Silver Skin (A Cold Iron Novel)

by D. L. McDermott

  “That,” he said as he paced to the desk at the far side of the room, “would only add piquancy to the experience. Put the dress back on.”

  She exhaled in relief and snatched her dress off the floor. She turned to see Finn picking up the phone. “Send my son in to see me,” he said into the receiver.

  He replaced the phone and turned to Helene. “Bargain with me now for the life of the sorcerer.”

  “Brian has him in cold iron. He wants him to open a solstice gate in the basement of the museum at the university. Free Miach and help us kill the Druids.”

  “And his son, Brian? Would you like me to kill him, too?”

  “Brian is Miach’s to deal with.”

  Finn considered. “It was Brian who told Miach about Garrett and Nieve, and Brian who suggested to Garrett that the sorcerer would not allow them to keep the baby.”

  “So you do love your grandson,” she said. “And you do care about Nieve. It isn’t just vanity.”

  “Do not pretend to understand the Fae,” said Finn coolly. “You can buy Miach’s life at the price of your freedom. Agree, and you will be marked now, as mine. Until such time as I see fit to release you. If ever.”

  It was a Fae bargain, but she was determined to come out ahead. “Vow that you will not act against Miach or his family while I belong to you. If you wish to renew your feud with him, you’ll have to release me.”

  Finn laughed. “Perhaps you have some Fae ancestry, Helene Whitney. You bargain like a child of the Tuatha Dé Danann.”

  But still, he had not agreed.

  The door opened.

  Little feet stampeded into the room. Young Garrett made a bee line for his grandfather and held up a plush stuffed elephant with one chewed off ear. Finn considered the pachyderm a moment, then accepted the toy from the toddler’s outstretched hand.

  Nieve’s husband—ex-husband, Helene realized—entered the room.

  Garrett looked surprised to see Helene. And he looked pale and drawn, as Miach had when he’d come to rescue her.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  Finn didn’t look up from his grandson. Instead, he smoothed his fingers over the raggedy elephant’s ear again and again, a soft light infusing the stuffed toy until the velvet ear was regrown, whole. He handed it back to his grandson, who squealed with delight. “The terms, Helene Whitney,” said Finn softly, “are agreeable.”

  • • •

  Elada drank the milk and the honey that the landlady brought him and parted the curtain on the window over his bed to look outside.

  Dawn wasn’t far off. He could see it on the horizon. But the details of the parking lot, the garden, the outdoor seating area, were all bright as day. The Druids had cast a ring of fire around the building, and it lit the scene in a green, unwholesome light.

  As the right hand of a sorcerer, Elada was used to fighting in the presence of magic. But not like this.

  The Fae called forth powers of destruction when they battled. Fierce winds, stampedes of animals, rushing waters. Not disease and decay. The broken Druids outside had raised a rotting dog from the ground and sent it rampaging into the inn. Conn had dispatched it. Swarms of biting flies had followed, which the warrior had managed to trap in an empty bedroom.

  Beth frantically cast protections on the doors and windows.

  “Don’t you have any offensive magic?” Elada asked.

  “Miach didn’t like the idea of a Druid knowing spells of attack,” she replied.

  “You see how well that has worked out,” said Conn of the Hundred Battles.

  They dared not leave the inn until the Druids were dead or they possessed some means of countering their magic. One of the patrons in the bar—drunk, surly, and disinclined to believe in the old ways—had stormed out of the inn, jumped through the ring of fire, and walked down the road. Elada had watched from the window as the man slowed and staggered, then fell forward onto his face, then been consumed by maggots.

  And the only one of them who could fight these ravenous creatures was Elada. Miach had released him, but his body was still covered with the sorcerer’s protective gaesa. He would be immune from almost anything these petty mages could cast on him, if he could only get out of bed.

  • • •

  Miach’s wrists and ankles throbbed. The iron shackles burned his skin. The iron chain net was almost certainly overkill. He couldn’t cast bound in cold iron. The shackles were enough to incapacitate him. The net only added a pounding headache and nausea.

