“Happen?” Guillaume must have entered the club proper just in time to hear the last word. He hurried over toward us, saying, “What sort of things do you expect to happen? You said nothing would happen to the club, nothing at all. You reassured me!” He stopped when he rounded the bar and caught sight of the bare-chested Constantine lounging on the floor, his eyes widening in shock. “Merciful Zeus! You are engaging in sexual shenanigans right there on the floor? You are, you cannot deny it, it’s right there in front of me. The Venediger will be furious, furious, I tell you!”
“Oh, calm down, you big ole drama llama,” I snapped, irritated both by the fact that he assumed Constantine and I were getting it on and that there was a part of my mind that wouldn’t be opposed to that idea at all.
“Ha!” Constantine said.
I pinched his side again. “I said that merely to be ironic. As for you…” I sent a frown over to where Guillaume lurked. “Your precious club is safe. I meant what I said—no harm will come to it from Charming a curse. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Constantine.”
Constantine, whose feet were bopping in time to a B-52s song that came from Gary’s cage, suddenly stopped humming along and propped himself up on one elbow. “What cannot be said about me?”
“That’s why I want a longer time to study the curse, really study it, so that I have all of its nuances down pat. If I get something wrong, or even slightly out of order, it could spell the end.” I waited a minute before adding, “The end for both of us.”
“Oh, well, if that’s all…” Guillaume didn’t finish his sentence, shuffling off to the back room again, evidently reassured that the club would be fine.
Constantine prodded my arm. “I heard Charmers were not affected by the curses they charm.”
“We aren’t, but… wait, you’re not worried about yourself?”
“Not particularly. I died once before.”
“Yeah, but you’re physical now.” I couldn’t resist sliding an appraising glance at his chest. “If the Charming goes pear-shaped, then you could be harmed.”
“It’s not likely. I am a wyvern first, and a spirit second. Even bound to a physical form as I now am with the placing of the bête noire, I do not fear for my well-being. You, however…” He frowned. “We do not have time for you to study the curse in leisure, not with the demons of Asmodeus obviously on our trail. You must break the curse now, but do so without harming yourself.”
He laid back, arranging the box in place.
I bit back the desire to tell him that I didn’t appreciate the bossiness, but since he included my well-being in his list of concerns, I felt it was wiser to move past it.
“Very well. But if we both turn into bearded lizards named Bernie, then you have no one to blame but yourself.”
He looked puzzled. “Why Bernie?”
“Why not?” I slipped the ring on my finger, immediately aware of heat that seemed to glow within it. “All right, let’s give this a shot and hope we don’t end up as lizards.”
“Your obsession with lizards is confusing, and one I will wish for you to explain at a later date,” Constantine said, lifting his head to watch as I placed a finger on his side just as I’d done before. This time, with the ring on my hand, the touch felt different. My finger felt heavier, as if the curse clung to it, and made it slow to move along the pattern that still flashed in and out of my vision.
“You don’t say anything? There are no verses? No spells?” Constantine asked after a minute of watching me. I was wholly focused on the curse now, on forcing my (seemingly reluctant) finger to travel along the intricate twists and circles of its design. I was itchy and unusually warm, but disregarded those sensations for what was most important: keeping my finger on the right path. If I slipped up, it would at best mean starting over… at worst, it might cause the curse to lash out at Constantine or me.
“You draw no wards of protection first?”
“No, no, no, and no,” I said, my face a scant inch from his chest as I forced my finger along the fleeting lines of the curse. The ring grew hot and tight on my finger, and my fingertip tingled when it moved, a little trail of fire following it before dissipating into nothing. It was as if the dragon fire burned off the curse, for the lines glowed first black, then gold, then dissolved into nothing. “Charming a curse is just a matter of unmaking the pattern that holds the power. Now be quiet so I can focus.”
