Cold Iron

by D. L. McDermott

  “Hurting her is hardly my intention,” Miach said icily. “I’m trying to free her from the bastard’s control, but her will is badly eroded. He probably doesn’t know what he is or how to use suggestion without battering her mind.”

  Like he’d battered Beth. And she’d survived, because the Druid in her had woken up and taught itself, inch by inch, to fight back. It was a process that had started long before she’d met Conn. It made him feel better, to know he had not brought all of this turmoil into her life. And it explained why she had the courage and skill to resist him.

  Conn watched as Miach let go of the girl, then listened as the sorcerer spun a fantasy for Christie Kelley. He told her how she had realized Frank Carter was no good for her and had determined to break it off with him. He’d told her that she had finally recognized the way this man had isolated her from people and that tonight she would call up old friends, maybe go to a movie. When Frank Carter next called her—and Conn had promised himself that would be never, because he was going to kill the man—she would rebuff him.

  Then, to Conn’s eternal amusement, Miach got up and made the girl a cup of tea. “I have granddaughters,” he said in response to Conn’s raised eyebrows. “Bad breakups are par for the course.”

  It was dusk by the time they returned to Beth’s house. Conn felt a prickle of fear when he didn’t see any of Miach’s cars outside. He took the stairs two at a time, and when no one answered the door, he kicked it in.

  He ran through the apartment calling for Beth. His heart skipped a beat when he saw the quilt missing from the bed, the sheets naked and tangled.

  “Conn.” Miach was in the kitchen. There was blood dotting the floor ,and a smear of it was on the shattered glass of the back door.

  Conn tumbled back through time, to the day he’d returned from enforcing some petty Fae edict and sought the warmth of his mistress’s house. He had remained fond of the woman, though she was no longer young. The Court had mocked him for continuing the liaison. But he’d ignored them and continued to visit the cottage where his mistress lived and his daughter was growing into a beautiful woman. Vanity, he had called it then, to watch his quick-witted child grow.

  The cottage, too, had been empty. And by the time he found them, it was too late.

  “Not this time.” He had said it out loud.

  “Liam and Nial would not this do alone,” Miach said. “Brian must be behind it. Perhaps some of the Fianna.”

  “I can’t reach Beth,” Conn said. “I gave her the earrings.”

  “Well, I can find the Amazon,” Miach said wryly. “Luckily I don’t have your scruples. I marked her while she was out on the sofa. And before you scold me, it was only by way of a memo to myself. I used a felt pen. It will wash off.”

  “You can have my blessing to bed every woman in Boston tomorrow, so long as you find my woman tonight.”

  It was cold on the water. Beth lay huddled in a corner of the boat, her hands tied behind her back. She still had the quilt, but she’d managed to get it over Helene, who was pale and unmoving and needed it more.

  Helene’s eyes opened. At least the two of them were out in the air and not stuffed into the cabin. She’d been so afraid Helene would wake up in the trunk.

  “What’s happening?” Helene asked. “Who are they really?”

  “Criminals,” Beth said quietly.

  “They’re not just criminals,” Helene said tonelessly. “The older one, he did something to me. He was inside my head.”

  “They can do that,” Beth said. “They’re Fae half-breeds. And Conn and Miach are true Fae. Ancient and immortal. Beautiful but cruel. They can get inside your head, make you want them, make you do things.”

  “I thought fairies were supposed to be nice.”

  “We made the Fae into bedtime stories,” Beth said, remembering Conn’s words. “Because the reality would keep us up at night. Helene, I’m so sorry to have gotten you into this.”

  “I’m sorry about what I said in the gallery.”

  “Oh, Helene, you had every reason to be furious. I poured red wine down that beautiful dress.”

  Helene smiled, bit her lip, and said, “Of course you did. I was ogling your boyfriend.” Then she burst into laughter mixed with tears, and Beth joined her.

  “Enough of that.” Brian’s Fae resonant voice carried over the deck. The boat, Beth realized, had stopped. Nial cut their bonds and lowered them none too gently into the dinghy. Liam was careful not to look Beth in the eye, but she didn’t fool herself. There was no help there.