  The basement had been hot and filled with smoke by the time Brian had come for him. Miach had begun to think that he was wrong, that his son would let him burn. Instead, Brian had unlocked the shackles from the wall, leaving Miach chained and helpless, and ordered his Druids, singed and reeking of smoke, to drag him up the steps and out of the hatch.

  The house was well and truly ablaze, long past saving, and Miach found himself grinning despite the smoke and the pain. He had known Helene was resourceful. He’d learned that much firsthand when she’d thwarted his attempt to kill Beth Carter so many months ago, waylaying Elada at a rest stop and convincing a crowd of good Samaritans that she was an abused wife. Elada had lost precious time extricating himself from the situation, and Beth Carter had gotten away. Even at the time Miach had felt a grudging admiration for Helene.

  Now he vowed that if he got out of this, he’d give her the paintings he had shown her, that she had arranged in her mind, for exhibition at the museum. Because the fire had been a stroke of genius. Even if she hadn’t managed to free Miach, she’d gotten away from Brian, and that left Miach free to act when the opportunity arose.

  It had also flushed the Druids from their nest. Miach observed them now, running around screaming, some of them watching the house burn. Only a small group, no more than a dozen, seemed able to act in concert, to salvage their possessions from the house and load the vehicles waiting in the drive.

  That was encouraging. The great strength of the Druids had been their ability to organize, to work together—a strength the Fae had always lacked except when led by a charismatic figure like Finn—and even then it was only possible to lead a Fae in the direction he already wanted to go.

  But most of these Druids lacked the focus to work together toward a common goal. And none of them had the power of Beth Carter.

  In the van they threw the net over him again. As they careened out of the compound, Miach could feel Helene through the tracking geis. He resisted the urge to turn in her direction, but he could tell that she was not far. He did not want Brian or the Druids spotting her.

  “Why are you so determined to carry out the Prince Consort’s plans, Brian? The Court won’t thank you for it. They are Fae, and to them you are human. A little faster, a little stronger, a little less delicate than ordinary men, but still human and to be scorned.”

  “Don’t patronize me, old man. I know exactly how much the Fae scorn humans. I learned it at your knee, when you chose to train Garrett, and not me, because he was a true-Fae, even though I’m nearly a full-blood myself.”

  Miach had known Brian resented Garrett’s presence in their house, but he had assumed it was the natural friction of young men—or Fae—thrown together at an age when they were still struggling to find their place in the world. He had not known that Brian believed it was because he was a half-blood.

  And in one sense, he was right. “I didn’t train you beyond your natural abilities, Brian, because that is what happened to the Druids. Their magic wasn’t natural. It was thrust on them by the Fae. For our convenience. So we didn’t have to lead or administer, just rule. And it twisted them.”

  “You twisted them,” said Brian. “With your cruelty.”

  “The Druids overthrew us, but they could have banished us all. They didn’t need to keep us in their temple mounds. They didn’t need to cut us open and search for even more power. It was our magic that twisted them. There have been revolutions without vengeance and cruelty, Brian. We’re livi
ng in the product of one, a country that threw off its shackles and built something new that looked forward instead of back.”

  “Don’t tell me that you held me back for my own good,” sneered Brian. “You gave Garrett everything that should have been mine, and even after he took Nieve, you still wouldn’t train me. At least the Prince Consort will. And the Court won’t care that I’m a half-blood if I’m of use to them.”

  “Even if you are right, you would be condemning Nieve and Garrett and Liam and Nial and your whole family to hell.”

  “And don’t forget you, old man. Don’t forget you.”

  • • •

  Garrett led Helene back downstairs, past the kitchen, and into a finished basement. The hill fell away sharply behind the house and the back of the basement was aboveground. There were two small bedrooms for servants down here, a second kitchen, a large entertaining area with French doors leading out onto a patio, and at the front of the house, where the basement was truly below ground and the small windows were set above Helene’s head, was a workshop.

