Enchanted Again

“I’ll see you tomorrow.” She turned and walked to her backyard. Pred, the brownie, was still there.

They stared at each other silently until the roar of the engine announced that the men were gone. The brownie looked up at her with big, sad eyes, his ears rolled down to his head. “Too late now. I will have to tell Tiro about you. He will be angry.” The small being shook his head. “It is not good to live with an angry brownie.”

“Live! What?”

With a shake of his head, Pred said, “And that is not the worst. Your magic hurts you when you use it. I am sorry for you.”

But not as sorry as Amber was…

Chapter 2

RAFE HAD BEEN driving for several minutes when he had to say it. “That was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen you do.”

“I’m dealing with my curse and the aftermath,” Conrad snapped, not opening his eyes. “Unlike you. And you’ve made a career of being stupid. Rock-climbing, glacier snowboarding, extreme sports. Like you’re tempting death to take you before you’re thirty-three.”

“Like I’m living every moment of my life to the fullest,” Rafe said evenly, an old argument.

“I really love Marta and my son.” Conrad veered back to the most important topic.

“I know you do,” Rafe said. He threaded through the traffic on Speer, muscles moving as he used the clutch and gearshift. He was better with action.

Conrad said, “You told the P.I. team to check out flights to Eastern Europe, right?”

“Of course. And did you do a run on her?” Rafe asked.

“Marta ran,” Conrad answered.

“I meant, did you have someone investigate the sexy genealogist?”

Conrad cracked an eye, the side of his mouth near Rafe kicked up. “Sexy, huh?” He closed his eyes. “She did have a good body. Looked like her name…Amber. Yeah, I had someone research her background.”

“When?” Rafe asked.

“When?” Conrad’s tones were getting slow and foggy. “When I got her name. ’Bout a year and a half ago, I guess.”

“You still have the file?”

“Sh-sure.” Conrad fell asleep.

Rafe took the exit for Conrad’s mansion in Cherry Creek. Since Rafe only had a small, dusty apartment in Manhattan that he hit from time to time between adventures, he was bunking with Conrad.

At a stoplight, he punched the in-car phone for his investigators.

“Mr. Davail,” the detective’s assistant said politely. “We will call you with any updates.”

“Got another job for you.”

“Oh. Yes?”

“Name is Amber Sarga, gypsy genealogist, age in the early thirties, brown hair and eyes, about five feet seven inches, a hundred and thirty pounds.” He still thought of the woman as honeyed, much warmer and more vital than amber. Not stony to him. “She lives at number seven Mystic Circle in Denver.” He paused, mouth turning down, decided to say the words anyway. “Supposed to be—” but he couldn’t get “a curse breaker” out of his mouth “—psychic.”

“We’ll get right on that,” the assistant assured him.

“It’s urgent. Got a meeting with her tomorrow morning.”

“We’ll have a report to you by the end of the day.”

“Thanks.” He disconnected the call and wondered what the hell he was getting into. Conrad twitched and moaned.

A fleeting curiosity about his own family tree—and all those first sons who died before thirty-three—wisped through Rafe’s mind.

Maybe he’d call his younger brother. Gabe was the practical one, running the family corporations, salt of the earth. He’d said something about a family tree a long while back. Rafe would bet his helicopter that Gabe had a chart or two Rafe could slap down in front of the honeyed Ms. Sarga.

Not that it would change anything. A tendril of fear began to whip acid inside his gut. Conrad’s curse had come true.

Would his?

Amber played with the pups, enough to tire them for a few minutes, then went to her downstairs office and initiated a computer search for Conrad Tyne-Cymbler.

He didn’t have any social network pages, but her online investigation program showed his home—inherited—at a pricey address in Cherry Creek. His worth was recently downgraded due to a prospective divorce settlement. Amber winced, recalling the hurt that had emanated from the man. A quick search of public court files showed that the divorce hearing had been set for this morning.

She did an online query about his wife, Marta Dimir. Nothing showed up…except a quick ice-cube quiver sliding through Amber. Her minor magic that she used in genealogy, a certain past-time-sense, warned her that if she explored Marta Dimir’s background she would find violence, despair, darkness.

Amber shook off the feeling. Let Tyne-Cymbler’s investigators take care of the wife angle. The man had spoken of his son, and Amber noted that the boy was nearly a year old. But that wasn’t what snagged her interest. Tyne-Cymbler obviously felt that the curse that affected him would also impact his son.

A father-to-son curse.

She brought up the professional genealogical database she used most often. The Colorado Tynes had a family tree available online, about five years out of date. The chart listed Conrad’s father, deceased, and Conrad, but named no other Cymblers. It didn’t show the Cymbler line.

There were some pics in the family albums and one of them showed the blond guy, an old college roommate of Conrad—Rafe Davail. Very uncommon surname.

Very good-looking guy who lived in Manhattan.

Without thought her fingers typed in his name on the ancestry site and got a hit. She stared at the chart.

Davail had a father-son curse, too. Anxiety tightened her throat as her eyes tracked the graph. For the past three hundred years, the first Davail son had died before he’d turned thirty-three. Rafe’s father was gone, so was his grandfather and great-grandfather. There was a great-uncle who was a second son, and Rafe had a younger brother.

That wasn’t good.

The only item of value Amber had in the world from her family was a gypsy ancestress’s journal. A far too sketchy journal when it came to talking about curses.

But she knew what she was seeing.

Rafe Davail was very cursed.

Thumps and bumps woke Amber in the night. Her heart pounded—home invaders! The pups sprang from her bed and shot down the hall, barking. She snatched at the phone, pressed 911, started shouting over the dispatcher. “This is number seven—”

The ceiling light flicked on and a brownie appeared on the end of her bed. The phone slipped from her grip.