The current carried us to Franklin, spitting us out at a remote leypoint, and from there we drove up a winding road to the Highlands. It used to be a ritzy destination, beautiful lakes and waterfalls wrapped in emerald-green forests that spilled from the sheer cliffs. Million-dollar homes, leisure boats, play ranches with pampered horses…But the magic had wrecked the infrastructure and the residents quickly learned that the mountains in winter are much less fun without electricity and takeout. Now the homes lay abandoned or taken over by die-hard locals. Little villages sprang up here and there, small remote communities whose residents peered suspiciously at us as we drove by.
Cliffside Lake was beautiful, but we had no time for sightseeing. Eight hours after we had left the Keep, we stood by a mountain scoured with white lightning whip marks.
I had expected an altar, or some sort of mark to show the right spot, but there was nothing. Just a cliff.
I dumped a bowl full of jewelry and bullets onto the rocks. They scattered, clinking. “Ivar?”
Nothing happened.
Doolittle’s face fell.
“Ivar, let us in!”
The mountains were silent. Only Roderick’s hoarse breathing broke the quiet.
We should’ve gotten here sooner. Maybe the offering worked only during a magic wave, but as soon as magic hit, the necklace would snap Roderick’s neck.
“Let us in!” I yelled.
No answer.
“Let us in, you fucking sonovabitch.” I hit the mountain with the bowl. “Let us in!”
“Kate,” Curran said softly. “We’re out of time, baby.”
Doolittle sat down on a rock and smiled at Roderick, that patient calming smile. “Come sit with me.”
The boy walked over and scooted onto the rock.
I sagged against the mountain wall. It didn’t work. All this and it didn’t work.
“It’s pretty up here,” Roderick said.
It wasn’t fair. He was only a boy…I buried my face in Curran’s shoulder. He wrapped his arms around me.
“Can you hear the birds?” Doolittle asked.
“Yes,” Roderick said.
“Very peaceful,” Doolittle said.
I felt Curran tense and looked up.
A man walked up the path. Broad and muscular, built like he wrestled bears for a living, he had a wide face, lined with wrinkles and framed with a short dark beard and long brown hair. He wore a pair of soot-stained jeans and a tunic.
His gaze fell on Roderick and the necklace. Thick hairy eyebrows crept up above his pale blue eyes.
“What are you guys doing up here?” he asked.
“We’re looking for Ivar,” Curran said.
“I’ll take you.” The man looked at Roderick and held out his hand. “Come, little one.”
Roderick hopped off the rock and walked over. The dark-haired man took his hand. Together they walked up the steep mountain path. We followed.
The path turned behind the cliff, and I saw a narrow gap in the mountain, its walls completely sheer, as if someone had sliced through the rock with a colossal sword. We walked into it, stepping over gravel and rocks.
“Where are you folks from?” the man asked.
“Atlanta,” I said.
“Big city,” he said.
“Yes.” None of us mentioned the necklace choking the boy’s throat.
Ahead the sun shone through the gap. A moment and we passed through and stepped into the light. A valley lay in front of us, the ground gently sloping to the waters of a narrow lake. A watermill turned and creaked on the far shore. To the right a two-story house sat on the lawn of green grass. A few dozen yards to the side a smithy rose and behind it a garden stretched up the slope, enclosed by a chain-link fence. Further still, pale horses ran in a pasture.
The necklace clicked and fell off Roderick’s neck. The dark-haired man caught it and snapped it in half. “I’ll take that, then.”
Roderick drew a breath. Tiny red dots swelled on his neck, where the necklace had punctured skin.
“No worries,” the man said. “It will heal in the next magic wave.”
A shaggy gray dog trotted up to us, spat a tennis ball out of his mouth, and pondered Roderick with big eyes.
“That’s Ruckus,” the man said. “He’d like it if you threw the ball for him.”
Roderick picked up the tennis ball, looked at it for a moment, and then tossed it down the slope. The dog took off after it. The boy turned to us.
“Go ahead,” Doolittle told him.
Roderick dashed down the slope.
“So you’re Ivar,” I said.
“I am.”
It finally sank in. The necklace was gone. Roderick was safe. My legs gave a little bit and I leaned against the nearest tree.
Ivar studied me. “Oh now, that’s not good. Why don’t y’all come down to the house? Trisha was making iced tea before I left. It should be about done.”
As if in a dream I followed him down to the house. We sat on a covered porch, and Ivar brought a pitcher of tea and some glasses.
“Why make a necklace that would strangle a child?” Curran asked.
“It’s a long story.” Ivar sighed. “I take it you know what I am?”
“A dvergr,” I said.
“That’s right.” Ivar looked at his hands. They were large, out of proportion to his body. “I work with metal. As long as I can remember, the metal spoke to me. Some things I make are harmless. Plows, horseshoes, nails. Some are not. I have made a blade or two in my time. The thing is, once the blade is out of your hands, you can’t control what it’s used for. I try.”
“Like with Dagfinn?” I guessed.
Ivar nodded. “How is that boy doing?”
“Well,” Curran said.
“Good to hear. He had a bit of a temper, that one.” Ivar looked out at the river’s shore where Roderick and Ruckus chased each other. “Trisha is my second wife. My first one, Lisa, well, she was…The best I can figure, she was elfin. No way to know for sure, of course. She showed up on my doorstep one day and stayed. She was beautiful. We had a daughter, but the valley life wasn’t for Lisa, so one morning I woke up and she was gone. Left the baby with me. I did my best to raise her. She had hair like gold, my Aurellia. But I must have done a lousy job raising her. There was never any warmth in her, no empathy. I don’t know why. She was fully grown when a young man came down to the valley. He said he wanted to apprentice himself to me. To learn about smithing. I don’t take apprentices, but the boy had talent, so he and I made a bargain. He would stay with me for a decade.”
