The Cursed (League of the Black Swan) (25 page)

Kit tilted her head and flicked her ears, as if listening intently.

“Maybe it was a onetime thing,” Luke suggested, heading for the coffee maker. “You just never know with magic. Trust me, the weirder explanation is usually the right one with magical creatures.”

Kit turned her head toward Luke and flattened her ears, like she was disagreeing with his comment.

“Hey, it was just a guess,” Luke told her. “If you have something different to say, spit it out, little one.”

Kit didn’t move, but she perked up when Rio began to wash her bowls and refill them with fresh food and water. Rio placed the bowls back down on the floor, but when Kit didn’t immediately jump down to eat, Rio turned to find the little fox watching her.

It is not easy to communicate this way. I am
Yokai
; we meddle, we intervene and interfere, and sometimes we help. But my mind does not comprehend what you call morality in the same way that you do. I am here to help you with a specific task, but I cannot tell you what or why, because I do not know it yet.

“But you’re good?” Rio felt like an idiot, but she had to ask. “You’re on my side?”

Yes. And no. It is complicated.

With that, Kitsune leapt lightly down and began to eat her breakfast.

Rio blew out a frustrated sigh. Luke handed her a cup of coffee and held up the butterscotch creamer in his other hand.

“I think I’ll try caramel today,” she decided. “It seems to be my week for trying new things.”

Luke grinned, and she ordered herself not to blush.

“I especially liked that new thing where your tongue—”

“Stop!”

Luke laughed, but he stopped.

“What did she say?” He nodded at Kit.

“It’s hard for her to talk to me. She verified that she is
Yokai
. Something about her morality is different from ours, and she’s here to help me but she doesn’t know with what,” Rio summarized.

“Did she say whether she’s on your side? Because I gotta tell you, if she’s not, we can save money on fresh chicken,” he said, joking.

Kit raised her head and delicately lifted her upper lip away from her front teeth in a silent snarl. Evidently she didn’t find him funny.

“Lighten up, fur-face,” Luke advised. “I’m a whole lot bigger than you are, and I like to blow things up.”

Kit vanished. One moment she was eating her breakfast, and the next, she had completely disappeared. Rio dropped the spoon she’d been using to stir coffee and looked frantically around.

“You might want to be careful what you say,” she slowly told Luke, her eyes widening.

“Why is that, exactly?”

Rio pointed to where Kit was sitting, washing one paw, on the top of Luke’s refrigerator.

“Well, this makes things interesting,” Luke said calmly. “Now might be a good time for you to tell me if she said she’s on your side.”

“She said yes, but then she said no. It’s complicated, apparently.”

Her point made, Kit disappeared again and reappeared at her bowl of food, where she continued eating as if she’d never performed a magic trick right there in the middle of the kitchen.

“Yet another person, well, creature, in my life who knows more about me than I do,” Rio said glumly. “I could throw a party and only invite people who know more about my past than I do, and we’d fill the Bordertown hockey arena.”

Luke started assembling the ingredients to make another omelet, and it temporarily distracted Rio.

“Does Alice just stop by long enough to buy groceries and then leave?” A little pang of something that felt uncomfortably like jealousy struck, and Rio bit her lip. “Also, does she live here?”

Luke glanced up at her and then stopped what he was doing, crossed the space between them, and kissed her.

“Alice and I are old friends, nothing more. She stays here for the few days a month that she’s actually in town, and we catch up. She manages to hear more eerily accurate scoop and gossip than anyone I’ve ever known, and she always shares any interesting information she learns with me.”

He went back to his eggs but then looked up and hit her with a hard stare. “While we’re clearing the air, what about Cage Whatsisname, the bike boy? He seemed like way more than a friend to me when I was—ah, when I happened to accidentally cross paths with you on multiple occasions in the past.”

She caught a sheepish look on his face before he bent his head to chop vegetables, but decided not to ask.

“Cage may have wanted to be more than a friend, but I never returned the sentiment, and he promptly moved on. The last I heard, he was serving as Ophelia’s operatic muse.”

“Her naked muse?” Luke grinned at her. “I could use one of those.”

“I’m the only naked muse you’re going to see for a long time, Buster,” she warned him, laughing.

For some reason, he scowled down at his omelet pan, which puzzled her until she thought back to what she’d said.

Oh. He didn’t want her to think she had any claim on him. Of course.

“Hey, that’s fine,” she said lightly, pretending her heart wasn’t beginning to crack like the eggshells he’d just discarded in the sink.

Discarded. Abandoned.

Like garbage down the drain.

She forced her face into something that might have approached a smile. “No expectations, right? You can get naked with anybody you like.”

He was around the counter so fast she didn’t even see him move, and then he had his hands on her waist, lifting her into the air. “Don’t even think about it. There will be no naked anything for you with anybody but me. Do you understand me?”

