Her lungs began to fill as he dragged her up the dingy carpeted risers. Her feet caught on the bunched pile, she stumbled, and she felt Frank take a bruising grip on her biceps and nearly yank her shoulder from the socket.
The rush hit her as they reached the landing. A moment of pure exultation she’d give her soul to live in forever. A frisson of pleasure that traveled through her body and out her fingertips. Then a strange, floating sense of well-being, frighteningly at odds with her circumstances.
The long hallway appeared to stretch on to infinity, a tunnel of brown-painted paneling and scuffed security doors. Late Victorian vulgarity married to postwar practicality.
They hurled her into a room that was of a piece with the hall and locked the door. She beheld her surroundings with despair. More brown paneling, elaborately carved, the detail lost beneath thick layers of chipped paint. Above the wainscot the walls were sickly green. The leprous ceiling had snowed white lead onto the floor, piled into drifts in each corner. On a dirty brass chain a single bare bulb hung from a crumbling plaster medallion.
There was a bed in one corner: war-issue gray metal, topped with a bare ticked mattress. There were stains. Leather straps trailed from the corner of the bed, and she felt a moment of sick revulsion, remembering Egan’s molestation the last time she’d been drugged. She had to get out of here.
Apart from the bed, there was only an aluminum chair and folding table. Dirty and old, but nothing natural here. No life to drink.
Except the wood paneling. She took a step toward the wall, and staggered. Her legs felt rubbery, her head light. The soreness in her abdomen from Egan’s blow had become a low, pulsing cramp. She reached for the chair to steady herself, but it was too far away. She thought, I need the chair.
It flew across the room into her hand.
The Druids used intoxicants to access their latent powers, Conn had told her. That explained the chair. Parlor tricks, said her Druid voice. There’s more. Take it.
Yes. There was more. More power. But to get it, she would have to kill.
They deserve it. The Druid voice, louder and clearer than it had ever been, urging her to do murder. She ignored it for all its seductive truth.
She made her way to the wall, using the chair as a crutch. She gripped the paneling. Tried to pull power from it, to fight the effects of the drug. There was almost nothing there, the barest residue of vitality in the wood, suffocating beneath layers of chemical paint, but she realized even as she tried to channel that trickle of power that it was a hopeless effort. Broken bones and blood vessels could be reknit, but toxins like the drug coursing through her system could not be extracted, only metabolized. Time was the only cure for the poison they’d given her. And she didn’t have time. The Manhattan Fae were coming.
Escape. She had to get out of the room and find the sword. She used the paneling to steady herself, felt a shock as sound traveled through it into her body. Voices. Frank and Egan. She could hear them through the wood. The drug again, freeing powers she never dreamed of. Poppy, her Druid voice said. More.
No. Bad Druid. No more poppy. This altered, out-of-control state was bad enough. She didn’t want to know where more might lead.
“No,” Frank was saying. His voice traveled clearly through the wood, like it had some affinity for it.
Egan was muffled, but intelligible. “We shot her up with heroin and locked her in a room. That’s kidnapping. And worse. We can’t let her go now.”
“We’ll give her to the weirdos,” Frank insisted.
“And if they let her go, she’ll go to the police, and we’ll both end up in jail. No thanks.”
She heard a drawer scrape.
“What’s that?” Frank asked.
“Get your maps and your notebook. We’ll give her another hit and see if we can get anything useful out of her. If the weirdos don’t pay up, you’re going to need a new discovery. And for fuck’s sake, Frank, cover that thing up.”
A soft metallic ring, like a bell swaddled in a blanket. The Summoner. She closed her eyes and focused, and found that she could also travel the route the sound took, sending her mind back through the paneling, along the hall, down the stairs, around a corner, to what was once a library. There was the sword, lying muffled in a wool blanket. And Frank, his eyes bright with worry, fingering the heap of gold on a sideboard. The gold from Clonmel. And Egan, looking every inch the aging, dissipated frat boy, filling a syringe with something clear and viscous.
