Cold Iron

by D. L. McDermott

  The cruelty of this duty struck her then. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t realize your own relationships were so circumscribed. Miach has ordered you to protect me, and Conn and I cavort in front of you like lovestruck teenagers.”

  “I don’t have a family like Miach’s, and I am not engaged in a love affair like the Betrayer, but I do have a woman in South Boston. And stepsons. And this duty is not so burdensome.”

  “Because I make good coffee?” she teased.

  He smiled at that. “The coffee is acceptable,” he agreed.

  Conn’s tread sounded on the stairs. She took a step toward the door. Elada moved, faster than the eye could follow, to grasp her wrist and pull her back. “I like your coffee, little Druid, and I have some sympathy for the Betrayer. But know this. If Miach orders me to slay you, I will do so.”

  Conn could no longer stand waiting by the beginning of the fourth week. He saw Beth off in the morning, with Elada, and whispered a promise in her ear to visit when she took her midday meal and make a meal of her, on her desk. She’d blushed furiously but made no protest, so he took her silence for acquiescence.

  Then he set out for Christie Kelley’s. Frank Carter had sent the girl to the bank for him once, and he might contact her if he needed money again. And there was always a chance that they had missed something that day—that Christie Kelley had some subconscious, buried knowledge of where Frank was hiding.

  It was still early, the workday not quite started, when he reached the rambling house where she lived. The scholars here shared the baths and the kitchen, he realized, and at this hour most of them left their bedroom doors open and bustled back and forth to perform their ablutions and prepare their breakfasts with a refreshing lack of prudery.

  The hairs on the back of his neck pricked when he saw Christie Kelley’s door closed. Perhaps she was a late riser or had already gone out, but something felt wrong. He knocked softly at first, then louder. When he received no response, and not wanting to draw further attention to himself, he sprang the brass locks on the door with a casual gesture and let himself inside.

  He knew at once that Christie Kelley was dead. She lay across her narrow bed, robe askew, eyes rolled back, body contorted, one slipper hanging off her foot, the other upended on the floor. There was something so pathetic about her twisted young body—like a broken bird. It seemed profane to touch her, but it was important to confirm his suspicion, that she had been killed by a Fae. He tried to do it gently, to lift the robe and examine her body for injuries, but rigor mortis had set in and it was impossible to grant her the dignity she deserved.

  There was not a single mark on her, only telltale red splotches in her eyes indicating asphyxiation. It was a peculiarly Fae form of murder: to invade the mind and stop the victim’s breath. Some did it as a form of dangerous love play. And some did it to kill. It was neither quick, nor painless. There was ample time for the victim to experience terror and panic. Ample time for the Fae to observe it, savor it. Perhaps, if you had the leisure, you might release your hold for a moment, allow the victim to draw in a single life-giving breath, and then cut it off again.

  Miach had knocked Helene unconscious that way, when simple suggestion had failed, but he could not imagine the sorcerer killing in this fashion. For one thing, Beth was right. He did not like to see women hurt. For another, Miach was zealous about guarding the secrecy of the Fae in this place. If he had wanted the woman dead, it would have been easier, given his vast family of minor Southie villains, to arrange something human, mundane, that would raise no awkward questions—perhaps a mugging or a break-in that had taken a nasty turn.

  Conn knew that Christie Kelley was nothing like his dead daughter or her dead mother. Yet she was everything like them because she had been fragile and now she was broken and could not be put back together again.

  He called Beth first, feeling a rush of terrible emotion when she answered. Old grief and new love and things he couldn’t name that came crashing down around him so he couldn’t speak.

  “Conn?” she asked again. “Is everything all right? Are you all right?”

  He understood. Between the second when Beth spoke and the second when he answered, he understood why the Fae stopped feeling. Because they were cowards. Because once you loved, the world was terrifying.

  “Christie Kelley is dead,” he said baldly.

