A Family Affair by Karen Chance

Author:Karen Chance [Chance, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Goodreads: 9459103
Publisher: Smashwords
Published: 2011-08-06T22:00:00+00:00

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Casanova had spent years perfecting the alluring quality of his voice, imbuing it with the charm, the grace, the honeyed tones that often did much of his seduction for him. Rian had taught him some of that, but he was proud to say that much more came from his own Castilian roots, from a people who understood the lyrical potential of the spoken word in a way that few of the braying descendants of the British Isles ever would. He was an artist with his voice. He could make women, and the occasional man, weep with his voice.

And then there were times like these.

“Fuck it,” he rasped, which would have made his point quite clearly had anyone been listening to him.

“I think I found something,” Cassie’s excited shriek drifted out of one of the rocks on this godforsaken hill.

Literally God forsaken, Casanova thought grimly, and he didn’t blame Him one iota. Ugly, barren, and creepy as, well, hell--and he’d thought the city was bad. Out here, nobody bothered with a spell to disguise anything, because there was nothing worth the effort. Just rocks and a little on-the-brink scrub and a lot of dark, the latter broken only by the faint urban sprawl in the murky valley below them.

Why did anyone live here? Surely even demons could do better than this? And more importantly, what in the name of sanity was he doing here?

“Did you hear me?” Cassie demanded, and Casanova’s hand clenched.

He knew what he was doing here. She was like a disease, a human virus that infected everyone around her, turning off their good sense and making them do things completely against their own best interests. Someone should lock her up, study her, figure out a vaccine before the whole damn world caught the madness—

A curly blond head poked out of a crack in the rock so its owner could glare at him. “I’m not going in there,” he said curtly.

Blue eyes narrowed. “Why not?”

“Why not? Why not? Because this—” his savage gesture took in the entire train of events that had led him from a warm, soft bed in Vegas to a frigid, rocky mountainside in Hell--“is insane. The only thing that could possibly make it more insane would be to crawl inside an unexplored hole in the ground after a mage who, on a good day, is suicidally reckless and who on this day is chasing a demon battle queen.”

Cassie looked at someone over her shoulder. Rian, he assumed, since his traitor of a demon had floated in after her a few minutes ago. “I thought you said he’d calm down once we got out of the city.”

Rian murmured something reassuring.

“Well, I don’t know,” Cassie told her. “He’s getting pretty shrill.”

“I am not shrill!” Casanova said, and all right, perhaps that had been a little shrill, but if so, he thought he’d earned it. “I am the voice of reason—”

“Well the voice of reason needs to get his butt in here.”

Casanova didn’t even bother to respond to that.

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