Cold Iron

by D. L. McDermott

  “What is this Malaria? Her friend wants to take her to a hospital.”

  Miach swore. “You can’t take her to a hospital with that mark on her shoulder.”

  “If they can save Beth—”

  “Mercury is a poison to ordinary humans. The first thing they’ll do in the hospital is try to remove the geis. If they succeed, her wound will reopen and kill her.”

  “Miach,” he said. “I will not leave her like this. Even for the sword. If you want it recovered, you must come tend to her.”

  Miach tried to recall a time he had left South Boston when he did not intend to steal something, burn something down, or sell something he had stolen. All of his family lived in Southie and held their celebrations there. When he wanted open spaces, the wide sea, he went to its beaches. Treats for the endless grandchildren and greater-grandchildren, he went to its bakeries. Finery for his women, he went to its jewelers. Finery for himself—well, his tailors came to him.

  He contemplated taking the Porsche, which had been too pretty to sell, no matter what he’d told Conn, and instead tossed Liam the keys to the Range Rover and let the boy drive.

  When he arrived at the little Druid’s apartment, he found Conn of the Hundred Battles being assaulted by an Amazon. She was all of the adjectives he usually steered clear of in a woman: educated, expensive, aggressive. Tall for a female, nearly five foot ten, wearing, ludicrously, for the New England weather in autumn, beaver-fur Eskimo boots, the tiniest of madras shorts, and a thick woolen pullover. She was all tanned legs and flying golden hair.

  “Give me that!” She lunged for the cell phone Conn held in the air.

  He crushed it in the palm of his hand—reducing it to a twist of metal and plastic. “No hospital,” Conn said.

  “She needs to see a doctor.” The woman’s fury made her even more appealing.

  And you need a proper seeing to, Miach thought. “I’m a doctor,” he said. It was true, in the strictest sense of the word. He was a learned man, and he knew far more about the body than any human physician. He’d had lifetimes to learn.

  The woman turned to look at him, and he resisted the instinct to use his glamour on her.

  But Conn saw. “I would wager she is not from your neighborhood, Doctor Miach. Beth is in the bedroom.”

  The sight of the blond Amazon and the thought of bed were enough to conjure images of spreading her tanned legs wide and taking her. With the fur boots on. Yes, that appealed to him. But first he had to prevent the Betrayer’s little Druid from dying. If he could.

  Conn watched as Miach examined Beth. The blond Amazon was right. He should have taken her to a hospital. Miach had saved her life once tonight, against his better judgment. He might not do it again.

  Conn had never felt so powerless. He knew everything there was to know about killing, and next to nothing about saving lives. Even battlefield triage had seldom interested him. Whether his enemies, or those who fought under him, lived or died of their wounds had meant precious little to him.

  The sorcerer sat down on the edge of the bed, felt Beth’s forehead, and gently opened her eyelids. “How long ago did she contract the malaria?”

  Helene answered, a little calmer now, “About a year ago, when they went to Mexico. Shouldn’t she be in a hospital?”

  Miach didn’t answer. He peeled back the quilt Conn had wrapped her in, revealing the angry red geis.

  Helene gasped. “What is that?” She turned a fierce stare on Conn. “What the hell did you do to her?”

  “He saved her life,” Miach answered curtly. Conn knew the sorcerer didn’t like the humans outside his little fiefdom to learn of the Fae, but he also knew he couldn’t allow Miach to hurt Beth’s friend.

  “Get her out of here,” Miach said. “And tell Liam to bring the ice up from the car.”

  “Why is the geis still so red and angry?” Conn asked. He knew now that he had not been entirely selfless when he’d accepted Miach’s dictate that this was the only way to save Beth. If she died, it would be his fault. He had to know. “Did my mark do this to her?”

  “Malaria is a disease that can lie dormant in the body. The wound from the Summoner weakened her, gave the disease a chance to flourish. Your mark closed the wound, but she’s a Druid. The magic in her is naturally resistant to Fae control. Her body is fighting too many battles at once.”

  “This is crazy,” Helene said. “All this magic and fairy nonsense. Drop the act—you’re going to kill her.”

