Cursed Objects: R.I.P. Investigations, book 1
by Eden Crowne
Copyright 2015. All rights reserved
Chapter 1
“Don't you have any caviar in this infernal cold box of yours?” The tall, fair man with eyes the color of the arctic sea stared at Riley over the refrigerator door.
“The dead,” she moaned with a bitter shake of her head. “Can't live with them, would really like to live without them. Or at least this particular one.”
He gave her a look of affronted dignity, “I am not dead.”
“Shut up and stop listening in on private conversations!”
"You were talking to yourself," he pointed out.
“Dead, deader, deadest," she growled, not taking her eyes off the computer screen. “Whatever you are, if you want to change your current state you need to let me figure out this curse.”
He stood beside the open fridge, one hand raised palm out as if awaiting the caviar to fall into it. The light from the inside bounced off the gold buttons on his black military uniform embellished with epaulets and sash. Both the belted jacket and trousers were cut to fit tightly along the lithe, athletic lines of his body. The pants were tucked into a pair of tall black boots, the leather gleaming. The severe color of the uniform accented the golden blond hair swept back over his ears. His bangs kept falling forward and he brushed at them with quick, automatic gestures. Clean-shaven, the high plains of his cheekbones and brows lay in beautiful symmetry to the rich curve of lips and jaw. His whole demeanor radiated Old World aristocracy.
Royal was the word that sprang to mind.
“And for gods sake, where is the vodka?”
Royal pain in her butt.
There was the clink of glass followed by a long, satisfied sigh.
“'Deader' my dear Riley O'Ryan, is not a word.”
He'd found the vodka. Damn.
Taking another swallow, he stooped to pour a measure in the dog's bowl. Prince, her Belgian Shepard, wagged his fluffy black tail in anticipation. His full name was actually Prince Machiavelli Consort of the Devil because he had been a very bad puppy who transformed into a demonic dog when she needed him to.
“God damn it Alexi, you're going to poison him! Prince, no. Sit! Bad dog.”
Prince stared at her with his big brown eyes, glancing from the bottle to his bowl and back again.
“No!” she repeated firmly. “No alcohol for dogs.”
Alexi looked down his perfect aquiline nose at her, nostrils slightly flared, “In my Russia, the dogs were always given a measure of vodka in the evening.”
“Honestly, in your Russia even babies were given vodka in the evening. That does not make it right.”
“You know nothing of my Russia,” he sniffed, patting Prince on the head.
“That's because everyone who knew anything about your Russia is dead, your high and mightiness. Killed by the Bolsheviks.”
A look of pain flashed across his face. He turned away trying to hide it, but she had seen. Damn her tongue!
“Alexi, I'm sorry.”
“It is of no consequence.”
“Honestly. Please.”
With great dignity he said, “I am going back in my egg.”
Which is actually rather a difficult thing to say with great dignity, Riley thought, but he carried it off.
With a bang that made the glasses shake in the cupboard, the blond man vaported into a thick column of silver smoke. The glass he was holding dropped to the floor, spilling its contents on her Berber rug. With a sly, doggy smile, Prince eagerly lapped it up. The smoke flowed sinuously around and around the room before disappearing into a large jet black ebony egg inlaid with bright gems sitting atop a carved stand on her mantlepiece.
She and the dog were alone.
Riley was a curse expert. She broke them for a living. They usually didn't follow her home and move in.
Chapter 2
“Alexi could you come out here and take off your clothes please?”
The jet of silver smoke shot from the egg with such alacrity that Riley had to throw herself against the wall to avoid being knocked down. Prince wagged his tail and chased it around the room joyously, leaping over the sofa and two antique wingback chairs, narrowly avoiding knocking over the yellow Ching vases Riley had inherited from her grandmother. The dog liked their new roommate very much.
The Faberge-like egg had seen many owners since the revolutionaries stormed the aristocrat's estates burning the place to the ground and slaughtering everyone they found. Almost prophetically, the object had earned an incendiary reputation over the years. Wherever the egg went; fire followed.
Jason McKenna, lead singer of the heavy metal band Hangman, learned that after personally acquiring it as a birthday present for his wife, Marley. Actually it was Jason's very efficient PA who found and acquired it. In LA celebrity circles, that's personal enough.
