Cold Iron

by D. L. McDermott

  “Ex-husband,” Conn corrected.

  “You suspect he has Fae blood,” Miach guessed.

  “It fits. The preternatural charisma. The compulsion to take—to steal—as by right. The appetite for luxury.”

  Miach looked around the apartment. Colorless, cold, divorced from the natural world. “If he can live like this, his blood is dilute.”

  “He has been using Beth to find the mounds for some time.” And he had used crude human poisons to violate her mind and more, and for that he would pay. “He told Beth he had a buyer for the Summoner, which means he is acting for someone else. The progenitor to whom he owes his Fae blood, perhaps.”

  “He is not mine,” Miach said. “And he doesn’t look like any of the Fianna. But he could be from one of the New York septs. If so, we must find him quickly. The Fae who inhabit Manhattan and the Hudson River Valley are decadent as the old Court. They learned nothing from our downfall. They would turn your Druid inside out with torture and force her to use the sword.”

  “And what did you learn, Miach?” Conn knew the sorcerer had been with the Court when his daughter died.

  “You are right. I was there,” Miach said, sensing the direction of his thoughts. “And I did nothing to stop them. But neither did I touch her. Not even when she was offered.”

  “That is hardly a penance.”

  “No,” Miach replied. “This was my penance.” He unbuttoned his shirt, revealing an ugly scar running down the center of his chest. He’d been split open. Stem to stern.

  “We thought the Druids had only the magic we gave them, but we were blind in our arrogance. They studied our power, learned to harness and focus it, as only our best sorcerers did. Imagine their delight when they were no longer confined to studying it at a distance, coaxing it from the soil and the trees and the dumb beasts. They wanted to see it firsthand.”

  “Thank you,” Conn said.

  “For what?”

  “For not killing Beth.”

  Miach shrugged. “It was clear she was your woman first, and a Druid second. But if it comes down to it, choosing between her life and preventing the return of the Court, I will not hesitate to kill her. All I can promise you now is that if the Manhattan Fae gain hold of the sword, I will make the Druid’s death quick and painless.”

  “What is it you want, Brian?” Beth took another step into the room. She could see Helene trembling, the point of the knife pressed into her throat. A single wrong move and she would die.

  “The sword,” said Brian.

  “I don’t have it.”

  “No, but your ex-husband does. Call him.” He tossed her a cell phone. “Tell him to bring it here. No tricks, and no police. Or I cut her throat.”

  Beth’s hands trembled. She dialed. The phone rang. And rang. And went to voice mail, as she knew it would. After the other night at the museum, there was no way Frank would answer her call. And if she told Brian that, Helene and she were dead. Their only value to him lay with the sword.

  “The old man will be back soon,” Nial said, eyeing the door uneasily.

  “Call him again,” Brian instructed. She did. No answer. “Right, then,” he said, yanking Helene up by her hair. “We take them with us.”

  Beth didn’t need the Druidic voice in her head to tell her that she and Helene were as good as dead if they left with Brian. She had to keep them talking and pray Conn and Miach returned in time.

  “What do you want with the sword?” Beth asked, stalling.

  “To summon the Court back, you stupid cow,” Brian replied.

  Beth scanned the faces of the other two half-breeds. Nial’s was hard now, but Liam looked worried. “Is that what you want, too, Liam?” she asked. “The Court back? Conn says they aren’t exactly kind to half-breeds.”

  “He would say that,” Nial spat. “He’s the Betrayer, after all. He’s why we live like this, hiding from your stupid laws, instead of ruling over you.”

  “They’ll honor us for freeing them, give us weapons and power the way they gave it to the Druids before,” Liam recited. He must have heard it many times, probably from Brian. Still, he wasn’t convinced. Beth knew she had to use that. She desperately needed an ally here.

  “Do they do that now, the true Fae who are free?”

  “No,” Liam admitted. “The other true Fae despise half-breeds. Except for the old man—and the Fianna.”

  “Father and the Fianna are weak from living among humans so long,” Brian cut in.