“This is a rehab clinic,” he was saying. “You already told her boss she had a drug problem. It will look like she checked in here with a hidden stash, then OD’d.”
No. She didn’t outwit a Fae sorcerer and his assassin and put Helene in danger to die here. She could hear Frank and Egan leaving the library. She didn’t have much time. She grasped the aluminum chair, hid behind the door, and waited.
Her mind wanted to go spinning off in all directions but she forced herself to focus on the door.
It opened. She put everything she had into lifting the chair high in the air and bringing it down on Egan’s blond head, then swinging it hard at Frank. Egan went down like a rag doll and Frank staggered and fell. She dropped the chair, scrambled over the tangle of limbs blocking the door, and ran.
To the end of the hall, down the stairs, into the library. Her heart raced. Her vision swam. The sword. The sword. There it was, on the desk beneath the window, wrapped in a blanket.
Frank and Egan came barreling through the door. They were shouting, but they sounded distant. The drug again, coursing through her system, scrambling her senses. She could taste the Summoner, all silvery death wrapped in flannel wool, and smell the dust clinging to the quilted tarp Frank was holding, but the sound of her breathing was unnaturally loud and everything else was dull and muffled.
They circled her, Frank and Egan, wary after her attack with the chair. She tried to gather up the sword and edge toward the door, but her fingers were clumsy and she couldn’t keep hold of the wool. Then Frank rushed her, throwing the tarp over her head and bearing her down to the ground.
Her ears popped, the sound came back, and she screamed and kicked and fought in suffocating darkness to get him off her, but his weight was impossible to shift.
“Hurry up,” Frank snarled.
“Hold her still.”
She felt Egan jab her with another needle. This time the dose hit her more quickly, and harder. Her head throbbed, her teeth ached, and the euphoria took on a painful aspect, everything too bright and loud. They held her down on the floor until they were sure she was done fighting.
And she was. The room spun. She tried to kick off the tarp, but her feet snarled in it. Her hands were heavy and her fingers numb.
“She’s no use this way,” Frank complained.
“She’ll perk up.” Egan said. “Might as well have some fun with her in the meantime.”
Her stomach cramped. Her body jerked—an involuntary reaction to the pain. It came again, short, sharp, and vicious. Like being kicked in the gut.
“The maps first,” Frank insisted. “Give her something to wake her up.”
She heard someone whimpering, wondered at that a moment, then realized it was her.
“I am awake,” she tried to say, but her tongue felt leaden, and the words came out garbled.
“What the hell is wrong with her?” Frank asked. He whipped off the tarp. “Jesus.”
Beth curled into a ball, shivering now without the tarp, though she hadn’t been cold before. She looked down. Blood slicked her skirt, ran down her thighs. And the cramping continued.
Egan crouched next to her, rolled her onto her back. It hurt. Everything hurt. “Placental abruption.” He said with clinical amusement. “A classic side effect of drug abuse in early pregnancy.”
Another cramp.
“Jesus Christ,” Frank swore. “What d
o we do?”
Egan shook his head. “Nothing. She’ll miscarry. Then probably bleed out in a few hours. Faster if she moves around much. No harm in letting the weirdos talk to her now, if they turn up. Maybe they’ll pay extra for the privilege.”
Another cramp. This one worse than the others.
“What about the maps? Can you sober her up enough to look at some maps?”
She sobbed, curled into a tight ball. A fresh rush of blood between her thighs, and a final, ineffable emptiness.
The baby was gone.
She felt the end of that fragile life and knew.
A sacrifice had been made in her name.
A door at the back of her mind opened, and knowledge cascaded in. Images and ideas flooded her brain—too many, too fast to process. A lifetime—lifetimes—worth of learning. No wonder the Druids trained for years. They had to be the librarians of their own minds. It was too much for any one being to comprehend all at once. Facts and formulas whirled past her. She grabbed at the ones she needed now, knowing she would have to work hard, later—if she lived—to learn how to access the rest. It was as though her brain was the processor of a computer and the Druid learning was a vast store of memory.