The auction house had opted not to mention the objects fiery past in their glowing catalog description. So it was with some surprise that the housekeeper noticed little black scorch rings appearing on the furniture wherever the egg was placed. Those rings grew, both in size and intensity, until fires started flaring up here and there in the vicinity of the jeweled egg – though the object itself remained mysteriously untouched. Fearful of celebrity stalkers or psychos or both, the police were called in and security cameras quickly installed. All to very little effect. The cameras picked up only a brief flash of smoke and flame as the fires continued.
About a month after it came into their hands, the situation took a much more dangerous turn. One warm June night as the family slept, a blaze sprang into life at the bottom of the huge spiral staircase that soared dizzyingly up through the Malibu mansion's four-story atrium. This time the egg was looking to make a statement. The flames jumped from step to step to step to step. Bottom landing to top.
The fire department roared in, sirens screaming, hoses gushing. Much to the delight of the family's twin girls, they turned the staircase into a cascading waterfall. Back came the police and the insurance adjustors. Staring down over the railing, it was an arson investigator who first noticed the patterns in the mysterious burn.
These were not just random scorch marks.
They were letters.
Again and again, marching up the steps, they spelled in beautifully executed cursive the words, 'Curse Woman'.
Although those words were open to lengthy philosophical and psychological debate for the police profilers and arson specialists – luckily for the safety of the household – Marley thought she knew exactly who the message was meant for. She called her old classmate's spooky younger sister, Riley O'Ryan, the curse expert and current head of R.I.P. Investigations.
R.I.P. Investigations handled malignant energy, anomalies, hauntings, exorcisms and just about anything else on the supernatural menu. Though that isn't what three generations of P.I. licenses said. The agency was started by Riley's grandparents and their best friends.
They didn't advertise and they weren't listed in any phonebook or data base available to the general public. They didn't do Discovery Channel series or the talk show circuit. You couldn't watch them on 'America's Most Haunted or the 'Today' show'. Jobs came strictly by word of mouth, and that mouth must come both highly recommended and know when to keep shut.
The only reason Marley had the number at all is because she used to date Riley's older brother, Ross. Who indulged in far too much pillow talk for the rest of the family's liking. Riley had come into her gifts very young.
Now the 'agency' consisted of just Riley. Which was rather ironic. The last thing her parents had wanted was for Riley to follow in their spectral footsteps. We don't always get what we want.
London had changed all that. Changed everything.
She was a freshman in college when they disappeared. Something came out of the darkness. The Shadowland. One of many lands on the other side of the all too thin veil between the worlds. Something very bad that killed her father and took her mother.
Despite her experience, Riley was taken completely by surprise when Alexi popped out in living color that first night after she took the egg home. She had been prepared for fire and was sitting on her patio on the big rattan love seat, fire extinguisher on one side and Prince on the other. A breeze had blown up off the Pacific Ocean only a couple of blocks away.
She lived in Hermosa Beach in what people in LA called the South Bay: Manhattan Beach, Hermosa, Redondo and Palos Verde. The egg sat centered in a portable fire pit within a strong circle of protective rune stones to contain and hold the magic. Or so she thought.
She read out a very reliable summoning spell and there was indeed a puff of smoke. Riley thought, 'this is it'. Then the smoke billowed and grew larger and larger still until it formed a towering silver column. A blinding flare flashed out, burning her eyes. When she could see again, her mouth fell open in surprise. A tall man wearing a black uniform from another age sketched her a courtly bow, stepping out of the rune circle as if it wasn't even there. In beautiful English, he introduced himself as Count Alexander Ivanovitch, Captain of the Imperial Horse Guards, a Romanov on his paternal grandmother's side.
With an enchanting smile, he explained he had been looking for someone like her for a very long time. The Count and his brother Viktor had been saved – or damned depending on how you looked at it – before the Bolshevik's attack on their home by their Grandmother, he explained. She placed them under a spell. He needed to break his curse and find his brother. Trapped in a shadowland between life and death. The same Shadowlands that had taken her parents.
Riley was entranced rather than frightened. Of course in the very next sentence he was demanding champagne and a roast leg of lamb followed by two whole capons and wanting the servants to look after his boots.
It had been several weeks since that night and the Egg continued to resist all her efforts to 'speak' to it on any supernatural wavelength. In direct contrast to the Count who she couldn't seem to shut up.
Tonight, Alexi stepped out of the smoke dressed as always in his severe black uniform, sword strapped to his side, fully corporeal. The Count could see and be seen in turn, which Riley knew for a fact, was beyond rare for manifestations. He had the power not only of speech, but to eat, drink, and annoy.
