Cold Iron (21 page)

Beth redoubled her efforts to find the sword. There were times when it came in handy to be the sole curator of an underfunded department that existed only because of an unbreakable nineteenth-century trust. No one much cared what Beth Carter, curator of Celtic antiquities, did with her days.

For weeks she had closeted herself in the quiet of her office and searched, using maps and photos and drawings, every town in all directions up to thirty miles from Boston. Today she realized she must choose a direction and concentrate her efforts farther from the city, but she was uncertain which way to go. First she considered south, toward Rhode Island. Frank had friends in Providence, part-time faculty at Brown. She scanned the area where they lived, remembering their ramshackle Victorian with distaste. She was relieved when she came up with nothing.

Then she considered west. She tried to picture Frank hiding out in one of the derelict factory towns of western Massachusetts—an unlikely scenario. And a farm was entirely ludicrous for idle, luxury-loving Frank.

North, maybe. He’d disappeared with Egan . . .

She had never been there, but that was the direction of Egan’s clinic. A quick search of public information turned up no mention of the place—just a few articles about Egan having his license suspended in Massachusetts. She knew that the clinic was in New Hampshire, but it could take her weeks to locate it without some idea of where to start.

That’s when she remembered the maps. She’d never wanted to set foot in that condo off Harvard Square again after leaving Frank, but the lawyer Helene had found—actually, the lawyer Helene happened to be dating at the time—had arranged a day when Frank promised to be out and went with her to remove the few possessions she’d left behind. Books, mostly, a few items of clothing, the odd kitchen utensil.

Beth had piled her books into boxes and swept clean the shelves of maps in the study. She’d assumed they were all hers. Frank never had much use for maps. But when she’d gotten home, there had been a crumpled auto-club map of New Hampshire in the pile. She’d saved it, only because she could never bring herself to throw out any map.

Now she searched her office for it. She kept a small shelf full of New England travel material, and tucked inside the pages of a book lover’s guide to New Hampshire was the map. When she spread it over her desk, she knew at once that it was right. There was a circle marked on an unincorporated piece of land outside of Portsmouth. It had to be Egan’s clinic. But the map wasn’t detailed enough for her to search it for Fae influence.

It took an hour for her to pull together what she needed. The museum library proved helpful this time, coming up with several engravings of Portsmouth in the eighteenth century, a series of nineteenth-century drawings, and a handful of more recent aerial photographs.

She found it almost immediately, a few miles north of town. An empty green place on the map, a half-glimpsed house in one of the aerial surveys—and that familiar clenching in her belly. The Summoner.

And something else. She shifted in her chair. Laid a hand over her stomach. There. No room for uncertainty or disbelief. Simply a feeling of otherness, like she’d sensed in some women before. A presence that was
more
than her,
more
than Beth Carter.

She was pregnant.
Too soon
, said modern, rational Beth. Too soon to tell. But not too soon to be true. Conn had been her lover for a little less than a month now. She checked her calendar. Her period should have come last week. She hadn’t been thinking about it, or had cause to, because she hadn’t experienced any of her usual premenstrual misery.

He’d said it became more difficult as a Fae grew older, warned her it might never happen, but it had. Now that she thought about it, there had been signs. Her breasts were swollen and tender, her belly more rounded than usual. A normal pregnancy wouldn’t show so quickly, but she suspected from Conn’s foreboding words that Fae pregnancies were anything but normal.

A child. A child who wouldn’t grow up frightened of the power inside her. A child she could pass her rediscovered legacy down to. She wanted to tell Conn. It was almost noon, he would be here shortly, but she couldn’t wait. She reached for her cell.

She dialed. Her heart raced. She was breathless with anticipation, to share this with him. The phone rang. And rang. She felt a prickling at the back of her neck. Then voice mail. A prerecorded greeting. A mailbox number. She’d never gone all the way to his voice mail before. Didn’t even realize he had it.

Something was wrong.

She dialed again. Before she reached the greeting, the prickling became impossible to ignore. She turned to look out the window.

Elada was gone.

She fought to stay calm, but every sense was telling her something was very, very wrong. Conn always answered her calls. And Elada hadn’t strayed from his post in all these weeks.

