The Cursed (League of the Black Swan) (26 page)

Luke had been in the Winter Court Palace several times before, but familiarity, though it didn’t breed contempt, didn’t breed admiration or liking, either. The place’s icy lines and sterile decorations always made him think that here was a home without a heart. It was an easily recognizable flaw when the one doing the noticing suffered from the same problem.

Rio could have been the heart of his home, Luke realized, and the rhythm of his pace faltered enough that the flunky cast a chiding glance back over his epauletted shoulder.

Merelith inhabited an enormous suite on the east wing of the third floor. By the time they got there, and more of her flunkies, this time dressed like the Royal Guard, screwed around for a while and then finally allowed him into her presence, Luke was about a mile and a half past reasonable.

Which was fine by Merelith, apparently, because she didn’t bother much with small talk, either.

“How did you get in here? Get out.” She didn’t even bother to look at him, which raised the thermostat to red on the How to Anger the Wizard meter.

“Make me. What do you know about Rio and her parents?”

Her eyes narrowed, and the four guardsmen flanking her immediately drew their swords and pointed all four of them, plus the requisite daggers, straight at Luke. Luke bared his teeth at them, and then he started to laugh.

“Merelith, do I look like somebody who’d be afraid of your boy toys and their little pointy sticks? They’re very decorative, but I’ve had a bad damn day. I’m soaked from the rain, and I’m standing here dripping on what I’m sure are very expensive carpets. Is this really something you want to prolong?” He held up his hands and made sure she saw the blue flames sparkling between his fingers. “I’d be happy to redecorate for you. Kind of minimalist in here, don’t you think? Little cold? What would you think about a nice roaring fire right here where your men used to be standing?”

The guardsmen all simultaneously tensed and leaned forward, eager to slit him from stem to stern, no doubt.

“Wow, it’s like watching synchronized swimming without the water. Now we just need Michael Phelps,” Luke drawled. “Did you hear the rumor that he’s probably a Water Fae?”

Merelith sighed. “Lucian Olivieri, you make it very hard for a person to be pleasant to you.”

Her voice was as icily arrogant as ever, but Luke’s wrongness detector was buzzing. The Fae wasn’t one hundred percent on her game today; she lacked some indefinable quality of command or control that he’d never seen her without before. Luke suddenly looked around. Something was off. The usual luster of the room had dimmed to a dull sheen. He’d visited Merelith on a few occasions on investigative business. Whenever he had been in her sitting rooms before, it had felt uncomfortably like he’d entered the inside of a highly decorated ice cube.

Now, however, the effect was more like that of the interior of an old tin box.

“What’s wrong? I don’t mean to be blunt, and you know I can play Winter Court etiquette with the best of them when I’m really motivated—”

“Which is almost never,” she interrupted icily.

“Granted,” he agreed. “But it’s almost Rio’s birthday, and suddenly everybody in the known universe is interested in her, and I don’t like anything about that. I need to help her, and in order to do so, I need to know what’s going on. You gave us the impression that you knew something about her, when you were at my place, so talk.”

One of the guardsmen raised his dagger and rushed Luke, screaming something about Luke’s “effrontery,” and Luke smashed him to the ground with a bolt of enhanced gravity designed to break several of the man’s bones.

“I don’t even know what ‘effrontery’ means, and that pissed me off,” Luke said, mocking the rest of them, daring them to try something.

Anything.

“Is this the wizarding world equivalent to trying to start a bar fight?” Merelith stared down at the broken guardsman with distaste. “And you. Did I order you to attack this man, who is a guest under my roof, however uninvited and unwanted?”

She pointed to the others. “Get him out of here.”

The remaining three guardsmen picked up their fallen companion and filed silently out of the room, leaving Merelith and Luke alone.

“Why would you possibly think I would tell you anything, especially after you just damaged my guard?” Merelith never raised her voice, but she didn’t need to do anything overt like that. Menace ran through her veins like blood, and Luke wondered why he wasn’t afraid.

Maybe because he’d finally reached the point where he had something to lose.

“Because you owe me. Do I really need to call you on the debt that your honor should have seen paid?”

Luke played the game. Fae were big on defending their honor. He didn’t give a rat’s ass if she ever paid him for basically playing taxi service to her niece, and if she did, he’d do with it what he always did—donate it to the poison control hotline.

Those gifts always gave him a great deal of satisfaction. It was like spitting in his ancestors’ collective eye.

“Do not question me on my honor, wizard, or you will regret it very bitterly. Payment is on its way to you, as agreed, but I have been somewhat . . . occupied.”

Luke wanted to blast something, but for once in his miserable, impatient, cursed life, he took the time to consider his options. He studied—
really
studied—Merelith’s face for a hint of what she was feeling. That would usually be a stupid waste of time with her, or with any Fae, but this time something was different.

Merelith’s face was showing emotion, and that was very, very wrong.

He could see faint lines of strain around her perfect eyes, which meant that either she was in true pain or her magic had become so badly flawed that it was failing to preserve an illusion of beauty that she had previously maintained for all the years he’d known her. He knew enough of the Fae to discard the second option. Her beauty was no illusion. Neither was the terror she inspired in any sane man.

Therefore, something was wrong, and only one name came to mind.

Elisabeth.

“Where is she? Where’s Elisabeth? Is she all right?” He strode right past the startled Fae and slammed open the door to her inner sanctum. It was a door he’d never seen opened before, and he didn’t know quite what to expect. What he found was gut-wrenchingly devastating.

