The Cursed

by Alyssa Day

  Rio glared at him. “Don’t even say the word league. Don’t even think it. Not softball, not bowling, and definitely not League of the Black Swan. What kind of monster would use a little girl like that?”

  Luke didn’t bother to answer. Rio had lived in Bordertown all of her life, so she knew all about monsters. The question had been rhetorical at best and hopelessly futile at worst.

  “It’s only two days until my birthday. I need to find out what is going on before I lose my mind worrying about all of this,” Rio said.

  “The League’s new offices are over on Asimov Avenue. That might be a place to start,” Alice said, pouring two jars of tomatoes into her large pot and turning the heat on low to simmer.

  “Will you go with me? Luke has to make this potion for Elisabeth right now, and nothing is more important than that. But I’m a little nervous about facing Maestro and his shadowy League by myself,” Rio admitted.

  Alice glanced at her watch and then regretfully shook her head. “I’m sorry, love. I’d be happy to do it, but I’ve only got about forty-five minutes to get to the airport, and I’ll still just make my flight to Hawaii by the skin of my teeth. I’ve got a job I committed to do, and in my business, my word is everything. If I don’t show up, it’s a real problem.”

  Rio nodded. “I understand. Be careful in Hawaii. I’ll head over to Asimov by myself. I need some answers, and I need them now.”

  Kit, who’d been sitting by her water bowl, yipped in protest before Luke could do the same, and Rio smiled down at her.

  “Yes, you can come with me,” Rio said to the fox.

  “Well, there you go,” Alice said, washing her hands and drying them on a kitchen towel. “Kit can go with Rio, Luke can make the potion, and I can go to Hawaii. Let this chili simmer, please, and you’ll have a lovely dinner in about four hours.”

  Luke waited until the door had closed behind Alice before he started yelling.

  The first thing that Rio did was walk around to the stove and turn off the burner beneath the pot. She had a feeling it wasn’t going to be the kind of day where she could wait around for hours for chili to simmer.

  “You do realize that there’s no way I’m letting you go confront Maestro by yourself?”

  Luke’s eyes flared a hot blue, and she caught her breath as she truly began to believe that she was important to this man, perhaps important in a way she’d never been to anyone else in her life. Her own world was beginning to revolve around his presence, and it terrified her even as it comforted her.

  She needed to establish boundaries or she would be floating, lost and untethered, in this new emotion. She couldn’t allow herself to lose her independence, no matter how heady the feeling, and she couldn’t let him begin the relationship believing he could give her commands.

  “I’m not a child, and I’m not an idiot. All of this affects my life. You may think I’m taking it pretty well, since I haven’t had a meltdown, but do you realize that it’s been only a few days since my life was entirely different?” The reality of what she was saying crashed down around her head, and her breathing sped up.

  “I had a nice apartment—okay, it was a tiny apartment, furnished with milk crates, but it was mine—and I had a job that I usually enjoyed. I had a nice, quiet life, with nobody trying to abduct me or kill me, and I certainly didn’t have magical foxes or wizards hanging around.” She realized she was shouting by the time she got to the end of her mini-diatribe, and she forced herself to unclench her hands and take deep breaths before the hyperventilating kicked in.

  Kit trotted up and twined around her ankles, offering comfort, and Rio leaned down to scratch behind the little fox’s ears. Luke stared at the two of them for a moment, and then he shook his head.

  “You’re wrong. I’m not trying to run your life. I’m only trying to tell you what to do,” he said, and then his mouth fell open and a quizzical expression crossed his face.

  “Oh. Shit.”

  They both started laughing, and he ran a hand through his hair in his familiar gesture of frustration.

  “I’m only trying to help, Rio. I need to keep you safe.”

  She softened. “I know that, Luke. It’s your big bad need to protect everyone—”

  “To protect you. Everybody else can go hang,” he growled.

