Page 13 of Cursebound
The cellar is like plenty of other cellars I’ve been in. Dim, dusty, stacked with crates full of bottles and kegs of beer. I smell spilled beer and rat droppings—and her. A faint trace, but enough to make me furious. With her, and with myself. How could I have been so fucking stupid? So goddamn arrogant? I should have known that she’d pull some stunt like this.
The exit from the cellar is on the far side of the space, up a few steps and out of a similar hatch to the one I came in through. I shove it open, climb up, and get a face full of heavy rain for my trouble.
When I emerge, it’s into a little courtyard that appears to be shared by three or four businesses. There’s a parking lot and dumpsters and big containers full of glass bottles for recycling. A delivery truck with pictures of tomatoes on the side sits idling several feet away.
It’s been ten minutes tops since I last saw her, and I realize now she was playing me exactly how I thought I was playing her. She deliberately danced right by the window, and I saw exactly what I expected to see—the drunk Seer drowning her sorrows, safe in the knowledge that the big bad vamp had left.
She fooled me, and that makes me want to punch myself in the face, but it also makes me admire her more. She’s sneaky and duplicitous and far too brave for her own good.
I run across the courtyard to the backyard of the building opposite. She didn’t return to the road by the bar. I would have seen her or scented her. She’d know that, and she would have gone a different direction.
The back door to the place is propped open by a bucket filled with sand and cigarette butts, and inside a tired-looking fifty-something woman is taking a delivery of fresh fruit and greens. In a second, I take in the coffee machine, tables and chairs, the chiller cabinets. It’s a café, and she’s getting it ready for the breakfast shift.
She glances up as I walk into the room, and her eyes widen. I look like I’m here to assassinate someone. I hold my hands out in a placatory gesture and don’t even need to talk to her. From the way her eyes dart to the front door, it’s clear that this isn’t her first unexpected visit of the day, and the lingering scent of lemons and spice confirms that Rosa has been here.
Outside, I find myself on a street that’s half asleep, at that hazy junction between night and day. There are still a few people wandering around drunk, heading from one bar to another, maybe heading home after clubbing. A small line of those big black cabs they have here is open for business, and I can hear heavy rock music thudding away in a place that has a mural of guitars covering its exterior walls. I’ll have to tell Matteo that his beloved Liverpool is another city that never sleeps.
There are delivery vans like the one at the café, and a few workers either locking places up or opening them, and the ever-present figures of the homeless sheltering in doorways with dirty sleeping bags and piles of old duvets to keep them warm. Same all over the world—nobody sees them anymore. It’d break my heart if I had one.
What there isn’t, at first glance, is a Capelli malocchio. Pausing, I inhale and let the smells flow through me. It’s not as easy in a city, tracking someone. Too many scents all at once. I filter out the wet dog and discarded burgers and stale vomit and the lingering hint of sex, ignore the traffic fumes and spilled vodka and pigeon shit. My nostrils flare as I unexpectedly come across a suggestion of magic—witch magic. Interesting, but irrelevant to my hunt; lots of cities have witches, and that’s not what matters now.
Eventually, I find a trace—the tiniest of threads, but enough. I race toward it, pounding down the street until I come to a junction. One way is the huge sea-like river that dominates this town, another is a shopping mall, and the third is some kind of green space surrounded by office blocks and apartments.
On the corner, at the center of it all, is a trash can. A trash can that smells like Rosa. I dash over and see a jacket stuffed into it. Someone dumped a load of fries on top, but when I shake the garment free, it’s clearly the one she was wearing when I last saw her. Holding it up to my face, I inhale her unique lemon spice aroma as absolute fury hurtles through my veins.
I go through her pockets in case she was foolish enough to leave anything that would be useful to me. All I find is a tiny vial that holds maybe a couple milliliters of pale liquid. I close my fist around it and welcome the pain as the glass fractures and pierces my skin. The liquid flows over my palm, mixing with my blood and the shards of glass, smelling exactly how I knew it would—of lemons and spice.
I’ve been tricked. Again. I’ve been following her perfume, not her. I have no clue where she might be now, and it’s getting too close to sunrise for me to remain out here much longer.
Yeah, I’ve been played. But I will find her, and when I do, I am going to teach her that I can play too.
And I don’t play nice.
CHAPTER 6
ROSA
Jenny Brunelli’s friends know she likes to run, swim, and play tennis. What they don’t know is that she also likes to kick the shit out of a punching bag and poke pointy wooden sticks into cardboard figures decorated with hand-drawn Magic Marker fangs. A girl’s got to have her mysteries, right?
Jenny Brunelli—a.k.a. Rosa Capelli—is now home. Back in the apartment I’ve owned for so long, a place I consider safe. At least for now.
Dumping Luca da Firenze turned out to be easier than I expected. Yet another man who underestimated me. I still blush with embarrassment when I remember the way I reacted to him when we first met, at how the needs of my body overrode all thought, but in the end that helped. He didn’t see me as anything approaching an equal; he saw me as some kind of sex-starved princess who needed saving.
Well, okay, maybe he’s right on the sex-starved front. But that can be fixed. His is not the only cock in the world. And I sure as hell don’t need saving. I might need a little help, but I don’t need a savior. Especially not one of the vampire variety.
After slamming a vicious flying back kick into the punching bag, I collapse onto the reinforced floor, dripping with sweat. I’ve been knocking the shit out of that punching bag for over an hour now, and it feels good. It makes me feel strong. Capable. A welcome change from the way I felt when I left Liverpool.
I sip some water from my bottle and tap my toes along to the screaming Foo Fighters song blasting from the sound system. The apartment is soundproofed as well—Jenny Brunelli does like her privacy.
Somehow though, even with the doorman downstairs, the elevator with its security code, and the three deadbolts on the door, I don’t feel entirely safe. Entirely hidden. I can still feel his fingers on my skin. Feel his eyes on my body. Remember how pussy-clenchingly good it was to have his thigh between my legs.
I hoped an hour of mindless violence might chase him away, but I was wrong. Although I escaped him physically, it’s like he left a piece of himself with me, and I don’t like it. Or maybe I like it a bit too much.
After giving him the slip, I went straight back to my hotel, feeling pleased with myself but annoyed that it had cost me one of my favorite jackets and a travel bottle of one of my biggest indulgences. My perfume—a custom blend of lemon and basil, with hints of pepper and underlying oud—comes from an artisan perfumery in Italy and costs a fortune, but I don’t have many vices in life, so what the hell.
By the time the sun rose as much as it was going to, I knew I was probably safe, so I grabbed my gear, jumped into my rental, and drove to the airport.
Airports aren’t the best places to be if you’re vampire-dodging. Whole sections of them are free from natural light, and the glare of electricity is the only sun. Plus, everyone is so stressed and self-obsessed that they wouldn’t notice if someone were being drained of their life’s blood in the check-in line. They’re a bit like Vegas in those respects, and Vegas is crawling with vamps. I was tense until I was on the plane and three mini bottles of vodka in.