  “That whole power sharing thing didn’t work out very well with the Druids, did it?” Beth asked. “You think the Court will trust anyone with that kind of power again?”

  “They’ll need enforcers and overseers,” Brian said. “Just as they always have. And they’ll trust their own blood sooner than they would humans again.” He turned to Nial. “Take them down to the car.”

  “Wait!” Beth said. “Conn was telling Miach the truth. I don’t know how to do Druid things. Even if I had the sword, I wouldn’t know how to use it.”

  Brian’s eyes turned hard and glittery. “The knowledge is locked inside that pretty Druid head of yours. I don’t know how to get it out, but I’m acquainted with a true Fae who does.”

  A true Fae like Conn who could crack her mind like an egg, compel her to do almost anything and torture her to death once he was through. She would not, could not, let Helene share that fate. “I’ll come quietly if you let Helene go,” she offered.

  Brian laughed. “Now why would I do that, when there’s so much fun to be had?” He yanked Helene’s head back, and Beth saw her eyes, wild and frightened, lock with Brian’s.

  Helene swayed. Her taut body relaxed in her bonds, and she stopped whimpering, but her eyes screamed. Brian slid a hand inside the collar of her pullover, and Beth could see the revulsion in Helene’s wide pupils.

  Brian looked up at Beth as he fondled his incapacitated victim. “I can’t compel a Druid like you, that’s true. But I’m almost full-blooded Fae. I can compel an ordinary human. I can slip inside your friend’s mind, make her enjoy the things I do to her, and leave just enough of her mind free to know.”

  Beth felt a sick despair. As long as Brian threatened Helene, she knew she would do everything he asked. He had no need to compel her.

  “I don’t think you should touch her, Brian,” Liam warned. “The old man wants her for himself.” Liam looked nervous, and with good reason. He was caught between his patriarch and his elder “brother,” and Beth didn’t think either of them liked to be crossed.

  But it had been the wrong thing to say to Brian. Beth knew it at once.

  Brian licked his lips. “Even better. I’m tired of the old man calling dibs on every decent piece of ass that crosses his path.”

  “He won’t like it, Brian,” Liam insisted.

  “Do you want to live under the old man’s heel forever, Liam?” Brian asked, letting Helene go and advancing on his brother. “Because you’re either with me, or you’re against me. He’ll never let you have your pretty painter girl from Cambridge. Never let you go to law school, never let you build a life outside that tiny, dirty little slum.”

  “I know, Brian,” Liam said softly. Beth felt for him. She understood what it was like to grow up in a place that stifled you, even if it was out of love, and knew what it was like to live under the thumb of a bully like Brian. But Liam had a backbone. “But you said you wouldn’t hurt the women.”

  Brian’s eyes narrowed. “That thing,” he pointed to Beth. “Isn’t a woman. She’s a Druid. She would have you rotting beneath the earth. Or she’d gut you like they did Father just to see what was inside you.”

  “We’re not nice,” Conn had told her. Apparently, her people weren’t very nice either. And it appeared that the Fae had a long memory for injuries they’d suffered at the hands of the Druids.

  Liam made his de
cision and took a step toward Beth. Where, she wondered, was the voice she had used on Conn in Clonmel, the Druid power he and Miach were so afraid of, when she needed it? She opened her mouth, and all that came out was a scream. Her house was old, her walls thick and nearly soundproof. Her cry rang off the plaster walls and died inside the confines of the apartment.

  Liam hesitated, but Nial didn’t. He grabbed for her and she spun and ran toward the kitchen. There was a backdoor. If she could reach it, if she could get help. . . .

  Her hands gripped the knob and fumbled with the deadbolt.

  Cruel fingers threaded through her hair, yanked her head back, then smashed it into the door. Pain and confusion. Before she could recover her senses, the same hands pulled her back and hurled her facedown to the kitchen floor. Then Nial was on her, his weight crushing her and stealing her breath, as he wrenched her arms back and tied her wrists together with rough, biting twine.