Constantine obliged by being silent, but the room was anything but quiet. Not only was Gary rocking out to Freebird at the other side of the bar, but in the distance I could hear Guillaume talking to someone, presumably to his boss on the phone. Faintly, over both of those distractions, the sound of Paris intruded on my little corner of the world.
And beneath my hands lay a man who was both irritating as hell and oddly intriguing.
“You stopped?” Constantine asked softly.
“Yes, sorry. I got distracted for a moment.”
He glanced over at the door. “Should I tell the head to turn off the music?”
“No, it’s okay, I listen a lot to music when I meditate. This is just another form of focus.” I took a deep breath, pushed away my awareness of everything but the curse, and continued to move my hesitant finger through the design of the curse.
When I reached the beginning of the curse, the whole thing flared to life for a second, hanging black above Constantine’s chest, then it faded to nothing.
“There we go,” I said, sitting back on my feet. I felt drained, which was normal with a Charming, but at the same time, there was an emptiness inside me, a hollow feeling that something had gone not quite right.
I looked down at Constantine’s chest, trying to see with my peripheral vision, but saw no sign of the curse. Mentally, I ran over the way I had Charmed the curse, but didn’t see anything that I’d done wrong.
“Well?” he asked, sitting up. “Is it broken?”
“Yes,” I said slowly, shaking my head over my odd feelings.
“You do not seem certain. And your finger is still on fire.”
I looked down in surprise, shaking my hands to put out the little blob of dragon fire that burned merrily away on my forefinger. “I am sure. Pretty sure. It’s just… I don’t know, it’s hard to describe exactly. It looks like the curse is gone, and everything went the way it should, only I didn’t feel the curse break.”
“Is that normal?” Constantine asked, reaching for his shirt. He slipped it on, but didn’t button it.
“For the curses I’ve Charmed before?” I shook my head. “I’ve always felt them break, but this is a curse laid by a demon lord, the most powerful practitioner of curses there is. Maybe theirs don’t dissipate like the others do.”
“There is only one way to tell,” Constantine said and, looking around, spied a phone that was connected to the wall, but sitting on the floor. He went to it and dialed a number. “I will call Kostya.”
“I don’t see what you expect to do by calling him,” I told Constantine. “You can’t talk to anyone outside your sept. He’s in a different sept; therefore, you won’t be able to understand him.”
“Ah, but if he understands me, then we will know you succeeded in breaking the curse after all.”
“Oh. That makes sense.” I reviewed the Charming a second time, unable to shake the feeling that it hadn’t been done correctly.
Could I have traced the pattern incorrectly? Gotten confused on one of the more detailed circles? Maybe I didn’t touch every part of the curse… I looked at Constantine’s chest with speculation while I considered the problem.
And that’s how I saw the curse flare back into life a scant half-second before I heard Constantine’s intake of breath prefatory to speaking, and I knew with a sudden flash of insight that the curse was going to strike back for the attempt at breaking it.
“No!” I screamed, and threw myself at Constantine to protect him just as his lips formed the words, “Hello? Kostya?”
A percussive bla
st followed, knocking me backward with a force that slammed me up against the bar counter. Glass tinkled down in a rain of sharp noise, and in the distance, I could hear the squeal of car brakes, and muffled voices shouting questions.
I lay slumped against the side of the bar for a few seconds, my mind reeling with the echoed percussion.
“Bee!”
The voice was close at hand, and yet sounded so far away. Idly, I wondered how that could be.
“Bee, are you harmed? Sins of the saints.” A crash followed, one that was sufficiently loud as to cause me to open my eyes. Constantine flung off a heavy mirror that had been hanging on the wall, blood dripping down his chest and belly. To my horror, he got to his knees, clearly intending on making his way over to me.
“Don’t move!” I spoke without being consciously aware of it, and likewise I suddenly found myself crawling over to Constantine, shoving bits of plaster and wood and glass out of my way. “Mother of mayhem, you’re bleeding, don’t move at all. That mirror must have sliced you to ribbons.”
