s tears flowed as her blood had done mere moments before, when she agreed, and the moon caused a magnificent fountain to appear on that very spot. In the center of the fountain, a perfect black marble statue of the beautiful young woman, one hand held out to a swan, now stood as eternal monument to the vow.

  From that day until this one, a black swan swims in the fountain and sings her songs of loss and longing every third night, while the moon smiles her icy smile. This woman who is also a swan plots and plans for how to avoid falling in love and how to never, ever bear a daughter who would be forced to carry the curse. But the moon’s pull is strong, and she is determined not to lose the lovely swan song, so these plans have never succeeded.

  Not yet.

  ONE

  Bordertown, a place where the Fae, demon, and human worlds intersect, hidden in the heart of New York

  Sean O’Malley ran into the burning building, dodging and weaving around the rest of his colleagues who were running and limping out of
the inferno before it exploded or completely collapsed, either of which was due to happen any minute.

  “O’Malley, get your ass back here,” his boss, the new Bordertown fire chief, shouted.

  Sean ignored him, just as he’d ignored the previous fire chief. He’d heard something in that building. Maybe it was only a cat, and no matter how much it tore him up inside when he found evidence that a helpless animal had lost its life in a fire, he knew the rules: Firefighters didn’t risk their lives for pets. Not that he usually gave a rat’s ass for rules, and he’d certainly bent a few to save pets in the past. They all had.

  But it hadn’t sounded like a cat. It had sounded like a baby.

  Zach, the closest thing to a friend Sean had on the crew, planted himself in front of Sean, blocking his path to the door.

  “Not this time,” Zach shouted.

  They had to be loud to be heard over the roar of the flames that were greedily consuming the old building. Too much rotten wood, too little upkeep—it would be easy to blame that, if this hadn’t been the fourth building in as many nights hit in exactly the same way. They had a serial arsonist on their hands.

  “I heard a baby. Get out of my way, or I’ll go through you,” Sean said, deadly calm and deadly serious.

  He didn’t have time to delay. There was no way he was taking a chance on giving up on a baby who needed him. Not now and not ever—not ever, but especially not today, after his mom’s bombshell.

  Zach was a couple of inches over six feet tall, but Sean was bigger by a few inches and probably by forty pounds of muscle, not to mention his extra abilities. Zach didn’t hesitate; he moved out of Sean’s way, fast, as soon as he heard the word baby. None of them understood how Sean could hear things that nobody else could, but they knew it was true. Enhanced hearing was one of his super powers, they liked to joke.

  They also all knew that he could withstand temperatures that would have fried most of them alive. They didn’t joke about that one. He’d caught more than one of his colleagues watching him warily after they’d fought fires, their expressions similar to how he imagined he’d watch a feral wolf. They weren’t all that far off.

  They knew he was different, but they didn’t know how different. Sean didn’t tell anybody he was half fire demon. Life was easier that way. Even in Bordertown, where demons were as common as low-caste Fae or shady humans, fire demons were considered to be the worst of the worst: crazed berserkers and the most terrifying of predators. His abilities already isolated him enough from the rest of the tightly knit crew. He didn’t need to add to it.

  All of this ran through his mind in the few seconds it took for him to hit the building doorway running. He burst into the conflagration, head down and racing for the spot where the sound had originated. Second floor, to the left. He barely paused at the staircase, but the view was enough to make a sane man flinch. A roaring wall of orange-red flame screamed toward him, and the heat knocked him back a couple of steps. His skin felt the heat, even under his suit, and when the fabric started to melt off his body, he discovered that his protective gear wasn’t rated anywhere near high enough.

  Whatever accelerant the arsonist had used wasn’t purely chemical; no way would a normal fire be burning that hot. Magic was involved here. In fact, it would take black magic to push a fire to these levels. Sean could feel his eyes flaring as his pupils contracted, and he knew that anybody watching him would see the irises turn deep blood orange in color and start to glow.

  Sean analyzed the situation for options, but the stairs were the only way up; no matter that the stairwell was a tunnel of flame and probably going to explode any minute. He took them four at a time, barely clearing the last one before the explosion hit and the stairs collapsed into a burning mass of tinder. He glanced back at the fiery pit at the bottom of the stairwell and grimaced, and a falling chunk of ceiling smashed down on his helmet, nearly knocking him on his ass.

  He stood there, head ringing and skull vibrating, and realized that one of these days he was going to kill himself trying to act like a big damn hero.

  But not today.

  The sound came again, and he still wasn’t sure. Wounded animals sometimes sounded a lot like babies. It could go either way. But he’d come this far, and he’d be damned if he’d leave anybody behind. He took the first door across the hall to the left, unerringly finding the source of the sound. The front room of the apartment, cheaply furnished but neat and tidy, was only beginning to burn, and he had a moment to hope that the bedrooms were in good shape before he hit the closed inner door running. Two seconds later, about a hundred pounds of shaggy black fur smashed into his chest.