Especially the latter.
He was not a spirit, but something else entirely. Something she had never encountered. Exhaustive research through her parents' case files and research data from a number of esoteric and very private databases provided maddeningly few clues.
She waved one hand impatiently,“Your clothes, take them off.”
Sweeping back his bangs, he flashed her a beaming smile and swiftly closed the gap between them. “My dearest mademoiselle, or may I call you mon cher? That is the finest thing anyone has said to me in a very long time.” He stepped forward slipping both hands around her waist and pulling her close, pressing his lips to hers. Warm and real and strong.
Too late she realized how her request could be misinterpreted. She attempted to push him away but he held her tighter. One part of her brain noted that he smelled and tasted very nice. Very nice indeed. Then he tried to put his tongue in her mouth.
So she did the only sensible thing.
She knee'd him in the groin.
After the howls of pain had scaled down several decibels she shook her finger at him, “Good god Alexi, what were you thinking?”
"Awk," was the only sound he seemed able to make.
"Don't ever try that again."
"Awk," he croaked.
Due to the necessity of having to apply an ice pack, it was some time before Riley could continue with her experiment.
Opening a page in one of the rare grimoires spell books from her mother's collection, she sat down on the arm of the couch and showed him an etching of an amulet stitched inside a piece of clothing.
“It was just staring back at me from the vellum,” she explained. “I think the binding curse may not be on the egg but on you. The egg only serves to ground the portal. Which is why it just sits there while I throw spell after spell at it. Don't you agree?”
He moaned.
"I'll take that for a 'yes'. What we need to do first is look inside your clothes for amulets, runes, anything that could link you to the spell. I just assumed your clothes were attached to you like an injection molded action figure. But of course they're not, right?”
“Will it keep you from kicking me again?” he groaned.
“Yes.”
“Then I will take them off. First, I need vodka for the pain.”
“How about an aspirin?”
“Vodka," he moaned. "Medicine is for women. Bring the bottle.”
“Glass.”
“Bottle.”
They eventually negotiated it down to one large glass and a bowl of green olives on the side.
After the vodka disappeared, he began undoing the intricate and varied buttons, belts, and fastenings on his uniform. Prince thought it was a new game and ran off with bits of clothing and gear determined to engage them both in 'catch me if you can'. Alexi chased the dog up – slowly and with a slight limp – and down the stairs through the beach bungalow swearing in Russian, French, and English as Riley examined each article of clothing he managed to retrieve.
It took some time before she had him stripped down to his underwear.
Moaning, the Count sat on the couch, his long legs stretched out in front of him on the coffee table, the ice pack back on his crotch.
“Stop being a baby!” she admonished.
He shot her a stern look and grabbing the remote, switched on the TV with a flourish, mumbling to himself in Russian.
Despite a minute examination of every stitch and seam with her father's Ocular Glasses and the ancient moleskin divining gloves from Prague (made from real moles, the fingertips went icy cold if passed over any occult object or spell), she could find nothing that even hinted at magic.
She stared at him. Except for a few scars, his skin was smooth, with almost no body hair. Beautifully sculpted, the muscles in his arms and shoulders bunched thick and knotted as oak, his abdomen ironing board flat. And so alive. For perhaps the hundredth time she thought, 'What are you?' She called him a manifestation but that was so far from the truth. That was when Riley realized she had been thinking of him purely in the abstract.
There was nothing abstract about the way he sat there on the couch pushing Prince away. The dog was determined to apologize for making Alexi mad by licking every inch of exposed skin.
She stood in front of the TV, “Stand up.”
Alexi rolled his eyes.
“Please.”
He did as she asked. Stepping close, she reached out. Surprised, his hands flew to his crotch.
“Alexi.”
Though obviously unsure of her intent, he stood quietly enough. Wearing the gloves she ran her fingertips over his face and scalp, across his throat, down his chest and abdomen, then up to his shoulders. As her fingertips drifted along his forearms, featherlight, she was nearly knocked of her feet by a burning jolt of energy. If Alexi hadn't grabbed her, she would have fallen for sure. Shaken, she gave a little gasping breath, realizing her hunch had been right.
“There's a spell, or at least words of power written here on your forearms. I can't see them – yet. Let me go upstairs and put some things together. We'll try to make them manifest. Oh,” she looked at him, "you can put your pants back on.”
“No, I am quite comfortable.”
