Cursed: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Thrice Cursed Mage Book 1) (6 page)

The musky scent of wolf filled my nostrils as I inhaled a breath that somehow steadied me on my feet. Another surge of adrenaline burst through my veins, bringing with it visions of the full moon. My knee shot out, catching him in the crotch and doubling him over as I released my hold on his wrist. Instantly, his melting face froze in place, reminding me of oozing metal being doused with liquid nitrogen.

He slumped forward onto the ground as I grabbed him by the ear with my right hand. His skin blackened beneath my grip, and the smell of burned flesh filled my nostrils. With about as much effort as it would have taken to pick up a used Kleenex, I lifted him into the air by his ear. Admittedly, I was half-surprised his own bodyweight didn’t tear it straight off his body. Then again, I’d just seen him shrug off some gunshots so there was that. Well, I had something a little more permanent in mind this time.

Power I didn’t know I had roiled up inside me, filling me with strength as I stepped forward and flung the huge man directly into the path of an oncoming work truck. The white, three-quarter-ton pickup smashed into the guy with so much force, it hurt me to watch. The truck slammed on its brakes, sending its tires skidding on the street in a burst of smoke that carried the scent of burnt rubber, but it was way too late for it to matter.

Guilt and fear swept up over me as I caught sight of the panicked workers inside. I’d just thrown a guy into his truck with my demon enhanced arm, and I had no idea how I’d managed to do it. As much as I’d hoped she’d been wrong about the whole deal with the devil thing, I was starting to think maybe she was right after all. Maybe I really had traded my soul to a demon for power. How else could I explain what I’d just done?

“We should go before Tall, Dark, and Heals-gunshot-wounds gets up and tries to kick your rather nice ass once again,” I said, feeling more energized than I had since I’d woken up in the morning. My arm had faded back to its non-radioactive mode, but whatever it had done when I’d grabbed the brute left me feeling pumped. I needed to run a marathon or lift some weights. Hell, I needed to get into another fight.

I was pretty sure I’d gotten a concussion when the thug had used my skull for batting practice but somehow, grabbing him had healed me. I wasn’t sure how that’d happened, but I wasn’t keen to try it out again if I could help it. Gift horses and all that.

The girl shot a glance at the still skidding truck and smirked even though that didn’t seem like the proper reaction. Shouldn’t she have been horrified by what I’d done? The thug was underneath the huge vehicle somewhere, no doubt twisted into a mangled mishmash of flesh, and while I had no way of knowing if he’d be getting back up, maybe she did? Judging by her lack of concern, he would be. That worried me, but not nearly as much as I was about his friend. If the two were anything alike, I did not want to be here if he decided to make an appearance.

“I agree,” she said, glancing past me toward the parking lot of the building as the sound of sirens filled my ears. I watched her shoulders sag a little as she took one last look at the pickup. “Come on.” Her words seemed to come out of her like they were made of razor blades and shrapnel.

“Thanks,” I said as I scooped up the Beretta and followed behind her. Part of me hoped her friends would be able to fill me in on why cherry light spilled off the tattoos on my blackened arm like a fourth of July firework when I’d grabbed the brute accosting her. The other part of me hoped I hadn’t just deposited a boat load of trouble on her doorstep. If I had, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make up for it.

Chapter 7

“Maybe I should go alone,” I said as the other minion from the laundromat threw open the door to the black van I remembered seeing in the parking lot of said establishment and glanced around. His eyes locked on me like a heat-seeking missile, and he charged like a bull.

The big guy crossed nearly the entire block lot in the time it took for me to leap into her Dodge Neon. Fortunately, the brunette had completely ignored my safety and stomped on the gas before I’d landed, sending us screaming across the asphalt in a spray of smoking rubber and gravel. It was almost like she didn’t value my safety. Nah, couldn’t be.

The car fishtailed as she swung it hard to the left, turning onto the street amid a blare of car horns. A black Buick barely missed our taillights as she swerved onto the street and gunned it. I would have been scared out of my mind by her reckless driving if the thug wasn’t nearly on top of us. His face was twisted into a snarl as his legs pumped like pistons, propelling him toward us with inhuman speed. Even though he was on foot, he’d be on us in a moment. I wasn’t sure how he was so fast, but I wasn’t going to wait around and ask him.