  Sean barely stayed on his feet. There had been a lot of power behind that furry projectile. The beast hit the floor and immediately clamped its powerful jaws around Sean’s ankle and pulled, hard. The pink collar on her neck proclaimed that the creature was named Petunia.

  “Okay, Petunia, hang on,” Sean said, using his most soothing voice, but the dog’s whining increased in both pitch and volume, and she pulled even harder, trying to move Sean over to the corner of the room.

  There was a crib, or bassinette, or whatever the hell people called the small, lace-draped wooden cradle tucked against the corner of the room. He heard the crying again, and it was definitely coming from the crib.

  “I got him, girl,” Sean told Petunia.

  She seemed to understand, since she let go of Sean’s ankle immediately and stood there, panting and making deep coughing noises. Smoke inhalation could damage dogs’ lungs, too, and Sean made a mental note to have the dog looked at when they got out of there. A crash sounded in the apartment’s front room, and he amended the thought.

  If they got out of there.

  The baby turned her startled, reddened eyes up to Sean in the instant before he swept her into his arms, and then she waved one pink-pajama’d arm at him and gurgled.

  “We’re out of here, princess,” he told her, and then he picked up the room’s only chair, a wooden rocking chair, and hurled it at the window while shielding the infant.

  The glass shattered outward, as planned, and Sean crossed the room and looked out. A jump from the second story was an easy one for him to make with fire-demon strength, especially only carrying a tiny baby instead of a large, screaming adult—which he’d had to do before—so he had this one in the bag.

  No sweat.

  And then the dog barked, reminding Sean that Petunia was not going to make it out alive on her own. He shook his head, impatient with his stupidity. His mother’s news had been blanking out everything else on his mind, and he knew better than most that distraction could be fatal at a time like this.

  Sean looked down at the dog’s hopeful face, hesitantly wagging tail, and big, brown eyes. Petunia had stayed in that room to protect her precious charge, and she’d even pulled a Lassie on Sean’s leg to get him to find the baby.

  Screw the rules. There was no way in hell he was going to leave that dog to burn to death.

  “You’re going to have to trust me, girl,” he said, crouching down in front of the dog, but keeping an ear out for the shift in sound that would tell him that the entire apartment was about to collapse. He could somehow feel in his bones that the fire was about to take the whole thing down.

  The dog’s big eyes looked worried, but she lifted one paw as if to shake, and Sean took that for a yes. He lifted her into the arm that wasn’t full of baby, took a running leap for the window, and leapt out into the comparatively cool darkness of the autumn night.

  Within the next five minutes, he’d reunited the baby with her mother, who’d been missing because she’d run down to the building’s laundry room while her child was napping. The exploding water heater had shaken debris loose from the basement’s walls and ceiling, and a big chunk of something had hit the woman and knocked her out. Zach had knocked the debris off her and scooped her up, and by the time they roused her to consciousness, the EMTs were administering oxygen to her baby right next
to her, so she’d never had to suffer even a moment’s fear that her child was dead. Petunia, also wearing an oxygen mask and getting checked out, was frantically trying to wrap her furry body around her entire small family all at once.

  “Good job, girl,” Sean murmured, tipping a salute to the canine heroine before he moved on.

  As always, he wanted to be sure to disappear before the thank-yous started and the media showed up. Bordertown’s lead crime reporter, Jax Archer, was a disgraced Fae lordling who just happened to be a living, breathing lie detector, so Sean preferred to stay out of his way. Sean’s old fire chief had gone along with his disappearing acts, mostly because Sean worked more hours than anybody else in the department.

  The new chief wasn’t clued in yet.

  “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” the chief shouted at him, crossing behind the hoses toward Sean while everyone else, exhausted but on the alert, watched the powerful streams of water battle the raging, magically created fire.

  Sean noted that the department’s witch had arrived at some point, and he was now adding his efforts to the mix. Good thing, too, because water alone wasn’t going to stop that beast.

  “Avoiding reporters,” Sean said bluntly, too tired and worried to care about playing nice with the new boss, who was turning out to be quite an asshole.

  One of the reporters Sean could actually tolerate picked that moment to round the corner behind the truck and, spotting Sean, she headed straight for him, her cameraman racing to keep up with her.

  “Pierce Holland, Bordertown Gazette,” she said unnecessarily, thrusting her microphone in Sean’s face.

  “I know who you are, Pierce,” Sean said, but the reporter kept her game face on.

  “You know the drill, O’Malley. Intro for the viewers, all hail the courageous firefighter, et cetera, et cetera,” she said, lowering her microphone and grinning while the cameraman checked something on his lens.