Elisabeth lay in the middle of an enormous bed, swaddled in silk coverlets, so pale and still that he was sure she must be dead.

“What did you do to her?” He whirled around and confronted Merelith. “If you hurt her in any way, I swear to you—”

He abruptly shut his fool mouth, because the truth of it was plainly apparent on Merelith’s drawn and tired face. She was hurting over this. Hurting in a way that he’d never seen before, not even when her youngest sister—Merelith’s favorite—had made a bad marriage and been exiled. Or murdered, Luke had always secretly suspected, but that wasn’t important now. It was simply his brain babbling and taking cover under an onslaught of trivia so Luke didn’t have to face the tiny body on the bed.

“When did Elisabeth die?” Luke managed to force the words out, even though his throat was closing up and his eyes were burning.

Merelith’s face softened for a second as she watched him, but then she resumed the blank stare that had replaced her icy mask of indifference.

“She is not dead.”

Luke’s knees weakened with relief, and he didn’t even care that Merelith saw it.

“She is very ill, and we do not know why,” the Fae continued. “None of our healers can help her, not even I, and I share a blood bond with her. I have had five different human doctors examine her and take specimens of her blood, hair, and urine back to their laboratories outside Bordertown, in case the illness could have been related to Elisabeth’s human heritage, but none of them could find anything.”

A single tear pooled in Merelith’s right eye and slipped down her face, and it was all the more jarring since Luke was almost certain that she was completely unaware of it.

“I let them live,” she said, almost as an afterthought. “The useless human doctors. In case that’s the next accusation you want to hurl at me.”

The only accusations Luke wanted to hurl were at himself, but he figured he’d join Merelith in her anguish only when he’d run out of other options. He was a wizard, damn it. He should be able to find a cure for a sick kid.

“When did it start?” He crossed over to the bed and stared down at the tiny girl, who seemed much smaller than she’d been when he’d retrieved her from Dalriata’s office.

She was so pale—impossibly pale—a color that no human skin should ever be. Her pulse and breathing had slowed so much that it was almost as if she were under a sleeping curse.

“Sleeping beauty,” he murmured, reaching out to move a strand of her hair that had fallen in her face.

Merelith glanced sharply at him. “That is a very old curse, indeed. I’m surprised you have heard of it, beyond the fairy tales that infuse contemporary culture. I thought of it, of course, but the counterspell has had no effect. Whatever this is, it is not that.”

Merelith sank down to sit on the bed next to her niece, graceful even in her extreme distress.

“She wanted to see Rio. She asked me if Rio and the fox could visit her, and I said no,” Merelith admitted, the perfect silken perfection of her voice finally cracking. “That was the last thing I said to her before she fell into this coma, or curse, or whatever it is.”

“She knows that you care about her,” Luke said, briefly putting a hand on Merelith’s shoulder even as he wondered why he cared that she was hurting so much.

It was a touch she never would have allowed, and he never would’ve attempted, but for their shared burden of grief over one small, half-human child.

“You are a wizard,” she began, slowly, then picking up speed as the idea formed. “You will be able to find a way. Heal my niece, and I’ll tell you everything I know about Rio.”

Luke scowled. “You damn Fae. Even in the worst situations, you’re still trying to negotiate and bargain. You didn’t need to do that, and you don’t need to threaten me either. I will do everything I can to try to help Elisabeth. For her sake, not for yours.”

He knelt down by the side of the bed, leaned over, and sniffed at the puff of breath that barely touched his face when Elisabeth shallowly exhaled. There was no odor, no hint of a sense that might tell him of a sickness or a poison.

“Is this coma, or sleep, her only symptom?”

“She grew ever more tired when we brought her home, and within the space of six hours had become as you see now.”

He fought the urge to lash out at her for not calling him earlier. For letting her pride get in the way of seeking out help for Elisabeth, who now might be too small and too frail to fight this off—whatever
this
was—any longer.

“I need a sample of her blood, and a lock of her hair, if I may.” He tried to be formally correct, knowing that to ask for such things, when the request came from a wizard, was no small thing.

Especially to the Fae.

Merelith offered no arguments, though. She simply nodded and walked away, presumably to find the necessary tools.

“I’ll do everything I can for you, I promise that,” Luke whispered to the still, silent form on the bed. “Come back to us, Elisabeth. Your auntie Merelith needs you, and Kit would love to play with a nice girl like you. I promise I’ll bring Rio to visit, too, if she ever forgives me.”

He bent his head and rested it on the edge of the bed, praying to any gods who would still listen to someone with a soul as dark as his. “Please spare this child. Please help me find a way to help her.”

When he looked up, Merelith was standing there, staring down at him with an expression of utter astonishment.

“I had not expected this of you, Lucian Olivieri,” she whispered.

He blinked hard, because his eyes were burning so much. He must’ve gotten dust in them, and he didn’t want Merelith to see it. When he had it under control, he stood up and nodded to her. The healer she’d brought with her gently drew a vial of the child’s blood and snipped a long strand of her hair, packaged both, and handed them to Luke.

“You will do your best,” Merelith said.

The words were not a question, nor were they a request, but rather pure command, coming from one who was second in line to the winter throne.

Luke nodded. “I always do my best. I’ll contact you as soon as I know anything.”

Luke didn’t waste time saying anything else but headed for the door.

Merelith’s voice stopped him. “Your Rio is in more danger than she knows. On the anniversary of her birth, she will be claimed—one way or the other. Keep her safe until we can talk again.”

“Keep her safe from whom?”

“Everyone.”

The word haunted him all the way home.