Blade Dance (A Cold Iron Novel Book 4)

by D. L. McDermott

  “No.”

  “It doesn’t strike me as particularly Fae,” she said.

  “It is, though. We played something like it two thousand years ago. And everyone has had enough blood for one day. They want to be outside, in the open air, and they want to forget all about Druids and death.”

  “But not you?” she asked.

  “No. Not me. I want to be with you,” he said.

  “I’ll get you wet,” she said.

  “I’m counting on it.”

  “We don’t have time.”

  “We have an hour. Remember how I promised you that I would never pass with you without warning?”

  “Yes?”

  “Consider yourself warned.”

  It was easier this time, perhaps because she’d done it several times now, perhaps because it was such a short trip compared to the stomach-churning return from the island. Perhaps because she was soon where she had longed to be all day: home, in her own bedroom.

  “Thank you,” she said. “It’s good to be home.”

  “Good enough that you’re ready to tell me about your mother?”

  “Do you really want to know?” People often said they did, but Ann had long since learned that they didn’t really want to hear the bad stuff.

  “I want to know everything about you, Ann Phillips.”

  She sat down on the bed, and he joined her there, pulling her into his arms and making her feel safe and secure. “I’ve never told anyone the whole story,” she said. “My caseworker knew some of it. The foster families I lived with got the official records, but they didn’t know. I had a roommate in college whom I wanted to tell. She was the nicest person. She took me home at the holidays to stay with her family, and after that, I couldn’t tell her. They lived in a big house in Beverly. It was old, like your house, with big beams and creaky floors and photographs everywhere. Nieces and nephews and cousins. The rooms upstairs were like a maze and wandering around in them felt like trying on someone else’s life.

  “They were so nice and so normal. I knew I could never tell them the truth. I cherished those holidays, the time I spent with them. And they would have looked at me differently if they’d known. I used to lie awake at night on those trips, tucked up in a twin bed with my friend sleeping a few feet away from me, imagining what it would be like to be part of a family like that. I used to tell people that my parents were killed in a car crash. I made myself into an orphan from a fairy tale. But that isn’t what happened.”

  He rubbed slow circles over her back. “If the memories are too painful, you don’t have to share with them with me.”

  “I do,” she said. “I need you to know why I’ll never trust the berserker inside me. Even if I learn how to use her. Even if I say yes to Fae ink. I need you to know, so someone can stop me if I ever . . . You need to know what happened to my mother.”

  And you might not love me once you know.

  “Tell me, then, because I’ll always have your back, Ann Phillips.”

  She prayed that was true. “It was the third time we’d moved that year. All those little towns south of Boston started to blur into one for me, but this one was different. The lawns were bigger. The school was built out of red brick with leaded glass windows and it had a real gymnasium with parallel bars. I remember because I thought I was very special when my teacher told me I could stay after school every day and use them. It felt a little bit like a castle, that school, with all its dark wood paneling and nooks and crannies. It was just an ordinary nineteenth-century public school, nothing special, really. I know that now. But it seemed so permanent and reassuring to me. And I didn’t realize until years later that the after-school program was something for poor kids, so my mother could work a full day. I thought it was because I was special. They gave us dinner, and I loved eating with the other kids and sitting in the lunch room at night with the pretty brass chandeliers lit. It made me feel like a princess. I didn’t understand that they gave us dinner to make sure we were getting three square meals.

  “My mom had lucked into the job. She’d been working as a night janitor at an office building outside Route 128. One of those invisible people who empty the trash and vacuum the floors every night after the employees go home. It’s lonely work and a little dangerous, being in a big empty building at night, but a lot of single mothers do it on top of their day jobs. You can’t support two people on just forty hours of minimum wage work. There was another girl who worked the same building, and there was a supervisor who kept bothering her. One night he cornered her, and my mom heard her crying and she stopped him. He fired both women. But there was a man who worked in the building, an engineer at a tech company, and he saw everything. He couldn’t get my mom’s job back for her, but he wanted to help.

  “He had an elderly mother who lived in a big place in the next town all by herself. She was going deaf and she needed someone to help out around the house. There was an apartment above the garage, two little rooms, with a dust ruffle on the bed. It had pleated trim that I used to run my fingers over as I fell asleep at night. And my mother could keep her day job clerking at a dry cleaner as long as she did chores.”

  “That sounds ideal for a woman in your mother’s position,” said Finn.

  “It was perfect. Even my mother seemed hopeful. We were finally going to get on our feet. Every time she got fired, she’d promise that it would never happen again, but this time I believed her. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was the pleated ruffle on the bed or the big lawns or the hot meals at school. It felt like the kind of place where bad things didn’t happen. And then it all went wrong.

