Iron Kin: A Novel of the Half-Light City

by M. J. Scott

  Fen stayed silent, his gaze fixed on Simon over Holly’s head. His eyes glittered—too green, too sharp. He looked almost feral.

  “Simon? What’s he talking about?” I asked.

  Simon shrugged. “I said, I’d show you. Guy, can you bring Reggie?”

  “I’ll carry her,” Fen said sharply.

  Holly stepped closer to him, her hand lifted as though to touch him. Fen flinched away. “I said I’ll do it.”

  “It’s safer if Guy does,” Bryony said. “That potion you took can be unpredictable.”

  That news didn’t seem to improve Fen’s mood any. “How?” he gritted out.

  “Sometimes it keeps people going for a few hours and then it knocks them out cold. Where they stand. It’s probably better if you aren’t carrying Regina if that happens.”

  Fen’s lip curled, but he stepped aside. Guy picked Reggie up as though she weighed no more than a kitten. He held her as gently as Fen had, worry frosting his eyes as he looked down at her still face. He turned from the bed, adjusted his grip. Then he paused. “Don’t we need charms?”

  Charms? For what? And for that matter, why the hell did everybody else in this room seem to know what was going on except for Fen and me? “Why would we need charms?”

  “The only people who know about this are in this room,” Simon said.

  For the first time, I realized that no one else had come to help Simon and Bryony. Normally there would be others—prentices, orderlies, other healers—watching and learning and assisting as needed. But nobody had come into the room since we’d entered. Now that I thought about it, I could feel a ward humming gently behind me, sealing the room to prying eyes and ears.

  Simon’s or Bryony’s work? If they were worried about being overheard here in St. Giles—which was not only a hospital but a Haven, a place of supposedly inviolate safety—then whatever it was they were hiding was serious indeed.

  But I had no idea what it could be. Fen had said something about vampires. But that couldn’t be right.

  Holly pressed a charm into my hand, a twisting dangle of glass beads and leather that looked small and simple. But the thread of magic that pulsed from it was complicated.

  From the taste of the power, it was Holly’s work. Which meant we couldn’t be going far. Holly’s charms worked spectacularly well when she used them on herself but usually lasted only a short time for others.

  “All right,” Simon said when everyone—apart from Lily, Simon, and Bryony—had been handed charms. Holly had tied one of them around Reggie’s wrist as well. Fen had looked at his as though he recognized it and his brows drew down, the anger in his eyes sparking hotter. Obviously he knew what the charm was for.

  I couldn’t tell.

  “Lily will go first, then Holly will activate the charms for the rest of you.”

  Lily faded from sight, which was something I still wasn’t used to, even though I’d seen her do it a number of times. When the last smokelike image of her disappeared completely, Holly did something and everyone else in the room disappeared from view as well. Invisibility charms. Well, that solved that mystery, though it didn’t provide any answers as to why we needed such things within the walls of St. Giles.

  After a minute or so, Simon gave the order for us to follow him. How exactly we were going to achieve that when all of us were invisible remained to be seen, but the more immediate problem was how we were all going to be able to leave the room without crashing into one another.

  Holly took care of that, making me jump as she brushed past me to take up a position somewhere near the door and issuing instructions for how we were to proceed in a low voice. Bryony left the room first and as she passed me I noticed a tiny, faint glow of light floating in the air roughly at the height her shoulders would be. Follow the invisible Fae.

  Holly’s system worked and we set off on a strange, mostly silent journey through hospital corridors that seemed too empty. I wondered if Bryony had given orders for no one to be wandering around for a certain period of time or whether she was using a spell to contain people where they were, but as I had to focus on walking—being invisible was an odd and unsettling sensation that made me prone to tripping over my skirts—I didn’t try and feel for any magic.

  Bryony’s light led the way to the back corridors of the hospital, then down into its bowels via a series of staircases I’d never used before. Down and down and down. What exactly had the founders of the hospital been expecting when they built the buildings with several levels belowground?