A rustle behind her. She whirled, her heart in her mouth, but it was Helene.

“Beth,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m not sure.”

She almost jumped when her cell buzzed.

It was a text, from Conn’s phone.

Run.

She looked back out the window to the spot where Elada usually stood guard. His absence, and Conn’s text, could mean only one thing. Miach had decided it was safer to kill her.

She considered, in the space of a heartbeat, her options. They were very few. No one could protect her from the likes of Miach and Elada, Fae with the ability to
pass
at speed and glamour anyone who got in their way. Running was futile. Her only possible escape lay in convincing Miach that it was safe to let her live.

And for that, Conn must have the sword.

“Helene,” she said. “I’m sorry to ask you this, but can I borrow your car?”

“It’s them, isn’t it?” Helene asked.

“Yes. It is. I have to get to Portsmouth, or they’re going to kill me.”

“No,” Helene said. “
We
have to get you to Portsmouth. I’ll get my keys.”

“I can’t ask you to put yourself in danger again.”

“You don’t have to ask. I’m offering. I’m sick of them having everything their own way,” Helene said. Her vehemence shocked Beth. “The gifts keep coming,” she explained. “Like he can buy me. I came home last Friday and found one of his
family
cleaning my gutters. Another night I came home and found a new dishwasher in my kitchen. I called a man I’ve gone out on a few dates with and he told me that he couldn’t talk to me because some scary Irish thug warned him off. It’s like Miach believes he already
owns
me.”

There was something wild and hunted in Helene’s expression.

“Okay,” Beth agreed. “We’ll go together.”

Beth gathered her coat and the maps while Helene went for her keys. They met in the hall. Beth felt the prickling again. At the other end of the long corridor that ran the whole length of the main building, blocking their way out, was Elada.

No question that he saw them. His relaxed stance did nothing to mask the warrior’s feral grace.

“This way.” Beth tugged Helene, and they ran, deeper into the museum.

“Can he make us do things with his mind? Like Miach?” Helene asked. Beth could hear the tremor in her voice.

“I’m not sure. Better not to put it to the test.”

There was a service elevator in the old wing that went down into the basement garage, and the antiquated carriage was made of iron. No way Elada could follow them into it, and the stairs were on the other side of the museum. They reached the elevator and Beth rammed the gate closed, unlocked the brakes on the carriage.

Not a moment too soon. Elada stopped short of the iron gate.

“Come out of there, Druid,” he said.

She was becoming familiar enough with Fae compulsion that she could discriminate between their different voices. Miach’s had the purity of a Mozart opera, Conn’s the power and emotion of a Beethoven symphony. Elada’s voice sounded more like something written for a single instrument. Chopin, maybe. But as the paired daggers in his hands indicated, his talents lay elsewhere.

“Tell Miach I’ve gone for the sword,” she said. She punched the button, and they descended.

From the basement it was, thankfully, a short sprint to Helene’s car.

C
onn had not felt the
bite of cold iron in two thousand years. Not since the Druids had gone to work on him, carving their
gaesa
into his flesh. First, the mark they inscribed on all the captive Fae, which bound the Beautiful People to the will of the Druids. Then the mark that imprisoned him in the temple-tomb. Later, the marks that tied him to the Summoner. And, finally, the ones that freed him from the mound. To his shame, he had passed out the first time they’d carved him, the iron chains and the iron knives driving him to the brink of madness.

He battled to remain conscious through the pain now, because these might be the last minutes Beth spent on earth, and they were ticking away on Miach’s mantle clock. His only comfort was that he would not survive her long. His vow to Miach and the marks on his wrist might compel him to retake the sword and fight for the sorcerer’s family, but nothing would keep him in this life long afterward without Beth.

He heard, shrill as the
bean sídhe
, the phone ring on Miach’s desk. It could mean only one thing: that Beth was gone. He thought he would have known, been able to feel it, sense the flight of her beloved spirit. But he’d felt nothing.

Instead, he heard Miach, terse and angry. “How could she have been warned?”

Hope, joyful and terrifying, welled up inside him. He hauled himself to his knees, focused all his attention on Miach and the phone.

