The Cursed (League of the Black Swan) (2 page)

2
A.M.

CENTRAL PARK, NEW YORK, ON TOP OF THE RAMBLE STONE ARCH

Getting stabbed is hell on the dry-cleaning bill.

Luke Oliver looked down at the silver blade stuck between his ribs and then up at the only person still alive who’d known him back when his name was Lucian Olivieri. “I’d kill anyone else for that, Maestro.”

He pulled out the knife, wincing as it scraped a rib, wiped it on his jeans, and then put it in his pocket. “You didn’t want it back, did you?”

The other man, his face hidden by the shadows cast by his fedora, laughed. His laugh sounded like rock being crushed beneath a giant’s boots and was just as appealing. Luke suspected the maestro knew it, too, and used it as one of a lifetime’s worth of weapons.

“Consider it a gift. And I was just checking,” the maestro said. “When silver starts burning you like acid—”

“I know the terms of my own curse,” Luke said, cutting off the reminder. Beating back the past. “What do you want? I have a job to get back to.”

“Still doing those jobs? Trying to save the world from your hideaway in the dank, dingy corners of Bordertown?”

It was Luke’s turn to laugh. “No hideaway. A crappy office. And I’m only trying to save one person. The world can go to hell for all I care, but right now I’m too busy to reminisce about old times.”

“We didn’t have any old times. We were on opposite sides. Your mother was a thug.”

“Even enemies have old times. And my mother was an
aristocratic
thug. Never let it be said that Lucrezia Borgia didn’t do her murdering with class,” Luke countered, as he silently watched a trio of gangbangers, smelling of cheap booze and acrid smoke, saunter underneath the arch while trading raucous and profane insults. Secure in their mistaken belief that they were apex predators in the darkest hours of the night. He wondered briefly what they’d do if he dropped down among them and showed them the face and power of a true predator.

Wet their pants and run screaming for Mommy, no doubt.

“Do you still do it? Hunt the criminals?” The maestro’s voice held only a calm curiosity, as if he were asking about the weather. “Do you feel the pull to stalk them as prey and crush them? Burn them to cinders?”

Yes.

Always.

No.

Never.

Never
again
, at least.

Luke settled on a nonanswer. “You have one minute to say something relevant.”

The other man pulled an envelope out of his coat pocket and held it out to Luke, and then he said the two words Luke had never wanted to hear again.

“Black Swan.”

Shock knocked Luke back like a crossbow aimed at his heart and he fell off the arch, but recovered in time to land with his characteristic grace on the path thirteen feet below.

The maestro laughed once more and tossed the envelope down through the night air before he disappeared. Luke caught the envelope as it fell, almost in spite of himself. The glossy black-and-red logo was embossed on one corner, as he’d expected—the sinuous arch of the black swan’s neck stark against the Templar cross and mocking him with its elegance.

He needed to get back to Bordertown; back to his office. His client’s missing niece was far more important than anything that could be inside this envelope. He’d burn it. Destroy any evidence that the League had ever reached out its slimy tentacles and move on with what was passing for his life these days. He told himself all of that, even as he tore open the envelope right there on the path and pulled out its entire contents: a single photograph.

The moonlight seemed to caress the woman in the photo, highlighting her perfect bone structure, the curve of her cheek, and her wary expression with vivid clarity. The world tilted on its axis, and the edges of Luke’s fingers shimmered with blue flame, nearly incinerating the photo before he extinguished the fire. He stared at the picture—still perfect but for the charred edges—and another kind of fire flashed to an inferno inside him. He knew this woman. Her name was Rio Jones and she worked for the bike messenger service. He’d limited his contact with her when she’d dropped packages at his office. Admired her from afar, but made it a point never to speak more than a few words to her.

She was too beautiful. Too vibrant. Too dangerous to his limited amount of self-control. The last thing he needed was a complication like her in his life. But now the League of the Black Swan was back, and it wanted him to get involved with Rio Jones.

An immortal just couldn’t catch a break.

BORDERTOWN

Rio Jones knew she had maybe an hour, tops, before somebody found her. She had that kind of luck: the kind that trips over cracks in sidewalks, falls off her bike in the middle of rush-hour traffic in the middle of Bordertown, and sees a major supernatural heavyweight kidnapping a kid in broad daylight.

A major
magical
heavyweight. She’d heard a flash of something so wrong—so
other
—in his thoughts that she’d nearly wrecked her bike when she’d turned to look at who or what was making that horrible noise. The taxi hadn’t even clipped her that hard; she’d had far worse working as a bike messenger for Siren Deliveries.

Not that most of the fancy companies she delivered to would believe they’d hired a company owned by an actual siren. They just knew they got their packages on time. Ophelia liked to hire humans as messengers. She said they were slower but harder to distract. More reliable. Gave her the chance to focus on her budding opera career, instead of dealing with Fae and demon hatreds, feuds, and failures to deliver on time. Punctuality was king in the cutthroat bike messenger wars, and Rio was human enough to pass muster.

Rio nearly growled at the thought of Ophelia and her damned rules. If Rio hadn’t been so focused on making it to her next delivery on time, she wouldn’t have taken that shortcut through the alley, and so she never would have rounded the corner in time to see the tall, dark-haired man step out of a limousine and snatch a small girl right off the street.

The girl had screamed, Rio had slammed on the brakes of her bike and gone over the handlebars, and the kidnapper had met her gaze with eyes that blazed a surge of dark power across the distance between them. Black eyes, almost all pupil, had tried to bore into Rio’s mind until the struggling child had screamed again and the man had thrown the girl into the limo and slammed the door. He’d given Rio one last dismissive glance as she knelt, bleeding, on the filthy pavement, and then he’d angled his tall body into the front seat next to the driver. By the time he’d changed his mind and the brake lights had flashed on the limo, she’d seen them over her shoulder as she glanced back while racing away. She’d used her throwaway cell phone to call in an anonymous report to the sheriff’s office, complete with license plate number, for all the good it would do.

Bordertown hadn’t had any law of its own since the last demon uprising, when the rebels ate the sheriff. That very lawlessness was the draw for most of the people—human and, mostly, other—who lived, worked, and played in the five square miles of dimensional fold that lay hidden behind, beneath, and between the streets of Manhattan. Bordertown was the Wild West, but the cowboys and outlaws of the typical frontier town were demon and Fae here.

Dangerous and deadly, with or without six-shooters.

But she’d made the futile call, and a few minutes later, still shaking, she’d tossed her cell phone in the back of the first trash truck she saw, with some vague idea that the kidnapper might trace it back to her if she kept it.

It was all too little, too late, though. She knew it. She’d heard his thoughts—they’d shattered the everyday barrier she wore around her mind like an icy wind slicing through a flimsy scarf. Her mental shield was plenty to keep out human thoughts; if she heard everything that people thought around her all day long, she would have gone insane years ago.