Cold Iron

by D. L. McDermott

  Beth circled the rink, while Frank, Egan, and the woman clung together sharing a flask and ignoring the glares of the skate guards. Until the woman whooped, glided with drunken grace over to Beth, and grabbed her by the arms. She curled her fingers into the sleeves of Beth’s coat and swung them both into an arc, then jumped into the air in a clumsy imitation of a pirouette. She came down hard on top of Beth, knocking her flat on the ice.

  And then she’d skated off, leaving Beth sprawled on the cold hard surface.

  Beth tried to get up, but her left arm wasn’t working. It didn’t hurt, much. A dull pain. Sprained, most likely.

  Camp counselor Beth, older sister Beth, capable Beth—she had been all those things before Frank wore her away—ticked through all the things she should do for a sprain: rest, ice, elevation, then called out to her husband.

  Frank’s perfect brow wrinkled. He skated to her side, obviously annoyed. Beth asked him to take her home. Her spouse turned to look at Egan and his girlfriend, clowning at the center of the rink.

  Frank told her he wasn’t ready to go home yet. She wasn’t badly hurt, after all, and the rink was closing soon. If Beth wanted to spend the rest of the afternoon sitting on the benches, that was her business. He skated away.

  She’d never felt so desolate, so abandoned, in her life.

  Until tonight. Frank crouched over her now, curiously uninterested in her, but clearly fascinated by the wound. He leaned close to touch it—not tenderly, not carefully, but with the malignant curiosity of a child who has just plucked the wings off a fly. He spread the ruined velvet and prodded. She sobbed. And she was not the sobbing type.

  The edges of the wound were strangely curled and black. Conn had said the Summoner was steeped in death. She knew she needed help, that this was no ordinary wound and that she had to sacrifice her pride and appeal to the man she loathed most. “Frank,” she gasped, her voice still constricted from the fall. “You can’t leave me like this. There’s something about the sword. Something that kills.” If she’d doubted it before, she didn’t now. There was creeping death in that bloody furrow.

  “No,” he insisted, leaning back, the nasty look gone now. “It’s just a scratch.” But he was looking at it like it was a hole in the universe, a black void without end.

  Icy fear gripped her.

  “Frank.” She tried to rise, but her rib cage was still achingly tight from her hard landing. “I need help. And you need me. Or you’ll never find another site again.”

  His handsome face went blank in that cool, detached expression he used when he was determined to ignore her. Her heart sank. She remembered crawling across the ice, hauling herself up with her good arm on the barrier, slipping and struggling to the exit, making it all the way to the ticket window to ask calmly and rationally for help. And to be ignored because she had been calm and rational. She was going to have to do it again, and she wasn’t at all confident that this time she could be calm or rational, or that she could be put back together again.

  “I don’t need you anymore,” Frank said. “The guy who’s buying this sword, he’s better than you are. Doesn’t need a map or anything. I’m sick of catering to you, depending on your moods for my next find. You can’t even take a chemical shortcut. You’re such a lightweight; you passed out before we got anything useful out of you that time.”

  The time he’d drugged her. Had she really lived with this man? Slept with him? Everyone thought he was so charming, but he was far colder, in many ways more alien, than Conn. “Frank, if you don’t help me, I’ll die.”

  Doubt flickered over his face for one second, then it was gone. “Get over yourself,” he sneered. He straightened and turned his back on her. No more help there. She slumped back, heard him crunch over the broken glass, then heard his rubber soles squeaking across the marble floor, fading into silence.

  She gathered her strength and struggled to her feet. The wound pulsed in her shoulder. Modern Beth wanted to use words like toxin or infection, but the Beth who knew better thought, magic. If there was a life force that flowed through everything, the thing in the blade was its opposite.

  And it was kin somehow to the strange power inside her. She knew that. The same way she knew which way was north, even underground. Her fingers traced a circle around the wound. Auto-writing. A phenomenon she’d never believed in. A message from a part of her brain she could not consciously access. There was knowledge in her, knowledge that could save her, and she could not get at it.

  “Beth.”

  For a second she didn’t believe he was really there. Conn had left. He wasn’t coming back until tomorrow. And when he did come back, he would want the Summoner. She had made him a promise, and failed in it.

  “Beth.” Not a figment of her imagination. He had returned. He must have sensed or guessed the danger to the sword. She wished that he had not. The despair she felt at Frank, whom she hated, abandoning her tonight—as he had on the ice that day—was enough. She could not bear the same from this preternaturally beautiful creature, whom she did not hate. She’d thought that by now she knew how to protect herself from that kind of hurt, but it turned out she had learned nothing at all.

  “I will not let you die,” he said.

  She wanted to believe it. But there was more, and she had to tell him. “Conn,” she said, trying to concentrate, and it was becoming difficult now, the pain in her shoulder stealing her breath away. “I think Frank has a buyer for the sword.”