  There was silence on the other end of the line, but he didn’t need a connection to her mind to feel her horror. He knew her now.

  “How?”

  “The killer was Fae.”

  “Miach?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so. Is Elada still outside your window?”

  A pause. He heard the blinds rustle on her end. “Yes.”

  “Stick close to him today.”

  “Are you still coming by at lunch?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come soon.”

  “By midday. I promise.”

  There was nothing more he could do for Christie Kelley.

  He rang Miach next and told him about the girl.

  Miach swore. “Come to the house.”

  “It was a Fae who killed the girl. Beth could be in danger.”

  “Elada is with her, and I have news of the Summoner.”

  The geis around his wrists tightened and pulsed. If he chose Beth again over pursuit of the sword, defied his geis again, he would grow even weaker, less able to defend her. The longer, and the more willfully, he violated it, the heavier its burden became.

  “I will come now,” he said.

  Conn reached the house at City Point before ten, and knocked impatiently.

  He heard running feet in the hall, a fast, unfamiliar patter, followed by a heavier tread. The door opened on empty air and he looked down.

  The toddler at his feet stared up at him for a long moment, then fell over, giggled, hiccupped, and burst into tears.

  “Sorry about that. Granda didn’t tell me to expect anyone.” The child’s mother was not a raving beauty. She had too much of Miach’s strong jaw and not enough of his soaring cheekbones, but she had a lively smile and a winning way with her child, who she scooped up and tickled into cheerfulness again. “They’re upstairs in the study.”

  Granda. Perhaps he should share that tidbit with Helene, and make an ally of Beth’s friend.

  Miach was closeted with Liam and Nial, who looked sly and furtive, although Conn was beginning to think that was their native state.

  “Sit, please,” Miach urged him.

  He didn’t want to. He wanted to hear what the sorcerer had discovered, then get back to Beth. But Miach waited in silence, so Conn took the seat opposite his desk.

  “My contacts in New York say the Manhattan Fae have located Frank Carter.”

  “No doubt they used Christie Kelley to do so. Where is he?”

  “There’s the rub. I don’t know. All my sources could discover is that the Manhattan Fae are planning a two-pronged attack on Frank Carter and your Druid.”

  “When?” Conn asked, his geis tightening again.

  “Conn, I am sorry. The attack will come today. We have run out of time.”

  Beth.

  “No.” The hairs on the back of his neck rose. His instincts told him to pass, now.

  Too late. Metal rang. Iron chains whipped through the air and struck him like lightning. His body exploded in anguish at the contact, and he dropped to his knees. The chains wrapped around him and tightened.

  Through a fog of pain Conn saw and understood. Liam and Nial, looking sick, frightened, and determined as hell. Of course they were. They needed to redeem themselves in Miach’s eyes.

  Cold iron. Half-breeds were weaker than the Fae, but they could handle cold iron.

  Liam dug in Conn’s pockets and took his phone and his silver dagger.

  “I would not do t
his had I any other choice,” Miach said. “The Manhattan Fae have no sorcerer powerful enough to use the Summoner. They require both the girl and the sword to free the Court. We cannot find the sword, but we know where the girl is. Elada will make it quick, I promise.”

  The agony was nearly blinding. His head pounded, his stomach heaved. “Coward,” he ground out.

  “The Manhattan Fae outnumber us two to one.”

  “Miach, if Beth dies, the Manhattan Fae will know it was you who killed her, who destroyed their only chance to free the Court. They will come after you and your precious family for revenge.”

  “Of the evils threatening us, the return of the Court or the vengeance of the Manhattan Fae, I choose the lesser. Once the Druid is dead and all hope of freeing the Court is lost, I will help you reclaim the Summoner. And you will stand with us against the Manhattan Fae. The geis you took upon yourself, and your all too human conscience, will demand it.”