He looked down at himself, surprise flitting across his face before it turned to concern as, despite my order, he got to his feet and moved the few remaining yards to me. “Stop crawling through the glass. You’ll cut yourself, you deranged woman.”
That pulled me up short. I sat back on my heels and glared up at him. “Deranged woman? I like that! Here I was trying to save you from spilling your guts all over the room and you call me deranged? Hey.” I frowned at his belly, then moved my gaze upward. There was blood on his chest and stomach all right, but it wasn’t due to gashes. The blood followed the pattern of the curse. I reached up and gently touched the edge of one bloody curve. “That’s the curse. It embedded itself in you. Oh, Constantine! I’m so sorry.”
“You can’t think you are responsible for this?” He lifted me to my feet despite my brain shrieking warnings about people who are bleeding from their torso making such exertions. “The curse is not of your making, Bee. Unless you are really Asmodeus in disguise, and since we saw him earlier, I suspect that can’t be.”
“Of course I’m not Asmodeus. But I did Charm the curse, and clearly, I did something wrong and it blew up on us—”
“And what of this?” He held up my hand.
I gave a little shriek at the sight of the ring. It was black now, as black as coal. “Get it off! Hellballs, it’s stuck!”
Constantine examined my hand closely, touching the now-black ring. “Does it hurt?”
Slowly, I stopped panicking at the thought of the ring turning my finger black, and wiggled my fingers. “No.”
“Is it uncomfortable?”
“Not really, no. I mean, I’m aware of it.” I twisted the ring on my finger. It didn’t seem to want to come off, but at least it moved. “My hand feels a bit heavier with the ring on it, but it doesn’t bother me.”
“Can you remove it?”
“Probably, if I really worked at it, but it doesn’t feel like it wants me to do that. Should I be worried about it changing color?”
“No,” he said after a moment’s thought. “It must still have power; therefore, we must keep you safe from demons. Asmodeus would likely kill you to get the ring.”
“Great,” I said waspishly, and would have continued, but at that moment, an unearthly moan came from the other side of the room, followed by a hacking cough.
“Gary!” I whirled around to see if the head had been hurt. Evidently my own head, knocked around as it had been, protested such movement, and I weaved to the side and would have fallen if Constantine had not caught me up against his chest.
Constantine tsked at me. “You see? You are deranged. You have been hurt. You will stop fussing over me and let me see how badly you are harmed.”
To my horror/surprise/secret swooning delight, Constantine scooped me up and, stepping carefully over the debris from the curse’s percussion blast, set me down onto a clear section of the bar.
“Glorious green goddesses, what happened?” Gary groaned. “Did the demons set off a bomb?”
“I’m fine, Constantine. Stop trying to undress me,” I said, slapping off Constantine’s hands when he attempted to pull my shirt off. “That’s seriously over the line, you know. Besides, it’s my head that was hurt, not the rest of me.”
“You’re bleeding,” Constantine pointed out, nodding toward my shoulder, and with a speed I hadn’t seen in a man, he had my nice linen shirt unbuttoned and tossed aside before I could blink. “You’ve been injured. I must ascertain where and how badly.”
“I’m hurt, too. At least I think I am. Oh great, I lost a tooth,” came Gary’s feeble voice.
“You must ascertain nothing. For one, I’m not your responsibility, and for another, I’m a big girl and if I say I’m not hurt, then I’m not—ow.” I turned my head to reach my shirt, when my ear brushed against my shoulder. Pain burned for a few seconds, causing me to reach up. My earlobe was wet with blood, and pierced by a jagged sliver of glass about the width of a pencil.
“Stay still, I will remove it.”
I flinched, and was about to tell him to leave it be, that I’d get a professional to look at it, when there was a brief zing of pain from my ear, and Constantine was tossing the shard of glass onto the floor.
“Ten lords a-leaping!” I shouted, trying to clutch my poor, abused earlobe, but Constantine’s head was in the way. “That hurt!”