“Ten years is a long time,” I said.
“It’s enough to learn how not to do harm,” Doolittle said.
Ivar threw him a grateful look. “You understand. You can’t teach the craft in ten years. I’m past eighty and I still learn new things every day. But I thought a decade would be long enough to teach him what you should make and what you shouldn’t and when. Can’t just hand that kind of power to a man and let him loose in the world without guidance. So Colin and I made a bargain. He would wear the collar and stay here in the valley to learn all I could teach him. If he left the boundary of the valley before the time was up, the collar would kill him. He understood that there was no turning back. Once he put on the collar, he had to stay here for ten years.”
“Aurellia decided to leave?” Curran asked.
Ivar nodded. “She had no skills. There’s a school down in Cashiers, and I tried to take her there, but she quit. Didn’t care for it. Didn’t care for the metalwork either. Thought it coarse and common. It’s my own fault: I had explained money to her and that in the outside world you can’t just live off the land and barter the way we do here. So she decided Colin would take care of her. One day I went up in the mountains to the old Cooper mine, and when I came down, they were gone. I had warned Colin that even if he managed to take the collar off, it would try to find him again and he wouldn’t be able to resist. The way I figure, Aurellia got it off him s
omehow and they must’ve sold it. There was a lot of gold in that collar.”
Now things made sense. Colin made the money. She needed him alive to take care of her. Roderick was just incidental.
“Colin doesn’t do metal smithing anymore,” I told him. “He’s an accountant. I don’t think he even remembers his time here. They way he acted when he saw the collar, I don’t think he knew what it was. He and Aurellia had a daughter. The necklace killed her. That’s their son.” I pointed down toward the valley where the boy and dog played. “Aurellia put the necklace on him to keep it off Colin.”
Ivar’s face jerked. “The necklace was never meant to follow the blood. It was only meant to keep Colin here.”
Roderick came up the stairs. His face was flushed. “We don’t have to go yet, do we?”
I would not take him back to that bitch.
Ivar looked at his grandson. There was a sadness there and regret. A lot of regret. I could see the resemblance between them now: same dark hair, same serious, somber look in the eyes.
“Do you like it here?” Doolittle asked.
Roderick nodded.
The medmage looked at the dwarf. “Second chances don’t come about often.”
Ivar’s face went slack.
“He’s right,” Curran said.
Ivar took a deep breath and smiled at Roderick. “Roderick, I’m your grandfather. Would you like to stay here for a while? With me?”
Roderick looked at Doolittle.
“It’s your choice,” the medmage said. “You can come back with me, if you would like.”
Roderick mulled it over.
“I never had a grandfather before,” the boy said.
“I never had a grandson before,” Ivar answered.
“Can I go swimming?”
“Yes,” Ivar said. “Your grandmother will be back from the market soon. We’ll have us some lunch and you can go swimming. The water’s cold but you might enjoy it. Our kind does.”
Roderick smiled. It was a tiny hesitant smile. “I would like that.”
Ivar got up and offered the boy his hand. “Would you like to see my smithy?”
Roderick nodded. The two of them walked off the porch together, hand in hand.
The three of us sat on the porch, watched the river, and drank the iced tea.
“What about Aurellia?” I asked.
“She’s still married to the DA’s brother-in-law,” Curran said. “A woman told me it would be a bad idea to do anything about that.”
“I wouldn’t worry about Aurellia,” Doolittle said, watching Ivar and Roderick by the smithy. “I have a feeling she’ll get what’s coming to her.”
EPILOGUE
Atlanta Avery hospital reported an extremely troubling case: a local woman, Aurellia Sunny, has aged forty years overnight. The medmage professionals theorize that accelerated aging occurred due to a gold ring that arrived in the mail and was left on Mrs. Sunny’s front porch. The ring has since dissolved into her skin and is impossible to remove. The aging process is continuing and the family has been advised to make the proper arrangements. PAD Detective Tsoi, the lead investigator on the case, had the following advice for residents: “Don’t accept gifts from anonymous parties. If you don’t know who the package is from, don’t open it.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Ilona Andrews is the pseudonym for a husband-and-wife writing team. Ilona is a native-born Russian, and Andrew is a former communications sergeant in the U.S. Army. Contrary to popular belief, Andrew was never an intelligence officer with a license to kill, and Ilona was never the mysterious Russian spy who seduced him. They met in college, in English Composition 101, where Ilona got a better grade. (Andrew is still sore about that.) Together, Andrew and Ilona are the coauthors of the New York Times bestselling Kate Daniels urban fantasy series and the romantic urban fantasy novels of the Edge. They currently reside in Austin, Texas, with their two children and numerous pets. For sample chapters, news, and more, visit www.ilona-andrews.com.
Ace Books by Ilona Andrews
The Kate Daniels Novels
MAGIC BITES
MAGIC BURNS
MAGIC STRIKES
MAGIC BLEEDS
MAGIC SLAYS
The World of Kate Daniels
GUNMETAL MAGIC
The Edge Novels
ON THE EDGE
BAYOU MOON
FATE’S EDGE
eSpecials
MAGIC MOURNS
MAGIC DREAMS
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Gunmetal Magic (kate daniels) Page 47