  “But I need answers, and I’m running out of time. You need to make Elisabeth’s antidote. You admitted you have no idea exactly how her metabolism works because of her mixed parentage. So that means you have no idea if the stopgap antidote you gave her will last as long as you think it might, right?”

  He stopped pacing up and down the room and scowled, but reluctantly nodded.

  “Then you need to work on mixing an antidote that’s tailored to Elisabeth, and I need to go talk to whoever happens to be at the League’s new offices. I doubt it will be Maestro anyway. He’s doing a really good job of hiding from us lately.”

  Kit suddenly hopped up on the back of the couch and snarled at Luke.

  “Yeah, I know. I know you’re going with her. But you’ll pardon me if I’m not all that reassured that Rio’s only protection will be a forty-pound fox who moonlights as a really bad interior designer.”

  Kit snapped her teeth in Luke’s general direction, and suddenly the walls and ceiling were Day-Glo orange.

  Luke snorted. “You’ve just proved my point. What are you going to do if Maestro threatens Rio? Color-blind him to death?”

  Luke took a step toward Rio, and suddenly a furry projectile rocketed through the air toward him, flew over his shoulder, and landed on the other side. Luke and Rio both froze, stunned.

  “Luke, there’s a red scratch on your neck that goes all the way around the side,” Rio said slowly. “Was that there before?”

  Luke put a hand to his neck and then winced, as if it stung.

  “I think your fox just gave me a demonstration of her nonartistic skills,” he said wryly.

  Kit looked away from both of them and began to wash her paw.

  “That wasn’t very nice,” Rio scolded her, but then she felt ridiculous.

  Who was she to scold a magical creature, let alone one who might actually be a Japanese celestial figure? Rio’s life was tumbling into the rabbit hole, and she had no idea which way was out.

  “Please, then,” Luke said, gritting out the words. “Will you please wait for me to mix this antidote, and then we’ll go together? The elixir will need time to process before we can take it to Elisabeth. We’ll leave it to cook, we’ll throw the chili in the Crock-Pot and leave that to cook, and then we’ll go beat some answers out of the League of the Black Swan. This is an extremely dangerous organization, Rio. They’ve been making their enemies disappear for centuries. Don’t underestimate what they’ll do when they want something.”

  Rio took a deep breath and nodded. There was a thin line between courage and stupidity, and she didn’t particularly have any desire to cross it. If a perfectly good wizard was offering to go with her to confront one of the scariest organizations that had ever existed in the history of the world, who was she to say no?

  “Where’s the Crock-Pot?”

  CHAPTER 21

  The early afternoon sunlight slanted into the office window, and Rio watched as Luke mixed liquids and powders into various vials, measuring proportions by sight and feel, apparently, because she hadn’t seen him use a single measuring tube or beaker. The aroma of dried flowers and herbs, combined with the sharp electric scent she’d come to associate with his use of magic, infused the air. His long, capable fingers arranged items on the table with careful precision, and she realized that she was watching his movements so closely that she was nearly hypnotizing herself.

  “When did you become a wizard?” she asked, suddenly curious about his background; after all, he had a lot more of it than the average person. “This is something you’re born with? Magical ability?”

  Luke didn’t look up from what he was doing, but he shrugged a little. “I think that�
�s how it usually works. I don’t know if that’s what happened with me. Considering my family, if I had any innate magical talent, it would’ve all been black magic.”

  Rio shivered a little at his blunt statement. She’d made it a point to stay far out of the range of any black magic practitioners; she’d even refused to deliver packages to certain streets that were known enclaves. Some of her friends at Ophelia’s had liked to experiment, as if they’d been trying out a new kind of cocktail or designer drug, but something deep inside her had recoiled from allowing even the slightest hint of a black taint anywhere near her.

  Now, though, she was sleeping with a wizard who’d been born to an evil family and cursed with more of the same. When she decided to jump, she didn’t waste any time.