  As we traveled deeper, the notes from the metals in the building grew muffled by the earth that surrounded us . . . except, that is, for the familiar song of iron. That grew steadily stronger as we filed along, until the walls almost pulsed with the sensation. I wondered how Bryony bore it as well as she did. Or if she did. As the sensation from the iron grew even stronger, the little flickering orb of light dimmed, until it was only the faintest of sparks.

  We turned at a final junction in the seemingly unending tunnels and suddenly the source of the ironsong was apparent. A massive door—warded so heavily it fairly glowed—blocked our path. I stopped in my tracks, heedless of Fen walking behind me, trying to calculate how much the door must have cost.

  It was a horribly expensive barrier to whatever lay beyond.

  A chill shivered through me. What was worth spending so much on to protect?

  I was about to find out. Simon blinked into sight and started working the wards. The door swung open silently to his touch, making me itch to inspect it more closely, to see how it was wrought. To balance such a weight of iron so that it moved so easily was a skill indeed.

  Simon beckoned and beside him Lily also faded into view. She stepped through the door and then Bryony and Holly also appeared. Bryony waited by the door, drawing on a pair of slim leather gloves while Holly held out a hand.

  “Saskia, then Fen. Come up to me and put the charm in my hand.”

  “I can kill a charm.” Fen’s voice was sharp.

  “I’d prefer you didn’t waste all my work,” Holly said. She sounded like she was holding on to her temper with both hands as well. “Saskia, you first.”

  I did as requested, moving carefully, hoping that I wouldn’t crash into Guy. I’d lost track of where he might be. Fen, I knew, was behind me. I reached Holly, dropped the charm into her hand, and then had to suppress a sigh of relief when I could see myself again. I rubbed my arms, one after the other, both to relieve the chill I felt and to prove to myself that I was indeed all here.

  I didn’t envy Holly, who used such charms regularly in her work as a spy. Not being able to see my body was unnerving. I preferred seeing that both my feet were firmly on the floor.

  Holly jerked her head toward the door and I walked through. Behind me, Holly said, “Fen?” He didn’t reply. I didn’t look behind me, focusing instead on my surroundings. We stood in another stretch of St. Giles’ seemingly endless tunnels. About fifty feet or so beyond us was another massive door.

  More iron. More wards. My chill increased.

  Soft footsteps came up behind me. Holly walked past me to stand by Lily and Guy joined her, Reggie still safely in his arms. Fen stopped beside me. I snuck a glance up at him. His eyes still looked too bright as he stared at Reggie. The air around him almost vibrated with his anger. I wanted to touch him, to help with the pain he had to be in, but I didn’t think he’d welcome it right now.

  Bryony closed the iron door behind us and the resonance between the iron of each of the doors made the air sing softly around me. I found myself caught by the song, listened to the metals with wonder. I didn’t think I’d ever been in such close proximity to so much iron. My prentice chain warmed around my neck as my power flared in response.

  “How can you stand to be down here?” I said to Bryony. Down here, the sense of power that usually surrounded her was muted and she looked pale.

  She made a fluid Fae gesture, smoothed the leather gloves. “I can bear it for a little w
hile. As long as I don’t touch the iron directly.”

  I wondered how much she was underplaying. Being so close to so much iron had to hurt her. All of the Fae who chose to live in the City had to get used to some degree of discomfort from the iron in the buildings and machines, but that was different from being this close to what must be at least half a ton of iron.

  Simon cleared his throat. “Before we go on, there’s something I want to tell you.”

  Fen made a sound that was almost a growl. He had to be close to his limits of tolerance as well. Which couldn’t be helping his anger. He was frowning at Simon, his mouth set in a tense line.

  I was suddenly reminded that he had grown up in the border boroughs, running half wild in those streets. Part Beast. Part Fae. Surviving. And thriving. He wasn’t the simple pleasure seeker he affected to be, this man. No. He was strong. Powerful in his own right. Not a man to cross.

  And probably full of secrets that I didn’t necessarily want to know about.

  Much like my brother, it seemed.

