The Cursed (League of the Black Swan) (16 page)

“Why not? I don’t have anywhere else to go,” she said, throwing her hands in the air in defeat.

Defeat wasn’t an emotion he wanted to see on her face or in the slumped line of her shoulders. Not now, and not ever again. He started thinking up ways he could protect her from everything bad in the universe and realized his mental inventory was starting to look a lot like a list of people he’d need to kill.

Not good.

It wouldn’t help Rio if she wound up needing protection from
him
, after he turned dark because he was trying to take care of
her
.

Damned if he did and damned if he didn’t
had never sounded so true.

They took his Jeep to his place, after Luke paid a kid ten bucks to ride her bicycle over. On the drive, she told him everything that Maestro had said to her. Luke caught himself slamming his fist against the steering wheel and forced himself to stop. There was no need to scare Rio into thinking he’d gone over the deep end.

“But what I don’t know and don’t understand is why the League would want me. I don’t know why everyone is so interested in my birthday, either. I don’t know what significance twenty-five years old has. I don’t even know if he’s lying about knowing who my parents are,” she said, her hands clenched together on her lap. “Argh. That’s a lot of ‘don’t know,’ isn’t it?”

“I don’t know any of that either, except for the significance of twenty-five years,” he said, leading the way into his office. “The quarter-century mark is important to several magical traditions. It’s also a major birthday for the Fae, who consider a child finally grown to adult independence at that age.”

Rio opened the door to his living quarters, and a warm feeling of contentment spread through him at the idea that she was comfortable enough with him to act so at home. Maybe he should just ask her to move in with him right now. She could start out in the guest room, until he had time to figure out how to be charming and romantic and whatever else women wanted.

“Okay, then we know why the birthday is important, but why, specifically, is
my
birthday important? Why did Merelith even know anything about it? Why did she call me a Halfling?” Rio scowled, yanking him out of his fantasies of waking up next to her for the next twenty or thirty or hundred years.

He decided to be useful while he thought about it. He poured a bowl of water for Kit and put it on the floor, and then he stood watching the little fox daintily drink about half of it while he considered Rio’s questions.

“I have no idea. None of this makes sense to me. The only way any—wait. Is there any chance your parents were Fae?”

Rio’s face drained of all color, and she sank down into the overstuffed chair next to his couch, as if she’d lost the ability to stand upright.

“I have no idea who my parents were. I have two things that the nuns claimed came with me to the orphanage. A necklace and a little stuffed animal.” She glanced at Kit. “Oddly enough, the stuffed animal is a fox.”

“I’m not a big fan of coincidence, especially as the explanation for any fact in a mystery, but even I have to admit that the stuffed animal thing sounds like one.” Luke grabbed a couple of bottles of water and headed over to sit down on the couch next to her.

“The important question, I guess, is what am I going to do? Maestro didn’t even try to deny that he was the one who got me fired. Fired and evicted, for that matter. I can’t imagine that he’ll let me find any other job without exerting this unbelievable influence he seems to have in order to keep me unemployed.”

Rio stared at the floor and then suddenly, in spite of the topic, she smiled. “Is that a brand-new cushion for Kit?”

They both watched as the fox turned around three times and curled up in the little pet bed he’d found at the store when he’d bought the bowls for food and water, the brush, the shampoo, and the freezer box of recommended fox food. Luke shrugged and pretended he was only imagining feeling the tips of his ears heating up.

“It’s no big deal. I happened to drive past the pet store, and they were having a sale, and I thought if you stopped back by, Kit might be more comfortable in that than on the floor.”

He scratched the back of his neck and changed the subject. “What I don’t get is why Maestro had you evicted. What could he possibly gain from that?”

“You tell me. He wanted me to move in with you. How exactly does that work? Is the League of the Black Swan suddenly your tenant pimp?”

Luke almost laughed, but the look on her face warned him not to do it, and he realized that he cared—cared quite a lot—what she thought of him. He was sinking into quicksand with this woman; slowly going under. Defiant and in denial with one breath, and wishing it would happen faster with the next.

“Soon it will be all over but for the sucking noises,” he told Kit mournfully.

He could have sworn that the little fox laughed up at him.

“I have no idea why he’d want you to move in with me, but for once, I have to agree with the man. For whatever reason, dangerous people are suddenly very interested in you. You’d be safer here than anywhere else, at least until we get this figured out.”

Luke’s cell phone rang before Rio could answer him, and he wisely kept from making any comments about being saved by the bell.

“Oliver.”

The voice on the other end was frantic. “I’ve got demons fighting in my shop! Help! They’re destroying half my merchandise.”

“Who is this?”

“Connor Kinney, down at the potions shop. Oliver, I can’t—”

A loud crash interrupted whatever Kinney had been about to say, and Luke pulled the phone away from his ear a little. Rio raised her eyebrow, and Luke held up one finger to ask her to wait a minute.

Kinney came back on the line. “Never mind,” he said, panting heavily. “They left. No thanks to you. When the fuck are you going to just accept the sheriff’s job and be done with it? Things are getting worse and worse around here.”

Before Luke could answer, Kinney hung up.

Luke dropped his phone on the couch next to him and tried to ignore the throbbing that had taken up residence in the middle of his forehead.

“What was that about?”

