Blade Dance (A Cold Iron Novel Book 4)

by D. L. McDermott

  Ann walked back to her classroom, heels clicking over the linoleum of the hallway floor, reflexively stroking the silver whistle that hung from the chain around her neck. It was her only memento of her mother, and the cool metal, shaped and etched to resemble a curled leaf, always soothed her.

  She reached her empty classroom, shut the door, and used every trick she knew to get control of her raging emotions. She read from her favorite book of poems, made a list of good things she had done that day, tidied her classroom, packed her bag, touched up her makeup, and headed for the house of the only person who might be able to help Davin: Finn MacUmhaill.

  Chapter 2

  Finn surveyed the gathering of his people at the old Commandant’s House in the Charlestown Navy Yard with dissatisfaction. He did not see the Fae he was waiting for, the swordsman who was pivotal to his plan to win back the loyalty of his son, as well as that of the disgruntled, dwindling Fianna.

  The beautiful, angular faces scattered through the space, male and female, were all familiar to him. Some of them he had known for millennia. All were Fae, to a greater or lesser degree. Many were his half-blood descendants and bore the stamp of his distinctive features. They made the pillared room a hall of mirrors in living flesh and bone.

  Once, these reflections had stretched to the doors and beyond. The size of his band had waxed and waned since the destruction of the Druids, but it had never been so small, so feeble as this. He was weak, vulnerable, and it was clear that he had to act—to do something soon—if he hoped to maintain control of his territory.

  That was why he needed Iobáth. And why it infuriated Finn that this particular Fae still hadn’t deigned to show up. He scanned the familiar faces again and cursed. For the first time, he contemplated the possibility that Iobáth might not come at all, and what that might mean for the struggling Fae in Charlestown.

  The Fianna had been meeting in the brick mansion on the water since the structure had been built. Finn could remember how grand the house had been then, with its soaring ceilings and classical proportions. The navy had spared no expense in its construction, but the first commandant and those that came after him, all the way down to the present stewards at the National Park who administered the yard now, had known who really ran Charlestown and the house had been always at his disposal to use for Fae gatherings.

  Now, though, its faded grandeur—the chipped paint, the scuffed floors, the dull brass—mirrored the sad state of the Fianna. Just a few short months ago his followers in Charlestown had numbered over a hundred. Now there were barely two-dozen Fae pledging him fealty, and another dozen or so half-bloods, products of Fae and human unions, filling out their ranks. The Fianna did not accept every part-Sídhe whelp who wanted to join them, only the ones who proved themselves worthy—Fae enough—to belong to that select company. They gathered every week to receive their orders, to beg for favors, to seek Finn’s justice in their petty disputes with one another. Those disputes that they didn’t resolve with their fists or swords, at least. Finn allowed his followers free rein over the human population of Charlestown, and normally he set no limits on their activities across the water in Boston, either.

  Things weren’t normal, though. They hadn’t been normal since his long-simmering feud with his old enemy, the Fae sorcerer Miach MacCecht, had boiled over. Miach ruled the Fae in South Boston, and for a time he had tutored Finn’s son, Garrett, in magic. Then he had lured Finn’s son away and sent a stone-singing Druid bitch to knock Finn’s house down. But Finn was going to win his son back with the one thing Miach could not give him: a right hand. Iobáth.

  As soon as that particularly elusive Fae turned up and they could strike a deal. For now, Finn just wanted this pathetic shadow of a gathering to be over. But there was still business to be done, petitions to be heard.

  It was Patrick’s job to bring these forward, to announce the Fianna by their titles and present their requests and grievances. To outsiders, Patrick probably looked like an ordinary Charlestown thug, but he was Finn’s right-hand man now that Garrett was gone. The striking man wore a wife-beater and jeans. His tattoos could have come from prison, his body could have been honed at the gym, but the ink he wore was Fae and magical, and the muscles in his arms were earned during long hours practicing with a sword. He prowled from the open doors to Finn’s gilded chair and bent his shaved head, leaning heavily on one of the flanking pillars, to speak softly in the language of the Tuatha Dé Danann.

