Cold Iron (20 page)

The first time she woke up to the clash of swords outside her window she had panicked, convinced the uneasy peace between the two Fae had been broken. She’d run through the kitchen out to the back porch and leaned over the wooden rail to find Conn and Elada battling up and down the long narrow garden. The little girl and boy downstairs had been watching from their own porch, awestruck.

Conn was the superior swordsman, that much had been clear. He moved with a dancer’s grace. But Elada possessed determination and technical skill. Their blades flashed in the sun. Beth understood now why the Fae Court had enjoyed such matches.

Conn drove Elada to the center of the yard, then struck in a blur of motion, disarming the warrior. The children downstairs squealed with joy and Beth noticed for the first time the fuzzy pink pom-poms hanging from the hilt of her lover’s sword. A little girl’s hair ornament. He made a great show of bowing and tossing it back up to its beaming pigtailed owner on the porch.

After a few days of such mornings Beth became used to the ring of the swords at dawn. Her neighbors did not complain, although she suspected that had as much to do with the fact that Somerville was the haunt of all manner of eccentrics—actors, reenactors, role-players—who might be expected to spend their mornings dueling in the garden, as it did in the way that Conn and Elada welcomed their young audience downstairs with open arms.

On the second Sunday of their odd ménage Beth woke to find the sun shining full in her window. She’d overslept. She could hear Conn and Elada sparring in the yard, by now a comforting, familiar sound. She wrapped her robe around her—Conn loved it, so she had begun to wear it all the time—and wandered into the kitchen to make coffee for Elada and tea for herself and Conn. She’d replaced most of her iron pans with copper for the comfort of her Fae houseguests, but they still avoided the little cabinet beside the range where most of the cold iron resided.

She had the coffee maker percolating and the kettle on by the time she realized they were out of milk and down to the bottom of the honey jar. She stepped out onto the porch. The day was unusually warm and both Conn and Elada were stripped to the waist. She took a moment to admire their sleek muscled bodies, then called down to them, “We’re out of milk. I’m going to the store.”

Elada nodded. “I will accompany you.”

“I’m only going a few blocks,” she protested.

“
I
will accompany her,” Conn said, pulling on his shirt and strapping his borrowed sword over it. He’d told her that Fae glamour hid their weapons from human eyes, but it didn’t hide them from Beth’s, and the gleaming blades both Fae carried were constant reminders of her danger.

“I am obligated to attend as well,” Elada said.

“This is silly,” Beth said. “No one has come after me for weeks. If you both shadow me everywhere, even in your human glamour, we’ll start to attract attention.
Fae
attention. The kind you’re trying to protect me from.”

“I must remain near you at all times,” Elada insisted. “Miach charged me with protecting you. If you go to the store for milk,
I
go to the store for milk. The Betrayer may do as he likes.”

Conn strode toward the garden gate. “I will go to the store by myself. Do we need anything else, my cow-eyed beauty?”

“A jar of honey.”

A little smile quirked the corner of his mouth at that. They both took honey in their tea. He liked tasting it in her mouth when he made love to her after breakfast on lazy weekend mornings, like she knew he would today. She flushed at the thought.

She slipped back inside the kitchen and turned the oven on to make toast. Elada came padding up the back stairs a few minutes later. He was still shirtless, and though she’d seen them practicing like that before, she’d never been alone with him in such a state of undress. She quickly averted her gaze from the finely honed muscles of his chest.

The moment struck him as awkward as well. “Apologies,” he said, donning his cotton T-shirt. “It has been a very long while since I spent so much time with another Fae. I forget human courtesies.”

She hadn’t thought about that before, what life must be like for Elada, with most of his race exiled and only Miach for company. “Is there no one else for you to practice with?” she asked, curious.

“Practice, no. I teach Miach’s sons sometimes. And I have dealt with the Fianna, when there are difficulties between the two families.”

“Have you no family of your own?” she asked.

“I have had children in the past, but none now live. I am the right hand of a sorcerer,” he said. “Miach must always come first.”

“Why?” she asked. “Why can’t you be your own Fae, like Conn?”

