Cold Iron (9 page)

They drove through the darkened streets and over the new bridge, past the giant post office and the Gillette sign. She didn’t know Southie well. A few of her friends had moved there for the cheap Victorian houses and access to the beach, but they all lamented the crime in the area. A few had been mugged; others had experienced break-ins. The neighborhood’s gentrification had been incomplete at best.

They turned off Broadway, leaving the shops and streetlights behind, and Conn dimmed the headlamps. She had no doubt he could see perfectly in the dark.

Southie never looked particularly salubrious during the day, and the ruinous wasteland here of truck yards, abandoned industry, and empty warehouses looked even worse at night. The squalor was a distraction. She closed her eyes and let that familiar feeling grow in the pit of her stomach. The proximity of the ancient. Fae magic. Growing stronger. Normally she enjoyed it, savored it. The feeling had an almost erotic component to it, lush, and when she finally arrived at the epicenter, climactic.

“Stop here,” she said.

The car rolled to a gentle halt. She was grateful for that, and for Conn’s solicitude: when he’d carried her up and down the stairs and his smooth driving now. Any jolt or jar sent agony shooting through her whole body.

She opened her eyes. “Great.” A street of burnt-out, empty warehouses with one lone sign of habitation at the end of the block: a decrepit, single-story bar, clinging like a barnacle to the side of a boarded-up factory, windowless save for the barred grille in the door, lightless save for the neon
BEER
sign squatting on the roof. Three tall men lounged outside with the casual elegance of waiting predators.

It was not a safe place. A woman alone would never set foot in there. Even with Conn, the thought terrified her. “It doesn’t look safe,” she said.

“That’s because it belongs to the Fae,” he said. “Can you walk in? We can’t afford to show weakness.” He hesitated. “I’m already in violation of my
geis
. It bears down on me. Like Cú Chulainn. If they pick a fight, I won’t be as fast or as strong as I should be.”

It didn’t make sense. “Why would they want to fight one of their own kind? You said there were few of the Fae left free aboveground.”

“There are many reasons they might challenge me. For fun, primarily. Violence is second nature to us. For prestige, also. Mine was once a great name, and to be the killer of Conn would make a Fae’s reputation for all time. For”—he stopped abruptly—“other reasons.”

She was learning to read him now. There was more to it than that. “What other reasons? I deserve to know, since I’m about to walk in there with you. And if anything happens to you . . .”

“You will wish you had died at the museum tonight.” He said it flatly. “Beth, this is your only hope, but it is not the only choice. You must weigh the risk against the reward. If the sorcerer agrees to and is capable of healing your wound, you will win back your life. If he doesn’t, if the Fae attack and defeat me and you fall into their hands, you will not have a pleasant death.”

“What,” she asked, feeling the fear well up and try to overwhelm her, “is the other option?”

The silver flashed in the moonlight, barely a blur, and then the gold-chased dagger from the mound was there in the palm of his hand, offered to her. “I can make it quick and painless now.”

Chapter 5

B
eth looked up at the seedy facade of the bar. The door was open, a yawning mouth of deeper darkness. In the shadows beneath the neon light she could make out three figures lounging against the squat building. Perhaps they seemed taller and more menacing because the building was so small and squalid, but she doubted it. “Is what we’re going to face in there so bad?” she asked.

“I told you. We’re not nice.” The edge in his voice alerted her to the tension vibrating through him. He was waiting for her answer.

She shook her head. “No. I’d rather fight for my life than hide from whatever it is you’re not telling me. But I think you owe me that. The truth. Why are your own people so dangerous to you?”

The silver dagger was gone in the blink of an eye as though she had imagined it, glittering with lethal promise, in his hand. She thought, but couldn’t be sure, that she heard him exhale. “Because the Druids didn’t defeat us alone. They had help. From a Fae traitor.”

“Who?”

“Me.”

He got out of the car before she could ask him anything more. Now, of course, was not the time to indulge her scholarly curiosity. If her shoulder wasn’t screaming in pain and her head wasn’t swimming from breathing in short shallow gasps for so long, she’d want to know everything. He was talking about events she knew, half-glimpsed through myth and legend, utterly recast by his revelations. If she lived, a whole world of discovery about the past awaited.

Her door opened and he offered her his hand. Another courtly gesture. Whatever the Fae might be, they were not ill-mannered. She took his arm gratefully and found she could counterfeit a steady walk and measured, even breathing. For a few steps. When she faltered, he slipped an arm about her waist. Another counterfeit. The possessive lover. She would have raged at the presumption a few hours ago. Now she accepted the necessity of it.

The three men were younger than Beth expected. One appeared to be a little past thirty. The other two looked barely out of their teens. They warily watched Conn and Beth approach. Only one moved. The oldest. The other two were the perfect picture of languor, but even in the strange pink light Beth could see them looking to the older man for their cue.