  It was nearly dark, but there were no lights on the shore. Or in any other direction. They were miles from South Boston and from every other Harbor Island. Even if there had been another island nearby, it was too cold to swim the channel. There was no need to tie them up out here. There was no escape.

  The shore was rocky. She felt every stone through the soft soles of her moccasins and stumbled blindly in the dark with only Nial’s rough hands to guide her. Somewhere up ahead she heard stones skittering and knew Brian must be dragging Helene. The sure-footedness of the half-breeds confirmed her suspicion. The Fae-blooded could see better than humans in the dark.

  They reached the top of the shoreline, and rocky beach gave way to thick forest. It was old growth, stout and stolid, with a soft carpet of needles beneath her feet. Finally the moon—a bright crescent—came out of hiding and Beth realized they were on a trail that had perhaps once been a road. They climbed, up and up, until they reached a plateau and a clearing where the moonlight played silver off a hipped slate roof.

  The island must have been one of the fortified British outposts before the revolution, built to repel the French, then turned against the colonists during the blockade of Boston. The graceful Georgian proportions and Flemish bond brick placed it firmly in the middle of the eighteenth century. Beth would have found it picturesque and lovely, sitting atop this hill, even with the gardens grown wild and the shutters rotting on their hinges, if its utter isolation didn’t mean Brian could do anything he wanted to them.

  There was dim light behind the twelve-paned windows. Candles or oil lamps, Beth thought. No electricity in this forgotten place. She could smell smoke on the air. No heat either. And the temperature was dropping fast.

  Ahead of her Helene was shivering. Brian laughed and ripped the quilt off her shoulders, flung it into the air. Beth saw it flutter to land on the wild grassy slope. Irrationally, she wanted to run and scoop it up, wrap herself in it, and hide, like from the boogey man. Because these creatures were all her worst nightmares come to life.

  Except perhaps Liam, who stopped to gather up the quilt and throw it over his shoulder.

  The wide doors to the house were open, the pillared porch peeling to gray wood and the painted floor of the front hall covered with windblown leaves and rustling brown pine needles. An eerie keening sound drifted out of the parlor to their right, and Beth’s first thought was the bean sídhe, foretelling her death.

  But the music came from a man. An ordinary man. Not Fae or half -Fae. His clothes were tattered but had once been quite fine. White tie and tails. He sat in a chair beside the fire, an oboe to his lips, his fingers poking through the frayed ends of white gloves, and beneath them, the keys slick with fresh blood. As though he had been snatched from the orchestra at Symphony Hall and forced to play until his fingers bled. Very likely he had.

  The creatures he entertained were of a piece with the elegant house: beautiful, clean limbed, and full of hidden rot. There were three of them, all pure Fae. If their long hair, antique clothes, and cruel smiles hadn’t told Beth what they were, the clenching in her belly would have.

  She was glad Helene couldn’t see them as they really were, because even Beth, who had looked on Conn and Miach with iron-clear eyes, felt her teeth ache and her eyes burn looking at these Fae. She tasted salt and iron and realized her nose was bleed
ing.

  She did not want to enter that room. She had not expected to encounter true Fae here. Brian and the half-breeds, yes. Discontents from the other Fae clan, the Fianna, yes. But this changed the odds considerably. Conn might be a tested warrior, but Miach was not, and if Conn tried to rescue them, it would be three against one.

  And while she had been learning how to repel Miach’s and Conn’s mental advances, they, she realized, had been civilized Fae, used to touching humans minds, they’d gone native from their time spent with mortals. These Fae, though, were truly alien. When their leader stood, his night-black hair swept the floor. He rose from his chair with preternatural grace, then examined Beth the way a cat scrutinizes a mouse foolish enough to enter his domain.

  “So this is Conn’s Druid.”

  Every instinct told her to run, but Brian’s knife was pricking her back. He shoved her forward into the room, put his booted foot in the middle of her back, and thrust. She sprawled at the feet of the exquisite Fae.

