Silver Skin (A Cold Iron Novel) (23 page)

Not over Miach’s. Even though Miach’s symbol had been drawn with Magic Marker and would fade. And Finn’s mark would be with her forever, or until he released her.

“Anywhere but my shoulder,” she said.

“I can do it as an armband, if you like. Stretch the characters out, make it pretty, delicate. Easier to remove, if the time comes,” he said.

She nodded and held out her arm. He took a small silver pen, Fae workmanship, she was certain, and outlined a design over her biceps in silver.

“Nice muscles for a girl,” he said. “Not Dad’s type at all, though. If you’re lucky, he’ll leave you alone once the novelty of flaunting you to Miach wears off.”

She didn’t want to think about it. “Is Nieve all right?” she asked.

Garrett painted something over his design that felt cold and sparkled. “It’s something I came up with to numb the pain,” he explained, avoiding the question.

“The Druids took her away,” said Helene. “I was afraid they were going to hurt her.”

“They did,” said Garrett curtly. He opened a drawer in the worktable and took out a silver bottle shaped like an inverted lily, and a matching silver needle nearly a foot long with a sinuous handle and a tip that was so fine Helene couldn’t tell where it ended.

“It’s better if you look away,” he said.

She did. She felt the first jab like a pinch and bit her lip to keep from crying out. It wasn’t the individual pricks that were so bad but the cumulative effect circling her arm with a ribbon of pain.

Garrett went on jabbing her and said, “Why are you doing this? Miach isn’t worth your freedom.”

“I’m not doing it entirely for him, Garrett. I’m doing it for myself and Nieve, too. I want to make sure that Brian and his Druids can’t hurt anyone else.”

“Miach ordered your friend killed. He knocked you out cold, and his right hand left you locked in a car at a rest stop for ten hours. How can you forgive him for all that?”

It came to her that Garrett wasn’t talking about Miach. He was talking about himself and Nieve. “People can change, Garrett.”

“People, maybe. The Fae are different.”

“That’s what they tell themselves,” said Helene. “An excuse for not learning from their mistakes.”

“That’s a dim view of our kind,” said Finn from the doorway, “for a woman who is about to give up her soul for one of us.”

“I didn’t realize you got my soul in the bargain,” said Helene. “I wasn’t even sure you wanted my body.”

Finn examined the half-finished mark on her arm. “Finish it later,” he said to Garrett. “The vehicles you described have been spotted parked near the university museum. I need to know how many Druids there were, what kinds of weapons they had, what type of casting you think they are capable of.”

Helene told him everything she knew about Brian’s Druids. She drew him a floor plan of the museum. She couldn’t perfectly remember the layout of the storage bay in the basement where the solstice gate was. She’d been down there so few times.

“I think the aisle leading down to the staging areas is the fourth one, but I’m not certain,” she admitted.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Finn. “I expect you to come to guide us. Do these Druids have the power of voice?”

“What is that?” asked Helene.

“If you have to ask, then you haven’t heard it. It’s their most dangerous skill. But also the most difficult for their practitioners to master. It’s like the compulsion in Fae speech, but far more powerful. The force in a Fae’s words are natural, inherent, physical, and magical. The Druids studied it and developed an answer to it. An artificial voice. It can even carry physical force.”

“I didn’t hear or see anything like that,” she said. “But Miach thought that these Druids weren’t well trained, or very strong.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Garrett. “I’ll cast a silence as soon as we make contact with them.”

“What else works against Druids? Is there something they don’t like, the way the Fae dislike cold iron?” Helene asked. She didn’t want to walk into the museum and face them without a weapon, and she had only the silver knife Miach had given her tucked in her handbag.

Finn walked to a large cabinet on the back wall of the room and opened it, revealing a small arsenal. She’d come to recognize Fae weapons by their silver hue and sinuous organic workmanship, but he didn’t reach for one of the blades arrayed on the wall. Instead, he reached for what appeared to be a gun.

“It’s been a long time since I encountered one,” said Finn, loading the weapon with equally silvery shells. “But I expect they won’t like bullets.”

