Trouble with Gargoyles: an Urban Fantasy (Moonlight Dragon Book 3) (4 page)

"Let's call my cousin Rodrigo!" Melanie said excitedly. "He's an underground cursebreaker."

"Underground?" Vale repeated with an arched brow.

Melanie giggled at his expression. "That means he does it for
other
people," she said in a stage whisper. "Shhh!"

I hoped she wasn't implying that Rodrigo lifted curses for non-magickal beings but I wasn't about to ask and force her to spill even more secrets. She tended to be loud when she revealed things she shouldn't.

"Well, give him a call and get him here yesterday!" I exclaimed.

Melanie pulled out her phone.

~~~~~

Rodrigo was the same height as Melanie, but he hadn't dyed his hair blue. Any question I had about whether he was also a monkey shapeshifter vanished when he immediately scrambled up onto Moonlight's roof.

"Is that really necessary?" I asked as Vale, Melanie, and I watched this skinny, middle aged man scuttle across my roof. With his black backpack riding high on his shoulders he resembled a crab. "I'm afraid you're going to fall off. I'll be honest: if you do, we can't call an ambulance because then the cops might check the place out and something really bad and magickal might happen."

"Monkeys do not fall, young
amiga
!" Rodrigo called down to me. "We are more agile than cats and stronger than spiders."

I grimaced at the mention of spiders but Melanie was eagerly bobbing her head so I quickly pretended that I was impressed.

Rodrigo was dressed in denim overalls for some reason, like he was a farmer. He went shirtless beneath it, which gave me an unencumbered view of his dense, dark chest hair. He was also barefoot. He had Hobbit feet rather than the long 'monkey toes' I'd been teased as a child about having.

"I work as an independent contractor for ordinary people," he called down to us, his cheerful voice carrying clearly to, oh, pretty much anyone in the neighborhood who happened to be awake. If I'd handed him a megaphone he would have happily used it to tell us about how he used magick for ordinary people who absolutely were not supposed to know anything about real magick. I guesstimated the odds that the Oddsmakers would be paying Rodrigo a visit to be about 2 to 1.

"You'd be surprised how many of them get hit with curses," he went on as he scrambled across the roof.

"I didn't know ordinary people dealt with curses," I admitted.

"
Dios mio
, too many! Most of them are accidental fallout from sorcerers and warlocks who were sloppy with their spells, and shame on them. You use magick you must respect it, I say. You don't go hitting ordinary people with your spells. All sorts of terrible and unkind things can happen—and they do! Why, I saw—"

"Sorry to cut in," I cut in, "but why did you choose the roof to check out first? You barely looked through the shop and that's where most of the curses are."

"Because, young
amiga
, that curse you have now and the ones you told me about—they are just part of a soup curse."

Vale raised his eyebrows when I looked to him. Melanie didn't appear to have a clue, either.

"What's a soup curse?" I asked reluctantly, braced for a punch line to a lame joke.

"Well, ha ha, it's truly called a chaos curse because it isn't very particular about what it uses. It affects all sorts of objects and places—animals, too—whatever is within reach. Anything that falls into it gets served up, which is why I call it a soup. That's why your curses are all over the place, young
amiga
. Electricity, wasps, flaming money—whoever cast it didn't care what it did, only that it got your attention."

"Well, mission accomplished," I growled. I glanced at the scraggly dead tree in the yard. During the day it was just ugly, but at night it sort of worried me. It reminded me too much of the tree from
Poltergeist
. I wanted to go back inside. "So what does it being a soup curse have to do with you being on the roof?"

"Because you cast a soup curse at the highest point, so it covers the most area and affects the most things. Think a big umbrella. Or a black magick net." Rodrigo patted his chest and grinned down at me, his teeth flashing whitely beneath his bushy mustache. "So I am on your roof!"

"So you are," I muttered.

"The Oddsmakers might grab him before he does us any good," Vale warned Melanie and me.

But Melanie waved off the concern. "Nah, Rodrigo has been working underground for years! No one cares. I kinda think the Oddsmakers don't mind because at least he's removing proof that magick exists, right? If he left a curse in the hands of someone ordinary, well, then they could call the FBI or Homeland Security and then they'd have a talking coffee pot to study. Rodrigo is making us safer!"

Weird justification, but she could have been right. Rodrigo wasn't exactly hiding what he was doing. The same had been true of my friend Rob, who had used real magick during his stage magic performances in a casino before he was killed in an explosion by Dearborn. The Oddsmakers could have—should have—stepped in both times and they hadn't.

It could be suggested that it showed that the magickal bosses were forgiving and magnanimous. My gut told me they let things slide only if it suited them or it somehow benefited them. Clearly everything I did, including brushing my teeth, did
not
suit the Oddsmakers since they kept snatching me up.

When Rodrigo stood, straddling the very tip top of my roof and yelled, "A-ha!" a pair of dogs, four doors down, began barking.

Beside me, Vale tensed. "What did you find?"

Rodrigo looked down at him and his smile wavered slightly. It strengthened, though, when he looked to me. "Yes, you have a curse here. Soup, like I thought. Made by an old hand." He glanced at Vale again. I guess Rodrigo was intimidated by gargoyle shifters or men, because he quickly addressed only me again. "I haven't seen something like this around Las Vegas, but it is no problem, young
amiga
. I can break it for you. It will be my pleasure. It's okay!"

"Yay!" cheered Melanie. "Good job, Rodrigo!"

"Thank you," I said to him, feeling the weight of the world sliding off my shoulders.

"No problem, young
amiga
." Rodrigo shrugged off his backpack and began pulling things out of it: a Tupperware container full of white stuff that I assumed was salt, a hand mirror, a stick wrapped loosely with string, and other implements I couldn't make out. "It will take me ten minutes."