“If I give her anything else, she’ll hemorrhage faster, bleed out before you get anything useful from her,” Egan was saying.
“Then put her out until it’s over,” said her ex-husband, “so we don’t have to listen to that.”
Until she was dead, he meant. She’d been married to this man.
Frank was only inches away from her. She could feel the dilute trace of magic, of power in him. Fae blood. Of course. It explained so much about him. His charisma. And his coldness.
He had some Fae magic. Not enough for her to heal herself, but perhaps enough for what she needed to do. She grasped his ankle and pulled at his power. Not gently, not carefully, because Frank didn’t deserve gentleness or care. She pulled to hurt. She pulled every trace of Fae energy that flowed in his watery half-breed blood.
And Frank screamed.
Useless, said her Druid voice. Need more magic. True Fae magic.
She understood now how she’d thrown Conn across the room in Clonmel. She’d drawn from him. Instinctively. He was full-blooded Fae, so the power to hurl him a half dozen paces had been only a tiny sip of his vast reservoir; she could have drained Frank dry and not gotten enough to knock down a child. She didn’t have enough to fend off Egan and Frank, and Egan—Egan was preparing another dose to finish her. There was only one thing she could do. Call for help.
Conn hadn’t fully explained all the markings on his body. She knew that now. When the knowledge inside her began to float to the surface under the drug’s influence and then the dam burst with the taking of that tiny life, she’d glimpsed what the marks had meant. Obedience.
Her Druid ancestors hadn’t been fools. They were too smart to unleash a dog that could still bite. They’d laid gaesa upon their captive Fae, compelling them to obey Druid commands. And they’d done unspeakable things with that power, such as carve Miach open.
The irony of it was breathtaking. She didn’t need to mark Conn. Her ancestors had already done it for her. And with her voice liberated at last, she could compel his obedience. And that of every “free” Fae that the Druids had left aboveground.
She opened her mouth, and the voice that came out this time was Druidic—and her own. A command. “DEFEND ME!”
Conn heard it. The voice rang like a claxon in his head. Beth, and not Beth. The woman he loved, but changed. The voice commanded obedience. Her ancestors had seen to that. His heart commanded the same. But the chains kept him rooted to the floor.
Every Fae within a hundred leagues had heard and felt the command tug at them like a geis. The closer, the more compelling. Every Fae aboveground had heard and understood. A Druid’s voice had been lifted again in command. Atenuated by distance, yet it bespoke power and danger—an unwelcome surprise that called for investigation, if not outright obedience.
Liam and Nial furrowed their brows as though they’d heard a faint sound they couldn’t quite place. Of course. They weren’t truly Fae.
But Miach was, and the last time he’d heard a Druidic command, he’d lain himself down on a cold stone slab and held perfectly still while the bastards split him open.
There was no way to know how he would react.
“You heard it,” Conn said carefully. So difficult to speak calmly and slowly when Beth was in danger. “She has found her power.” He didn’t like to think what it had cost her. A life. He hoped the sacrifice had been deserving of death. For Beth’s sake.
“Every Fae in North America has heard it by now,” Miach said, the cracking of his knuckles the only outward sign of his struggle to resist the pull.
“Circumstances have changed,” Conn said. “You no longer need to kill her. There isn’t a free Fae who can force her to do anything. Just the opposite.”
“There is one,” Miach said. “The Druids never succeeded in marking him. His skin would not hold ink, nor would it scar. They kept him in cold iron alone.”
“The Prince Consort,” Conn said grimly. “Miach, let me go to her. There may still be time to rescue her and the blade.”
Miach hesitated. The phone rang. He reached for the receiver, then thought better of it, and put the call on speaker.
It was Elada. “I have found the Druid,” he said, his voice cold, almost metallic.
“Alive?” Miach asked.