  “Feet, too.” She couldn’t see anything but the linoleum floor tiles, but she knew Brian was standing over her now. “Then put them in the trunk.”

  “Not Helene,” Beth begged. “She’s claustrophobic.”

  They didn’t listen to her. Her head reeled and her vision blurred when Nial threw her over his shoulder and Brian stuffed a filthy sponge from the kitchen sink in her mouth. Then a blanket—her quilt—the horror of being muffled and dragged from home in such a loved thing overwhelmed her—was thrown over her head, and she felt Nial descend the back porch stairs.

  Between the jolting and the rank taste of the sponge in her mouth she became nauseated, and by the time Nial rolled her, still swathed in the blanket, into the trunk, she feared she was going to throw up and choke on her own vomit. She concentrated on calming herself, relaxing her jaw, and forcing the sponge out with her tongue.

  Before she could eject the sponge, the quilt whipped back and Brian snatched the gag out of her mouth. She retched, trying to get the taste out of her mouth.

  “If you scream, or puke, I’ll hurt your friend,” Brian warned, and strode out of her view. Then Liam lowered Helene into the trunk—far more gently than Nial had deposited Beth, and peeled back the sheet covering her face.

  The gag was gone, but Helene was out cold. “What did you do to her?” Beth asked, terribly afraid now.

  Liam gritted his teeth, started to shut the trunk.

  “Please, Liam. Tell me if she’s okay.”

  He swore. “Brian put her to sleep. Like the Betrayer did for you after the tatt. She’ll wake up soon enough.”

  “Liam, wait! Please tell Miach where we are. I won’t ask you to stand up to Brian alone, but you’re human enough to know this is wrong. What he’s going to do to us is wrong.”

  “Tell him where the sword is and free the Court, and you won’t get hurt,” he said, and slammed the trunk.

  Beth prayed Helene would stay out for the duration of their journey. Enclosed spaces terrified her. She avoided taking elevators and couldn’t stand many of the tiny rooms in the old part of the museum.

  The trunk didn’t frighten Beth. She knew the real danger lay when they reached their destination. She’d assumed, up to now, that Conn would come for her. He’d told her he wouldn’t let her die. But if he found Frank, and he found the Summoner . . . he could return to Clonmel with the blade. In fact, Beth thought, her heart constricting, he would be a fool to do anything else.

  Beth was useless to the half-breeds without the sword, and she knew Brian wouldn’t just let them go after kidnapping them. He would kill them.

  But thinking that way wasn’t going to solve anything. In the movies, clever abductees kept track of where they were being taken. They listened to the street sounds and counted the turns. Beth didn’t need to. She guessed where Brian would take them. After a few miles of stop-and-go city driving, the final, short descent downhill, and the salt smell of the ocean confirmed her worst fear.

  They were going to the island.

  Conn recognized the girl from Clonmel. She still stank of base metals, and he realized it was from some strange caustic she used on her hair.

  They’d searched Carter’s antiseptic home, but discovered no trace of the sword, or the man himself. They’d found his office at the university empty, and questioned, first politely, then with compulsion, the secretary who guarded the department’s halls, but she knew only what Carter had told her: that he was away on business.

  “Follow her,” Conn said, when he spotted Carter’s paramour across the grassy quadrangle.

  She left the precincts of the university and headed into a residential neighborhood, ancient and sprawling houses giving way to dilapidated Victorians and triple-deckers. As they trailed the girl, Conn found himself wishing he could reach out to Beth and touch her mind, but she’d asked him to stay out of her head, and he’d given her the earrings to ensure that. He’d violated her wishes when she’d lain on Miach’s table, exhausted from her ordeal, but he knew better than to do anything like that again, even if he had the best of intentions.

  She made him think like that. In terms of good and bad. And better. She made him want to be better. Better than his people had been to his daughter. And his Druid allies to his people.

  “Living among them,” he said to Miach, as they followed the girl. “It changes you.”

  Miach trailed his fingers along a hedge they were passing. “Yes. They rub off on you. Like rosemary. But I’ve never been foolish enough to bind myself to one. I like life too much.”