• • •

M
iach wasn’t surprised when the
doors of the van opened and he discovered that they were back at Helene’s museum. The solstice gate was there. The Druids now had the Prince Consort’s arm, and he suspected that the smarter ones had come to the same conclusion that he had: that it could be used to open the gate.

Maybe not all the way, maybe not enough to allow the Wild Hunt out, but enough for their purposes. The wall had been built to balance on the brink of two worlds. And that balance had been jeopardized when Beth Carter had flung the Prince Consort—or most of him, at least—through.

Miach had studied the arm and its silver skin enchantment for months. He did not know how it was cast, he did not know how to break it. What he did know was that no matter where he placed the arm, the severed end of the limb oriented itself along the ley lines, toward the nearest solstice gate, and whenever it was left alone, it crept closer, in this plane, to the entrance to the next.

A powerful attraction, the arm to its body, enough to span planes of existence.

Enough to pull the Prince Consort’s body through if the right conditions were met. Miach knew what those conditions were. He hoped these Druids didn’t.

They dragged him into the museum by way of the loading dock, where he was sorry to see the corpse of the guard who had been fond of Helene. If he got through this and she walked away from him forever, it would be difficult to blame her.

The Druids weren’t skilled enough to open the card locks with their magic, which frustrated Brian, who also lacked that skill. Miach refused to do it for them. The more he could slow them down, the likelier it was that Elada or Conn could get free, reach them, and stop the Druids. He knew it might cost human lives, that any security guard unfortunate enough to answer the alarm would probably be killed by his son or his crazed followers, but more would die if the Prince Consort was freed or, Dana forbid, the gate opened.

They chained him to one of the massive shelves in the storage bay while they put the gate back together. Another thing he had Helene to thank for: knocking the lintel stone off the gate. It bought him an hour and a half, as none of the Druids had any skill with the forklift.

Then his hopes dissipated when his son unchained him.

“I would kill you first,” said Brian, “as a kindness, because I don’t think the Court will treat you kindly when they realize you could have freed them, and didn’t. But I think you have to be alive when we fling you through.”

So they had figured it out. That the gate had rebalanced itself. That it had adjusted to the weight of one more Fae—or most of a Fae—on the other side. And that to realign it long enough to pull the Prince through, they would need to fool it by replacing the weight.

“How can you be sure it will work?” asked Miach. “I’m a whole Fae. The Prince went through less one arm.”

“We could cut your arm off,” said Brian, “if it looks as though the vortex won’t take you. But we’d have to do that at the last minute, to be sure you went through alive.”

Miach said nothing. He only watched the wild-eyed, unkempt Druids assemble in front of the gate and argue about how to place the arm. Another delay, but there could only be so many, and then they would begin.

The Druids finally agreed to place the severed end of the arm toward the opening of the gate. The second it was aligned, the stones around the portal began to hum and the earth groaned.

Brian dragged Miach forward, to kneel behind the arm, and held him pinned there. Then the Druids closed in around them in a circle.

Their chanting was ragged, their pronunciation poor. They would not have been able to move a pebble if they didn’t have the arm, but they did have the arm.

The shrieking of the earth, of the planes rubbing against each other like tectonic plates, grew louder, and Miach felt the currents of the Prince Consort’s enchantment—the magic that had turned his arm into silver—swirl around him. Under other circumstances he would have been fascinated.

Now, though, he grieved, and not for himself.

The gate would balance itself. There was nothing he could do. It was bigger than him or the assembled Druids or any power that existed on either plane.

“Brian,” he said, looking up. He pitched his voice loud enough to be heard over the chanting and the groaning of the worlds.

The face he had seen come into the world and grow from boy into man was fixed avidly on the gate. He looked down at the sound of Miach’s voice.

“No matter what happens,” said Miach, “I want you to know that you are my son, and that I loved you.”

“It’s a little late for that, old man.”

Light burst from the gate. Miach felt its pull, but the iron chains were anchoring him to the ground.

