Cold Iron (13 page)

That Frank Carter was a smuggler and a thief did not surprise Conn at all, in light of his suspicions about the man. He found the human laws about drugs puzzling but understood that the unregulated kind Carter brought into the country could be deadly.

“I think they roofied her,” Helene said finally. “When she refused to find him another site. I think he roofied her and made her do it. She wouldn’t go to the police, because she didn’t think anyone would believe her, but I think they . . .” She trailed off. “I shouldn’t be telling you this? Why am I telling you this?”

“It’s a drug,” Miach said to Conn. “Humans use it on women like a glamour. It makes them pliant, suggestible, and robs them of memory.”

“Beth remembers. She tries not to, but she remembers. I saw it in her mind.” And Frank Carter would suffer for it.

“Beth wouldn’t want me telling you this,” Helene murmured.

“Beth will wake up soon,” Miach said to Helene. “She’ll need fluids, and she should eat if she can. My grand—my
sons
—will stay here with you and get you anything you need. We’ll be back after we speak with Frank Carter.”

Conn wanted to go at once, to
pass
to the location Helene had given them, but Miach warned that the city in that direction was crisscrossed with iron roadways and buildings, and passing would be a stop-and-go process fraught with peril. Driving was faster. The sorcerer placed a call to request a car. Twenty minutes later Conn followed Miach outside, and the Porsche pulled up to the curb. Nial got out and tossed Miach the keys.

“I thought you said the Porsche was in Quincy, in pieces.”

“Some things are too beautiful to destroy, as you should know,” Miach replied. He turned to Nial. “Look after the women. We’ll be back in a few hours.”

The young man nodded and disappeared into the house.

“Just how numerous are your progeny?” Conn asked as Miach started the car.

“More descendants than children over the last few decades, but I have a mind to change that now.”

“Not with Helene. Beth wouldn’t like it.”

“And what would your little Druid do to me if she didn’t like how I treated her friend? Use her voice? She’s close to it now, isn’t she?”

So Miach had seen Beth’s
geis
, seen how it had changed. “Yes. What will you do?”

“I don’t know. But you were right when you said that I stand now where you stood then. I have kindred to protect. I will not let the Court return to destroy them.”

“And I will not let you harm Beth.”

“Patience,
Betrayer
. I’m not your enemy, yet. Let us find your little Druid’s ex-husband first.”

“Yes,” Conn agreed. “Let us find him, and his friend, and kill them.”

“
I made soup.”

Beth decided she must be dreaming again, because the voice was Helene’s and Helene had never made anything vaguely resembling soup in her life. She liked the dream on Granny’s sofa better. Especially when Conn had been in it and had promised never to stop.

Conn. Her sex clenched at the thought of him, and her shoulder tingled. Then she remembered the
geis
and opened her eyes.

Helene was holding a bowl of something steaming. Beth felt achy and sore, as though she’d run a mile and lifted weights on a cold, rainy day. And she felt thirsty. And hungry. And tingly. Shoulder tingly and sex tingly.

“You don’t cook,” Beth said suspiciously.

“I reheated it. Liam brought it from the place down the street.”

“Liam?”

“Doctor Miach’s son. I still don’t understand why a doctor works for Interpol, or why his sons work for Interpol, too, or how he can have sons that old, but he and Conn went to get the gold and the sword back from Frank.”

That part, at least, made sense. The rest . . . Conn must have called Miach when she passed out. She remembered ice. Cold baths. Ugh. Miach had seen her naked. And the two of them must have glamoured Helene, because when she talked about them, she had that slightly fuddled expression Dave Monroe had worn in the gallery.

Beth took the soup. It was the best thing she had ever tasted, and she didn’t even like soup. Helene sat down on the bed. “I don’t like the other one.”

“The other what?” Beth asked, wondering how many lies she was going to have to tell.

“Miach’s other son. Nial. He makes me nervous. And he wouldn’t let me go out. He sent Liam for the soup. I’ve been staying in here, because I don’t like him. Liam’s all right, but even he acts weird when Nial is there. Nial’s cell phone keeps ringing and he goes out in the hall to talk, like he doesn’t want me to hear. Then they go out there and argue together. I’m afraid they won’t let me leave when I try to.”

They were Southie thugs, organized criminals, no doubt planning their next heist. She could hardly tell Helene that, though. And these, to judge from what Miach had intimated, were the nice Southie criminals who didn’t want to kill her for revenge, or use her to bring back the Fae Court. She couldn’t tell Helene that either. Liam, she remembered, had brought her the shawl. He’d been kind. Nial she had seen almost nothing of, only his face, so similar to his brother’s, another echo of Miach’s, turning green while Miach inked her with the quicksilver.