  It was clean, well lit, finished and painted, but Helene still felt a chill when Garrett told her to sit at the table. “The tatt’s going to hurt,” he said. “No way to get around it.”

  “Just do it,” she said.

  “Where does he want it?” asked Finn’s son.

  “He didn’t say.”

  Garrett shrugged. “Then where do you want it?”

  Not over Miach’s. Even though Miach’s symbol had been drawn with Magic Marker and would fade. And Finn’s mark would be with her forever, or until he released her.

  “Anywhere but my shoulder,” she said.

  “I can do it as an armband, if you like. Stretch the characters out, make it pretty, delicate. Easier to remove, if the time comes,” he said.

  She nodded and held out her arm. He took a small silver pen, Fae workmanship, she was certain, and outlined a design over her biceps in silver.

  “Nice muscles for a girl,” he said. “Not Dad’s type at all, though. If you’re lucky, he’ll leave you alone once the novelty of flaunting you to Miach wears off.”

  She didn’t want to think about it. “Is Nieve all right?” she asked.

  Garrett painted something over his design that felt cold and sparkled. “It’s something I came up with to numb the pain,” he explained, avoiding the question.

  “The Druids took her away,” said Helene. “I was afraid they were going to hurt her.”

  “They did,” said Garrett curtly. He opened a drawer in the worktable and took out a silver bottle shaped like an inverted lily, and a matching silver needle nearly a foot long with a sinuous handle and a tip that was so fine Helene couldn’t tell where it ended.

  “It’s better if you look away,” he said.

  She did. She felt the first jab like a pinch and bit her lip to keep from crying out. It wasn’t the individual pricks that were so bad but the cumulative effect circling her arm with a ribbon of pain.

  Garrett went on jabbing her and said, “Why are you doing this? Miach isn’t worth your freedom.”

  “I’m not doing it entirely for him, Garrett. I’m doing it for myself and Nieve, too. I want to make sure that Brian and his Druids can’t hurt anyone else.”

  “Miach ordered your friend killed. He knocked you out cold, and his right hand left you locked in a car at a rest stop for ten hours. How can you forgive him for all that?”

  It came to her that Garrett wasn’t talking about Miach. He was talking about himself and Nieve. “People can change, Garrett.”

  “People, maybe. The Fae are different.”

  “That’s what they tell themselves,” said Helene. “An excuse for not learning from their mistakes.”

  “That’s a dim view of our kind,” said Finn from the doorway, “for a woman who is about to give up her soul for one of us.”

  “I didn’t realize you got my soul in the bargain,” said Helene. “I wasn’t even sure you wanted my body.”

  Finn examined the half-finished mark on her arm. “Finish it later,” he said to Garrett. “The vehicles you described have been spotted parked near the university museum. I need to know how many Druids there were, what kinds of weapons they had, what type of casting you think they are capable of.”

  Helene told him everything she knew about Brian’s Druids. She drew him a floor plan of the museum. She couldn’t perfectly remember the layout of the storage bay in the basement where the solstice gate was. She’d been down there so few times.

  “I think the aisle leading down to the staging areas is the fourth one, but I’m not certain,” she admitted.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Finn. “I expect you to come to guide us. Do these Druids have the power of voice?”

  “What is that?” asked Helene.

  “If you have to ask, then you haven’t heard it. It’s their most dangerous skill. But also the most difficult for their practitioners to master. It’s like the compulsion in Fae speech, but far more powerful. The force in a Fae’s words are natural, inherent, physical, and magical. The Druids studied it and developed an answer to it. An artificial voice. It can even carry physical force.”

  “I didn’t hear or see anything like that,” she said. “But Miach thought that these Druids weren’t well trained, or very strong.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Garrett. “I’ll cast a silence as soon as we make contact with them.”