The force that was now unstoppable tugged Brian toward the opening.

Miach gripped his son’s arm and said, “I’ll save you if I can.”

Brian tried to shake him off, his face a mask of horror. “What are you doing? What’s happening?”

“I’m not doing anything, Brian. It’s the arm, and its enchantment, and your Druids. And the gate. It’s going to rebalance itself. It’s used to having
almost
one more whole Fae on the other side, and you are
almost
a whole Fae.”

“No.” It came out a gasp, and was swallowed by the shrieking wind. Miach held fast to his son’s arm, but the cold iron prevented him from casting and weakened his grip.

Brian was ripped out of his grasp. There was a flash of light. Then a sound like a crack of thunder, and then total silence.

And standing in the gate was the Prince Consort.

Chapter 18

T
he Prince’s body, face, hands, clothing, hair, was all made of silver and glowed faintly in the light. But it was liquid metal, animated argent, and he walked and breathed like a living being when he could be nothing of the sort save through magic.

He stalked into the circle of awed Druids, his hair sweeping the ground as it went, the little silver leaves he normally wore woven into it the same color as all the rest of him, the lace at his cuffs and the velvet of his frock coat and the stitching on his long lean blue jeans all silver.

He fitted the arm to its socket. His face contorted. Then he threw back his shoulders and stretched his arm, now attached to his body as though it had never been severed, out in front of him. He opened his fingers, palm up, to the ceiling, then closed them, and his hand turned to flesh. The effect rippled up his arm, over his face, through his hair, down his whole body until he stood in the circle restored, and laughed.

Then he noticed Miach kneeling on the ground beneath his iron net.

“Miach MacCecht,” said the Prince Consort. “I see you’ve met my Druids.”

The Druids crept closer, fascinated by the Prince’s transformation.

The Queen’s lover eyed the iron shackles and the chain-link net. “I take it,” he said in the musical voice that was more beautiful than that of any Fae save the Queen, “that you objected to freeing me from the void.”

“I would fling you back through,” said Miach, “if I thought the wall could stand it.”

“Brave words, for a Fae shackled in cold iron. And ironic. You scorn the cruelty of the Court, but you have flung your own son into their midst. They know of your treachery, Miach MacCecht, that you alone beside the Betrayer have had the power to free them, all these years. And you have not. What will they make, I wonder, of your son?”

“Better my son than the whole of humanity,” said Miach.

The Prince sighed. “How tiresomely noble,” he said. Then he beckoned his Druids closer and pointed at Miach and said, “Kill him.”

• • •

H
elene had asked Finn for
a weapon before they’d left his house. He’d asked her if she knew how to fire a gun, and when she’d said yes, he’d given her a small pistol, made entirely of silver. Then he’d traced his finger along the half-finished tattoo on her upper arm.

Charlestown was on the same side of the river as Cambridge, so they were able to drive there directly. The museum looked strange to Helene, and when they got close, she realized why. Usually there were tiny lights in the bushes in front, trained on the facade and the exhibit banners, and a security light at the back door on the loading dock, illuminating the parking lot. Tonight the building was entirely dark.

The back door was unlocked. Finn checked the security guard, who was slumped at his desk, and then shook his head. Helene had known the man for six years. He was a veteran and retired firefighter and grandfather. She choked back tears. Brian and his Druids had to be stopped.

She showed Finn the cage elevator and the stairs, and he divided his forces, which numbered nearly fifty half-breeds, humans, and his Fae son. Garrett took ten men in the elevator, and Helene, Finn, and the rest of the company took the stairs.

They were on the stairs when the earthquake—or whatever it was—struck, and Helene almost tumbled down. But Finn grasped her tight and steadied her until it passed, offering a faint, wry smile and saying, “There’s no point in all this if I don’t get my prize at the end.”

But she couldn’t shake the feeling that his interest in her was impersonal and calculating.