  “Nancy McTeer begs an audience.”

  Finn had spotted her waiting outside when he’d arrived. He could not see her. His position as leader was so precarious that he could not violate their customs without recourse; those traditions were the thin threads binding his followers together. “Nancy McTeer is human.” Only the Fianna had the right to speak at their gathering. Consorts and half-bloods not yet admitted to their brotherhood had to seek permission. Nancy McTeer belonged to one of Finn’s captains, Sean Silver Blade, which meant that she shouldn’t be speaking at all unless it was at her lover’s side. If Finn heard her without Sean present, he would alienate even more of his followers.

  That was something he could not afford to do. The Fae liked a winner. The Fianna had been loyal to him as long as he’d held his own against Miach and the South Boston Fae, but they’d abandoned him in numbers the day Miach’s stone singer had cracked the foundation of his house. If Miach struck again, now, Finn did not have the numbers to stand against him. Finn would lose all of his hard-won territory.

  “She’s been to the house three times this week,” said Patrick.

  “And she’s been sent away three times,” Finn replied irritably.

  “She says it’s important.”

  “Then she can ask Sean to come see me.”

  “It’s about Sean.”

  “Then it’s his business.” The Fianna would abandon him utterly if he started to interfere in their relationships with humans, and Sean was one of his best captains. Finn could not afford to lose him, not now. “If there are no more Fae waiting to speak, we’re done here.”

  Patrick looked like he might want to say more, but Finn rose to his feet and pitched his voice to the room. “The cars that Ruari brought in go to the chop shop in Quincy. Aiden will take the container job on the docks. Ian is to handle collections, and there is to be no other business”—meaning no crimes of opportunity, no muggings, no trucks hijacked, no businesses shaken down—“anywhere, and especially no antagonizing Miach and his family. Any Fae that crosses the Fort Point Channel into Southie is expelled from this company.”

  They didn’t like it, but they were Fae, so there was no grumbling, only the far more dangerous silence of plotting. It didn’t matter. He was still quick enough to avoid a knife in his back. The Fianna were too weak to antagonize Miach now and they were better off without any Fae too stupid to understand that. Even something as small as a few rogue members of his band who trespassed on the Southie docks to steal a case of whiskey—Miach would take it as an act of war and the destruction of the Fianna would follow. It was Finn’s responsibility to keep his followers alive, in spite of their own stupidity.

  He strode out of the house without looking back.

  The Navy Yard was quiet, the tourists all gone home. He could remember when they made ships here, decades ago. Now it was a museum and condominiums. Gentrification. That meant outsiders who didn’t know about the secret people hidden in their midst, who weren’t wise enough to fear the Good Neighbors. It created difficulties. Nothing that payoffs and bribes and the judicious use of Fae glamour couldn’t handle, but he remembered when things had been less complicated.

  The meeting had been so short that it was still light out. The granite obelisk atop Bunker Hill glowed softly in the dusk. Finn’s brownstone town house on the square was covered in scaffolding, an unwelcoming sight. Miach’s bloody stone singer had cracked the fucking foundation with her voice, and it was
costing Finn a mint to dig it out and repair it. That wasn’t the only damage she had done. The stone cladding had sheared off the back of the house, beams had cracked on the second and third floors, and a raft of copper shingles had come crashing down from the roof. The house had gone from being one of the most spectacular buildings in Charlestown to an uninhabitable wreck in the space of a minute, courtesy of Druid sorcery and Miach’s enmity.

  Fortunately it wasn’t the only property Finn owned in the neighborhood. He crossed to the other side of the park and fitted his key to the lock in the front door of an unassuming Georgian house on the corner. It was one of the few clapboard structures to have survived the British bombardment during the American Revolution. When the city had decided that it needed another parking lot more than it needed its past, Finn had paid to save the house from demolition and move it to this spot. That had been fifty years ago. He’d always wanted to live in it, but it had never been big enough for the comings and goings of all of his followers.