  She backed toward the door. Miach stood. “Get Liam and the ice. I’ll take care of the woman.”

  “She’s Beth’s friend,” Conn warned.

  “I won’t harm her,” Miach said. Then he struck. And Conn remembered why the Fae hosts took their sorcerers into battle.

  He couldn’t see the magic Miach used—not the way the Druids could. They trained themselves to harness Fae magic, tuned their bodies to sense its currents. For the Fae, magic was like air, invisible but always there. But he saw its effects. Helene slumped, her back against the door, her eyes fluttering as Miach took hold of her mind.

  She gasped for air. “Don’t hurt her,” Conn warned.

  Miach rolled his eyes in exasperation. “I’m trying not to, but she’s fighting me.”

  The sorcerer crossed the tiny room in one stride and caught the Amazon as she went boneless in his arms. “She was too worried about her friend to take light suggestion. I had to cut off her breath until she blacked out. She’s only unconscious,” Miach assured him. “Get Liam and the ice.”

  “Don’t molest the woman,” Conn warned.

  “I’ll leave her on the sofa. She’ll come around soon enough. And your Druid will need a nursemaid.”

  The next several hours passed in a hellish blur. Conn brought up the ice and the medical supplies Liam indicated. The boy hovered, looking nervous, but Miach chased him from the room and told him to watch over the Amazon.

  Conn didn’t like the looks of the needles and strange fluids Miach wanted to use on Beth. “What is that one?”

  “It’s primaquine. This is what they would have given her in the hospital. It isn’t always effective, though. She’ll already have had a course of it when she was first infected. It can’t hurt, and it may help, but more important now is to bring her fever down.”

  She fought them the first time they lowered her into the icy bath, but not the second, and that worried Conn. “The fever has broken,” Miach explained. “Most attacks only last six to ten hours. She’s out of danger now. Wrap her up warmly and put her to bed.”

  Conn lifted her out of the bath and laid her on fresh towels on the bed. Once she was dry, he settled her under the soft cotton quilt. He could feel the work of aged hands in the fine sewing, was glad that Beth slept under that kind of protective magic. As he tugged the counterpane up to cover her shoulder, he looked at his geis on her pale skin, and froze.

  It had changed. The edges were no longer raw and red. The quicksilver ink lay smooth across her skin, shimmering faintly in the morning light slanting through the windows.

  And moving. In a sinuous circuit. Alive. Rewriting itself. His own symbol, the hundred-fold knot that told his history in its twisting pattern, was still there, but another pattern was emerging beneath it.

  He heard Miach enter the room and flicked the quilt over her shoulder.

  “The Druid is out of danger,” Miach said. “We must find the Summoner.”

  “Yes.” Conn said. “Helene will know where to find Beth’s ex-husband. Pity you had to knock her out.”

  “She’s awake. I doubt she likes either of us very much,” Miach said. “But it sounded as though she hates your Druid’s ex-husband more.”

  She did. They found Helene sitting on the sofa in Beth’s living room, looking daggers at poor Liam and nursing a cold cup of tea. “I want to see Beth,” she said.

 
“She’ll be up soon,” Miach assured her. “Tell us about her ex-husband.”

  She looked at Conn. “I thought you were working with him. With Frank. That’s what Beth thought. That all of this Ren Fair reject nonsense was to get her out of the way so Frank could steal the gold.”

  “Ren Fair reject?” Conn had absorbed a great deal of their popular culture in a few short days, more than a human mind would have been capable of, but the reference eluded him.

  And tickled Miach, who laughed. “She means your hair. You should cut it. Or perhaps not. She likes mine better, don’t you, Helene?” His voice was potent now with lures.

  “Someone should have gelded you ages ago, Miach,” Conn said. “We aren’t working with Frank, but we do want to recover the treasure from Clonmel.”

  Helene’s brow wrinkled. “What are you? FBI? Interpol?”

  These were words Conn did recognize, and useful ones, but Miach beat him to it.