  When had things gotten so complicated? My head ached, fatigue and apprehension tightening the muscles in my neck and back. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know any more, despite my curiosity. Didn’t want to risk having my relationship with Simon altered by what he was about to reveal. He was my brother and I loved him and I wanted things to be easy between us.

  But in these times of rising dark, perhaps things could no longer be so black and white. In the half-light, it was never easy to see the truth, after all. But it was important to try.

  “Tell us,” I said to Simon.

  He nodded and took a few steps closer to Lily, seeking the comfort of her closeness, perhaps. “A few years ago,” he said in his quiet, calm voice, “I was coming here, to St. Giles, very late—or early, perhaps. I found somebody in one of the laneways near the hospital. Injured, horribly burned.”

  “One of the Blood?” Fen said.

  “Yes.”

  I stifled the pained laugh that rose in my throat. Only my brother would do such a thing. He hated the Blood for what they had done to our sister, yes, but his healer oaths would bind him to help anyone who needed it. “You took them into the hospital? Gave them Haven?” Anyone who wanted it had to be granted refuge in any of the Havens in the City.

  “He was too far gone to ask for it,” Simon said. “But he managed to say something about being hunted, so I took him down to one of the old disused quarantine wards here in the tunnels. It was too close to dawn to take him anywhere else.”

  “Why try to save him? Easier to let him fry,” Fen muttered. I got the impression he would have chosen the latter option.

  “I’m a healer,” Simon said. “I had to try. So I worked on him. It was too late to do much. Someone had used silver and holy water on him. The Blood heal fast and the scars were already forming. I did what I could. But he’d been blinded.”

  “How do you—” I cut my words off. On second thought, I didn’t know what kinds of torture it would take to blind a vampire. They, like the Fae and the Beasts, heal inhumanly fast. They can survive and heal wounds that would kill a human many times over. To lose his sight, well, the only thing I could think of was that someone had actually gouged out his eyeballs and then burned him with molten silver to seal the wounds. My mouth tasted a sour rush of bile, and I swallowed. Hard.

  “So you saved him,” Fen said. “Then what?”

  Simon looked toward the door at the end of the corridor. “I couldn’t just send him back out into the world. A blind vampire wouldn’t last long without help, and he said that Lord Lucius was the one who’d hurt him, so there was truly no hope for him if the Blood Court found him.”

  “So you kept him? A vampire?” It seemed crazy, even for Simon.

  “He asked for Haven. I couldn’t have turned him away.”

  “The Blood would not scruple to turn humans away,” Fen said. Guy made what I thought was the start of a nod of agreement before he caught himself and stopped the movement.

  “Not if someone had claimed Haven.”

  “You believe that?” Fen said incredulously. “Do the Blood even operate a Haven?”

  “There are Havens in the Night World.”

  “I’d imagine they’re pretty dusty and disused,” Fen retorted. “Anyone fleeing the Night World isn’t going to stick around in that part of the City. If they don’t leave the City entirely.”

  “Be that as it may,” Simon said. “How the Night Worlders deal with their supplicants isn’t my concern. How I treat anyone who comes to this hospital seeking help is.”

  I stared at my brother, fascinated. I’d never quite understood until just now how deep his healer instincts ran. Hells, it was still hard to reconcile either of the naughty, hell-raising big brothers I’d grown up with with the Master Healer and the Templar knight who stood here, both looking tired and resolute. It didn’t seem that long ago that it had been the five of us playing croquet in the gardens of our house, happy and carefree.

  Now we were only four and I didn’t know if even Hannah could be called completely carefree.

  Perhaps, that is why Simon and Guy have difficulty seeing you as a metalmage, a guilty little voice in my head said. I chased it away. I was allowed nostalgia if I didn’t let it color my actions now. My brothers were just being stubborn and pigheaded in their desire to keep me hidden away.

  “So what happened next?” Fen asked. “Healing him is one thing”—he stopped, gestured at the doors—“but you wouldn’t need all this if you had just healed him.”