They were all tall and dark haired, with liquid-brown eyes. Masculine, but pretty. Too pretty, to Beth’s mind, for Southie thugs, but their attitude and location left no doubt as to what they were. Brothers, she decided. They all bore the imprint of the same discordantly elegant features, although the eldest had the most vivid looks. Beside him the younger men looked like pinchbeck copies struck from the same mold, shallower impressions of the same design.

When the oldest one spoke, Beth felt it in her spine. “And what would you be wanting this fair night?” he asked Conn.

Beth looked from the thug to her protector and back again. The affinity was unmistakable. “They’re Fae,” she said.

The Fae thug cocked his head and looked at her.

“They’re half-breeds,” Conn corrected.

“And what is
she
that she knows the People?” The eldest thug was using his Fae voice, but it was a pale imitation of Conn’s. If it had been music, she would say it lacked genius. If a recording, she would say it had been played too many times.

“She,” Conn answered coolly, “is not for the likes of you, so mind your manners. We’ve come to see your sorcerer.”

The half-breed’s limpid brown eyes narrowed. An enemy already, and they weren’t even through the door. “You’ve come a long way if you don’t know him by name.”

“I might not know his name, but he’ll recognize mine. Tell him Conn of the Hundred Battles seeks a favor.”

The other two blanched, but their adversary sneered. “You’re fresh off the boat if you think I’ll believe that.”

“Your belief is not required. Just tell him,” said Conn.

The half-breed nodded to the younger men. “Watch him,” he said, and disappeared inside the bar.

His hostility had been palpable, the tension in the air the only thing keeping Beth on her feet. She sagged against Conn, grateful for his strength. If he hadn’t come back to the gallery . . .

“Is she all right?” One of the two younger half-breeds took a tentative step forward, his tough guy pose momentarily forgotten. The other pulled a rusted folding chair out from behind the door, but before Beth could sit, the eldest returned.

“He’ll see you.” Surly. Resentful.

They went inside.

She’d thought the street was dark, but outside there had been moonlight. The inside of the bar was cave-like. There was only a single wan light behind the bar and a bare bulb hanging at the far end of the room, centered over a wooden table, where a man sat.

Conn stiffened. Not visibly, but Beth could feel it everywhere their bodies touched, the tensing muscles of predator meeting predator. More, Conn knew this man.

They walked side by side down the center of the long narrow room. Beth was dimly aware of many other people—no—other Fae, or more likely half-breeds—seated in the shadowy booths lining the wall to her left, hard-eyed men whose impossibly handsome faces and fit bodies gave them away as kin to the
Aes Sídhe
. They watched Conn like hawks.

To Beth’s right was the bar, or what passed for it, a scarred wooden counter running the length of the room, presided over by a gimlet-eyed half-breed with a torn ear. She wondered, giddy with fear, if he had a shotgun like bartenders in the movies, but then she wondered if the Fae used guns at all.
Iron.
Another of those strange thoughts not quite her own.
The true Fae cannot tolerate the iron in the steel.
But half-breeds might.

Conn halted a yard short of the man at the end of the room. He was handsome and most definitely related to the half-breeds they’d encountered outside. If the two younger brothers looked like copies of the older, then here was the mold from which all three had been struck. Night-black hair, cut neat and short. Brown-black eyes, slightly almond shaped, bruisingly high cheekbones and a chiseled jaw. But for all his masculine perfection, Beth did not sense anything Fae about him.

“Miach MacCecht,” Conn said, inclining his head.

“Betrayer,” said Miach pleasantly. “What do you want?” He spoke to Conn, but his eyes slid over Beth, detached, assessing.

“A favor. The woman is hurt.”

Beth saw movement out of the corner of her eye. The Fae thug who had confronted them outside was there in the shadows, listening.

“Boston has many fine hospitals,” Miach replied. “You’re in the wrong part of town.”

“The wound is Fae. From my own blade.”

Miach bristled, and the illusion cloaking him fell away. She should have remembered. Conn had told her they could pass as human when they wanted, that it was simply another glamour for them.

Uncloaked, he had an aura as potent as Conn’s. His eyes were full of malice, the golden brown turned night black. “And yet,” Miach spat, “she lives.” The angry Fae rose from his chair in one fluid movement, and faster than Beth’s eye could follow, a wickedly curved blade appeared in his hand. “How dare you bring
that thing
,” he looked straight at Beth, “into my house?”

Behind them chairs screeched, and a hundred little metallic sounds told Beth that every man in the bar was now armed.

Conn didn’t flinch. He didn’t reach for a weapon. He didn’t even remove his arm from her waist.

“What is he talking about?” Beth asked, doing her best not to shrink into Conn’s embrace. Miach, she was certain, could smell fear, and the whole room was on a knife’s edge, tipping toward violence.