  “Interpol,” Miach said smoothly, allowing the cadences of their native tongue to lace his speech. He was using a subtle glamour. While Conn recognized the necessity of it, he would not allow the sorcerer to hurt the woman—or make a conquest of her.

  “You know he smuggles more than antiquities, right?” Helene asked.

  “Tell us,” said Miach.

  Under Miach’s suggestion, Helene poured out what she knew about Frank Carter. Some of it Conn had guessed. The man was a charismatic charlatan, who had used his good looks and charm to build a career off the work of besotted women. Then he had found Beth, who was more valuable than any of his former conquests. What Helene saw as talent, Conn knew for Beth’s latent Druid powers.

  Conn risked a glance at Miach while Helene talked. The sorcerer was no fool. He would realize, as Conn had, that Beth was very close to becoming an operative Druid. She’d studied—not the Druidic method but a close enough modern equivalent, the historic method—for most of her life. She knew how to recognize patterns. And she’d been using her power for years, clumsily, and without benefit of training, to be sure, but she’d been dowsing the Fae successfully all the same.

  That Frank Carter was a smuggler and a thief did not surprise Conn at all, in light of his suspicions about the man. He found the human laws about drugs puzzling but understood that the unregulated kind Carter brought into the country could be deadly.

  “I think they roofied her,” Helene said finally. “When she refused to find him another site. I think he roofied her and made her do it. She wouldn’t go to the police, because she didn’t think anyone would believe her, but I think they . . .” She trailed off. “I shouldn’t be telling you this? Why am I telling you this?”

  “It’s a drug,” Miach said to Conn. “Humans use it on women like a glamour. It makes them pliant, suggestible, and robs them of memory.”

  “Beth remembers. She tries not to, but she remembers. I saw it in her mind.” And Frank Carter would suffer for it.

  “Beth wouldn’t want me telling you this,” Helene murmured.

  “Beth will wake up soon,” Miach said to Helene. “She’ll need fluids, and she should eat if she can. My grand—my sons—will stay here with you and get you anything you need. We’ll be back after we speak with Frank Carter.”

  Conn wanted to go at once, to pass to the location Helene had given them, but Miach warned that the city in that direction was crisscrossed with iron roadways and buildings, and passing would be a stop-and-go process fraught with peril. Driving was faster. The sorcerer placed a call to request a car. Twenty minutes later Conn followed Miach outside, and the Porsche pulled up to the curb. Nial got out and tossed Miach the keys.

  “I thought you said the Porsche was in Quincy, in pieces.”

  “Some things are too beautiful to destroy, as you should know,” Miach replied. He turned to Nial. “Look after the women. We’ll be back in a few hours.”

  The young man nodded and disappeared into the house.

  “Just how numerous are your progeny?” Conn asked as Miach started the car.

  “More descendants than children over the last few decades, but I have a mind to change that now.”

  “Not with Helene. Beth wouldn’t like it.”

  “And what would your little Druid do to me if she didn’t like how I treated her friend? Use her voice? She’s close to it now, isn’t she?”

  So Miach had seen Beth’s geis, seen how it had changed. “Yes. What will you do?”

  “I don’t know. But you were right when you said that I stand now where you stood then. I have kindred to protect. I will not let the Court return to destroy them.”

  “And I will not let you harm Beth.”

  “Patience, Betrayer. I’m not your enemy, yet. Let us find your little Druid’s ex-husband first.”

  “Yes,” Conn agreed. “Let us find him, and his friend, and kill them.”

  “I made soup.”

  Beth decided she must be dreaming again, because the voice was Helene’s and Helene had never made anything vaguely resembling soup in her life. She liked the dream on Granny’s sofa better. Especially when Conn had been in it and had promised never to stop.

  Conn. Her sex clenched at the thought of him, and her shoulder tingled. Then she remembered the geis and opened her eyes.

  Helene was holding a bowl of something steaming. Beth felt achy and sore, as though she’d run a mile and lifted weights on a cold, rainy day. And she felt thirsty. And hungry. And tingly. Shoulder tingly and sex tingly.

  “You don’t cook,” Beth said suspiciously.