He laughed and took a seat at the kitchen table. “You have studied our world your whole life, little Druid, and yet you know so little of us. Every Fae champion, free or in exile, covets the skill—and freedom—of Conn of the Hundred Battles. Your lover is perhaps the finest warrior the Fae have ever known. He may pick and choose whom he serves. He owes fealty and loyalty to none. I, on the other hand, am an able swordsman with no other talents. My options were to join a band, like Finn once commanded, or pledge myself to a sorcerer.”

The cruelty of this duty struck her then. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t realize your own relationships were so circumscribed. Miach has ordered you to protect me, and Conn and I cavort in front of you like lovestruck teenagers.”

“I don’t have a family like Miach’s, and I am not engaged in a love affair like the Betrayer, but I do have a woman in South Boston. And stepsons. And this duty is not so burdensome.”

“Because I make good coffee?” she teased.

He smiled at that. “The coffee is acceptable,” he agreed.

Conn’s tread sounded on the stairs. She took a step toward the door. Elada moved, faster than the eye could follow, to grasp her wrist and pull her back. “I like your coffee, little Druid, and I have some sympathy for the Betrayer. But know this. If Miach orders me to slay you, I will do so.”

C
onn could no longer stand
waiting by the beginning of the fourth week. He saw Beth off in the morning, with Elada, and whispered a promise in her ear to visit when she took her midday meal and make a meal of her, on her desk. She’d blushed furiously but made no protest, so he took her silence for acquiescence.

Then he set out for Christie Kelley’s. Frank Carter had sent the girl to the bank for him once, and he might contact her if he needed money again. And there was always a chance that they had missed something that day—that Christie Kelley had some subconscious, buried knowledge of where Frank was hiding.

It was still early, the workday not quite started, when he reached the rambling house where she lived. The scholars here shared the baths and the kitchen, he realized, and at this hour most of them left their bedroom doors open and bustled back and forth to perform their ablutions and prepare their breakfasts with a refreshing lack of prudery.

The hairs on the back of his neck pricked when he saw Christie Kelley’s door closed. Perhaps she was a late riser or had already gone out, but something felt wrong. He knocked softly at first, then louder. When he received no response, and not wanting to draw further attention to himself, he sprang the brass locks on the door with a casual gesture and let himself inside.

He knew at once that Christie Kelley was dead. She lay across her narrow bed, robe askew, eyes rolled back, body contorted, one slipper hanging off her foot, the other upended on the floor. There was something so pathetic about her twisted young body—like a broken bird. It seemed profane to touch her, but it was important to confirm his suspicion, that she had been killed by a Fae. He tried to do it gently, to lift the robe and examine her body for injuries, but rigor mortis had set in and it was impossible to grant her the dignity she deserved.

There was not a single mark on her, only telltale red splotches in her eyes indicating asphyxiation. It was a peculiarly Fae form of murder: to invade the mind and stop the victim’s breath. Some did it as a form of dangerous love play. And some did it to kill. It was neither quick, nor painless. There was ample time for the victim to experience terror and panic. Ample time for the Fae to observe it, savor it. Perhaps, if you had the leisure, you might release your hold for a moment, allow the victim to draw in a single life-giving breath, and then cut it off again.

Miach had knocked Helene unconscious that way, when simple suggestion had failed, but he could not imagine the sorcerer killing in this fashion. For one thing, Beth was right. He did not like to see women hurt. For another, Miach was zealous about guarding the secrecy of the Fae in this place. If he had wanted the woman dead, it would have been easier, given his vast family of minor Southie villains, to arrange something human, mundane, that would raise no awkward questions—perhaps a mugging or a break-in that had taken a nasty turn.

Conn knew that Christie Kelley was nothing like his dead daughter or her dead mother. Yet she was everything like them because she had been fragile and now she was broken and could not be put back together again.

He called Beth first, feeling a rush of terrible emotion when she answered. Old grief and new love and things he couldn’t name that came crashing down around him so he couldn’t speak.

“Conn?” she asked again. “Is everything all right? Are you all right?”

He understood. Between the second when Beth spoke and the second when he answered, he understood why the Fae stopped feeling. Because they were cowards. Because once you loved, the world was terrifying.