  Luke, meanwhile, scowled down at the table as if it were an enemy he needed to destroy. “Look at this. All of this is the legacy I inherited. I spent years studying and learning, so I could be an expert in antidotes to every poison I came across. Where do you think I might’ve gotten that exciting ambition?”

  Rio didn’t know an awful lot about the Borgias, beyond the vague idea that they’d been a really famous family associated with some pretty awful things. She knew poisoning had been a specialty of theirs, and she thought she remembered that one of them had bribed and blackmailed his way into being a pope. She’d never been all that interested in European history, but now would be a good time to begin to develop some curiosity.

  Maybe what she ought to be doing while he worked was head to a library. She could check out books on the Borgias and on Japanese mythology in order to help her understand Luke and Kit. Maybe the Bordertown Public Library had a book titled The ABCs of Evil Conspiracy-Type Organizations to help her understand the League, too.

  “What happened? The curse? Do you know how that started? If you don’t want to talk about it, I understand.” There were plenty of things about her past that she didn’t want to talk about, like her entire childhood, for example.

  He capped a glass vial and shook it vigorously and then placed it upright in a wooden holder. The silver liquid inside bubbled and frothed, sparkling in the sunlight.

  “Done,” he said, and she could see the satisfaction on his face. “This should be exactly what she needs to remove any remaining traces of the Grendel poison from her system, for now and for always. I’m also pretty sure that she’ll have no residual effects from it.”

  Rio heaved an enormous sigh of relief. “That’s wonderful news. She’s so lucky that you’re the one Merelith called.”

  But then she slowly lowered her coffee cup to the table as a horrible thought occurred to her. “You don’t think that was all part of the master plot, do you? The League would contact you because you would know how to deal with poison if it happened to Elisabeth?”

  Luke narrowed his eyes, but then he shook his head. “No, I don’t think even the maestro is that devious. I’m pretty sure that Elisabeth’s poisoning was completely accidental and unplanned. Even in its worst days, I’ve never known the League to participate in any way in harming children.”

  “Dalriata paid a very high price for his part in what was essentially some kind of twisted business deal,” Rio said, feeling a twinge of unwanted sympathy for the man. He’d been a heartless criminal, but had he deserved to die for his minor role in all of this?

  She didn’t know, and she was suddenly glad that life-or-death decisions were not her job. She’d never do well in any kind of government role, because she saw all sides of a matter and could argue convincingly for each. Clarice had always told her she was too softhearted.

  “The players in all this are the types who are used to dealing with very high stakes,” Luke said, sounding troubled. “What bothers me about that right now is why they’re all circling you.”

  “It must be about my parents. People keep bringing up my birthday,” Rio reminded him.

  Luke rubbed a hand over his face, thinking, but then he nodded. “I think you must be right. At first, I wondered if you’d somehow seen something that somebody didn’t want you to see during the course of your job, but that doesn’t really make sense given the circumstances. And of course your birthday wouldn’t matter at all, in that case.”

  Rio looked at the potion, mostly in order to be able to quit thinking about herself and all the unsolvable puzzles surrounding her. The vial was only about three-quarters full. Such a tiny amount of liquid to be able to cause such a wonderful effect.

  “How long until it’s ready to take to her?”

  “A couple of hours. Long enough for the magic to infuse into the potion, but not so long that it begins to lose its efficacy.”

  “Should we eat lunch?” It would be better to face the League on a full stomach, after all. A few hours wouldn’t make much difference after all these years.

  Luke started laughing. “Have I mentioned how much I like that you’re not one of those women afraid to eat?”

  “I never understood that,” she admitted. “You eat, you use your body, and then your muscles need more fuel. It’s really a very efficient process. But I can’t ever say that out loud, because it turns out that not everybody’s metabolism works as well as mine. I’m really pretty lucky, Clarice tells me, and she also offers dire warnings of what will happen to us when we get older and everything slows down. For now, though, I like to eat.”

  “Good genes,” Luke said, and then he smacked himself in the forehead with the heel of his hand.