“
You
, my maddening little scholar,” Conn replied. “He’s talking about
you
.”

This was crazy. “He doesn’t even know who I am.”

“Not who.
What
. You’ve been wounded by the Summoner, but still you live and breathe. And you are not of the Fae. You can be only one thing.”

The truth came to her a second before he spoke.

“You, Beth Carter, are a Druid.”

C
onn had hoped to keep
it from her a little longer. At first the knowledge, his alone, had pleased him. The Druids had played him false, and taking one of their bloodline to his bed would be amusing. That was when he still thought he wanted to mark her.

Now he wished he could take the knowledge back, because she was not stupid, and once she understood what she was, she would start to realize other things. None of them nice.

“She is uninitiated, untutored,” Conn said calmly, aware that Beth’s life hung in the balance. “She has only the most limited use of her power, and no understanding of it. A toothless lion.”

Miach did not sheath his dagger, but he relaxed his posture. Conn knew the question before he asked it. “Why not let her die?”

There were many possible answers to that question. Almost all of them, in this place, with this Fae, would end in their deaths. Miach had suffered at the hands of the Druids.

But looking around the room, it was also clear that he had adapted. Stayed in the world, as Conn had not. And that he had . . .
interests
here now. There were at least three dozen warriors in the room, and they all, to a greater or lesser degree, shared Miach’s blood.

An accomplishment. The Fae bred fitfully with one another, and often produced sickly, defective children. It was not unusual for a distraught Fae mother, driven by her desire for a perfect, beautiful child, to steal a human baby—substituting her own twisted changeling in the human babe’s place. If taken to nurse soon enough, a mortal child could absorb some of the magic of the Fae, and while it would not become immortal, a Fae-suckled babe could live hundreds of years.

Conn had once asked Miach’s father, also a great sorcerer and healer—though one whose methods differed greatly from his son’s—why this was so, that the Fae could be such a mighty race yet produce such weak offspring. Dian Cecht had explained that it was because of their age. The Fae, quite simply, lived too long.

Conn wondered how many generations of Miach’s descendants he was looking at. Ten, at least, for the blood to be so dilute in the two youths outside. Their concern for Beth, when they were out of sight of the purer-blood Fae, had been entirely human. And yet they had a place at Miach’s table. Among the true Fae it would not be so. Half-breeds of the first generation might be tolerated, although the women, in particular, would be treated like chattel, but further descendants would not bear, as these did, Fae arms.

To a man. Because what Conn was looking at was a host, and a host meant power. Power that would blow away like a dandelion puff on the breeze if the real Gentry came back.

“Why not let her die?” Miach had asked.

“Her husband has stolen the Summoner.” It was not a lie. It was also not the entire truth, but it was that part of the truth that mattered to Miach. Conn felt Beth stiffen. Later he would tell her the other parts of the truth, becoming more apparent to him by the minute, but for now he had to win Miach to their cause. “She will lead me to him. It is my
geis
to prevent the sword from being used. From summoning the Court back.”

The dagger in Miach’s hand disappeared, and the half-breeds waiting in the shadows drew back.

Miach beckoned Beth forward. “Let me see the wound.”

Now it was all down to bargaining.

B
eth did her best not
to shrink away when Miach pulled the coat from her shoulders. His strange eyes touched briefly on the wound, then kept going. His hand followed. Traced a pattern over her collarbone, around the wound, down over the slope of her breast. If she hadn’t reflexively done a similar thing hours earlier with her own hand, she would think he was molesting her.

Then his hand dipped south, into the top of her gown and cupped her breast and thumbed her nipple, and he was
definitely
molesting her. Arousal, swift and unwanted, coursed through her, and panic gripped her.
Never let them touch you.
Because they can make you enjoy it. She understood that now.

Conn’s hand shot out to grip Miach’s wrist. In the shadows blades were again drawn, weapons were cocked, and for a second everything teetered in the balance once more.

“Give her to me afterward,” Miach said. Reasonable, friendly, like he was dickering over the price of a car. He rolled his thumb over her nipple once more, his movement horrifyingly in time with the throb in her shoulder. He spoke to Conn but his eyes never left Beth’s face. He was drinking in her turmoil. Pleasure and pain, she realized, they were all one to the jaded, sensation-hungry Fae.

“No,” Conn said. It was a single word, but it carried menace. And his hand remained firm on Miach’s wrist. “She is mine.”

“She is dangerous. There are fools who would welcome the old Court back. Fae-lovers and half-breeds. Even among my own family. Until now, though, the return of the Court has been only a daydream for them. I am the only Fae sorcerer aboveground powerful enough to invoke the Summoner’s magic. And all know I will not allow the Court to return. But once they learn there is a living Druid, one who is weak and could be forced to their will, they will scheme. If they got hold of the woman and the sword both, they could unleash Hell on earth.”