Riley rolled her eyes. The sooner she figured out this curse the better.
by Eden Crowne
Copyright 2015. All rights reserved
Chapter 1
“Don't you have any caviar in this infernal cold box of yours?” The tall, fair man with eyes the color of the arctic sea stared at Riley over the refrigerator door.
“The dead,” she moaned with a bitter shake of her head. “Can't live with them, would really like to live without them. Or at least this particular one.”
He gave her a look of affronted dignity, “I am not dead.”
“Shut up and stop listening in on private conversations!”
"You were talking to yourself," he pointed out.
“Dead, deader, deadest," she growled, not taking her eyes off the computer screen. “Whatever you are, if you want to change your current state you need to let me figure out this curse.”
He stood beside the open fridge, one hand raised palm out as if awaiting the caviar to fall into it. The light from the inside bounced off the gold buttons on his black military uniform embellished with epaulets and sash. Both the belted jacket and trousers were cut to fit tightly along the lithe, athletic lines of his body. The pants were tucked into a pair of tall black boots, the leather gleaming. The severe color of the uniform accented the golden blond hair swept back over his ears. His bangs kept falling forward and he brushed at them with quick, automatic gestures. Clean-shaven, the high plains of his cheekbones and brows lay in beautiful symmetry to the rich curve of lips and jaw. His whole demeanor radiated Old World aristocracy.
Royal was the word that sprang to mind.
“And for gods sake, where is the vodka?”
Royal pain in her butt.
There was the clink of glass followed by a long, satisfied sigh.
“'Deader' my dear Riley O'Ryan, is not a word.”
He'd found the vodka. Damn.
Taking another swallow, he stooped to pour a measure in the dog's bowl. Prince, her Belgian Shepard, wagged his fluffy black tail in anticipation. His full name was actually Prince Machiavelli Consort of the Devil because he had been a very bad puppy who transformed into a demonic dog when she needed him to.
“God damn it Alexi, you're going to poison him! Prince, no. Sit! Bad dog.”
Prince stared at her with his big brown eyes, glancing from the bottle to his bowl and back again.
“No!” she repeated firmly. “No alcohol for dogs.”
Alexi looked down his perfect aquiline nose at her, nostrils slightly flared, “In my Russia, the dogs were always given a measure of vodka in the evening.”
“Honestly, in your Russia even babies were given vodka in the evening. That does not make it right.”
“You know nothing of my Russia,” he sniffed, patting Prince on the head.
“That's because everyone who knew anything about your Russia is dead, your high and mightiness. Killed by the Bolsheviks.”
A look of pain flashed across his face. He turned away trying to hide it, but she had seen. Damn her tongue!
“Alexi, I'm sorry.”
“It is of no consequence.”
“Honestly. Please.”
With great dignity he said, “I am going back in my egg.”
Which is actually rather a difficult thing to say with great dignity, Riley thought, but he carried it off.
With a bang that made the glasses shake in the cupboard, the blond man vaported into a thick column of silver smoke. The glass he was holding dropped to the floor, spilling its contents on her Berber rug. With a sly, doggy smile, Prince eagerly lapped it up. The smoke flowed sinuously around and around the room before disappearing into a large jet black ebony egg inlaid with bright gems sitting atop a carved stand on her mantlepiece.
She and the dog were alone.
Riley was a curse expert. She broke them for a living. They usually didn't follow her home and move in.
Chapter 2
“Alexi could you come out here and take off your clothes please?”
The jet of silver smoke shot from the egg with such alacrity that Riley had to throw herself against the wall to avoid being knocked down. Prince wagged his tail and chased it around the room joyously, leaping over the sofa and two antique wingback chairs, narrowly avoiding knocking over the yellow Ching vases Riley had inherited from her grandmother. The dog liked their new roommate very much.
The Faberge-like egg had seen many owners since the revolutionaries stormed the aristocrat's estates burning the place to the ground and slaughtering everyone they found. Almost prophetically, the object had earned an incendiary reputation over the years. Wherever the egg went; fire followed.
Jason McKenna, lead singer of the heavy metal band Hangman, learned that after personally acquiring it as a birthday present for his wife, Marley. Actually it was Jason's very efficient PA who found and acquired it. In LA celebrity circles, that's personal enough.