“People seem to have the mistaken impression that they should call me instead of the sheriff’s office when they have problems,” Luke growled. “I’ve turned down that job over and over again. They can’t sneak me into it through the back door, either.”

“Why?” She tilted her head to one side in what he was fast coming to recognize as her expression of frank curiosity. “Clearly, you’re the best person for the job. Nobody would mess with you, and the ones who were stupid enough to try would learn their lesson. Don’t you think you ought to do your civic duty?”

He barked out something that approached a laugh. “Civic duty, my ass. Look how well that worked out for Wyatt Earp.”

Rio pulled her legs up onto the chair and wrapped her arms around her knees. Luke tried not to notice how nicely she filled out her jeans, but it was a losing proposition. She was in trouble, and he was turning into a horny lecher. He was going to the special hell.

“How about this? You stay here. In one of the guest rooms,” he added, when she shot him a look. “You stay here until things calm down. It’s almost your birthday, right? We get you past that, nothing happens, and you can go back to your normal life.”

She started laughing. “Oh, sure, rich boy. Maybe you rack up a big pile of savings when you live for five hundred years, but some of us have to work for a living. I can’t afford to wait a week before I get another job. I need to pay my cell phone bill and rent a new apartment, which means security deposits on rent and utilities, and I have about enough in the bank to cover maybe half that. Bike messengers are not exactly rolling in money.”

Luke winced and felt like a complete ass. It had been a few centuries since he’d had to worry about money, it was true. He kept the front office looking dingy deliberately, so as not to scare off his typical clientele, who were people who didn’t have a lot of money to offer him to help them solve their problems. But he could afford to have nice things in his home, and he looked around, trying to see his place through her eyes, and wondered what she thought of him.

The perfect solution popped into his brain, and he whooped triumphantly, making Kit open one eye for long enough to see that all was well before she went back to sleep.

“You can work for me.”

Rio slowly lifted her head from her knees and hit him with a glare so hot he was surprised it didn’t set his couch on fire.

“I’m not a whore,” she snapped. “Is that the kind of work you had in mind?”

“What the hell led you straight to that?” He was honestly baffled, and a little bit pissed off, and he figured it showed on his face because she looked embarrassed.

“I’m sorry. You’ve been nothing but helpful to me, and I shouldn’t think the worst of you. It’s just that I’ve had offers before, to ‘leave all this hard work behind,’ and it was almost always so I could take up a position in somebody’s bed.”

He could read every bit of how much it had cost her in pride and shame to admit that, in the way her shoulders tightened and she held her head perfectly straight.

“Well, that’s not me. But if you want to give me a list of names, I’d be glad to beat some sense into the ones who offended you like that,” he told her.

Kit lifted her head from her new cushiony bed and growled, as if in agreement, and pieces suddenly clicked in Luke’s brain. He leaned down to look closely at the animal.

“How many tails do you have?”

The fox tilted her head and looked at Luke as if he’d finally done something interesting. She stood up and waved her single tail in the air, quite deliberately, and then she lay back down.

“How many tails were you expecting?” Rio asked, smiling a little. “Also, thank you for changing the subject. I’m on to you and your secret chivalry, but I’m happy to let you pretend you’re just a gruff guy.”

Luke wanted to kiss her when she smiled at him. He also wanted to kiss her when she was sad, to cheer her up, and when she was angry, to calm her down. Basically, he was falling like an iron cauldron dropped off a cliff, and the whole idea of it freaked him completely the hell out, so he ignored it.

“I think she might be a
Yokai
, and from what I remember, they can have up to thirteen tails.”

“You’re the third person to say that to me, and I haven’t had a chance to go online. What’s a
Yokai
?” Rio slipped out of her chair to sit on the floor, and she reached out a hand to stroke Kit’s long tail.

“A kind of supernatural entity with special powers. Kit has already proven she’s no ordinary fox, and her name—Kitsune—seems to point us in the direction of her being a
Yokai
. Now we sit back and wait to see if she leans toward the helpful, benevolent kind or the willful, mischievous kind,” he said, privately betting on the latter.

It was the way his luck had been running.

Rio stared at Kit for a minute or two, and then she shrugged. “Whichever it is, she’s not saying. So I’m just going to go with
fox
for now, and worry about the rest later.”

Luke watched Rio, sitting at his feet with the fox, and told himself all the reasons why pulling her onto his lap and kissing the breath out of her was a bad idea. The problem was, the predator inside the thin veneer of civilization he wore around him like an easily discarded coat didn’t agree with him at all.

Luke Oliver
knew that if anything were to happen with him and Rio at some point in the future, he needed to take it slow.

Lucian Olivieri
wanted to lick every inch of her creamy pale skin and then take her right there on the couch, lying on the shreds of the clothes he’d ripped off her.

The Borgias take what they want
; the phrase had been the lyrics to the lullabies of his childhood. And deep down where it counted, he was a true Borgia. The curse never let him forget it. His mother’s enemy had cursed Lucrezia’s unborn son with immortality, to be lived out under the threat of a horrific fate: If his actions ever veered from the path of goodness and justice—if he showed even a hint of the true Borgia nature, in other words—he would be cast into darkness forever.

It would be difficult for Rio to enjoy a future with a man who’d lost his soul.