  That complicated matters, of course. They needed a Fae sorcerer and they needed one fast, but Conn knew nothing about the Aes Sídhe who inhabited this city. If there was a sorcerer or enclave here—and for Beth’s sake, he prayed there was—they might be the sword’s buyer. In which case, when he approached them, they would know he was weak, already in violation of his geis. That he, Conn of the Hundred Battles, could be defeated. And they would know what Beth must be, by the very fact that she still lived with the mark of the Summoner upon her.

  But it was not her strange power alone that sustained her. It was force of will. Strength of character. It made all the difference, he well knew, between survival and destruction. He had lost the two beings who mattered most to him in the world—his mistress and daughter—because they had given up, decided that torment was not worth suffering, sought refuge in madness and death. He had sensed their fear and their pain, and come for them—too late.

  Beth was fighting to stay alive, and an unfamiliar emotion stirred inside him at the sight. Gratitude. To her, and the goddess of the Fae.

  He was being given a second chance.

  A slim one. Even with what she was, the magic she had inside her that was holding the Summoner’s power at bay, Beth was fading. Her breathing was labored. Her movements were stiff. They must act quickly. He must make decisions, and a single mistake would end in death for both of them, his swift, hers less so. They would torture her, his Fae brothers and sisters, and they would make it last. Conn, they would finish quickly, for fear of his name and reputation, geis-burdened or not.

  “How do you find the Fae, Beth? When you locate our sites, how do you do it?”

  She bit her lip.

  “If you want to live, you must tell me.”

  “With a map,” she said it softly, as though it shamed her. “With a compass and a map. Sometimes with photos. I can feel it. A connection.” She clutched her stomach, the soft swell of her belly. “Here. Sometimes even with only a few lines drawn on a piece of paper, if they form a landscape, I can feel them.”

  “We need a map of the city, and the surrounding towns,” he said. They must hope there was an enclave inside the city proper. She would not last long enough to travel far.

  “At my apartment,” she said. “We have only tourist maps here. That I know how to find anyway,” she said. “Just of the T and the downtown streets.”

  “How far is your home?”

 
“About two miles. Somerville,” she supplied. The name had no meaning for him. The distance presented problems.

  He took her hand. “Come.”

  He led her from the gallery. She moved slowly. Too slowly. He stopped and picked her up. She made no protest. Her head rolled against his shoulder. “Stay awake, Beth. I need you.”

  Her eyes fluttered open. She smiled at him, but it was a glazed look.

  Outside, the cool air revived her, and she looked around. “Where are we going?”

  “We need a vehicle,” Conn said. “Do you have one?”

  “No. I walk or take the T, but it doesn’t run after midnight.”

  “Then we need a car. A fast one. I can pass, but I can’t carry you with me. And if the Fae enclave isn’t close by, we’ll need to cover ground quickly.”

  He set her down on a bench and examined the available options.

  “This is a student lot,” she said. “You can’t steal one of their cars.”

  “The Fae don’t steal. We accept gifts.”

  He selected one. Low slung, silver, with power and speed in her sleek chassis. Not Fae power, not Fae speed, but a counterfeit he did not at present have the luxury of scorning.

  He ran his hand over the locks. Harnessed energy. They called it electricity now, and they knew how to generate it, but not how to tease it out of living things, how to borrow it from one thing and lend it to another.

  He did, though. Conn was no sorcerer, but petty magic was the birthright of all Fae, and it served him well now. The locks sprang open under his fingers.

  He lifted Beth from the bench and carried her to the open door.

  “This is a Porsche,” she said.

  “Is that fast?” he asked innocently.

  Her eyes narrowed. “You know it is.”

  “Yes. I learned quite a bit in the last few days.”

  “I hope that includes how to drive.”

  “Ignition, gearshift, steering,” he said.

  “There are rules, too,” she said. “About using the roads.”

  “Rules are for the ruled,” he said, although he was already finding the maze of twisted lanes confusing as he pulled out of the lot. He risked a glance at Beth, expecting her to continue sparring with him, but she looked disappointed. “What is it?”

  “Nothing. Turn right at the next light.”

  He did. He checked on her once more. She was awake and alert, but strangely withdrawn.

  “What upset you?” he asked. It wasn’t physical pain afflicting her—though that was still there—nor was it fear.

  “That’s like what Frank used to say. Rules are for other people. Sometimes you act like him.”

  Ah. He had his suspicions about Frank. Beth didn’t have enough knowledge to work it out, but she had noticed the telling similarities. “I was born thousands of years ago, Beth. If anyone is like anyone else, surely it is Frank who is like me. I agree with you, though, that he shares some of the arrogance of the Fae, but with far less justification.”

  She was going to work it out eventually, the depth of her husband’s betrayal, but he hoped she would not need to learn it tonight.