“He is here, and in cold iron,” Miach said, casting a glance at Conn. Then his changeable gray-blue eyes roamed the room, lighting briefly on Nial, sullen and suspicious in the window seat. “Where is Liam?”

“Am I my brother’s—” he began.

“Yes.” Miach cut him off. “Find him. And bring him here.” He turned his attention back to the phone. “Follow them.” Another pause. “That may actually be useful to us,” he said, frowning, and hung up the phone.

Nial returned with Liam in tow.

“Give it to me, Liam.” Miach held out his hand.

“What?” The boy was a poor liar. Conn almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

Miach backhanded him. A vicious blow, no allowance for the boy’s human frailty. Bone broke, blood spattered. Now Conn did feel sorry for him. Not for the injury, easily healed if Miach so chose, but for the hurt written on the boy’s face, the look of betrayal in his eyes.

“Give it to me,” Miach repeated.

The boy fished Conn’s cell out of his pocket and handed it over. Miach flipped the phone open and tapped the keys. “Why, Liam? Why would you endanger your family like this?”

“Because it’s wrong,” the boy said, his voice nasal through broken bone and bloodied flesh. “I’d rather take my chances against the New York Fae and the Prince Consort than save my skin at the cost of a woman’s.”

“Then you would die, Liam. And so would Nial. And Nieve downstairs, and her baby, and all the others who share our blood. The Court would kill you all. I have given you and your brother Fae weapons, and the true Fae would take great offense at the presumption. When they were done slaughtering you, Nieve and the boy would make good sport for the kinds of games they like to play.”

Liam resisted the impulse to staunch the blood flowing from his nose and looked his patriarch in the eye. “Then so be it,” he said.

Miach let out a sigh. “Come here.” He beckoned the boy. “Let me tend that.”

Liam shook his head and stalked to the window.

“Fine,” Miach said, flipping open the phone once more. “Nial, call our friend at the police station and tell him we need a trace on a cell.”

H
elene’s BMW, as stylish as
everything else about her, was comfortingly familiar. Surrounded by so much normality, including the eternal traffic on Storrow Drive, Beth found it difficult to believe they were being pursued by a Fae assassin.

“We should head for the interstate,” she told Helene. “Ninety-five is the most direct route to Portsmouth.” She fished her maps out of her handbag.

Helene tapped the GPS screen. “What’s the address of Egan’s clinic?”

“I don’t know the address. Just the rough location. I’ll be able to feel it when we get close.”

Helene looked sidelong at her. “Does that mean you’re like them?”

A good question. “No, not exactly. But I can feel their artifacts. It’s how I found all those sites for Frank. I’m not one of them, not Fae. I’m a Druid. Or I would be one, if I knew how to be. But I don’t.” She explained about the Summoner, and Miach.

Helene laughed, a bitter sound, something Beth had never heard from her lighthearted, carefree friend. “So all this time he’s been courting me, sending me gifts, he’s been meaning to kill my best friend.”

“I would say it’s more like he’s always known he might feel obligated to,” Beth said. “Miach saved my life after Frank cut me. I don’t think he wants to kill me. I don’t think he
will
kill me, if we get the sword back. If it’s any consolation, I think he’s genuinely smitten with you, but he’s so inhuman, I’m not sure he understands why killing your best friend would be an obstacle to seduction.”

“That’s the sick thing about it,” Helene said, turning to look straight at Beth. “It almost isn’t. I wanted him from the first minute he walked into your apartment.” She swallowed hard. “I still want him. I fantasize about being with him. I know it’s the compulsion he’s using on me, but I still feel so ashamed.”

Beth wasn’t going to tell Helene that Miach hadn’t glamoured her since that first encounter in her apartment and had refused to compel her when it would have ensured her safety on the island. Beth wasn’t going to make Helene feel any more ashamed and conflicted than she already did, and she certainly wasn’t going to defend a man who was presently doing his best to kill her.

They were halfway to Portsmouth, the colorful foliage of New England autumn rolling by on either side, when Beth heard the muffled ring in her handbag. She pulled out the cell and checked the number. “It’s Conn.” Relief flooded her. She answered. “Conn. I think I know where Frank is.”