When they reached Storage Three, Finn’s captain, a brawny strong-blood armed to the teeth with silver knives, slipped inside the door and disappeared for the space of several minutes. He put his head back out and said, “Ten Druids, at the end of the vault. Chanting. Something’s happening, too. Magic. Not sure what kind. There’s seven aisles. They all bottom-out down there.”

Finn directed his men to fan out and creep up all seven of the aisles so they would flank the solstice gate and cut off any possible retreat. He took Helene with him up the wide center aisle, moving in the shadows until they were within sight of the gate.

The lintel stone was back up. The slovenly Druids were chanting. Finn motioned for her to stay hidden in the aisle, but then a bright light flashed and where Brian had been standing at the center of the Druid circle was only Miach, chained in cold iron.

Her heart was in her throat. It was like seeing a noble beast—a lion—caged. They were going to kill him. That much was plain. And Helene discovered that the future stretched empty before her without him in it.

In the solstice gate stood the Prince Consort.

“Kill him,” said the Prince.

“No,” screamed Helene.

She ran forward and fired high. Miach was kneeling. The Druids were not. She shot three of them and pushed past two more. Then she was through the circle and her body was between Miach’s and the remaining Druids.

Finn’s men descended on the unkempt figures while Helene trained her weapon on Miach’s shackles.

“Hands first,” said Miach.

She shot through the shackles on his wrists, then on his ankles.

Behind Miach’s back, the Prince Consort unsheathed his sword.

At the opposite end of the circle, Finn did the same.

Miach stood, blasted the remaining Druids to smoking corpses with one hand, and pulled Helene close with another.

Then they
passed
. It was only a little distance, but it brought them outside the circle of dead Druids and out from between Finn and the Prince Consort.

“Are you all right?” Miach asked her.

“Yes. What happened to Brian?” she asked.

Miach’s face was unreadable. “Brian is gone. He has his wish. He will finally see the glory of the Fae Court.”

He pushed Helene behind him suddenly and she saw why.

Finn and the Prince Consort had their swords raised and were circling each other warily.

“I have no quarrel with you, Finn,” said the Prince Consort.

Finn nodded. “True, but I’ve made a bargain to save the sorcerer, in exchange for something I want.”

Miach stiffened and turned to her. “Helene?”

“It was the only way. Elada and Conn are trapped in Clonmel. Your family are in the hospital. Deirdre wouldn’t come and she took Kevin’s cold iron away and ordered him to stay in the house. Finn was the only one who would help me.”

She saw the Prince Consort smirk. “Then after I kill Finn, the girl is mine.”

“You may have difficulty killing all of us,” said Elada, who had appeared beside Miach, sword in hand.

The Prince considered. “Today, perhaps,” he conceded, and without warning, he disappeared.

“Where did he go?” asked Helene.

“He
passed
,” said Elada with evident disust. “Likely to another continent.”

Helene could see the veins in his hands black against his pale skin.

“You’re still iron poisoned,” said Miach to his right hand.

“What about Beth and Conn?” asked Helene.

“Safe,” said Elada. “We killed all the Druids in Clonmel and Beth and Conn are traveling home now.”

And suddenly Helene wanted to cry. Miach would live. Beth was safe.

Finn held up his hand and beckoned her to his side.

She belonged to him now.

“No,” said Miach.

“No?” said Finn. “She bargained with me for your life. And you have it.”

“Let Helene go, Finn,” said Miach. “You can have any woman in Boston.”

“Yes,” said Finn in the pleasant voice that drew so many to his manner. “But I want yours.”

“No,” replied Miach. “You want to punish me. Choose another way.”

“Make it worth my while,” said Finn. “Or offer me something that I need.”

• • •

M
iach knew what Finn wanted.
It would gall him to give it. He would have to humble himself, to swallow his pride.

Helene Whitney was worth it. Even if she walked out of here tonight and never spoke to him again.

“I will take Garrett back,” said Miach. “I will train him.”

“Whether he binds himself to a right hand or not,” stipulated Finn.

“No.” The boy himself had come up behind his father. “I don’t need Miach. I can teach myself.”

