The Cursed (League of the Black Swan) (11 page)

“I think I am going to like it here very much. Give my regards to the Fae,” the wannabe king said.

Luke shot a pitying smile at him. “You are already a dead man. You just don’t know it. The Fae here are not sparkly little gentle beings, Pict. Merelith will crush you.”

“Now. We need to leave now,” Rio said. Her arms were full with Elisabeth, so the dog would just have to limp its way over to the door. Unless . . .

“Luke?” She made it a request without even uttering the question, and Luke scowled at Dalriata, the wall of fire that he still hadn’t put out but didn’t seem to be burning anything tangible, and even at her, but he knelt down and scooped up the dog in a single, fluid motion, and they left the room.

Nobody followed them.

“I’ll put out the fire when we’re on the street,” Luke called out, and they didn’t speak again until they were all settled in his Jeep. Rio sat in back with Elisabeth because the girl wouldn’t let go of her, and the dog curled up on the passenger seat up front. Luke closed his eyes in concentration for a moment, probably to stop the fire, and then he stared at the dog.

“Why did you want to take this smelly animal with us?” He sounded honestly curious rather than annoyed. “She probably has rabies. Do foxes even get rabies?”

“It’s a fox?” Rio said, blinking. “A girl fox?”

The fox lifted its head and regarded first Luke, then Rio, from those unblinking green eyes.

I am a fox. I am female. My name is Kitsune, and I belong with you, Rio.

“She’s a fox,” Rio confirmed out loud to Luke. “And her name is Kit-SOON-eh. She says she belongs with me.”

It was Luke’s turn to blink, but he just shoved the key into the ignition, started the Jeep, and pulled into traffic. “Of course she does. Well, hey, we have to get the Halfling daughter of a Fae aristocrat back home before Auntie Merelith destroys the city looking for her, and then we’re going to have a long conversation with a man about a horse.”

“I like horses,” Elisabeth ventured, her first words since they’d left Dalriata’s offices.

“Horses are lovely,” Rio agreed, stroking the child’s hair and staring at the fox, who was now sleeping with her nose resting on her tail.

A talking fox. Why not? How much weirder could her day get, anyway?

Luke muttered something that sounded a lot like a few mildly bad words. “Um, Rio? Things are about to get weird.”

She started laughing. “
About
to get weird? You have very high standards for what constitutes ‘weird,’ my friend.”

He silently pointed out the front window, and Rio’s mouth fell open. A duck the size of a city bus was squatting down in front of them, pushing an egg the size of a VW out of its hindquarters.

“I like ducks,” Elisabeth said sleepily.

Luke glanced down at the girl’s head, now resting on Rio’s lap, and then up at Rio. Their eyes met in a moment of perfect understanding, and they both started laughing. Really, really hard.

“It’s Bordertown,” he finally said, shrugging. “Gotta love it.”

Rio nodded, but she was starting to wonder if she’d be better off somewhere—anywhere—else.

After the Bordertown Road Hazards Crew got the duck and her egg out of the middle of the road, hopefully shepherding them off to a nearby pond, Luke spent the drive to his place dividing his attention between watching Rio in the rearview mirror and waiting for the fox to either go rabid-crazy and bite him or shift into a human right there in the front seat. He’d never heard of fox shifters, but that didn’t mean much.

He’d never heard of giant ducks, either.

The puzzle occupying his mind the most, though, centered on King Assfart’s snide little comment. The League owed him a favor, he’d said. “The League” had to be the League of the Black Swan. Luke doubted that the Bordertown Brew Pub softball league cared a tinker’s damn about Pict kings and their schemes. Also, he wasn’t much of a believer in coincidences. The League had suddenly jumped back into Luke’s life, focused in on Rio, and then Rio had gotten caught up in a scheme that had folded too quickly and without bloodshed.

No bloodshed if he didn’t count the fried Grendel and the headless goon, who were both Dalriata’s thugs—so he didn’t. Count them.

He snorted, and the bedraggled fox opened one eye to glance at him and then fell back into an exhausted sleep. Luke didn’t know why or how, but he had a feeling the fox was more than just a random stray that had happened to be in the building. Especially after Rio had mentioned that it was communicating with her. He scanned the little creature for magic, and only confusing impressions bounced back at him. Clearly, the fox had some magic of her own or someone had cast a spell on her, but he needed a little time to figure out exactly what was going on.

Also, deciphering magical puzzles while driving wasn’t the smartest idea.

“We should call Merelith and tell her we found her niece,” Rio said softly.

“She doesn’t exactly carry a cell phone. I’ll put out the word when we get back to my place, behind the wards,” he told her, swerving to avoid a crazed taxi driver. The cab drivers in Manhattan and in Istanbul, Turkey, were the only ones Luke had ever known who could compete with Bordertown cabbies for sheer reckless determination.

“That’s another thing that’s bothering me,” she said. “Why was it so hard to find this little girl? I know High Court Fae have some seriously scary powers. Wouldn’t they be able to track their own blood relative pretty quickly?”

“They should have been,” he admitted, impressed that she’d picked up on that problem so quickly. Brains
and
beauty. “Dalriata may have some major Old Magic going on, but against Merelith? He wouldn’t stand a chance, on his own.”

“On his own? Do you think he had help?”

He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw her amber eyes flash with anger. For an instant, he could have sworn he saw actual gold sparks in the irises, which reminded him that he knew very little about the lovely Miss Rio Green Jones Smith Stephanopoulos, or whatever her name was.