  Simon nodded agreement. “I thought it safest to keep him hidden until I knew his story. I told Bryony and she agreed we should keep his presence a secret. For his safety and for the safety of everyone else at St. Giles. Over time, I slowly got to know him. He had to trust me—I supplied his food and everything else and he told me a little of his life in the Court. It took time for me to see that perhaps not all the Blood were the same. Atherton—that’s his name, Atherton Carstairs—told me that he’d been in the retinue of a Blood lord who had opposed Lucius’ ways. He’s quite young, as the Blood count such things. Anyway, Lucius killed his mentor and tortured all those who followed him, to set an example. Atherton’s Trusted somehow got to him and set him free. She didn’t survive to escape with him, though.”

  Simon rubbed his hands along his thighs, fingers stretching. “As I was saying. We talked. Became friends of a sort, and one day I happened to say something about a cure for blood-locking.”

  “A cure?” Fen took a step toward Guy and Reggie, hope flaring on his face. “There isn’t a cure.”

  “No,” Simon said. “Not quite. Not even the hint of one back then. I hadn’t expected Atherton to help me. But he said that perhaps we should look for one. He thought that the one way to loosen Lucius’ grip on power would be to break the Blood’s hold over the blood-locked. Stem the tide of humans falling to the Night World.”

  “Damn fool idea,” Guy said.

  “You don’t approve?” I was surprised. I would have thought that anything that spiked the Night World’s guns would be manna from heaven to Guy.

  “Let’s just say that Simon and I disagree on the consequences of his cure, should he find it,” Guy said.

  “You’re looking for a cure?” Fen asked. His face twisted as he looked down at Reggie. “That’s madness.”

  “Why?” I said, puzzled.

  “A cure just gives those who choose the Night World less reason to be afraid of the Blood, doesn’t it?” Fen said, with a flick of one long-fingered hand. Across from him, Guy made an approving noise. “If they don’t have to fear being blood-locked, why should they stay away?”

  “I disagree,” Simon said. “A cure will help so many people. It’s vital if we’re going to survive.”

  A cure. My head throbbed. All I could think was that it was too late for Edwina. My throat was tight with sorrow. Too late for my sister. But maybe not too late for Regina. “This is all academic unless you’ve actually
found a cure,” I said. “Have you?”

  “We can talk about that inside. I just wanted to prepare you first.” Simon looked from Fen to me.

  Prepare us to meet a vampire, he meant. Not that it would be Fen’s first time. I’d seen Blood before, of course. They attended the opera at the Gilt and other amusements in the border boroughs, but I’d largely avoided contact with them. Vampires only reminded me of Edwina.

  Who’d died blood-locked and estranged from us. And now Simon thought he could find a cure?

  I tried not to think of Edwina but it was impossible. The hurt was always there. And, part of me whispered, maybe it was that same hurt that drove Simon now. Could he really find a cure or was he just trying to right a very old wrong? One that could never be mended.

  Our family would never be whole again. All of this ran through my head like a litany as Simon opened the next door.

  “Give me a moment.” He slipped through the door.

  Preparing the vampire, no doubt.

  Sainted earth.

  Guy stood closest to the door, shifting his stance slightly as he waited for Simon’s return.

  “I can take her,” Fen said to him.

  Guy shook his head. “She isn’t heavy.” He glanced down at Reggie and then back at Fen, his jaw tightening, lips settling into a grim line, and for a moment I saw a glimpse of the warrior Guy usually hid around us. Saw that his rage went deep as well.

  Just what we needed.

  I hoped Simon’s vampire—no, Atherton—I could at least extend the courtesy of using his name, was good at being circumspect. I didn’t think it would take much to set either Fen or Guy off tonight and a vampire would make a tempting target for their anger.

  Simon’s reappearance was a welcome break to the tension brewing in our little group. We followed him through the door into a moderately sized room. It was dimly lit, only a few of the gaslights on the wall burning. It was also mostly empty. A few tables set against the wall to our left held a clutter of notebooks and various medical-looking devices, and a somewhat neater desk and chair stood closest to the very ordinary-looking wooden door in the wall opposite us.