The Cursed (League of the Black Swan) (31 page)

Luke frowned, still thinking about Dalriata’s building. “Merelith isn’t the type to worry about collateral damage. I hope no innocent people were harmed or killed.”

Alice shook her head. “No, Dalriata owns the whole building, and it was mostly empty, except for himself, a couple of his thugs, and that nasty woman he kept chained to the front desk.”

“She didn’t seem like a prisoner to me,” Rio said, her brow furrowing.

“She was no prisoner. She probably chained herself there. She and Dalriata had a weird on-again, off-again relationship, and every time he tried to dump her, she hunted him down.”

Alice shook her head. “Very unhealthy. The woman needed to watch more daytime talk shows to gain a little self-esteem.”

Luke grabbed his coffee mug and filled it, took another croissant, and started to head back for his office to make Elisabeth’s antidote.

“Luke, stay a moment,” Alice said, her voice uncharacteristically solemn. “There’s one more thing I learned, and you’re both going to need to hear this.”

Rio buried her head in her hands. “Every time somebody tells me I need to hear something, another piece of my life crashes and burns.”

“I’m sorry to say that this is more of the same. The whole incident with Dalriata taking Elisabeth? It was part of a plot by the League to frighten Rio into joining.”

Luke swore a blue streak under his breath. “I’m going to kill that son of a bitch. When I find Maestro, I’m going to tear his head off and offer it to the Bordertown bowling league.”

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?”

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.