  Rio shrugged, but for the first time in a long while she felt a little twinge of pain at the reminder that she didn’t know anything about the origin of her genes. Maybe, finally, she was about to find out. There were only two days till her birthday. She had a feeling she was definitely going to learn something then.

  They pulled together an easy lunch of fruit and sandwiches, raiding Alice’s groceries with abandon and giving Kit a plate filled with sliced meat, leafy spinach, and strawberries. The little fox had a particular fondness for any fruit with the word berry in it, Rio had discovered.

  “So. You want to hear about the curse. Are you sure? It’s a pretty ugly story,” Luke said, looking resigned.

  He bit into a pickle spear, and Rio felt herself blushing a little as she thought about how he’d used his lovely white teeth when he’d been nibbling on her neck the night before. Luke raised an eyebrow, and then his eyes darkened, as if he’d picked up on what Rio had been thinking.

  “If you keep looking at me like that, we won’t be talking,” he said, and his voice had gone low and deep.

  Rio glanced at the clock on the wall. “How long did you say we had until the antidote was ready?”

  He caught her halfway down the hall and grabbed her and tossed her over his shoulder as if she weighed nothing. She laughed and fought him, and sometime between closing the door behind them and tossing her on his bed, Luke managed to take off his shirt. She let her gaze travel over his beautiful chest, letting it pass over the scars of old battles and linger on the sexy masculine muscles of his chest and abdomen.

  “I’ve never seen you go to a gym or work out,” she said. “How do you stay in shape like that?”

  He shrugged and then sat down on the bed next to her and became very interested in removing her shirt. “I have good genes, too, at least when it comes to the physical stuff. I also usually do an hour a day of some kind of training, depending on my mood. I was friendly with a martial arts sensei in the 1700s who taught me a great deal.”

  She blinked. “It still gets me when you toss out things like that. ‘In the 1700s.’ Like most people would say ‘in the nineties’ or ‘a few months ago.’”

  Luke’s face darkened, and she knew the ghosts of his past were haunting him.

  “I think we need to finish the conversation we were having, Rio. Let me tell you the rest, and then we don’t ever need to talk about this again, I hope.”

  “We don’t need to talk about it at all. I didn’t mean to bring it up. I have my own bad memories that I don
’t want to stir up. Please, just forget it.” She tried to pull off her shirt, anything to distract him, but he stopped her and sat on the bed next to her.

  “No, I’d rather tell you. I want you to know about me. It feels important that you do,” he said, and she reluctantly nodded.

  If he thought it was important, she couldn’t deny him the right to be heard. He already meant too much to her.

  “There’s really not all that much of the story that I know. My mother had been involved in poisoning a member of one of the family’s rivals. But this time, it wasn’t the business rival himself; it was the man’s cherished daughter. He was destroyed by it. His wife committed suicide, and his son—the girl’s brother—became a hopeless alcoholic, although we didn’t use that word back then. The family lost everything.”

  Rio touched his arm, aching for him, but she said nothing. She didn’t want to interrupt the flow of words. Sometimes it was better to lance the wound and let the infection drain out.

  “You realize, of course, that I only heard this third- and fourth-hand from the servants of my adoptive family. The Borgias found me a home, after my mother was forced to deny my existence.” He stared off into the distance, as if watching the horrific scenes from his past play out on a movie screen in his mind.

  “It took him years to do it, but before I was ten, the father found what he was looking for. He found a way to deliver a horrible curse, but instead of using it directly against the family who’d cost him everything, he thought that he would take their precious little boy away from them.” Luke laughed, and the sound was so filled with pain and bitterness that Rio shivered and wrapped her arms around him. He stroked her hair while he continued.

  “The curse’s exact wording is something I forgot a long time ago, but I can never forget the result. He cursed me to suffer the consequences of my family’s evil. He cursed me to always walk the line between salvation and damnation. He used my blood to seal the magic, and the poor, mad bastard promised me to the forces of darkness.”