  Christie Kelley’s sole link to the Fae had been Frank Carter. Now she was dead, and Beth felt keenly the injustice of it. She knew all too well how easy it was to fall under her ex-husband’s spell. Christie Kelley’s sins had been the same as Beth’s: youth and foolishness. She had not deserved to die for them.

  Beth redoubled her efforts to find the sword. There were times when it came in handy to be the sole curator of an underfunded department that existed only because of an unbreakable nineteenth-century trust. No one much cared what Beth Carter, curator of Celtic antiquities, did with her days.

  For weeks she had closeted herself in the quiet of her office and searched, using maps and photos and drawings, every town in all directions up to thirty miles from Boston. Today she realized she must choose a direction and concentrate her efforts farther from the city, but she was uncertain which way to go. First she considered south, toward Rhode Island. Frank had friends in Providence, part-time faculty at Brown. She scanned the area where they lived, remembering their ramshackle Victorian with distaste. She was relieved when she came up with nothing.

  Then she considered west. She tried to picture Frank hiding out in one of the derelict factory towns of western Massachusetts—an unlikely scenario. And a farm was entirely ludicrous for idle, luxury-loving Frank.

  North, maybe. He’d disappeared with Egan . . .

  She had never been there, but that was the direction of Egan’s clinic. A quick search of public information turned up no mention of the place—just a few articles about Egan having his license suspended in Massachusetts. She knew that the clinic was in New Hampshire, but it could take her weeks to locate it without some idea of where to start.

  That’s when she remembered the maps. She’d never wanted to set foot in that condo off Harvard Square again after leaving Frank, but the lawyer Helene had found—actually, the lawyer Helene happened to be dating at the time—had arranged a day when Frank promised to be out and went with her to remove the few possessions she’d left behind. Books, mostly, a few items of clothing, the odd kitchen utensil.

  Beth had piled her books into boxes and swept clean the shelves of maps in the study. She’d assumed they were all hers. Frank never had much use for maps. But when she’d gotten home, there had been a crumpled auto-club map of New Hampshire in the pile. She’d saved it, only because she could never bring herself to throw out any map.

  Now she searched her office for it. She kept a small shelf full of New England travel material, and tucked inside the pages of a book lover’s guide to New Hampshire was the map. When she spread it over her desk, she knew at once that it was right. There was a circle marked on an unincorporated piece of land outside of Portsmouth. It had to be Egan’s clinic. But the map wasn’t detailed enough for her to search it for Fae influence.

  It took an hour for her to pull together what she needed. The museum library proved helpful this time, coming up with several engravings of Portsmouth in the eighteenth century, a series of nineteenth-century drawings, and a handful of more recent aerial photographs.

  She found it almost immediately, a few miles north of town. An empty green place on the map, a half-glimpsed house in one of the aerial surveys—and that familiar clenching in her belly. The Summoner.

  And something else. She shifted in her chair. Laid a hand over her stomach. There. No room for uncertainty or disbelief. Simply a feeling of otherness, like she’d sensed in some women before. A presence that was more than her, more than Beth Carter.

  She was pregnant. Too soon, said modern, rational Beth. Too soon to tell. But not too soon to be true. Conn had been her lover for a little less than a month now. She checked her calendar. Her period should have come last week. She hadn’t been thinking about it, or had cause to, because she hadn’t experienced any of her usual premenstrual misery.

  He’d said it became more difficult as a Fae grew older, warned her it might never happen, but it had. Now that she thought about it, there had been signs. Her breasts were swollen and tender, her belly more rounded than usual. A normal pregnancy wouldn’t show so quickly, but she suspected from Conn’s foreboding words that Fae pregnancies were anything but normal.

  A child. A child who wouldn’t grow up frightened of the power inside her. A child she could pass her rediscovered legacy down to. She wanted to tell Conn. It was almost noon, he would be here shortly, but she couldn’t wait. She reached for her cell.