The auction house had opted not to mention the objects fiery past in their glowing catalog description. So it was with some surprise that the housekeeper noticed little black scorch rings appearing on the furniture wherever the egg was placed. Those rings grew, both in size and intensity, until fires started flaring up here and there in the vicinity of the jeweled egg – though the object itself remained mysteriously untouched. Fearful of celebrity stalkers or psychos or both, the police were called in and security cameras quickly installed. All to very little effect. The cameras picked up only a brief flash of smoke and flame as the fires continued.
About a month after it came into their hands, the situation took a much more dangerous turn. One warm June night as the family slept, a blaze sprang into life at the bottom of the huge spiral staircase that soared dizzyingly up through the Malibu mansion's four-story atrium. This time the egg was looking to make a statement. The flames jumped from step to step to step to step. Bottom landing to top.
The fire department roared in, sirens screaming, hoses gushing. Much to the delight of the family's twin girls, they turned the staircase into a cascading waterfall. Back came the police and the insurance adjustors. Staring down over the railing, it was an arson investigator who first noticed the patterns in the mysterious burn.
These were not just random scorch marks.
They were letters.
Again and again, marching up the steps, they spelled in beautifully executed cursive the words, 'Curse Woman'.
Although those words were open to lengthy philosophical and psychological debate for the police profilers and arson specialists – luckily for the safety of the household – Marley thought she knew exactly who the message was meant for. She called her old classmate's spooky younger sister, Riley O'Ryan, the curse expert and current head of R.I.P. Investigations.
R.I.P. Investigations handled malignant energy, anomalies, hauntings, exorcisms and just about anything else on the supernatural menu. Though that isn't what three generations of P.I. licenses said. The agency was started by Riley's grandparents and their best friends.
They didn't advertise and they weren't listed in any phonebook or data base available to the general public. They didn't do Discovery Channel series or the talk show circuit. You couldn't watch them on 'America's Most Haunted or the 'Today' show'. Jobs came strictly by word of mouth, and that mouth must come both highly recommended and know when to keep shut.
The only reason Marley had the number at all is because she used to date Riley's older brother, Ross. Who indulged in far too much pillow talk for the rest of the family's liking. Riley had come into her gifts very young.
Now the 'agency' consisted of just Riley. Which was rather ironic. The last thing her parents had wanted was for Riley to follow in their spectral footsteps. We don't always get what we want.
London had changed all that. Changed everything.
She was a freshman in college when they disappeared. Something came out of the darkness. The Shadowland. One of many lands on the other side of the all too thin veil between the worlds. Something very bad that killed her father and took her mother.
Despite her experience, Riley was taken completely by surprise when Alexi popped out in living color that first night after she took the egg home. She had been prepared for fire and was sitting on her patio on the big rattan love seat, fire extinguisher on one side and Prince on the other. A breeze had blown up off the Pacific Ocean only a couple of blocks away.
She lived in Hermosa Beach in what people in LA called the South Bay: Manhattan Beach, Hermosa, Redondo and Palos Verde. The egg sat centered in a portable fire pit within a strong circle of protective rune stones to contain and hold the magic. Or so she thought.
She read out a very reliable summoning spell and there was indeed a puff of smoke. Riley thought, 'this is it'. Then the smoke billowed and grew larger and larger still until it formed a towering silver column. A blinding flare flashed out, burning her eyes. When she could see again, her mouth fell open in surprise. A tall man wearing a black uniform from another age sketched her a courtly bow, stepping out of the rune circle as if it wasn't even there. In beautiful English, he introduced himself as Count Alexander Ivanovitch, Captain of the Imperial Horse Guards, a Romanov on his paternal grandmother's side.
With an enchanting smile, he explained he had been looking for someone like her for a very long time. The Count and his brother Viktor had been saved – or damned depending on how you looked at it – before the Bolshevik's attack on their home by their Grandmother, he explained. She placed them under a spell. He needed to break his curse and find his brother. Trapped in a shadowland between life and death. The same Shadowlands that had taken her parents.
Riley was entranced rather than frightened. Of course in the very next sentence he was demanding champagne and a roast leg of lamb followed by two whole capons and wanting the servants to look after his boots.
It had been several weeks since that night and the Egg continued to resist all her efforts to 'speak' to it on any supernatural wavelength. In direct contrast to the Count who she couldn't seem to shut up.
Tonight, Alexi stepped out of the smoke dressed as always in his severe black uniform, sword strapped to his side, fully corporeal. The Count could see and be seen in turn, which Riley knew for a fact, was beyond rare for manifestations. He had the power not only of speech, but to eat, drink, and annoy.