  He no longer had that problem.

  More recently he had begun updating and furnishing the house for his son, but Garrett had betrayed and deserted him. Finn was determined to win the young sorcerer back. Not just because Garrett was his son, but also because the Fianna needed a mage they could trust. Even now, there were gaesa going unwritten, vows unrecorded, protections, wards, and magics lacking in every corner of Charlestown. This was Finn’s problem and Finn’s responsibility. His followers looked to him to provide a sorcerer who could be trusted. And no one was more trusted than their leader’s son. They would not accept another substitute easily, if Finn could even find one.

  A shadow detached itself from the darkness beside the entrance. Finn reached for his knife, then stopped. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  Nancy McTeer stepped into the light. She was petite and black haired, with the porcelain pale skin so many Irish women had, but it was marred by a black bruise across her cheekbone.

  He didn’t like to see it, but he could not say he was surprised. Sean was a good enforcer because he was a violent and unpredictable Fae. He hadn’t always been that way. Finn had known Sean since before the fall. Since before the Druids had imprisoned and tortured them. Sean had been a poet then, but he’d left all that behind on the hillside where the Druids had chained him. Afterward he had joined Finn’s band. The surviving Fae all bore scars, the spells of control that the Druids had carved into their flesh, but some of them bore deeper, graver wounds. Sean was one of those.

  That, though, didn’t excuse the bruise on Nancy McTeer’s cheek.

  “You wouldn’t see me at the Navy Yard,” she said. “And I need to talk to you about Sean.”

  “If he did that,” said Finn, indicating the bruise on her cheek, “you should leave him.” Easier said than done, as he well knew. Mortals often became addicted to the Fae. Some pined and died when their Fae lovers abandoned them.

  “I don’t want your help for me,” she said. “It’s for my son, Davin.”

  Finn remembered Sean bragging about the boy. The Fae were extraordinarily long-lived, but they had always bred fitfully. A child was a triumph, even one gotten on a human woman—provided she survived the experience. The children of the Sídhe grew quickly and unpredictably, and births were rarely easy. Nancy McTeer had born Sean Silver Blade a brawler of a baby, a healthy rambunctious boy he was proud—if critical—of.

  “Sean’s son is his own affair,” said Finn. The boy was half-Fae and strong. He would be able to take almost anything his Fae father could dish out. Almost. A slip of a girl like Nancy McTeer, though . . .

  He wanted to interfere. He wanted to step between his captain and this pretty girl with her tear-stained face and black-and-blue cheekbone. If he did, he would lose the few followers he had left, who respected him because he still practiced the old ways, who chose him over Miach because he hadn’t gone native and become more human than the local population. And if he lost the Fianna, he would never get his son back. He would have nothing to offer Garrett, not compared to Miach, who could teach him secrets and give him a large extended family on whom to practice his skills.

  “Stay out of it, Nancy. Sean is the boy’s father. He is high, middle, and low justice in his own family, and I cannot protect you from him.”

  It seemed wrong to him—that he could not exercise the power he still had and keep it.

  “He brought a man to the house. Some wild-eyed bastard who inked my son. And this creature who wielded the needle was not one of the Good Neighbors.”

  Finn froze on the doorstep. “No one,” he said, “inks the Fianna but my son.”

  Sorcery was tricky stuff, and sorcerers, in the main, were untrustworthy bastards. Unfortunately, they were also necessary evils. Fighters like Finn needed mages to ink or carve their spells of protection and enhancement, their vows and their oaths, the gaesa that defined them, but a duplicitous mage could leave out a crucial word or symbol, or add in some chicanery of his own. That was why a band like the Fianna needed their own sorcerer, and why Finn had encouraged Garrett when his talent had first manifested. But when Garrett had left them to join Miach’s banner and sleep in Miach’s daughter’s bed, he left the Fianna with no mage of their own and his father with a heavy burden.