He knew she was brave as all hell when it came to protecting the defenseless, like the little girl for whom she’d put her own life in danger and the small, dirty fox sleeping next to him.

He knew she’d had a lonely childhood and didn’t let many get close to her, because he’d watched her go home, alone, every night during his stupid interlude of stalking her.

He knew that he wanted to wrap her in his arms and never, ever let her face anything dangerous again.

Okay, turned out he knew quite a bit about her, and every bit of it was a threat to his self-imposed, centuries-old bachelor status, which meant he was going to put a stop to this idea of hers that she could just march into harm’s way.

“We need to talk,” he concluded, pulling to a jerky stop in front of his building.

Rio shook her head, sending all that lovely dark hair flying. “Oh, no, we don’t. You heard him. He’s sorry, he won’t bother me again, he owed me a debt, blah blah.”

“I didn’t quite catch the blah, blah,” he said dryly.

He carried the sleeping child inside his office, holding the door open for Rio and her new pet to enter. She looked like she wanted to bolt, but it would have been hard to escape down the street with her arms full of filthy fox. Especially since he had no intention of letting her get out of his sight so easily, at least until he figured out what the League wanted with her.

Right. Keep telling yourself that you’ve got noble intentions
, he thought, as he watched the lovely sway of her hips while she crossed the room until she glanced back and caught him at it. He yanked his office door shut behind him and wondered why he was suddenly acting like a horny teenager. Another problem to think about later. For now, he reset his wards and led the way back to his apartment. He gently put Elisabeth down on his couch and gestured to Rio to do the same with her fox.

“No way. Kit needs a bath. Now. Who knows what she may have picked up from the Grendels? They probably have fleas,” she said, scrunching up her nose in disgust.

For some stupid reason, he found the expression sexy as hell. He decided to blame it on the residual Grendel venom.

While Rio took Kit to the bathroom to clean her up, Luke called a guy who knew a guy, and Merelith was banging on his door inside three minutes.

She flew into the room, nearly knocking him over, when he opened the door.

“Where is she?”

He pointed to the couch, and the terrifying Fae lady transformed, for the briefest of moments, into an ecstatic aunt. Merelith shot across the room to Elisabeth in a cloud of silver sparkles, and Luke’s nose started to itch. He’d always been slightly allergic to Fae magic, and whenever they were dealing with heightened emotion, it was worse.

The little girl, now safe in her aunt’s arms, opened her eyes and peeked up at Merelith through her tangled hair. “Can we go home now? I’m sorry I was late, Auntie Merelith, but I’m so tired now.”

Poor kid. She was totally exhausted. Dark smudges purpled the delicate skin under her eyes, and she looked a little worse than she had when they’d found her. A thought tickled Luke’s mind, but Merelith’s icy voice shattered it before it formed.

“Who?” she demanded, glaring at Luke. “Why? Does he or she lie dead and bleeding on the ground?”

“I think you stop bleeding when you’re dead. No pressure to pump the blood out,” Luke pointed out. “You want to explain to me why you couldn’t find her yourself?”

A flash of something that, in anybody else, might have been bewilderment came and went in Merelith’s eyes so fast that he almost didn’t catch it.

“My methods are none of your concern, wizard. Payment will be delivered.” She turned to leave, but he stopped her with a touch to the shoulder.

“She was very brave, but worried that you would be angry with her,” he said softly, glancing down at the sleeping child. “I’m really glad she’s safe.”

Merelith nodded, and then she glided out his door to the waiting silver limo. Her voice floated back to him as she climbed into the car while still holding her niece close to her chest.

“Do not think to distract me from the Halfling, Lucian Olivieri. We will meet again soon.”

Luke slammed the door and glared at it. “Damn Fae always have to have the last word.”

He turned at a noise, just in time to see Rio walking toward him carrying a fluffy towel wrapped around a wet fox.

“Merelith?”

Luke nodded. “She took her niece.”

Rio shivered. “I’m just as glad not to have had to deal with her again. Maybe everything can go back to normal in my life now.”

He doubted it, since the League was involved, but decided to keep that opinion to himself for the time being.

“Any chance you can light a fire in your fireplace, so Kit can warm up and dry off? I didn’t see a hair dryer in your bathroom,” she said.

“You wanted to use a blow dryer on a fox?”

She tapped her foot, ignoring the question, so he pulled the lever to open the flue and then flicked his fingers at the logs in his fireplace to start a fire crackling. Rio arranged the fox on the towel in front of the flames, and Luke could see that the creature wasn’t gray and brown at all, but rather the more typical luxuriously deep red. The fox shook itself, throwing off a fine spray of water droplets, and then turned around clockwise three times and settled back down on the towel.

“Lot of dirt?”

She sighed. “You have no idea. I hope you don’t mind, but I used all of your shampoo. The forest-scented one under your sink. It seemed appropriate. I’ll go back and clean out the tub now.”

Rio looked as tired as the child had been, and Luke inexplicably wanted to take care of her. He wondered how she’d react if he lifted her into his arms like the Fae had done with Elisabeth. Run screaming, probably.

He’d feed her, instead.

“Forget the tub. Let me fix you some breakfast. There are some things I need to tell you.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” she said, but she gave the fox one last gentle pat on the top of its head and followed him over to the kitchen.

“What can I do to help?”

He shook his head. “It’s okay. You’ve had a busy morning, and breakfast is the one meal I can actually make.”