I leaned out the passenger window and popped off two quick shots. While the first one missed him by a hair’s breadth, the second one caught him in the right knee, destroying cartridge, flesh, and bone in a spray of crimson. His leg gave out in an instant, and the big man tumbled head over heels with his own momentum before coming to lay face first in the street.

He tossed a murderous glare in my direction moments before a jackass in a Mercedes swerved around the stopped work truck from earlier and took him out like this morning’s garbage. The driver didn’t even stop to see what he’d hit. Hell, he didn’t even so much as glance in his rearview mirror. I guess his phone call was a little too important. A sly grin crossed my lips. Thank God for douchebags in nice cars.

I spun back around and placed the gun on my lap, partially surprised no one cared about the macabre scene behind us, but then again, we were already half a block away. The brunette swung us hard to right, taking us down yet another busy street and gunned the engine. It roared beneath us like a demon of Hell and shot forward as she nimbly bobbed and weaved between cars.

“Yeah, so I’m starting to think that maybe those guys aren’t just random muggers. Care to explain what’s going on?” I asked, absently stroking the barrel of the Beretta with my fingertips. Something about the movement was strangely calming. Was feeling up a gun really my nervous tic? If it was, I had serious problems.

Either way, I had no good reason for why I’d stroked the gun. I wasn’t planning on shooting her, but hey, it’d been an interesting morning thus far. Maybe I did things like that. My name was Mac Brennan, and the sky was the limit.

She shot me a glance which was a little disconcerting because she was drifting like a street racer in a car older than the movie that’d made drifting popular and barely missed an eighty-year-old lady crossing the street.

“The werewolves have been trying to get me to go see their alpha for a while now. They don’t understand no means no,” she said with a straight face, albeit angrily.

“Wait, did you say werewolf?” I asked, barely believing the words coming out of my mouth. It sounded impossible, but at the same time, I did have an evil hand tattooed by one of Lucifer’s buddies. In a world like that, werewolves didn’t seem that implausible.

“Yeah, those two meatheads, Dimitri and Jock, were werewolves. They’re lower in the pack, not omegas but not up to beta status either. I’d be surprised if they were even in the middle of the pack.” She shrugged.

“And they were after you why?” I said trying to decide how I felt about that. Assuming she wasn’t lying about their status, I’d just fought two dudes capable of shrugging off gunshots, and they’d been the pansy werewolves. The idea of them sending their “more adept at kicking my ass” friends to find me because I’d helped her didn’t exactly instill me with a sense of kittens and lollipops. Maybe helping her had been a poor idea. The last thing I needed was to get my ass caught up in a supernatural turf war. That kind of thing could make a memory-addled bloke dead. Fast.

“They are under the impression my ex left me something of incredible value.” She glanced at the rearview mirror before changing lanes into oncoming traffic to go around a trash truck. “They would be wrong.”

“Why don’t you just tell them that?” I asked, pretty sure I was only seconds from dying in a car accident the likes of which would shake the very planet.

“I have. They don’t listen. That’s one of the reasons I’m taking you far away.” She shot me an apologetic look. “The werewolves have no doubt caught your scent in the laundromat.” She flushed harder. “To be honest, I’d hoped you’d lure them away from me for a while, but they found us too quickly for them to be tracking you by smell.”

“So you wanted to use me as bait for werewolves?” I leveled my best “slow the hell down” gaze at her. “Then why did you offer to let me shower at your place? You should have sent me on my way right then.”

“You saved me and got all bloody. I felt bad about it, okay?”

I let her words sink in for a moment. She knew people who might be able to help me. But she’d wanted to literally throw me to the wolves to buy herself time to escape. That was definitely a negative mark against her. Still, she had copped to it. She hadn’t had to do that…

“Okay,” I said, fastening my seatbelt. “But I’m warning you, if this is some kind of double cross, I’m going to be pissed.”

“Look, if big strong you really wants to leave petite little me behind because you’re too scared to come meet my friends, here’s your chance.” She stomped on the brake, sending us skidding to a stop outside a convenience store boasting the largest drink on the planet for an inversely proportional price.