“Stop being such an infant,” he said sternly, peering close at the ear. “I have had much more grievous wounds, and never did you see me shrieking like a woman.”
“I am a woman,” I snarled, and gestured toward my breasts, exposed as they were in my bra. “Which should be pretty obvious to you since you were so fast to get my shirt off. Give me a cloth or something so I can stop my ear bleeding. I’ve got blood all over my shoulder now.”
“It was my favorite tooth, too. Do you think I could get a gold replacement?”
We both continued to ignore Gary. Constantine pursed his lips for a moment, then leaned in and blew on my ear. At least that’s what I thought he did at first, but the momentary sting that followed quickly melted into a warm, tingling sensation that made me jerk back in fear.
“Did you just breathe fire on me?” I gasped, snatching up my shirt and holding it like a shield in front of me.
“I cauterized your wound, yes. It has stopped bleeding, and will now heal.” He eyed my chest. “I should probably examine the rest of you to make sure you are not further injured.”
“Over my dead body!” Hastily I hurried into my shirt, outrage pouring out of every gesture. “You are the deranged one if you think I’m going to allow that!”
A soft voice drifted over the bar. “He could breathe fire on me any time.”
“You ogled my chest,” Constantine said, giving me a half smile. “It is only fair that I have the same opportunity. Or do you not believe in equal rights?”
“Don’t you even try that bullcrap on me,” I snapped and, with my shirt buttoned, tentatively touched my earlobe. It felt numb, but didn’t seem to be bleeding. “I’m as equal rights as they come, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know a manipulation when I see one.”
“I’d love to have a gold tooth manipulated into my mouth.”
“Gary,” I said, turning my head to glare over at where the cage teetered perilously on the now drunken line of crates. “I appreciate that you lost a tooth, and I’m sorry about that, but really, Constantine and I are trying to have a serious discussion and—oh, hairy hellballs!”
It seemed like just the act of my looking at Gary spelled doom, for his cage suddenly lurched to the side, bounced twice on crates, and hit the floor with an audible crash, which was almost immediately followed by a fleshy splat.
Gary groaned pathetically.
I closed my eyes for a moment, asking Constantine, “Is he splashed all over the floor?”
“No.” I cracked open an eye to see Constantine watching with interest as the cage rolled a few feet, an
d ran into a chair that, with exquisite slowness, rocked a moment before toppling over onto the cage. “Well, he wasn’t. He might be now.”
A faint, ghostly voice emerged from the mess. “Ow. Oh, so much ow. I think my dose id broken.”
“It’s like one of those insanely complicated Rube Goldberg machines,” I commented, opening the other eye. “You okay, Gary?”
“Do,” he answered, and the cage shook with a little tremor. “Hurty.”
“You stay put,” Constantine said, moving off to lift the chair from Gary’s crushed cage.
“And you stop giving me orders. I don’t like it, and I don’t have to take it. Oh, dear, Gary, you are a mess.”
“I feel like a bess.” The head that looked up forlornly through the cage had a black eye, a nose that was bleeding freely, and a gaping hole where one of his front teeth had been.
“You poor thing. Hold tight, and we’ll get you fixed up. I just want to make sure that Constantine isn’t going to pass out from loss of blood first.”
Constantine put his hands on his hips and glared at me. “I am a wyvern! Wyverns do not bleed to death unless you decapitate them first, and that is difficult to do. The blood you see is nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.” I leaned in and eyed the fast-drying lines of blood on his chest and belly. “On the contrary, it’s very something. I must have done something horribly wrong to make the curse revenge itself on you that way. I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am.”
“It will heal,” Constantine said without any concern for what must have been a very painful injury. He hoisted Gary’s cage up and propped it up on the bar. The cage was dented and twisted almost out of recognition, and immediately began to roll off the counter until Constantine pulled it into a rough approximation of its former shape. “Cease fussing over me, woman. I will survive this, although I assume it means the curse is not lifted, as we thought?”