“Christie Kelley is dead,” he said baldly.

There was silence on the other end of the line, but he didn’t need a connection to her mind to feel her horror. He knew her now.

“How?”

“The killer was Fae.”

“Miach?” she asked.

“I don’t think so. Is Elada still outside your window?”

A pause. He heard the blinds rustle on her end. “Yes.”

“Stick close to him today.”

“Are you still coming by at lunch?”

“Yes.”

“Come soon.”

“By midday. I promise.”

There was nothing more he could do for Christie Kelley.

He rang Miach next and told him about the girl.

Miach swore. “Come to the house.”

“It was a Fae who killed the girl. Beth could be in danger.”

“Elada is with her, and I have news of the Summoner.”

The
geis
around his wrists tightened and pulsed. If he chose Beth again over pursuit of the sword, defied his
geis
again, he would grow even weaker, less able to defend her. The longer, and the more willfully, he violated it, the heavier its burden became.

“I will come now,” he said.

Conn reached the house at City Point before ten, and knocked impatiently.

He heard running feet in the hall, a fast, unfamiliar patter, followed by a heavier tread. The door opened on empty air and he looked down.

The toddler at his feet stared up at him for a long moment, then fell over, giggled, hiccupped, and burst into tears.

“Sorry about that. Granda didn’t tell me to expect anyone.” The child’s mother was not a raving beauty. She had too much of Miach’s strong jaw and not enough of his soaring cheekbones, but she had a lively smile and a winning way with her child, who she scooped up and tickled into cheerfulness again. “They’re upstairs in the study.”

Granda.
Perhaps he should share that tidbit with Helene, and make an ally of Beth’s friend.

Miach was closeted with Liam and Nial, who looked sly and furtive, although Conn was beginning to think that was their native state.

“Sit, please,” Miach urged him.

He didn’t want to. He wanted to hear what the sorcerer had discovered, then get back to Beth. But Miach waited in silence, so Conn took the seat opposite his desk.

“My contacts in New York say the Manhattan Fae have located Frank Carter.”

“No doubt they used Christie Kelley to do so. Where is he?”

“There’s the rub. I don’t know. All my sources could discover is that the Manhattan Fae are planning a two-pronged attack on Frank Carter and your Druid.”

“When?” Conn asked, his
geis
tightening again.

“Conn, I am sorry. The attack will come today. We have run out of time.”

Beth.

“No.” The hairs on the back of his neck rose. His instincts told him to
pass
, now.

Too late. Metal rang. Iron chains whipped through the air and struck him like lightning. His body exploded in anguish at the contact, and he dropped to his knees. The chains wrapped around him and tightened.

Through a fog of pain Conn saw and understood. Liam and Nial, looking sick, frightened, and determined as hell. Of course they were. They needed to redeem themselves in Miach’s eyes.

Cold iron. Half-breeds were weaker than the Fae, but they could handle cold iron.

Liam dug in Conn’s pockets and took his phone and his silver dagger.

“I would not do this had I any other choice,” Miach said. “The Manhattan Fae have no sorcerer powerful enough to use the Summoner. They require both the girl and the sword to free the Court. We cannot find the sword, but we know where the girl is. Elada will make it quick, I promise.”

The agony was nearly blinding. His head pounded, his stomach heaved. “Coward,” he ground out.

“The Manhattan Fae outnumber us two to one.”

“Miach, if Beth dies, the Manhattan Fae will know it was you who killed her, who destroyed their only chance to free the Court. They will come after you and your precious family for revenge.”

“Of the evils threatening us, the return of the Court or the vengeance of the Manhattan Fae, I choose the lesser. Once the Druid is dead and all hope of freeing the Court is lost, I will help you reclaim the Summoner. And you will stand with us against the Manhattan Fae. The
geis
you took upon yourself, and your all too human conscience, will demand it.”

C
hristie Kelley’s sole link to
the Fae had been Frank Carter. Now she was dead, and Beth felt keenly the injustice of it. She knew all too well how easy it was to fall under her ex-husband’s spell. Christie Kelley’s sins had been the same as Beth’s: youth and foolishness. She had not deserved to die for them.