“No, I’ll meet your friends, although I’m starting to think saving you was a bad idea,” I told her, letting annoyance fill my voice. “But it’d be nice if I didn’t have to beat up more people.” Even as I said the words, I was pretty sure they were pointless. I’d known her all of a couple hours, and I’d already shot a couple guys.

It wasn’t like I was opposed to beating up the guys chasing her or anything. It was more that I needed to find out who I was, and I had the strangest feeling she wasn’t telling me the whole story. Which was smart of her. If she had told me everything she knew, I’d have left right now. As it stood, she had leverage.

Part of me wanted to leave anyway, but I needed answers, and at the moment, she was the only one giving me answers. Man, was I a sucker. Hopefully, her inevitable upsell wouldn’t be more than I could handle.

Chapter 8

Half an hour later, I found myself staring at a rundown bar with a sign above it that said “Jack’s” only the J was half torn off so it mostly just said “ack’s.” The rest of the place wasn’t much better. Its cinderblock walls were covered in black and green graffiti and rusty bars covered the two big windows in the front. Only one of them had glass, but the view within was blocked by an ancient black sheet with a faded picture of a girl with bat wings riding a broomstick. The other was covered by a piece of cracked plywood held together with more graffiti and duct tape. To say I had high hopes for this place was an overstatement.

“Lovely place but don’t you think we should find somewhere a little more inconspicuous to park?” I asked as she unfastened her seatbelt and got out of the car in one smooth motion. “We could park in the back instead of right in front.”

I wasn’t sure where we were exactly, but it didn’t exactly feel safe leaving her super conspicuous cherry-red car out in front of the world’s most decrepit bar. If the werewolves didn’t find us, her Dodge would get boosted within seconds, even if it was a Neon.

“Jack’s is a magical refuge. If the werewolves come here, they won’t be able to do a damned thing while we’re inside.” She shot me a devilish smile that made both good and bad chills run down my spine. Even since she’d told me I was bait, she’d made an effort to be nicer to me. I suspected it was because she felt bad about using me as bait.

“So what? They’ll just kill us when we leave.” I stared at her hard, trying to figure out why she thought hiding in a place known to be a magical refuge was a good idea. If I’d wanted to get someone inside, I’d have just set the place on fire or something, forcing my prey to run out while I waited on the roof of the supermarket across the street with a high-powered rifle, but then again that was just me and I was Faust incarnate.

Still, something niggled at my mind. I’d had a plan to take her out within a second, and not only that but several more. How could I have looked at this place for only a breath before having thirty different ways of getting someone inside, magical refuge or not? That wasn’t exactly normal. It made me wonder what I did before my deal with the Devil.

We stood in front of the bar for a moment longer, and I got the feeling something was making her apprehensive. Was she nervous about me meeting her friends? Maybe they weren’t too kindly to the Cursed. It was entirely possible.

“What’s wrong?” I said when she glanced from me to the door of the bar and back again with a strange look in her eye for the third time in as many seconds.

“You’re missing something,” she said, getting to her feet and walking toward me rubbing her chin. “Oh, I know.” She spun around and began rummaging in the laundry basket in her car. A moment later, she reappeared with a bright red power tie. “You need this!” Before I could stop her, she had it around my neck and expertly knotted.

“What do you think?” she asked, taking a step back to survey her handiwork, even though I couldn’t see the tie since I was wearing it. Then she blushed again. “Oh, you can’t see it, huh.” She turned me toward the side-view mirror.

“I think your ex must have been John Constantine,” I replied, pulling at the tie. Why she had washed a tie and also decided I needed to wear it was strange to say the least.

“When he let me go, it was like he let life itself slip through his fingers,” she said, staring off past me into a memory I couldn’t understand but was incredibly uncomfortable sharing with her. She must have realized it too because a second later she looked away, her cheeks practically scarlet with embarrassment.

“Sorry,” she squeaked, wiping at her face with the back of one hand as tears filled her eyes. “Let’s go.” And with that, she darted through the door, leaving me all alone on the sidewalk by myself.