Something feral and primitive stared at her from Luke’s eyes, and she instinctively knew that she needed to tread very carefully until he could leash the darkness that was haunting him.

So she leaned forward and kissed him. It was a sweetly seductive kiss; she nibbled at his lips until he opened his mouth for her, and then she delicately licked and tasted until he responded, slanting his head and returning the kiss with all of the fierce passion he’d displayed during the night.

When he finally pulled back, there was a grim cast to his features, as if he had bitter news to tell and didn’t know how to do it. Or maybe . . .

“Luke,” she began, choosing her words with care. “I think I may have just read your thoughts, a little. Did you think about needing to tell me some bad news?”

His eyes widened a little, but he didn’t seem either very surprised or very unhappy at her revelation.

“I need to tell you about my curse, Rio. I need to tell you everything, and then I need to give you the chance to walk out the door and never see me again, no matter how much I despise the thought.”

Smoke drifted up, and Luke cursed and went to rescue his omelet, leaving Rio to watch, all alone, as her life and her plans and her heart shattered all around her. She’d been in his bed all night, giving him her body and her soul, and they hadn’t even made it to breakfast before he was willing to say good-bye. She walked, dazed and almost blindly, across the room and out the back door before he could stop her, and then she stood in the rain and let the tears fall.

Luke grabbed the pan, burning his hand in the process, which only served him right. He turned off the heat to avoid burning down his damn house and ran after Rio, but she was gone, and nothing, not even a trace of her scent, remained. Only the haunting image of her shock and pain, after he’d dropped that final bombshell on her, remained to taunt him.

He turned his face up to the cold, driving rain and wished bitterly that, for once in his life, he could have been the type of man for whom eloquent words came easily, but the glib conversationalist gene in his storied heritage had bypassed him completely. He didn’t know how to talk to a woman he loved because he’d never done so.

He’d never before felt this way—that he might be falling in love with a woman—and now that he was, he had no map to guide him through the process. He was great at ordering people to do things. He was even pretty damn good at ordering people to leave him alone.

Cooperation had never been his style; he’d always simply blasted anything that annoyed him and anyone who deserved it. And now, without even trying, he’d driven away the most incredible woman he’d ever known.

Behind him in the doorway, Kit howled. The sound of her song was so desolate that the tiny hairs on the back of his neck stood straight up and his already chilled flesh pebbled on his arms.

He suddenly laughed, standing alone in the rain, like the lunatic so many figured him to be. After all, it made sense that Rio had run away from both of them. He spun around and stalked back to his house, looking down at the little fox as he stepped past her.

“It’s not like we didn’t deserve it. You told her that you didn’t know if you were on her side, and she thought that I told her I wanted her to leave. We deserve to lose her.”

Kit howled again, but he pulled his door shut, forcing her to back up into the kitchen and out of the rain. The two of them stood looking at each other. Both miserable; both wet and dripping; both probably cursing the other for contributing to Rio’s despair.

Luke had known enough about her history that he had no excuse for his thoughtlessness. Her parents—whoever they had been—had abandoned her at that convent. And now, even that pale shadow of a home had disappeared out from under Rio’s metaphorical feet.

What a perfect time for him to dump the truth of his curse on her. He couldn’t have timed his stupid blunder any worse if he’d planned it to cause her the maximum possible pain.

It was even worse than that, though. He had to be honest with himself. His fault lay in what he’d done the night before. He’d taken advantage of her inexperience and the vulnerability of her situation because he was a selfish bastard who’d only been interested in quenching his insatiable need for her.

It had been an unforgivable thing to do, especially from a man who knew he had no right to a future with someone like Rio. He was an immortal cursed to walk the razor’s edge between salvation and damnation—forever. A man whose entire existence had been, and always would be, spent paying for the sins of the past.

His first instinct was to try a locator spell, but the little bit of common sense he had left after Hurricane Rio had swept through his life told him that she would never forgive him for tracking her down like a lost dog. So he turned his thoughts to something—anything—he could do while he waited to discover if she’d ever return or forgive him.

His upper lip lifted from his teeth in what was probably a good impression of Kit’s best snarl. He knew exactly what to do. A practical task; one that would help Rio.

An easy mission.

He was going to storm the Silver Palace and drag the truth out of a certain Fae aristocrat.

Twenty minutes later, Luke was wondering how much trouble he’d be in for incinerating a half dozen Fae guardsmen, and whether it would be worth it, when a flunky finally officiously gave him permission to enter the palace. The flunky personally escorted Luke to Lady Merelith’s quarters.

“It’s not like I’m going to steal your silver, pal,” Luke snarled, but the man never even blinked an eye. Probably, after life among the High Court Winter Fae, the little guy wouldn’t be afraid of much that didn’t walk the icy realms. There was plenty enough and more to be terrified of right here.