  “We weren’t supposed to have guests. I thought that was because of me, that a little old lady wouldn’t want loud children running around the house, and it seemed like a small price to pay. Mrs. Vandersalm was nice, but she couldn’t hear very well, so you couldn’t really carry on a conversation with her. On weekends she’d put my mother to work cleaning out the attic—so her children wouldn’t have to do it when she died, she said—and sometimes she’d find old things that she gave to us. Winter coats. I was warm walking to school for the first time in my life that winter. And ice skates. I’d never owned a pair, but she had dozens up in the attic, all stiff leather and rotted laces, lined up by size as her children outgrew them. I got a bicycle, and my mother taught me how to ride it but Mrs. Vandersalm wouldn’t let me go past the driveway. That was all right, though, because the driveway went round in a circle and it was as big as a small street. It was perfect.”

  “What went wrong?”

  This was the hard part. The part Ann had never told anyone. “My mother brought a man home. She’d done it before, in our old places, in our awful rented rooms in flophouses, in the motels we sometimes had to stay at. But I’d been too young to understand. This time I was just old enough to figure out what the sounds coming from the next room meant, but my mother had always done that, just like she’d always gotten into fights. She did it again the next week, with a different man. And the week after that. It was just something she did.

  “Mrs. Vandersalm must have heard, too. Or maybe she saw the man leaving. I never found out. They argued. I remember Mrs. Vandersalm telling my mother that she was setting a terrible example for me. I think she was worried that one of the men would turn out to be dangerous, or maybe abuse me. I don’t think she understood that my mom could bring men home just for sex. She wasn’t needy or looking for something she couldn’t find, and she wasn’t going to fall into some kind of abusive relationship.”

  “She was a berserker,” said Finn, brushing Ann’s hair back from her face and tucking it behind her ears. “Even if she didn’t know it. Fighting and fucking came naturally to her. She would never have let anyone hurt you.”

  “No. She wouldn’t have. She couldn’t hold down a job because she couldn’t let an injustice pass unpunished. It made her mad, but she never even raised he
r voice with me. But Mrs. Vandersalm didn’t know that. She didn’t know what my mother was like. That she could handle herself.”

  “And Mrs. Vandersalm was old enough,” said Finn, “that she came from a different generation. She probably couldn’t conceive of a world in which you could grow up unchanged by your mother’s sexuality.”

  “She was right, in a way,” admitted Ann. “Even after what happened to my mother, I never thought that sex was something dirty or shameful. I was curious about it as a teenager, eager to experiment. My mother had seemed to enjoy it like a good meal or a hot cup of coffee or a bar of chocolate. Like it was one of life’s pleasures. So I approached it that way, too. And it got me labeled a nymphomaniac and a slut long before I even managed to lose my virginity.”

  “That wasn’t your mother’s fault,” said Finn. “That was the cruelty of children, the hypocrisy of human society and their idiotic ideas about sex. I have lived through two thousand years of changing human mores, and while the ones you were raised with were not the stupidest, they’re far from the most enlightened.”

  He pulled her into his arms, and it felt good to rest her head on his shoulder.

  “I know Mrs. Vandersalm was only trying to help. She thought my mother was endangering me. She thought I would be better off living with her in the big house, away from my mother.”

  “And your mother didn’t like that idea.”

  “No. She didn’t. That’s why I don’t blame Nancy McTeer for her behavior. I know what it’s like to have someone try to take your child away from you. I was that child. Mrs. Vandersalm just wanted to help. She took my hand and pulled me toward the big house, and my mother tried to pull me back. She pushed Mrs. Vandersalm, and Mrs. Vandersalm fell. She broke her hip, and she died in the hospital a few days later. The police took my mother away after that. I went into foster care. It was easy for the state to get custody, and my first caseworker didn’t think I should be allowed to see my mother. Neither did the one after that. My second foster mother took me to visit her, but by then she was already dying. She was serving a life sentence. When she got cancer, my new caseworker tried to get her out so we could spend the time she had left together, but she died before that could happen.”

  “You’re not your mother, Ann.”

  She sat up and faced him, because she needed him to understand. “But I could be. I could lose control and hurt someone. I’ve always been so afraid to have my own children because I can’t bear to think what would happen if I thought someone was threatening them. Even someone old and frail who couldn’t have hurt anyone.”

  “She might have been old and frail, but she probably could have called social services and had you removed from your mother’s custody.”

  “Just like I wanted to do for Davin,” said Ann.

  “Just like you wanted to do for Davin,” agreed Finn. “And with good reason. But social services couldn’t have helped Davin. His father would just have taken the boy back, and no doubt hurt whoever was trying to help him. I’m honestly not certain what to do about the child now. Sean hasn’t shown much remorse for his actions. Nancy isn’t the most responsible parent. But they’re my followers, part of my community, and ultimately, my responsibility.”

  “His grandparents are loving and sensible,” offered Ann. “And they sign all his report cards anyway.”

  “Perhaps something can be worked out,” said Finn.

  “But you have to see why I don’t want to embrace the part of me that destroyed my mother’s life.”