"Okay. We'll wait for you inside, Rodrigo."

I herded everyone back into the house. I figured we'd hang out in the shop and discuss how I'd ended up with an old, apparently non-local soup curse on my roof, but Vale headed straight for the front door.

"I have to go to California," he said as he paused with the door held open by one hand, his face in profile. "I don't know when I'll be back."

Though I was aware that had been his plan all along, I was a little disappointed that he wasn't interested in figuring out the origin of this curse with me. But whatever. I was a big girl. Badass dragon sorceress, right?

"Can you get a hold of a phone while you're there and tell me what you learn?" I didn't go into detail but I figured Vale understood that I was worried not only about the creature but about the state of Diana's body and whether she'd be able to return her consciousness to it.

"I'll try." He turned then, to look at me fully.

Now, Vale was a serious guy. "Intense", "brooding", and "solemn" were also good adjectives for him. Yes, he could be playful and flirty when the timing was right, but that didn't often occur while other people were present. He was a bit old fashioned in that regard. He definitely wasn't in flirty mode right now. More like,
I'm about to do something of grave importance to the world.
Whether that was actually true or just in his mind was another matter, but I tended to believe him. Vale and hyperbole didn't go together.

"What is it?" I asked him, nervous just from his demeanor. "What's wrong?"

He opened his mouth to reply and I leaned toward him, eager to hear what he had to say. But he must have thought better of it, for he cruelly teased me by shaking his head.

"When I come back," he muttered and then he was nothing but a memory, the door swinging shut behind him.

"He's very dramatic," Melanie observed. She giggled. "It's hot."

Yes, it was hot, but right now I was more worried by his behavior than turned on by it.

I took a seat on the stool behind the counter, listening with half an ear to Rodrigo moving around on the roof. "What do you think about Christian and Diana?"

"They were arguing when I left them. She's kinda bossy, huh? But it's all good. She likes me. I guess she likes monkeys."

I suppressed a laugh. "That must be it." Then I sobered. "What do you think attacked her? And why would it be interested in us?"

"You mean, why is it interested in Vale, don't you?" Melanie, despite being chirpy and hyper-spastic sometimes, was no fool. She leaned against the counter opposite me and played chicken with the zombie nutcrackers, seeing how long she could wait to pull her forefinger from their mouths before they bit her. "He told us that he ran off all his enemies. Remember? That could be true. Whatever went after Christian's mom could be something new, something Vale doesn't know anything about, either."

"He's a gargoyle prince," I blurted. Melanie rewarded me for that bit of truth by leaving her finger too long in a nutcracker's mouth. She yelped when it bit her.

"A—what?" She stuck her injured finger in her mouth but quickly pulled it out again in her excitement. "A prince? Oh, my god, Anne! That means you'll be a princess!"

I slapped a hand over my face. "That's not why I told you. Vale isn't interested in the throne. That's why he's here and not in Europe where the Gargoyle King rules. But him being some sort of royalty is incentive for someone or something to come after him. That could be what we're dealing with here."

She nodded encouragingly. "That totally makes sense, Anne, but I'm sorry—I just can't get over the image of you in a big ball gown and wearing a tiara! I'm so jealous!"

"You're also worthless," I muttered with a roll of my eyes.

"Tell me you hadn't thought of that at least once," she accused.

I pinched my lips together so hard I got a cramp in them. Melanie squealed with laughter.

That was how Rodrigo found us when he entered the house from the back a couple of minutes later.

"Young
amiga
, you are all set," he told me triumphantly. He grinned widely beneath his mustache and spread his arms in a
ta-da
motion. "No more soup for you!"

This guy was a riot.

"You're alright, Rodrigo. What do I owe you? Um, I hope it's not too much." I gave him a sheepish smile. "I probably should have asked you what you charge, first…"

To my relief, he held up his hand, palm out. "No charge for
amigas
of my cousin. And you're from my community. We stick together. Ordinary people—blah, they can pay what I charge them."

"So do you have any guesses as to what or who cast that curse?" I asked him as I walked him to the front door. "None of us, including my friend who just left, has any idea."

I'd mentioned Vale's absence deliberately because I hadn't missed the way Rodrigo had kept looking at him after he'd located the curse on the roof.

"Your good friend, eh?" Rodrigo asked with an uneasy smile as we came to the door.

I shrugged ambiguously. "Just someone I know." Thankfully Melanie didn't blow it, though I could sense her confusion.

Rodrigo scratched at his stubbled chin and then fiddled with one of the straps on his backpack. "You know what he is?"

"He's a gargoyle."

"A long time ago, they used to be demons. Not so much anymore, but the taint of that cold blood…some people think it remains."

"That's just not possible. Gargoyles didn't descend from demons. The demons were created to look like gargoyles in order to hide them in plain sight."

"That's what you think, eh?" Rodrigo shrugged one of those
it's
your funeral
kind of shrugs.

"Wait, what do
you
think?" I pressed him.

He studied me closely with his dark eyes. "You and he are not close?"

I held his gaze steadily. "Just tell me. I can handle the truth."

He gave me a different sort of smile, then. It was harder, jaded, making me think that Rodrigo had seen and broken some pretty ugly curses in his career. It was the kind of smile that told me his feeling about Vale wasn't born out of ignorant hysteria.

"That soup curse on your roof? It was cast by an old species from Europe," he told me. "A rare one. I don't say more, but maybe I don't need to." He tipped an imaginary hat. "Good luck, young
amiga
." He waved back into the shop. "
Adios
, Melanie."