  In a second she would have to look up at him. She experienced a moment of perfect clarity as the ragged musician played on. Madness, she realized, was an option. She could, if she chose, curl up into a ball at the feet of this monster and tumble into the abyss. Allow her mind to splinter. Flee from the terror and the pain his sublime beauty promised.

  It was the escape the landlady’s sister had chosen. What Conn’s daughter had chosen when she’d decided life wasn’t worth fighting for, sanity wasn’t worth suffering.

  I am not them, Beth thought. I will not break.

  Her eyes locked on the pattern of knots in the floorboards. Patterns. Everything is patterns. Every living thing has a pattern. You know them all. You know how to use them. Wake up! Wake up! An ancestral voice. A Druid voice, but she didn’t know what to do with its patterns.

  She rose on her knees and looked up at the Fae.

  This close, it was possible to see how inhuman he was. Nothing human moved like that, in perfect silence and with such feline grace. No man was proportioned like that, a Greek kouros, a living breathing collection of ideals. His skin gave off the scent of sunlight and green grass, and to be near him was to breathe in the essence of a warm summer day, lush and intoxicating.

  His clothes proclaimed him a princely wanderer. His court shoes were silk, embroidered with silver wire atop a Louis heel. His jeans were thoroughly modern, midnight black, finely tailored, and obscenely expensive. He wore an embroidered shirt, open to the waist, of the snowiest white cotton, and a silk frock coat of pearl gray beaded with a pattern of black roses. Even his long black hair was ornamented, plaited into hundreds of slender braids bound with silver leaves that tinkled softly when he moved.

  “Where is the sword?”

  He wasn’t talking to her. He was talking to Brian. Liam, Nial, and Helene were clustered near the door, and she realized that the two younger half-breeds were as frightened of the three true Fae as she was. That didn’t bode well.

  “We didn’t get the Summoner,” Brian admitted. “You said that if she was powerful enough, she wouldn’t need it.”

  “But she isn’t powerful enough. That makes her no use to me without it.” The true Fae’s voice was distant music, like a piano drifting softly from an upper-story window, and it caused the iron hoops in her ears to vibrate. Conn. His gift to her. She would thank him properly for them—if she lived—because she knew they were muting the Fae’s effect on her—and she was going to need every advantage she could call upon to survive this encounter.

  “She must know where it is,” Brian said. “Or at least how to find her ex-husband. He’s the one who has it.”

  “And you,” said the Fae, menace dripping through his words, “want me to take the knowledge from her mind for you? Do I look like an errand boy?”

  “No,” Brian said quickly. “She’ll tell me, as soon as I get to work on her friend.”

  Helene. He was going to torture Helene for information Beth didn’t have.

  Foolish, said the Druid voice. Do not do this.

  But Beth knew what she had to do to save Helene.

  “Search my mind.” She forced herself to look into the Fae’s eyes. The Druid voice was probably right. She didn’t have the skills or the power to survive that unscathed, but she couldn’t think of any alternative.

  The Fae cocked his head, looked down at her. He was intrigued and . . . excited. Yes. The cut of his jeans left little room for mistake. He was going to flay her mind, and the thought excited him.

  “I’ll let you in,” she said. “I won’t fight you. Just don’t hurt Helene. She isn’t part of this.”

  The Fae ran his gaze over Helene, then smiled faintly, as though he knew something the others did not. “Miach’s bastard will not molest the woman,” the Fae agreed.

  Never bargain with a Fae. Like Beth had any choice.

  She took a deep breath, exhaled, and opened her mind. She expected an invasion. Not this feather soft touch on her consciousness. It was far worse than anything she could have imagined. He didn’t push or batter, but he slid inside her memories, and like a rich man examining expensive baubles in a shop, he turned them over and tested their weight, with the unspoken threat that he might at any moment drop one on the floor, just to see it break.

  He slipped deeper into the past, lingered over youthful embarrassments and then more recent indignities, secret and shameful, and caressed them, made her live through them again. He found Frank, and there his interest peaked. Pain sparkled, and she realized he was digging through her thoughts and impressions to search for something hidden. The sword, of course. He wanted the Summoner. Could he use it without her? How?