  “I reheated it. Liam brought it from the place down the street.”

  “Liam?”

  “Doctor Miach’s son. I still don’t understand why a doctor works for Interpol, or why his sons work for Interpol, too, or how he can have sons that old, but he and Conn went to get the gold and the sword back from Frank.”

  That part, at least, made sense. The rest . . . Conn must have called Miach when she passed out. She remembered ice. Cold baths. Ugh. Miach had seen her naked. And the two of them must have glamoured Helene, because when she talked about them, she had that slightly fuddled expression Dave Monroe had worn in the gallery.

  Beth took the soup. It was the best thing she had ever tasted, and she didn’t even like soup. Helene sat down on the bed. “I don’t like the other one.”

  “The other what?” Beth asked, wondering how many lies she was going to have to tell.

  “Miach’s other son. Nial. He makes me nervous. And he wouldn’t let me go out. He sent Liam for the soup. I’ve been staying in here, because I don’t like him. Liam’s all right, but even he acts weird when Nial is there. Nial’s cell phone keeps ringing and he goes out in the hall to talk, like he doesn’t want me to hear. Then they go out there and argue together. I’m afraid they won’t let me leave when I try to.”

  They were Southie thugs, organized criminals, no doubt planning their next heist. She could hardly tell Helene that, though. And these, to judge from what Miach had intimated, were the nice Southie criminals who didn’t want to kill her for revenge, or use her to bring back the Fae Court. She couldn’t tell Helene that either. Liam, she remembered, had brought her the shawl. He’d been kind. Nial she had seen almost nothing of, only his face, so similar to his brother’s, another echo of Miach’s, turning green while Miach inked her with the quicksilver.

  “Conn and Doctor Miach,” Beth began, feeling her way through the lie, “left them here to protect us. They’ve probably got lots of other cases going on, and that’s why they’re on the phone all the time.” And partly because she wanted to keep Helene busy, and partly because she was ravenous, she said, “Is there anything else to eat?”

  Helene brought her a feast of sorts, also from the greasy spoon down the street. Slightly congealed cheeseburger and reheated french fries and melted milk shake. She ate it all. She took a bath, a perfectly norma
l-temperature bath, full of bubbles, while Helene fussed over the wreck of Beth’s black silk gown crushed on the bathroom floor.

  “It might have been salvageable—the tears anyway—if someone hadn’t stepped on it afterward. There’s a boot print in car grease on here. Miach, no doubt. But then, you’re murder on dresses anyway.”

  Beth noticed how often Helene used the sorcerer’s name. It worried her, but she didn’t know how to warn her friend without giving something away—or seeming as crazy as she had in the gallery. Beth knew she had to apologize for that, but first she had to get dressed.

  After her bath she pinned up her hair and ducked into the walk-in closet off her bedroom, which in an earlier time had probably been a room all its own. Now it was Beth’s secret girly indulgence, complete with a soft carpet and a mirrored dressing table.

  She slipped into a pair of forest-green cords—chagrined when she realized she’d chosen them because she thought Conn would like them. The silk peasant blouse she chose because she liked it, and the boiled wool vest with the pewter clasps she chose because it was warm. She found a pair of soft, fringed moccasins she hadn’t worn in years, then emerged to grovel before her friend.

  Helene wasn’t there. And the apartment was oddly silent. Beth pushed open the door to the hall, and walked, as softly as she could, across the wooden floor, but it announced her passing as it always did.

  Liam and Nial were there in the living room, and so was Helene, bound and gagged and kneeling in the middle of the carpet.

  And holding a knife to her throat was Miach’s nearly full-blooded son, Brian.

  Chapter 7

  It was difficult to imagine Beth living in the antiseptic precincts of Frank Carter’s home. A condominium—Conn thought of it as a cell in a hive—with staring blank walls and polished glass surfaces.

  It was empty. Not just of people, although it was that, too. It was empty of the thing he had never realized he most sought in human habitations: warmth.

  Miach peered at a heap of white powder on a glass table, dipped a finger in it, tasted it. “Your Druid’s husband has expensive habits,” he observed.