Cold Iron (22 page)

“So do the Manhattan Fae, Beth.” Not Conn.
Miach.

Beth saw the color drain out of Helene’s face at the sound of the sorcerer’s voice.

“Where is Conn?” Beth asked. She would know if he was dead. She would know.

“He’s with me, in South Boston. Come back now, and he won’t be hurt.”

“And you’ll kill me,” Beth said. She was certain of it. And then Conn would die, too.

“Beth, listen to me. The Fae are going to strike against Carter today. If you go to him now, you’ll hand our enemies everything they need to summon the Court back from exile: yourself, and the sword.”

“I have to try.”

“Helene is with you, isn’t she?” Miach asked.

Helene grabbed the phone and jammed it into her car speaker.

“I’m here, you asshole.”

“Helene,” Miach said. His voice, piped over the car speakers, had changed. Beth could hear the music in it. A tear slid down Helene’s face. She could hear it, too, and was fighting to resist its beauty. “Beth is dragging you into terrible danger. Come back now.”

“Promise you won’t kill her,” Helene said.

“Helene,” he repeated. This time her name was a tangible caress. “Even if you reach Frank Carter before the Manhattan Fae, he will not hand over the sword.”

Helene shook her head. Beth knew the cost of resisting that voice. “Promise you won’t hurt Beth,” she demanded.

“I promise,” Miach said, his voice measured and even, “that neither Elada nor I will harm
you
, Helene,
if
you give yourself into our keeping. But I cannot allow Beth to be taken by the Manhattan Fae. We have a trace on your phone. Elada is only a short distance behind you. Pull over at the rest stop in two miles, or I will tell him to run you off the road.”

And on this road, at this speed, they would both die.

They had no choice.

Helene looked at Beth, mouthed,
Trust me
, then said to Miach. “Okay. All right. We’ll pull over.”

“Wait for Elada, Helene. You won’t be hurt, I promise.”

The call ended.

“What are you planning to do?” Beth asked. She didn’t think Helene would betray her, but she knew the power of Fae compulsion. And without Helene’s car, her chances of reaching Portsmouth would be slim.

Tears were streaming down Helene’s face. “I’m going to make sure you get to Portsmouth. And I’m going to send that bastard Miach a message.”

“I’m sorry,” Beth said. “I’m so sorry I brought this into your life.”

Helene’s expression turned hard. “Don’t be.”

They pulled off the highway onto the curving access ramp for the rest stop. It wasn’t much: a long, narrow parking lot and a scrubby strip of grass with picnic benches. There was a tiny, utilitarian visitor center. Beth knew its kind well from childhood vacations—no heat, no hot water, a mile-long line for the vending machine. And, thankfully, at this time of year always thronged with leaf peepers and apple pickers.

Helene slid them into a space partially hidden from the road by the visitor center and jumped out of the car. She popped the trunk and came back with a small nylon pouch. Inside was a multitool with an impressive knife.

“I’ve seen Elada fight, Helene. I don’t think we’ll be able to take him with a Swiss army knife.”

“Just watch me.” Helene said. “I’m going to buy you some time.” She took a deep breath. “Hit me.”

“What?”

“Hit me. Give me a shiner. Then drive. I’ll wait until I see Elada pull in. Then I’ll wave him down and tell him you ran into the trees. It won’t take him long to search the rest area so when he figures out you’re not here, I’ll scream and tell everyone that he’s my boyfriend and that he punched me.”

“It won’t work, Helene. He can use his voice to compel people.”

“Not if I’m screaming bloody murder, he can’t. And while he’s dealing with the scene I create,” she brandished the multitool, “I’ll slash his tires.”

Beth was impressed. “Helene, that is brilliant and devious, but dangerous. Elada is a killer.”

Helene smirked. “I know. That’s why I goaded Miach into promising not to hurt me. He’ll call his attack dog to make that clear. I can raise all kinds of hell for Elada, and from what you told me about Fae pledges, he can’t touch a hair on my head.”

“He can still compel you, get inside your head, force you to tell him where I’ve gone.”

Helene nodded. “I know. I won’t like it. But I can bear it. And since you don’t know exactly where Egan’s clinic is, all Elada will get out of me is that the place is near Portsmouth. Now—
hit me
.”

M
iach hung up the telephone
and wheeled on Conn.

“Your woman and her friend are resourceful. The Amazon waylaid Elada and persuaded an entire rest stop full of Good Samaritans that he was her abusive boyfriend. Then she slashed his tires.”

“Not my woman and the Amazon,” Conn corrected. “
Beth
and
Helene
. They have names, Miach. Histories. Mothers and fathers. Siblings like Liam and Nial.”

“Helene won’t be harmed,” Miach said. “And after this, it’s unlikely there is any wooing that will bring her to my bed. Elada had to compel her to tell him where Beth was headed. Portsmouth, apparently. Does that mean anything to you?”

It didn’t. “I wouldn’t tell you if it did.”