“Conn and Doctor Miach,” Beth began, feeling her way through the lie, “left them here to protect us. They’ve probably got lots of other cases going on, and that’s why they’re on the phone all the time.” And partly because she wanted to keep Helene busy, and partly because she was ravenous, she said, “Is there anything else to eat?”

Helene brought her a feast of sorts, also from the greasy spoon down the street. Slightly congealed cheeseburger and reheated french fries and melted milk shake. She ate it all. She took a bath, a perfectly normal-temperature bath, full of bubbles, while Helene fussed over the wreck of Beth’s black silk gown crushed on the bathroom floor.

“It might have been salvageable—the tears anyway—if someone hadn’t stepped on it afterward. There’s a boot print in car grease on here. Miach, no doubt. But then, you’re murder on dresses anyway.”

Beth noticed how often Helene used the sorcerer’s name. It worried her, but she didn’t know how to warn her friend without giving something away—or seeming as crazy as she had in the gallery. Beth knew she had to apologize for that, but first she had to get dressed.

After her bath she pinned up her hair and ducked into the walk-in closet off her bedroom, which in an earlier time had probably been a room all its own. Now it was Beth’s secret girly indulgence, complete with a soft carpet and a mirrored dressing table.

She slipped into a pair of forest-green cords—chagrined when she realized she’d chosen them because she thought Conn would like them. The silk peasant blouse she chose because
she
liked it, and the boiled wool vest with the pewter clasps she chose because it was warm. She found a pair of soft, fringed moccasins she hadn’t worn in years, then emerged to grovel before her friend.

Helene wasn’t there. And the apartment was oddly silent. Beth pushed open the door to the hall, and walked, as softly as she could, across the wooden floor, but it announced her passing as it always did.

Liam and Nial were there in the living room, and so was Helene, bound and gagged and kneeling in the middle of the carpet.

And holding a knife to her throat was Miach’s nearly full-blooded son, Brian.

Chapter 7

I
t was difficult to imagine Beth living in the antiseptic precincts of Frank Carter’s home. A condominium—Conn thought of it as a cell in a hive—with staring blank walls and polished glass surfaces.

It was empty. Not just of people, although it was that, too. It was empty of the thing he had never realized he most sought in human habitations: warmth.

Miach peered at a heap of white powder on a glass table, dipped a finger in it, tasted it. “Your Druid’s husband has expensive habits,” he observed.

“Ex-husband,” Conn corrected.

“You suspect he has Fae blood,” Miach guessed.

“It fits. The preternatural charisma. The compulsion to take—to steal—as by right. The appetite for luxury.”

Miach looked around the apartment. Colorless, cold, divorced from the natural world. “If he can live like this, his blood is dilute.”

“He has been using Beth to find the mounds for some time.” And he had used crude human poisons to violate her mind and more, and for that he would pay. “He told Beth he had a buyer for the Summoner, which means he is acting for someone else. The progenitor to whom he owes his Fae blood, perhaps.”

“He is
not
mine,” Miach said. “And he doesn’t look like any of the Fianna. But he could be from one of the New York septs. If so, we must find him quickly. The Fae who inhabit Manhattan and the Hudson River Valley are decadent as the old Court. They learned nothing from our downfall. They would turn your Druid inside out with torture and force her to use the sword.”

“And what did you learn, Miach?” Conn knew the sorcerer had been with the Court when his daughter died.

“You are right. I was there,” Miach said, sensing the direction of his thoughts. “And I did nothing to stop them. But neither did I touch her. Not even when she was offered.”

“That is hardly a penance.”

“No,” Miach replied. “This was my penance.” He unbuttoned his shirt, revealing an ugly scar running down the center of his chest. He’d been split open. Stem to stern.

“We thought the Druids had only the magic we gave them, but we were blind in our arrogance. They studied our power, learned to harness and focus it, as only our best sorcerers did. Imagine their delight when they were no longer confined to studying it at a distance, coaxing it from the soil and the trees and the dumb beasts. They wanted to see it firsthand.”

“Thank you,” Conn said.

“For what?”

“For not killing Beth.”

Miach shrugged. “It was clear she was your woman first, and a Druid second. But if it comes down to it, choosing between her life and preventing the return of the Court, I will not hesitate to kill her. All I can promise you now is that if the Manhattan Fae gain hold of the sword, I will make the Druid’s death quick and painless.”

“
What is it you want,
Brian?” Beth took another step into the room. She could see Helene trembling, the point of the knife pressed into her throat. A single wrong move and she would die.

“The sword,” said Brian.

“I don’t have it.”

