The Cursed (League of the Black Swan) (14 page)

“I can’t believe she evicted me,” Rio told Kit for about the twelfth time.

She figured it might take another twelve before it finally sank in. Her landlady—and, she’d thought, her friend—had looked Rio right in the eyes and lied like a banshee on a bender.

No room. I thought you’d moved out. Did we agree that you were coming back next year, maybe the year after, dear?

Oddly enough, Mrs. G hadn’t given up on her lame excuses until Kit, who’d been lurking behind Rio’s ankles, had yipped up at her. Mrs. G had inhaled sharply and backed away from the threshold of her doorway.

“Where did you get a
Yokai
? Is she Zenko or Yako?” she’d demanded.

“Her name is Kit, and other than that I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

After that, the conversation had deteriorated until Rio had finally shoved Mrs. G’s envelope of cash back at her, nodded numbly when her landlady had mentioned storing Rio’s things until she got settled, and then taken her bike and wandered almost blindly off down the street. Now they were sitting on a bench in front of the bike store while Jeff installed a basket on the handlebars that was deep enough for Kit to use, and Rio still wasn’t sure what had just happened.

“She evicted me,” Rio mumbled, feeling shell-shocked.

Kit nudged Rio’s arm with her nose, then stared left toward the end of the street. Rio started to shake her head, but then the realization hit her over the head like a thunder god’s hammer. The end of the street.

The end of Tchaikovsky Street, where the Black Swan Fountain burbled merrily away. The centerpiece of the square where lovers gathered and children played in the water all year long. Black Swan Fountain, Black Swan League—somebody was racking up the poultry and they were all arrayed against her.

Do not forget the duck
, Kit sent solemnly, and when Jeff came out with her bike, Rio was cracking up.

“You sound like a hyena shifter on nitrous oxide, and let me tell you, I
never
want to run into one of those again,” Jeff said, grimacing. “I’ve been too traumatized to go back to the dentist ever since.”

Naturally that image, or maybe the combined stress of the past couple of days, or both, made Rio laugh even harder.

Kit fit perfectly in the basket and seemed content to ride along watching everything, wrapped in Rio’s spare jacket. The rain had blown over and the day was actually pretty gorgeous; a crisp fall day with sunbeams slanting across the street to fall in mud puddles as if illuminating jewels.

So Rio was in a pretty cheerful mood when she moved on to the final part of her day’s plan, right up to the point where she walked in the door and waved to her boss.

“You’re fired.”

Rio lifted Kit out of the basket, rolled her bike into the space tucked behind the front corner of the Roadhouse, and set her bike lock. Not that it mattered if anybody stole the bike at this point. She didn’t have a job to need it for.

“Well, it’s five o’clock somewhere,” she told Kit, almost apologizing, before she realized that carrying on a conversation with a fox had to look a little bit nuts.

There weren’t very many people inside the Roadhouse. Rio looked around, interested, to see what other kind of people hung out in a bar in the middle of the afternoon. It was pretty much what she expected. A few seedy-looking Winter Fae played pool in one corner, six or seven goblins huddled around a big-screen TV in the back watching the rugby game and offering loud, creative, and obscene suggestions as to how the players could do a better job, and Clarice was at the bar, undoubtedly doling out drinks and astonishingly bad advice to the lovelorn, as usual.

Miro was nowhere to be seen, which was probably for the best. She briefly wondered if he’d had indigestion from the barbecue of the night before, but then a wave of nausea pushed the random thought out of her mind.

“Hello, Clarice,” she intoned in her best sepulchral, Hannibal Lecter tone.

Clarice, a short, curvy, sparkling-eyed ball of optimism, groaned. “I’ve never heard that one before. Like, for example, every single time you walk in here.”

“I figured you’d hear it from everybody,” Rio said. “Does anybody watch the greats anymore?”

“Nobody in Bordertown cares about watching horror movies, Rio, when half the time we are all living in one. Or, at least, in a freak show. Did you hear about the duck?”

Rio started laughing. “I
saw
the duck. What happened to the egg?”

Clarice pointed to the Jeggleston Ale tap, and Rio nodded. “Yes, and make it a tall one. You would not believe the day I had. May I also have a bowl of water for my pal here?”

Clarice stood on tiptoe and peeked over the bar until she could see Kit sitting on Rio’s jacket. “Did you find a new friend? She’s gorgeous.”

Rio glanced down at Kit, whom she could swear was preening at the attention. “I think she’s a little vain, too,” she whispered.

Kit bared her teeth, and Rio grinned. At least one of them was having an okay day.

Clarice slid the tall glass of ale across the bar, and Rio took a long drink. By the time Clarice came back from the kitchen with a bowl of water, Rio had downed almost half of the beer. When she stepped off the bar stool to bend down and give Kit the water, the room wobbled a little bit.

“Whoa. I think I need food. How about a hamburger platter—wait.”

Rio fumbled in her backpack for the paper Dr. Black had given her. It didn’t say anything about hamburgers being forbidden, and Kit looked hungry, too. At least as far as Rio could read the facial expression of a fox she’d only known for a few hours.

“Make that two hamburger platters, but no bun on the second one. Probably no French fries either.”

Kit growled a little, and Rio rolled her eyes. “Fine, already. She wants French fries, too.”

Clarice’s eyes widened, and it was at least three full beats before she responded. “Suddenly you’re talking to a fox,” she finally said.