  “I do see, Ann, but I don’t agree with your choice. Your mother didn’t know what she was, didn’t know how to control her gifts, didn’t live as part of a community that understood her. But you and I are more alike than you realize. We saw the mistakes our parents made and decided we wanted something different for ourselves. You saw what your college roommate’s family had created, the kind of life they had made, and decided that was a better way of living, a life worth working for. I saw the same in Brigid’s family. The life she and I created was destroyed, but that’s the thing about surviving. You have to honor what you’ve lost by building something new in its place, otherwise you just leave behind the crater where lives once were. We can do that together, but not if you hide from your power. The world we’ve inherited, the challenges we face, are too dangerous. Ann Phillips, schoolteacher, won’t survive the fight that is coming. She won’t survive if the wall comes down and the Queen comes back. Ann Phillips, berserker, though, can go where I go, face what I face. And in my world, no one will condemn you for being a strong woman who makes her own choices, who fights for what’s right.”

  “But what if I lose my temper? What if I hurt someone like Mrs. Vandersalm?”

  “Do you think that your fears are unique to you or berserkers? Every man or woman, every Fae who has ever gone to war, who has ever had to employ violence to defend what is theirs, what is right, faces the same challenge when he or she returns home. Violence is a habit that can be broken, that can be left outside the door or on the battlefield. Not every warrior becomes a brute. We can be kind and gentle, too. I’ll show you that tonight, if you’re well enough.”

  She knew he was right, but it was still a difficult step to take. “Could it be someplace that no one can see? The ink? I doubt the parents at school would be thrilled to discover that their second-grade teacher has giant tattoos around her wrists.”

  “I suppose it could be someplace more discreet, although I don’t exactly relish the idea of you disrobing for Miach.”

  “That’s a relief,” she said. “Because I’m not into the whole Fae swinging thing.”

  “What makes you say that?” he asked.

  “The Prince. He wanted me to know what your world was like before the fall. He seemed to think that I’d find it appealing, so he showed me you and your wife.”

  Finn looked stricken. “He had no business doing that.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what he was going to show me.”

  “It’s not your fault. Where the Prince Consort is concerned, I know where to apportion blame. What did he show you?”

  “You were out hunting. You were together.” She colored at the memory of his lovemaking through Brigid’s eyes. “You were very happy. I could feel that. But you weren’t faithful to each other, either. I wouldn’t be okay with that. Even if it is a Fae thing.”

  “You don’t have to be okay with it. I’m not sure that I ever was, but it was such an accepted part of our world that I didn’t question it until the Prince set his eyes on Brigid, and there was no way for her to refuse without risking the Queen’s displeasure.”

  Ann shivered at the thought. “Does that mean that after Brigid you were monogamous?”

  “Not precisely, no,” he admitted.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that most of my relationships have been about sex, not partnership, and no one expected faithfulness. And sex itself, without the partnership, tends to get boring over time. The Fae solution to that is variation.”

  “What kind of variation?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Games, the kind you and I enjoyed together yesterday.”

  “I don’t mind those games. It’s everything else that falls under that heading that I’m not so sure about.”

  “Would it shock you to know I’d been with men, as well as women?”

  She considered a moment. “It wouldn’t shock me, no. Or upset me, as long as it was in the past. I don’t want to share you with anyone else, male or female.”

  “So a threesome is out of the question, then?”

  “You are kidding, right?”

  He laughed. “I am kidding, but it is a common Fae practice, and I wouldn’t want you to be caught unawares by it.”

  “How likely is that?” she asked.

  “I want you to be part of my world, Ann. I want you at my sid
e. That means you’ll encounter Fae who practice the old ways, who still live, to the extent possible, as they did before the fall. Some of these Fae will be allies in the coming fight to keep the wall up. Others will be enemies. Better that you not be caught off guard by their ways. I doubt the Prince was offering you a glimpse of life before the fall out of a sense of charity. He wanted to unsettle you, to recruit you to his cause, by driving a wedge between us. I don’t want anyone to be able to drive a wedge between us that way, so I have a confession to make.”

  “Are you going to tell me that you’ve been sleeping with Patrick?”

  Finn laughed. “No. I can swear to you that I have never slept with Patrick. But, more recently, I thought about joining a Fae and her human lover in their bed. I only really contemplated the idea because I wanted you, badly, but knew we would have a better chance at making something work if I waited for you.”

  “When did all this happen?”

  “After you came to my house.”

  “That was only a few nights ago.”

  “Fae appetites can be fierce,” he said.

  She looked at him sidelong. “Is that a joke?”

  “Only partially, my little berserker. I think tonight, once you regain your strength through the restorative powers of chocolate mousse, we should explore your creamy skin and decide where Miach is to place his ink.”

  “Not Garrett?”

  “I’d rather Miach did it. Garrett has no experience with berserkers. Miach knew many and inked more than a few before the fall.”

  “If I say yes,” she said, “do I have to do it right away?”

  “Sooner would be better than later.”

  “I’m a little tired of magic. The Druid was . . .” She shuddered. “There was something wrong with him. Something strange about his eyes. Something almost Fae. He was powerful. I could feel it. And he was . . . broken. His voice was this thing. This strange thing. I could hear all kinds of different voices inside it, all out of sync with one another. It sounded wrong. I don’t understand how Miach can train creatures like that.”