Miach sighed and beckoned Nial. “The Druid has the Amazon’s car. Get our friends in blue to run the plates. If there’s a theft-tracking device, get it activated. We have to find the Druid. She won’t be foolish enough to use her phone again.”

“Miach, if she can get to Carter and obtain the Summoner before the Manhattan Fae, then there is no need to kill Beth. Please, at least tell Elada that.”

Miach hesitated. “I will tell Elada to bring her back alive if she has the sword, but if the Manhattan Fae gain control of the Summoner, he will have to take the prudent course. He must kill her.”

B
eth didn’t need the map
after she passed through the center of Portsmouth. The sword was north and west. She knew it in her gut. What she didn’t know, unfortunately, was how many of the narrow two-lane roads leading out of town dead-ended or doubled back on themselves.

It took her an hour to locate the clinic. She missed the turnoff the first time, a dirt road with nothing to mark it but a mailbox. The drive was lined by sugar maples. At the end was a sprawling house, the sort of faux-rustic palace a robber baron must have built at the turn of the last century to play at hunting and fishing and Edwardian country weekends, his simple existence supported by an army of servants and an endless caravan of imported luxuries. The fieldstone foundation was squat and graceless, the Queen Anne–style porches too wide, too dark, and thoroughly uninviting. Institutional use had added functional insult to fanciful injury, and the misshapen mullioned windows were covered with chicken wire stretched over rusted bars. A tennis court with a listing net and cracked paving completed the air of Gilded Age luxury gone to seed.

Now that she was here, she wasn’t certain what to do. She parked Helene’s car behind the carriage house, a fish scale–shingled monstrosity larger than most single-family homes, and approached the front entrance.

It was damp and musty under the porch. The safety glass on the double doors was filthy, but Beth saw no signs of life inside the shabby entrance hall. She knocked, then tried the bell. It blared long and loud, more a buzz than a ring, another harsh institutional touch. The clamor of it made Beth feel exposed and vulnerable.

She waited. If she hadn’t felt the Summoner, singing to her somewhere inside the graceless house, she might have given up.

“Who’s there?”

The voice, tense and angry, came from a window to Beth’s right. Frank.

“It’s me. Beth.”

“Beth?” Even through the muffling layers of glass and curtain and carpet, she could hear the disbelief in his voice.

“Open the door, Frank.”

Silence. She glimpsed furtive movement, heard the floor creak, then the sound of deadbolts turning, locks clicking, chains being drawn back, and, finally, Frank, disheveled and twitchy, on the threshold in front of her.

“Are you alone?” he asked, looking past her shoulder. Poised, perfect Frank was coming apart at the seams. It should have given her joy. Instead, it sent a shiver up her spine. Something about the way he asked the question wasn’t right. His voice was too loud, his interest too intense.

“I came with Helene,” she said, hoping the half truth would be more convincing than a whole lie. No one knew where she was. It had been an advantage, fleeing Elada. It didn’t feel like one now.

“Where is she, then?” Frank asked, stepping past her to the edge of the porch, cutting off her retreat.

“Behind the carriage house. With the car.” She pointed.

Egan strolled around the side of the carriage house and shook his head. “She’s alone,” he said.

She didn’t like the way he said it.

“Quit playing games, Frank,” she said. “And give me back the sword. I don’t care about the gold. Just the sword.”

“That’s funny,” Egan said, climbing the porch steps. Now they both stood between Beth and escape. “Those weirdos in New York said the same thing.”

Weirdos in New York. The Manhattan Fae. And Frank and Egan still didn’t understand what they were dealing with. “Tall, long hair, uniformly good-looking, really charismatic?” she asked.

Frank’s eyes narrowed. “What do you know about them?”

“I know they’ve figured out where you are, and that they’re coming for the sword.”

Frank blanched, but Egan didn’t miss a beat. “Then it’s good that we’ve got something new to bargain with,” he said. “When Frank went to New York, his buyers were very curious about how he found that tomb, and when he told them, they became very curious about
you
, Beth.”

“You can’t bargain with them, Egan,” Beth said, concealing her disgust. “Whatever they promise you, it will be a trick. That’s how it went down in New York, isn’t it?”

She turned to Frank. She’d been married to him long enough to know that the only way to persuade him was to appeal to his vanity. “They promised you money, but you were too smart for them. You didn’t bring the blade. And then you got the feeling that something was very, very wrong, didn’t you? You knew in your gut that they were going to kill you. They’re not human. They’re like Conn. They’re Fae.”

She saw Frank waver and pressed on. “Christie Kelley is dead. They murdered her. But not before they found out about this place.”

Now Frank looked panicked. “How can Christie be dead? I talked to her yesterday morning.”

“Come on Frank—Christie isn’t dead,” Egan said, taking a step forward. “Your ex-wife is delusional.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a bottle and a syringe. “You’re a danger to yourself, Beth.”

Beth watched, frozen in terror, as he filled the syringe. They’d drugged her once before. The helpless shame and misery of the memory choked her. She took an unconscious step back, felt the threshold of the front door touch her heels.