Especially the latter.
He was not a spirit, but something else entirely. Something she had never encountered. Exhaustive research through her parents' case files and research data from a number of esoteric and very private databases provided maddeningly few clues.
She waved one hand impatiently,“Your clothes, take them off.”
Sweeping back his bangs, he flashed her a beaming smile and swiftly closed the gap between them. “My dearest mademoiselle, or may I call you mon cher? That is the finest thing anyone has said to me in a very long time.” He stepped forward slipping both hands around her waist and pulling her close, pressing his lips to hers. Warm and real and strong.
Too late she realized how her request could be misinterpreted. She attempted to push him away but he held her tighter. One part of her brain noted that he smelled and tasted very nice. Very nice indeed. Then he tried to put his tongue in her mouth.
So she did the only sensible thing.
She knee'd him in the groin.
After the howls of pain had scaled down several decibels she shook her finger at him, “Good god Alexi, what were you thinking?”
"Awk," was the only sound he seemed able to make.
"Don't ever try that again."
"Awk," he croaked.
Due to the necessity of having to apply an ice pack, it was some time before Riley could continue with her experiment.
Opening a page in one of the rare grimoires spell books from her mother's collection, she sat down on the arm of the couch and showed him an etching of an amulet stitched inside a piece of clothing.
“It was just staring back at me from the vellum,” she explained. “I think the binding curse may not be on the egg but on you. The egg only serves to ground the portal. Which is why it just sits there while I throw spell after spell at it. Don't you agree?”
He moaned.
"I'll take that for a 'yes'. What we need to do first is look inside your clothes for amulets, runes, anything that could link you to the spell. I just assumed your clothes were attached to you like an injection molded action figure. But of course they're not, right?”
“Will it keep you from kicking me again?” he groaned.
“Yes.”
“Then I will take them off. First, I need vodka for the pain.”
“How about an aspirin?”
“Vodka," he moaned. "Medicine is for women. Bring the bottle.”
“Glass.”
“Bottle.”
They eventually negotiated it down to one large glass and a bowl of green olives on the side.
After the vodka disappeared, he began undoing the intricate and varied buttons, belts, and fastenings on his uniform. Prince thought it was a new game and ran off with bits of clothing and gear determined to engage them both in 'catch me if you can'. Alexi chased the dog up – slowly and with a slight limp – and down the stairs through the beach bungalow swearing in Russian, French, and English as Riley examined each article of clothing he managed to retrieve.
It took some time before she had him stripped down to his underwear.
Moaning, the Count sat on the couch, his long legs stretched out in front of him on the coffee table, the ice pack back on his crotch.
“Stop being a baby!” she admonished.
He shot her a stern look and grabbing the remote, switched on the TV with a flourish, mumbling to himself in Russian.
Despite a minute examination of every stitch and seam with her father's Ocular Glasses and the ancient moleskin divining gloves from Prague (made from real moles, the fingertips went icy cold if passed over any occult object or spell), she could find nothing that even hinted at magic.
She stared at him. Except for a few scars, his skin was smooth, with almost no body hair. Beautifully sculpted, the muscles in his arms and shoulders bunched thick and knotted as oak, his abdomen ironing board flat. And so alive. For perhaps the hundredth time she thought, 'What are you?' She called him a manifestation but that was so far from the truth. That was when Riley realized she had been thinking of him purely in the abstract.
There was nothing abstract about the way he sat there on the couch pushing Prince away. The dog was determined to apologize for making Alexi mad by licking every inch of exposed skin.
She stood in front of the TV, “Stand up.”
Alexi rolled his eyes.
“Please.”
He did as she asked. Stepping close, she reached out. Surprised, his hands flew to his crotch.
“Alexi.”
Though obviously unsure of her intent, he stood quietly enough. Wearing the gloves she ran her fingertips over his face and scalp, across his throat, down his chest and abdomen, then up to his shoulders. As her fingertips drifted along his forearms, featherlight, she was nearly knocked of her feet by a burning jolt of energy. If Alexi hadn't grabbed her, she would have fallen for sure. Shaken, she gave a little gasping breath, realizing her hunch had been right.
“There's a spell, or at least words of power written here on your forearms. I can't see them – yet. Let me go upstairs and put some things together. We'll try to make them manifest. Oh,” she looked at him, "you can put your pants back on.”
“No, I am quite comfortable.”
Riley rolled her eyes. The sooner she figured out this curse the better.