  She dialed. Her heart raced. She was breathless with anticipation, to share this with him. The phone rang. And rang. She felt a prickling at the back of her neck. Then voice mail. A prerecorded greeting. A mailbox number. She’d never gone all the way to his voice mail before. Didn’t even realize he had it.

  Something was wrong.

  She dialed again. Before she reached the greeting, the prickling became impossible to ignore. She turned to look out the window.

  Elada was gone.

  She fought to stay calm, but every sense was telling her something was very, very wrong. Conn always answered her calls. And Elada hadn’t strayed from his post in all these weeks.

  A rustle behind her. She whirled, her heart in her mouth, but it was Helene.

  “Beth,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  She almost jumped when her cell buzzed.

  It was a text, from Conn’s phone.

  Run.

  She looked back out the window to the spot where Elada usually stood guard. His absence, and Conn’s text, could mean only one thing. Miach had decided it was safer to kill her.

  She considered, in the space of a heartbeat, her options. They were very few. No one could protect her from the likes of Miach and Elada, Fae with the ability to pass at speed and glamour anyone who got in their way. Running was futile. Her only possible escape lay in convincing Miach that it was safe to let her live.

  And for that, Conn must have the sword.

  “Helene,” she said. “I’m sorry to ask you this, but can I borrow your car?”

  “It’s them, isn’t it?” Helene asked.

  “Yes. It is. I have to get to Portsmouth, or they’re going to kill me.”

  “No,” Helene said. “We have to get you to Portsmouth. I’ll get my keys.”

  “I can’t ask you to put yourself in danger again.”

  “You don’t have to ask. I’m offering. I’m sick of them having everything their own way,” Helene said. Her vehemence shocked Beth. “The gifts keep coming,” she explained. “Like he can buy me. I came home last Friday and found one of his family cleaning my gutters. Another night I came home and found a new dishwasher in my kitchen. I called a man I’ve gone out on a few dates with and he told me that he couldn’t talk to me because some scary Irish thug warned him off. It’s like Miach believes he already owns me.”

  There was something wild and hunted in Helene’s expression.

  “Okay,” Beth agreed. “We’ll go together.”


  Beth gathered her coat and the maps while Helene went for her keys. They met in the hall. Beth felt the prickling again. At the other end of the long corridor that ran the whole length of the main building, blocking their way out, was Elada.

  No question that he saw them. His relaxed stance did nothing to mask the warrior’s feral grace.

  “This way.” Beth tugged Helene, and they ran, deeper into the museum.

  “Can he make us do things with his mind? Like Miach?” Helene asked. Beth could hear the tremor in her voice.

  “I’m not sure. Better not to put it to the test.”

  There was a service elevator in the old wing that went down into the basement garage, and the antiquated carriage was made of iron. No way Elada could follow them into it, and the stairs were on the other side of the museum. They reached the elevator and Beth rammed the gate closed, unlocked the brakes on the carriage.

  Not a moment too soon. Elada stopped short of the iron gate.

  “Come out of there, Druid,” he said.

  She was becoming familiar enough with Fae compulsion that she could discriminate between their different voices. Miach’s had the purity of a Mozart opera, Conn’s the power and emotion of a Beethoven symphony. Elada’s voice sounded more like something written for a single instrument. Chopin, maybe. But as the paired daggers in his hands indicated, his talents lay elsewhere.

  “Tell Miach I’ve gone for the sword,” she said. She punched the button, and they descended.

  From the basement it was, thankfully, a short sprint to Helene’s car.

  Conn had not felt the bite of cold iron in two thousand years. Not since the Druids had gone to work on him, carving their gaesa into his flesh. First, the mark they inscribed on all the captive Fae, which bound the Beautiful People to the will of the Druids. Then the mark that imprisoned him in the temple-tomb. Later, the marks that tied him to the Summoner. And, finally, the ones that freed him from the mound. To his shame, he had passed out the first time they’d carved him, the iron chains and the iron knives driving him to the brink of madness.