“You couldn’t even cast a simple silence tonight,” said Finn. “Do you agree, Miach MacCecht? The boy trains under you and will be tested and forged whether or not he takes a right hand.”

“If the boy has no right hand to watch his back, he will get himself killed. And bound to Nieve, he cannot make vows to a warrior. He’s your son. Don’t you want care what happens to him?”

“Yes,” replied Finn. “I do. Enough to allow him to make his own decisions, and his own mistakes.”

Finn was right and he was wrong. He had known so for some time. Known that he must allow his children the freedom to find their own happiness—or their own destruction. That did not make it any easier to admit in public, but for Helene, he would do it.

“I will train the boy,” said Miach, “under the conditions you demand, if you release Helene.”

“Agreed,” said Finn.

Miach did not turn immediately to Helene because he feared his relief would be visible to everyone if he locked eyes with her. So instead, he dickered with Finn about how to dispose of the bodies and what to steal to make it look like an art heist gone bad.

“Something from the modern paintings gallery,” suggested Helene.

At Miach’s raised brows she said, “It’s the director’s favorite collection.”

The ass who hadn’t thought Helene was worth a raise in six years. That was good enough for Miach, even though he had no interest in contemporary paintings. He could find a fence to sell it to someone who did.

In the end Finn took the bodies of the Druids, Miach selected the paintings to be stolen, and the leader of the Fianna offered Elada the keys to one of his vehicles to drive Helene home. There was nothing they could do for the dead watchman, and there would only have been countless deaths in the future if Brian’s Druids had not been stopped.

Miach walked Helene out to the car Finn had lent Elada, held the door open for her, and then closed it when she was settled inside. He gestured for Helene to roll down the window, and she did, which was a positive sign.

“I won’t ask you to come home with me tonight,” he said. “But when you’re ready to have this”—he touched the freshly inked tattoo on her arm—“removed, I’ll be happy to take care of it for you.”

She smiled and nodded and Elada pulled away from the curb.

Miach MacCecht had watched Helene Whitney walk out of his life once before. He had been patient, and she had come back. He must be patient now again, but this time, when she returned, he was determined that he would give her a reason to stay.

• • •

E
lada didn’t return to Miach’s
after dropping Helene Whitney off at her Back Bay apartment. He was tired and hungry, and after two thousand years, he was no longer bound to the sorcerer. That did not mean that he meant to leave South Boston, or ally himself with another Fae, flock to Finn’s banner, or find some other occupation.

It meant he had an obligation to repay.

Also, he wanted a decent meal and didn’t think he was likely to get one at this hour at Miach’s house with Nieve away at Finn’s.

So he drove to Maire’s. The South Boston widow who had been his consort for fifteen years now was a light sleeper and used to his irregular hours. She opened the door of the narrow two-story row house he had bought her—paid the mortgage after her marine husband had been killed in action leaving her with only a government pension and two small boys to raise—in a fine silk wrapper from Italy that had fallen off a truck Elada had hijacked.

She looked happy to see him. She always looked happy to see him. She had been feeding him and sleeping with him and bandaging his minor wounds, the ones he didn’t think worth curing with magic, for fifteen years now, and she had never once greeted him with anything but welcome.

In return he had taken care of her financially, though she insisted on working at the elementary school as a lunch aide to keep an eye on the boys when they were young and then later for the routine. And he had taken a firm hand with the boys, made sure, at her request, that they learned trades instead of crime.

She had been good to him, and she deserved better than life had given her. She brought him a beer as he sat in the tiny living room and ten minutes later a plate loaded with steaming bacon and hot eggs and buttery toast.

He ate his eggs, his bacon, and his toast, then took her upstairs and made her sigh and sob and then snuggle up next to him, with her dead husband’s photograph on the nightstand, watching them.

When he’d asked her about it years ago, she’d said she didn’t want to hide anything from him and that she thought he’d be all right with her taking up with one of the Fair Folk, one of the Gentry, because that way she wasn’t replacing him with another man.

She was lying with her head on his chest, and he was stroking her hair when he said, “Miach has released me.”