  “What else works against Druids? Is there something they don’t like, the way the Fae dislike cold iron?” Helene asked. She didn’t want to walk into the museum and face them without a weapon, and she had only the silver knife Miach had given her tucked in her handbag.

  Finn walked to a large cabinet on the back wall of the room and opened it, revealing a small arsenal. She’d come to recognize Fae weapons by their silver hue and sinuous organic workmanship, but he didn’t reach for one of the blades arrayed on the wall. Instead, he reached for what appeared to be a gun.

  “It’s been a long time since I encountered one,” said Finn, loading the weapon with equally silvery shells. “But I expect they won’t like bullets.”

  • • •

  Miach wasn’t surprised when the doors of the van opened and he discovered that they were back at Helene’s museum. The solstice gate was there. The Druids now had the Prince Consort’s arm, and he suspected that the smarter ones had come to the same conclusion that he had: that it could be used to open the gate.

  Maybe not all the way, maybe not enough to allow the Wild Hunt out, but enough for their purposes. The wall had been built to balance on the brink of two worlds. And that balance had been jeopardized when Beth Carter had flung the Prince Consort—or most of him, at least—through.

  Miach had studied the arm and its silver skin enchantment for months. He did not know how it was cast, he did not know how to break it. What he did know was that no matter where he placed the arm, the severed end of the limb oriented itself along the ley lines, toward the nearest solstice gate, and whenever it was left alone, it crept closer, in this plane, to the entrance to the next.

  A powerful attraction, the arm to its body, enough to span planes of existence.

  Enough to pull the Prince Consort’s body through if the right conditions were met. Miach knew what those conditions were. He hoped these Druids didn’t.

  They dragged him into the museum by way of the loading dock, where he was sorry to see the corpse of the guard who had been fond of Helene. If he got through this and she walked away from him forever, it would be difficult to blame her.

  The Druids weren’t skilled enough to open the card locks with their magic, which frustrated Brian, who also lacked that skill. Miach refused to do it for them. The more he could slow them down, the likelier it was that Elada or Conn could get free, reach them, and stop the Druids. He knew it might cost human lives, that any security guard unfortunate enough to answer the alarm would probably be killed by his son or his crazed followers, but more would die if
the Prince Consort was freed or, Dana forbid, the gate opened.

  They chained him to one of the massive shelves in the storage bay while they put the gate back together. Another thing he had Helene to thank for: knocking the lintel stone off the gate. It bought him an hour and a half, as none of the Druids had any skill with the forklift.

  Then his hopes dissipated when his son unchained him.

  “I would kill you first,” said Brian, “as a kindness, because I don’t think the Court will treat you kindly when they realize you could have freed them, and didn’t. But I think you have to be alive when we fling you through.”

  So they had figured it out. That the gate had rebalanced itself. That it had adjusted to the weight of one more Fae—or most of a Fae—on the other side. And that to realign it long enough to pull the Prince through, they would need to fool it by replacing the weight.

  “How can you be sure it will work?” asked Miach. “I’m a whole Fae. The Prince went through less one arm.”

  “We could cut your arm off,” said Brian, “if it looks as though the vortex won’t take you. But we’d have to do that at the last minute, to be sure you went through alive.”

  Miach said nothing. He only watched the wild-eyed, unkempt Druids assemble in front of the gate and argue about how to place the arm. Another delay, but there could only be so many, and then they would begin.

  The Druids finally agreed to place the severed end of the arm toward the opening of the gate. The second it was aligned, the stones around the portal began to hum and the earth groaned.

  Brian dragged Miach forward, to kneel behind the arm, and held him pinned there. Then the Druids closed in around them in a circle.

  Their chanting was ragged, their pronunciation poor. They would not have been able to move a pebble if they didn’t have the arm, but they did have the arm.

  The shrieking of the earth, of the planes rubbing against each other like tectonic plates, grew louder, and Miach felt the currents of the Prince Consort’s enchantment—the magic that had turned his arm into silver—swirl around him. Under other circumstances he would have been fascinated.