“No, but your ex-husband does. Call him.” He tossed her a cell phone. “Tell him to bring it here. No tricks, and no police. Or I cut her throat.”

Beth’s hands trembled. She dialed. The phone rang. And rang. And went to voice mail, as she knew it would. After the other night at the museum, there was no way Frank would answer her call. And if she told Brian that, Helene and she were dead. Their only value to him lay with the sword.

“The old man will be back soon,” Nial said, eyeing the door uneasily.

“Call him again,” Brian instructed. She did. No answer. “Right, then,” he said, yanking Helene up by her hair. “We take them with us.”

Beth didn’t need the Druidic voice in her head to tell her that she and Helene were as good as dead if they left with Brian. She had to keep them talking and pray Conn and Miach returned in time.

“What do you want with the sword?” Beth asked, stalling.

“To summon the Court back, you stupid cow,” Brian replied.

Beth scanned the faces of the other two half-breeds. Nial’s was hard now, but Liam looked worried. “Is that what you want, too, Liam?” she asked. “The Court back? Conn says they aren’t exactly kind to half-breeds.”

“He would say that,” Nial spat. “He’s the Betrayer, after all. He’s why we live like this, hiding from your stupid laws, instead of ruling over you.”

“They’ll honor us for freeing them, give us weapons and power the way they gave it to the Druids before,” Liam recited. He must have heard it many times, probably from Brian. Still, he wasn’t convinced. Beth knew she had to use that. She desperately needed an ally here.

“Do they do that now, the true Fae who are free?”

“No,” Liam admitted. “The other true Fae despise half-breeds. Except for the old man—and the Fianna.”

“Father and the Fianna are weak from living among humans so long,” Brian cut in.

“That whole power sharing thing didn’t work out very well with the Druids, did it?” Beth asked. “You think the Court will trust anyone with that kind of power again?”

“They’ll need enforcers and overseers,” Brian said. “Just as they always have. And they’ll trust their own blood sooner than they would humans again.” He turned to Nial. “Take them down to the car.”

“Wait!” Beth said. “Conn was telling Miach the truth. I don’t know how to do Druid things. Even if I had the sword, I wouldn’t know how to use it.”

Brian’s eyes turned hard and glittery. “The knowledge is locked inside that pretty Druid head of yours. I don’t know how to get it out, but I’m acquainted with a true Fae who does.”

A true Fae like Conn who could crack her mind like an egg, compel her to do almost anything and torture her to death once he was through. She would not, could not, let Helene share that fate. “I’ll come quietly if you let Helene go,” she offered.

Brian laughed. “Now why would I do that, when there’s so much fun to be had?” He yanked Helene’s head back, and Beth saw her eyes, wild and frightened, lock with Brian’s.

Helene swayed. Her taut body relaxed in her bonds, and she stopped whimpering, but her eyes screamed. Brian slid a hand inside the collar of her pullover, and Beth could see the revulsion in Helene’s wide pupils.

Brian looked up at Beth as he fondled his incapacitated victim. “I can’t compel a Druid like you, that’s true. But I’m almost full-blooded Fae. I can compel an ordinary human. I can slip inside your friend’s mind, make her enjoy the things I do to her, and leave just enough of her mind free to
know
.”

Beth felt a sick despair. As long as Brian threatened Helene, she knew she would do everything he asked. He had no need to compel her.

“I don’t think you should touch her, Brian,” Liam warned. “The old man wants her for himself.” Liam looked nervous, and with good reason. He was caught between his patriarch and his elder “brother,” and Beth didn’t think either of them liked to be crossed.

But it had been the wrong thing to say to Brian. Beth knew it at once.

Brian licked his lips. “Even better. I’m tired of the old man calling dibs on every decent piece of ass that crosses his path.”

“He won’t like it, Brian,” Liam insisted.

“Do you want to live under the old man’s heel forever, Liam?” Brian asked, letting Helene go and advancing on his brother. “Because you’re either with me, or you’re against me. He’ll never let you have your pretty painter girl from Cambridge. Never let you go to law school, never let you build a life outside that tiny, dirty little slum.”

“I know, Brian,” Liam said softly. Beth felt for him. She understood what it was like to grow up in a place that stifled you, even if it was out of love, and knew what it was like to live under the thumb of a bully like Brian. But Liam had a backbone. “But you said you wouldn’t hurt the women.”

Brian’s eyes narrowed. “That thing,” he pointed to Beth. “Isn’t a woman. She’s a Druid. She would have you rotting beneath the earth. Or she’d gut you like they did Father just to see what was inside you.”