Rio drained the rest of her glass and held it up for a refill.

“Let me tell you about my day,” she said to her best friend. “I think you’ll be surprised I’m not heading straight for the whiskey.”

Nearly an hour later, Rio was dragging her final, lonely French fry through ketchup as she finished her story. Kit, her own hamburger and a few of her fries long gone, was sleeping curled up on Rio’s jacket on the floor.

When Rio looked up, Clarice, who’d pulled up her own bar stool a good half hour previously and yelled at the busboy to cover the bar, was staring at Rio with her mouth hanging open.

“Say something already,” Rio pleaded. “I can’t figure out what I’m supposed to do.”

Clarice’s mouth opened and closed a few times, she bobbed her head, and her red curls bounced around as if even her hair were shocked at the story.

“You slept with Luke Oliver?”

Rio wildly scanned the immediate vicinity to see who’d heard, but nobody seemed to be paying any attention to them, and Bobby the busboy was at the other end of the bar, trying to flirt with a water demon who had huge breasts. Of course, when you could manipulate water, you could pretty much conjure your double Ds whenever you wanted them, but that was
so not the point
.

Crap.

“Really? I just spent an hour telling you my story—a story in which I nearly died, I might add—and
that’s
where you want to go with it?”

Clarice blinked. “You slept with
Luke Oliver
?”

Rio reached over, grabbed her friend by the shoulders, and gave her a little shake. “Snap out of it. I did not sleep with him the way you make it sound. There was no naked. There was no panting or moaning. There was only
sleeping
, and it’s because we were both sort of injured at the time.”

“You slept—” Clarice blinked again, and then she finally seemed to snap out of it. “Okay, okay. But don’t blame me for being freaked out when you tell me you slept with one of the hottest guys in town—the same guy you had a full-blown crush on not too long ago, by the way.”

Rio felt her cheeks heating up. “It wasn’t a crush. You make it sound so junior high. It was more of an . . . attraction.”

“Riiight. An attraction in which you lovingly described his utter hotness to me every single time you had a delivery to his office,” Clarice retorted.

“I won’t be doing that anymore.” Rio slumped in her seat, folded her arms, and pillowed her head on them on the gleaming bar. “I don’t have a job. Or a place to live, for that matter.”

Clarice waved a hand. “You can bunk with me—you and your adorable furry friend, by the way—and you know it. And jobs in Bordertown are easy to come by, since nobody but a few fools like you and me want actual, legitimate work.”

“That’s not the point, although I appreciate the offer of a place to crash,” Rio said glumly. “I’ve lost everything in less than forty-eight hours, and I think this League of the Black Swan that nobody admits to knowing about is to blame.”

“I assure you, we had nothing to do with it,” a deep male voice said from so close behind Rio that she jumped and spilled a little of the coffee she’d switched to after the second glass of ale.

Clarice’s glare turned to a speculative smile when she turned around to see who had interrupted them, which made Rio almost afraid to look. But they’d picked the wrong bike messenger if they thought she was a coward. She pushed the thought of running screaming for the door out of her mind and slowly faced the man who claimed to be part of the very organization that was ruining Rio’s life.

“They call me Maestro,” he said, holding out a hand.

At Rio’s feet, Kit growled, fierce and low.

“How nice for you. They call me Empress of the World, but that and five bucks will get me a cup of coffee,” she shot back. “My fox doesn’t like you. Please step back.”

“We need to talk,” he said calmly, but at least he did step back a pace. “And that is almost certainly not
your
fox. Interesting that she chooses to be with you, however.”

“Oh, and nothing good ever came out of those four words,” Clarice said. “
We need to talk.
I don’t think so, Buster. Rio, do you want me to call Miro or get the shotgun?”

Maestro turned his gaze to Clarice, and his lips twitched in what might, by the longest possible stretch of the imagination, be considered a smile.

“Allow me,” he said.

The bar shotgun floated up over the counter and hovered in front of Clarice, who narrowed her eyes and snatched it out of the air.

“I hope you don’t think that’s impressive,” she said, as she whirled on her stool to point the gun at the floor in Maestro’s direction. “This is Bordertown, not Vegas. I get six more impressive stunts than that in here every evening before midnight.”

The man—or whatever he was—laughed, and Rio flinched. That was not a laugh she wanted to hear ever again, under any circumstances. The sound made her think of death by suffocation under a ton of heavy rock. He, like Luke, looked a little like a pirate, but whereas she could see Luke commanding the ship and standing, tall and elegant, in the bow, complete with silk shirt and sword, this man would be the thuggish second-in-command who was always plotting mutiny and betrayal.

Or maybe Rio needed to cut down on the pirate romance novels.

“May I at least have a moment of your time?” He gestured to a booth that was relatively secluded from the rest of the room. “I assure you I will not harm you in any way.”

Kit’s growling increased in volume, but Rio was desperate for answers. She was in a public place, after all. What could he do?

Clarice made a
tsk
ing sound with her teeth. “Don’t do it. Don’t even think about it. Remember the Kelpie invasion of 2010?”

“I have to find out why they’re hijacking my life, Clarice. Watch Kit for me?”

Kit’s growling instantly stopped, and she rose and stalked over to the booth and hopped up on one bench.

“I think your fox has other ideas,” Clarice said dryly. “Let me know if you need me to shoot him.”

Maestro laughed and waved a hand, and a spinning roulette wheel appeared on top of the table nearest to them.