  Her neighborhood was dark and quiet, mostly shingled triple-deckers with wide, open porches. Conn parked in front of the one she indicated and hurried around to her side to open the door and lift her from the car.

  “I can walk,” she said.

  “You need to save your strength,” he replied. And I like holding you. A strange thought, one to worry about later. For now he had to carry her up to the second floor as smoothly and painlessly as possible.

  Beth directed him to set her down in a chair at a well-worn desk, the lacquer in the center rubbed away from too much writing. She shivered and he brought her a blanket from the bed and wrapped it around her, though it was unlikely that it would help. The cold seeping into her was the void between stars.

  She rifled through drawers, searching for the right map. He took the opportunity to study her dwelling. Shabby, but comfortable. Everything of good quality, but well worn. And natural.

  So much he had encountered today, from the pots and pans used to make his meal in Harvard Square, to the chair he had sat upon to eat it, were spun from the muck of dead beasts under the earth. Dinosaurs was the word they used now. Dragons, krakens, behemoths, wyverns, is what his people had called them. And his people knew better than to make anything out of their rotting remains.

  Not so the people of Boston. Or Clonmel, for that matter. Plastics, polyesters, paints, even in food—the foul stuff was everywhere. But Beth’s apartment was mercifully almost free of it. The furnishings were wood and wool and cotton, all grown in the soil, and a heady note of beeswax polish.

  He liked the smell of her kitchen, the pantry a royal hoard of exotic spices. That was one of the things their technology did best, move things vast distances. All Fae could pass, but few could carry anything of much size with them. Before the great sailing ships, such spices were the province of kings and princes, imported overland at great cost and peril. Now even the simplest of meals could be seasoned like a banquet feast. He’d eaten a curry today in Central Square and liked it very much, and found himself wondering, as he ate, if Beth liked such things as well. Judging from the bags of fragrant mace and cardamom and cloves, he decided she did. There were a great many things he liked about Beth Carter.

  Then there were the books. The tiny stack beside her bed. The bigger stack at the foot. The stack beside the sofa. And the one on the coffee table. A precarious tower atop the refrigerator. A few more in the bathroom. And hundreds more on shelves lining the apartment.

  If she only knew there was more learning locked inside her than was contained in all of them.

  “This must be wrong,” she said.

  She had one hand clutching her stomach, the other splayed on the map before her.

  “Tell me.”

  “I can feel two centers. One here”—she pointed—“on the Charlestown peninsula. But it can’t be right.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s in the projects. Giant government housing complex. Crime ridden. It’s better now than it was ten years ago, but still full of Irish gangsters. What would the Fae be doing there?”

  “What we always do. Making mischief.”

  “The Fae are your people. Why can’t you feel them?”

  “For the same reason you can’t feel other humans. They are what I am. For the Fae, magic is like the air. It’s everywhere, but invisible. You feel us because you aren’t a creature of the magic.”

  “But I have some of it inside me,” she said quietly.

  “You do,” he agreed, wondering how much he could tell her without terrifying her further. Very little, he concluded. “Where is the other location?”

  She pointed again. “South Boston. Another Irish enclave. But this makes even less sense. There are several distinct sites here. There’s one here, in the no-man’s-land between the warehouse district and the seedier residential area. Mostly tumbledown houses, bars, and keno parlors. But there’s the echo of a site, here also.” She indicated a spot along the shore. “On the beach in Southie. It’s faint, but I can still feel it. And then one that’s very strong, right here.”

  Her finger landed in the middle of the blue water. Tiny islands were dotted like beads on a string across the harbor. A difficult anchorage, riddled with treacherous shoals. A perfect hiding place for a sorcerer’s lair.

  “That,” he said as he tapped the watery spot on the map, “belongs to the Fae we are looking for.”

  “That’s an empty spot in the middle of the harbor.”

  “Perhaps. Or perhaps it’s an island the mapmakers have been glamoured into overlooking. See how well-protected it is. No ship would try to pass that way, no matter what the chart says, because it’s surrounded by impassable shoals. But we w
ouldn’t have any better luck finding it than your mapmakers, unless we had permission.”

  “From whom?”

  “Whatever Fae sorcerer controls South Boston.”

  He insisted on carrying her back out to the car. Beth didn’t like the way he kept telling her to save her strength, but she didn’t ask what for. She suspected she wouldn’t like the answer.

  The pain in her shoulder was constant and it hurt to breathe, but she tried not to think about it. It could not possibly last forever. She only had to endure it a little while longer. Until they found the Fae sorcerer.

  He settled her in the passenger seat, buckling the seat belt over her thick woolly blanket. He’d wandered around the apartment while she’d worked, thumbing through books. She’d wondered what he was doing when he’d disappeared into the kitchen, but now she detected the soft fragrance of cardamom and the sharp scent of cloves clinging to his skin. There was something strangely reassuring about it, a sense of connectedness between them that made her dare to hope she would come through this okay.

  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.