“We’re not nice,” Conn had told her. Apparently, her people weren’t very nice either. And it appeared that the Fae had a long memory for injuries they’d suffered at the hands of the Druids.

Liam made his decision and took a step toward Beth. Where, she wondered, was the voice she had used on Conn in Clonmel, the Druid power he and Miach were so afraid of, when she needed it? She opened her mouth, and all that came out was a scream. Her house was old, her walls thick and nearly soundproof. Her cry rang off the plaster walls and died inside the confines of the apartment.

Liam hesitated, but Nial didn’t. He grabbed for her and she spun and ran toward the kitchen. There was a backdoor. If she could reach it, if she could get help. . . .

Her hands gripped the knob and fumbled with the deadbolt.

Cruel fingers threaded through her hair, yanked her head back, then smashed it into the door. Pain and confusion. Before she could recover her senses, the same hands pulled her back and hurled her facedown to the kitchen floor. Then Nial was on her, his weight crushing her and stealing her breath, as he wrenched her arms back and tied her wrists together with rough, biting twine.

“Feet, too.” She couldn’t see anything but the linoleum floor tiles, but she knew Brian was standing over her now. “Then put them in the trunk.”

“Not Helene,” Beth begged. “She’s claustrophobic.”

They didn’t listen to her. Her head reeled and her vision blurred when Nial threw her over his shoulder and Brian stuffed a filthy sponge from the kitchen sink in her mouth. Then a blanket—her quilt—the horror of being muffled and dragged from home in such a loved thing overwhelmed her—was thrown over her head, and she felt Nial descend the back porch stairs.

Between the jolting and the rank taste of the sponge in her mouth she became nauseated, and by the time Nial rolled her, still swathed in the blanket, into the trunk, she feared she was going to throw up and choke on her own vomit. She concentrated on calming herself, relaxing her jaw, and forcing the sponge out with her tongue.

Before she could eject the sponge, the quilt whipped back and Brian snatched the gag out of her mouth. She retched, trying to get the taste out of her mouth.

“If you scream, or puke, I’ll hurt your friend,” Brian warned, and strode out of her view. Then Liam lowered Helene into the trunk—far more gently than Nial had deposited Beth, and peeled back the sheet covering her face.

The gag was gone, but Helene was out cold. “What did you do to her?” Beth asked, terribly afraid now.

Liam gritted his teeth, started to shut the trunk.

“Please, Liam. Tell me if she’s okay.”

He swore. “Brian put her to sleep. Like the Betrayer did for you after the tatt. She’ll wake up soon enough.”

“Liam, wait! Please tell Miach where we are. I won’t ask you to stand up to Brian alone, but you’re human enough to know this is wrong. What he’s going to do to us is wrong.”

“Tell him where the sword is and free the Court, and you won’t get hurt,” he said, and slammed the trunk.

Beth prayed Helene would stay out for the duration of their journey. Enclosed spaces terrified her. She avoided taking elevators and couldn’t stand many of the tiny rooms in the old part of the museum.

The trunk didn’t frighten Beth. She knew the real danger lay when they reached their destination. She’d assumed, up to now, that Conn would come for her. He’d told her he wouldn’t let her die. But if he found Frank, and he found the Summoner . . . he could return to Clonmel with the blade. In fact, Beth thought, her heart constricting, he would be a fool to do anything else.

Beth was useless to the half-breeds without the sword, and she knew Brian wouldn’t just let them go after kidnapping them. He would kill them.

But thinking that way wasn’t going to solve anything. In the movies, clever abductees kept track of where they were being taken. They listened to the street sounds and counted the turns. Beth didn’t need to. She guessed where Brian would take them. After a few miles of stop-and-go city driving, the final, short descent downhill, and the salt smell of the ocean confirmed her worst fear.

They were going to the island.

C
onn recognized the girl from
Clonmel. She still stank of base metals, and he realized it was from some strange caustic she used on her hair.

They’d searched Carter’s antiseptic home, but discovered no trace of the sword, or the man himself. They’d found his office at the university empty, and questioned, first politely, then with compulsion, the secretary who guarded the department’s halls, but she knew only what Carter had told her: that he was away on business.

“Follow her,” Conn said, when he spotted Carter’s paramour across the grassy quadrangle.

She left the precincts of the university and headed into a residential neighborhood, ancient and sprawling houses giving way to dilapidated Victorians and triple-deckers. As they trailed the girl, Conn found himself wishing he could reach out to Beth and touch her mind, but she’d asked him to stay out of her head, and he’d given her the earrings to ensure that. He’d violated her wishes when she’d lain on Miach’s table, exhausted from her ordeal, but he knew better than to do anything like that again, even if he had the best of intentions.