“She commanded me to defend her. And I obeyed. She recovered the Summoner.”
“Then there is no need to kill her now,” Miach conceded.
Conn felt the prickle of tears. Beth. Safe.
“Tell her Conn is here, waiting for her,” Miach instructed. “Bring her and the sword back with you.”
A silence. Then: “I don’t think she should be moved.”
Coldness in the pit of his stomach. “What has happened?” Conn asked.
Elada didn’t answer until Miach spoke again. “Tell us.”
“I’m uncertain,” said the bodyguard. “She’s hurt. He should come.” He meant Conn.
“Perhaps—” began Miach, but Elada cut him off.
“He should come, Miach. He should come now.”
Elada had been forced to use glamour and compulsion on a score of bystanders at the rest stop. By the time he finished, he was sorely tempted to disobey Miach’s vow and shake Helene Whitney until her pretty neck snapped.
The woman was more trouble than she was worth. He hoped Miach’s obsession with her would fade. Up to now, the sorcerer had always followed the edict he’d lain upon his family. He restricted himself to paramours from South Boston, and to lovers who had more to gain than lose from becoming entangled with a Fae. Helene was making him forget all that. And this Druid, Beth, had brought Conn of the Hundred Battles to his knees.
The Druid and the Amazon. They were dangerous women, the pair of them. Elada, for his part, was content with the South Boston widow who saw to his needs. Her heart, he knew, had been buried with her dead marine husband, and would there remain. Maire was in no danger of becoming Fae besotted. She enjoyed his protection in the neighborhood, the firm hand he lent with her teenage son, and his undivided attention in bed. That was all she wanted from him, and all he had to give. He was the right hand of a sorcerer. Miach would always come first.
Helene had tried to get away from him again, while he was attempting to placate her would-be rescuers without a bloodbath. He’d had to compel her then, which was unfortunate, because it was not a skill he used often, and he lacked finesse. She’d fought him, turning white and gasping with the effort until his patience had snapped and he’d played on her greatest fear, conjured a small room in her mind and closeted her there, as she’d been prisoned by Brian on the island.
She’d still refused him the i
nformation he sought. “Portsmouth,” was all she would tell him. And it was all he got when he took the information by force from her mind. After that she sat quietly on the picnic bench where he left her, while he spoke with Miach.
He was patching the tires on the Range Rover when he heard Beth’s command. Like all the captive Fae, he had been marked by the Druids. Being so near her summons had been irresistible, imperative.
He could follow the direction of her voice, pass to where she was. He cast a quick glance at Miach’s woman sitting on the picnic bench, arms wrapped around her knees, one eye swelling shut. Fortunately, Miach knew him well enough to believe him about the Amazon’s ploy, but he doubted the sorcerer would be best pleased to find that his woman had been left traumatized and alone—vulnerable—in such a place.
There was no time for talk. He compelled her to get into the stranded Range Rover, and stay there. Then he passed.
Earth, water, wood, stone, and he was inside a room lined with moldering books, the sharp tang of blood in the air.
And the sword. The Summoner. Fierce magic. The Druid had found it. Which meant she did not have to die. He felt relief. His life was complicated enough. He did not need to make an enemy of the Betrayer, and the woman herself had been kind to him while he was guarding her.
There were two men in the room. One was a half-breed, the lowest, most dilute type. He was backed against the wall, sinking into the shelves, to get away from the scene playing out in the middle of the room.
The Druid lay in a tangle of bloodied blankets, a blond man crouching over her with a needle. Beth moaned and sobbed, too weak to get away from her attacker. Elada drew his sword and skewered the man through the back—piercing his heart—then threw the twitching body across the room to land beside the half-breed. Who screamed.
This must be Frank Carter. “You are her husband?” he confirmed.
“Ex-husband,” the man gibbered.
“I will allow Conn to decide what to do with you.” Elada broke both Frank Carter’s legs with a single blow from the flat of his sword, and turned at last to the Druid.
Cold Iron Page 22