  “Your father, Dian, once told me that we live too long. That is why we breed so sluggishly. Why we feel so little. Our capacity for emotion atrophies.”

  “Anything atrophies,” Miach said, “if you don’t use it. But if you bind yourself to the girl, you’ll share her death. With the level of Druid skill she has now, she might live a few hundred years, maybe more if your seed takes in her and she bears offspring. Our magic crosses the placenta, imparts some of our longevity to women who carry our children, but when she dies, you will die, too.”

  Conn contemplated a few hundred years, feeling as he had this past week, versus millennia unfeeling as he had been in Clonmel, and with the Court in times before. Then a thought occurred to him, strange and heartbreaking. “You will outlive all your children, Miach. Even the ones who are nearly full-blooded Fae.”

  “Not if Brian murders me first. He craves fame and power, and this is a dangerous age for the Fae. Make no mistake, we are too few to rule the humans here. They have technology to rival our magic now, and if they knew of us, knew what we could do to them, they would destroy us.”

  Miach put out a hand to halt them. Conn saw the girl unlock a low gate, a silly thing easily vaulted, and let herself into a rambling house. Shared, no doubt. Conn could see shadows moving behind the windows.

  “I am disinclined,” Miach said, looking right and left and scanning the quiet empty street, “to glamour an entire house full of students.” He moved with the preternatural speed of their race, his motion a blur to anyone who chanced to observe, and severed Conn’s gleaming blond braid with a deft slice of his silver knife.

  “What did you do that for?” It was only hair, he told himself, but he was vain of it, like all Fae. It had shocked him to see Miach close-shorn.

  “It is memorable. Ren Fair reject is what the blond Amazon called you. We do not need to draw attention to ourselves here. Boston has never been a city renowned for the beauty of its inhabitants. We stand out enough, even when we mute our appearance.”

  “Beth liked my hair,” Conn said, knowing he sounded petulant.

  Miach handed him the shining braid. “Then give it to her as a love token. Now stop pouting. We need to question the girl and get back to your Druid. Liam and Nial are well-meaning but easily led.”

  So was Frank Carter’s mistress. Christie Kelley was easily glamoured into opening her door. Her apartment was strangely lacking in per
sonality, as though she had just moved in and only unpacked the essentials.

  But she hadn’t. She answered their steady stream of questions, and Conn felt a growing unease as the girl spoke. She didn’t fight him. He was using the lightest touch on her mind, but there wasn’t even the dullest spark of resistance. She rolled over for him like a well-trained dog.

  She’d been in the apartment for two years. Too long for such barrenness. Frank didn’t like to come here. Frank liked her to come to his house. Or his office. He liked her to service him in his office. She described this in the same matter-of-fact way as she did the other tasks he assigned her: grading papers, writing articles, answering emails.

  She didn’t know where Frank was now. He’d gone to New York on business, but come back angry, told her to go get money from his bank—from the teller, not the machine—and bring it to him. Miach explained that this meant Carter suspected someone was tracking his movements.

  She’d delivered the money to Carter at a café near the university. His friend Egan had been there. Something had gone wrong in New York. She hadn’t understood everything the two men had discussed.

  “She may know more than she realizes. Take a look,” Miach said.

  “Her mind,” Conn said, “is like a soft-boiled egg.”

  “Warriors . . . let me look,” Miach said.

  Conn withdrew his touch from the girl’s mind. Miach remained seated on the hard wooden chair he had chosen when they’d entered the room. Christie’s face took on a quizzical look as her eyelids fluttered open and shut.

  “Carter went to New York to sell the sword,” Miach said. “The girl didn’t follow what they were talking about, but it’s clear that his buyer double-crossed him. That suggests a Fae. He and the other man—Egan?—fled Manhattan with the sword and are looking for a new buyer. She doesn’t know where they’ve gone.”

  The girl whimpered. Her eyes shot open, fixed on something far away, and tears started to pour down her face.

  “That’s all we need, Miach. Don’t hurt her.”