  Until they recruited a new sorcerer they could trust, there would be no new ink, unless Garrett chose to write a geis for one of the Fianna as a personal favor. That was the only circumstance under which it would have been safe. Not even Sean, surely, would be so stupid as to risk buying magic from someone outside their extended family. And only one kind of human could write tattoos with any real power behind them.

  “Sean went to Garrett,” said Nancy, “but your son refused him.”

  Finn silently cursed his son’s obstinacy. And Iobáth for taking his own sweet time answering Finn’s summons. If the bloody swordsman had come a month ago, Finn and Garrett would be reconciled and Sean would never have sought out some rogue mage to tattoo his boy. “Who was this wild-eyed sorcerer, then?”

  She looked away. “He was horrible, something ferocious, but I don’t know what he was,” she said, face turned to the gathering darkness.

  Not a rogue mage, then. Something worse. Much worse.

  Druids.

  “Sean would never deal with a Druid,” said Finn automatically, but even as the words left his mouth, he knew that was wrong. Sean had never been quite sane after the Druids had tortured him. The man was capable of just about anything.

  “My husband thought our boy was too soft, with his books and poems and stories. He wanted to make a fighter of him. So he invited one of them into our house. They were supposed to all be dead.”

  But they weren’t. Finn hadn’t believed the rumors at first. Not until he had seen it for himself. He had hunted the Druids almost to extinction but been persuaded by Miach to spare the untutored children, who the sorcerer insisted would never be any threat. Two thousand years later, Miach had been proven wrong. The Druids were back. Finn looked across the street at the ruin of his house. He could take no pleasure in being right.

  “I’ll do anything,” she said, taking a step forward. “Anything to protect Davin.”

  She put a hand on his chest, slid it down.

  He was Fae. His appetites were prodigious. He wanted what she was offering, but he did not want this woman. His desire had been fixed on another for several months now, a redheaded schoolteacher who had the good sense to stay away from him. As soon as his house was in order, he would seek her out. Celibacy was not in his nature, but since meeting Ann Phillips, he had found no substitutes appealing.

  It hadn’t been just her looks that had caught his eye—though he found those deeply appealing. It was her fearlessness. She’d walked right into his parlor and confronted him. She felt the same responsibility for her students that he felt for the Fianna, the same obligation to protect them, even at cost to herse
lf. And she drank whiskey neat and savored it.

  He took Nancy’s hand from his chest and pushed it gently away. “Where can I find this Druid, Nancy?”

  “I don’t know.” She looked relieved that he didn’t want her.

  “What was this Druid’s name, then?” he asked.

  “They never spoke his name. Sean said he would kill me if I told anyone, but I couldn’t let him do this to Davin.”

  “What did he look like?”

  Nancy shuddered. “Like a junkie. Skinny, strung out. His clothes were filthy, just rags. And he didn’t have any shoes. I didn’t want to let him in the house, but Sean insisted. And the Druid is coming back next week to finish his work.”

  “When?”

  “Saturday.”

  Five days. If Iobáth didn’t turn up in that time, they were fucked. “What kind of Druid was he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Finn didn’t have enough followers to take down a Druid. If the creature was a magic user, if he had a powerful voice, he would be able to command any Fae who’d been imprisoned by the Druids in the past. They all bore the marks the Druids had carved on them, powerful spells of subjugation and control.

  Garrett’s sorcery was the only effective way to fight this creature. Half-breeds and those born after the fall had not been marked, but they were no match for a powerful Druid.

  No matter how things shook out, it was going to be bloody. And without Garrett, they didn’t stand a chance.

  “You should get out of town, Nancy.” He plucked a roll of bills from his wallet. “Leave Davin with your parents and go tonight. Pay cash. Don’t use Sean’s cards. He could track you that way.”