  Thought became action and suddenly she was hurtling through his alien mind in search of the answer. She found herself in a maze, a labyrinth of plots so intricate they had no end. Laughter. His. And thought. His again. Careful, little Druid. I could break you with a whisper.

  He could. She knew that. But he hadn’t so far, so she pressed on, because for motives too obscure for her to grasp, he let her. He was toying with her.

  Yes. His thoughts again. Let’s play. Then he was there in her memories of Conn, pressing on them like levers. Arousal, terror, gratitude, and then something warmer. Affection, longing, the stirring of something sweet and sacred.

  Memory, said her Druid voice, like a doctor explaining the procedure in process, is experience sieved through perception. And perception is a filter of learned patterns. In the twinkling of an eye the Fae learned the patterns that made up Beth Carter’s memory and began to reverse engineer new ones.

  She saw herself and this Fae naked and twined on her quilt, felt an explosion of sensation so vivid she cried out. He combined fantasy with memory and showed her the two of them together, at the museum, at a dig, at Beth’s well-worn desk in her apartment, as he answered her questions and filled in the thousand little details of his long-vanished world.

  These, she realized, were the fantasies she would have spun about a future with Conn, if she allowed herself such emotional luxuries. She hadn’t, but the Fae had used her memories, her wants and desires, to construct them, with himself in Conn’s place.

  “NO!” It was the voice she had used on Conn in Clonmel, but it didn’t throw the Fae across the room. And it didn’t throw him out of her mind either. Instead, he held her mind a second longer, to let her know he could, then dropped it.

  She caught herself on her outstretched hands. Felt the solidity of the wide-planked floor. She was on all fours at the feet of the Fae again, and from the stillness of the room and posture of his companions and her half-breed captors, only minutes, perhaps seconds, had passed since the creature had invaded her mind.

  “She doesn’t know where the Summoner is, and her ex-husband will not trade it for her,” the Fae announced to the room at large.

  Then he went down on one perfectly formed knee, tilted her c
hin up to look into her eyes, and spoke softly, for her hearing alone. “You are not yet strong enough to free the Court, my little Druid, but you will be. Until then, I have no use for you. But when you are ready, come to me. You will be well rewarded. First, though, I’m afraid you’ll have to survive Miach’s petulant children. And to do that, you must grow stronger.”

  He stood and brought his exquisite silk shoe down on her splayed hand. Agony gripped her. Bones snapped and crunched as he ground his heel into her knuckles. She saw black, then white when he lifted his foot away and the pain screamed louder.

  She rolled to her side to take the pressure off her broken hand and saw, through a haze of pain, the beautiful Fae smiling down on her. “I hope we meet again,” he said, and stepped back, through the delicate Sheraton card table, and the ormolu mirror, and the wall, and disappeared, his Fae companions following, into the night.

  Chapter 8

  They passed!” Brian screamed. “They fucking passed and left!”

  That was what Conn had said the night he’d invaded her bedroom in Clonmel. He’d passed into the room. He’d used the term again last night, when they’d left the museum, said he could pass faster than any human could travel. She didn’t realize he’d meant he walked through walls . . . and furniture . . . and glass.

  “If the old man finds out they were here—” Liam started.

  “Shut up,” Brian snapped.

  No one seemed to care much about Beth or her crushed hand at the moment. Heal yourself, said the Druid voice. How? screamed her conscious mind. But there was no answer.

  “We’ll do this my way.” Brian dragged Helene to the rotting sofa and threw her down.

  “The Fae promised you wouldn’t touch her,” Beth said.

  “And now he’s gone,” Brian said, pinning Helene on her back. “All bets are off.” Helene screamed. Brian slapped her. He gripped her knees and shoved them apart, then swore. “What is that?” he snarled.

  From the confusion in Helene’s eyes Beth guessed she didn’t know, but there on the inside of her thigh was a mark. Black, hastily scribbled, but unmistakably drawn by the same hand as the tattoo on Beth’s shoulder.