Another step. Now she was in the house, dark and smelling of mold, and still Egan came on. She reached inside her for the voice, the one that had thrown Conn across a room.

It didn’t come.

Chapter 11

T
hey tackled her before she could decide which way to run. Frank seized her wrists. She kicked and screamed, but Egan punched her in the stomach, driving the air from her lungs. Pain bloomed low in her abdomen. She doubled over, and Egan jabbed the syringe into her arm.

She felt the sting, but not the effect. Not yet. For now all she could feel was the pain in her belly, the desperate need to draw air into empty lungs, but she didn’t think she’d have long. Minutes, maybe seconds, before whatever it was went to work. She tried to twist free, but her movements were clumsy and Frank’s grip too tight. Egan fisted his hands in her hair and yanked her toward the stairs.

Her lungs began to fill as he dragged her up the dingy carpeted risers. Her feet caught on the bunched pile, she stumbled, and she felt Frank take a bruising grip on her biceps and nearly yank her shoulder from the socket.

The rush hit her as they reached the landing. A moment of pure exultation she’d give her soul to live in forever. A frisson of pleasure that traveled through her body and out her fingertips. Then a strange, floating sense of well-being, frighteningly at odds with her circumstances.

The long hallway appeared to stretch on to infinity, a tunnel of brown-painted paneling and scuffed security doors. Late Victorian vulgarity married to postwar practicality.

They hurled her into a room that was of a piece with the hall and locked the door. She beheld her surroundings with despair. More brown paneling, elaborately carved, the detail lost beneath thick layers of chipped paint. Above the wainscot the walls were sickly green. The leprous ceiling had snowed white lead onto the floor, piled into drifts in each corner. On a dirty brass chain a single bare bulb hung from a crumbling plaster medallion.

There was a bed in one corner: war-issue gray metal, topped with a bare ticked mattress. There were stains. Leather straps trailed from the corner of the bed, and she felt a moment of sick revulsion, remembering Egan’s molestation the last time she’d been drugged. She had to get out of here.

Apart from the bed, there was only an aluminum chair and folding table. Dirty and old, but nothing natural here. No life to drink.

Except the wood paneling. She took a step toward the wall, and staggered. Her legs felt rubbery, her head light. The soreness in her abdomen from Egan’s blow had become a low, pulsing cramp. She reached for the chair to steady herself, but it was too far away. She thought,
I need the chair.

It flew across the room into her hand.

The Druids used intoxicants to access their latent powers,
Conn had told her
.
That explained the chair.
Parlor tricks
, said her Druid voice.
There’s more. Take it.

Yes. There was more. More power. But to get it, she would have to kill.

They deserve it.
The Druid voice, louder and clearer than it had ever been, urging her to do murder. She ignored it for all its seductive truth.

She made her way to the wall, using the chair as a crutch. She gripped the paneling. Tried to pull power from it, to fight the effects of the drug. There was almost nothing there, the barest residue of vitality in the wood, suffocating beneath layers of chemical paint, but she realized even as she tried to channel that trickle of power that it was a hopeless effort. Broken bones and blood vessels could be reknit, but toxins like the drug coursing through her system could not be extracted, only metabolized. Time was the only cure for the poison they’d given her. And she didn’t have time. The Manhattan Fae were coming.

Escape. She had to get out of the room and find the sword. She used the paneling to steady herself, felt a shock as sound traveled through it into her body. Voices. Frank and Egan. She could hear them through the wood. The drug again, freeing powers she never dreamed of.
Poppy
, her Druid voice said.
More.

No. Bad Druid. No more poppy. This altered, out-of-control state was bad enough. She didn’t want to know where more might lead.

“
No
,” Frank was saying. His voice traveled clearly through the wood, like it had some affinity for it.

Egan was muffled, but intelligible. “
We shot her up with heroin and locked her in a room. That’s kidnapping. And worse. We can’t let her go now
.”

“
We’ll give her to the weirdos
,” Frank insisted.

“
And if they let her go, she’ll go to the police, and we’ll both end up in jail. No thanks
.”

She heard a drawer scrape.

“
What’s that
?” Frank asked.

“
Get your maps and your notebook. We’ll give her another hit and see if we can get anything useful out of her. If the weirdos don’t pay up, you’re going to need a new discovery. And for fuck’s sake, Frank, cover that thing up
.”

A soft metallic ring, like a bell swaddled in a blanket. The Summoner. She closed her eyes and focused, and found that she could also travel the route the sound took, sending her mind back through the paneling, along the hall, down the stairs, around a corner, to what was once a library. There was the sword, lying muffled in a wool blanket. And Frank, his eyes bright with worry, fingering the heap of gold on a sideboard. The gold from Clonmel. And Egan, looking every inch the aging, dissipated frat boy, filling a syringe with something clear and viscous.

“
This is a rehab clinic
,” he was saying. “
You already told her boss she had a drug problem. It will look like she checked in here with a hidden stash, then OD’d
.”

No. She didn’t outwit a Fae sorcerer and his assassin and put Helene in danger to die here. She could hear Frank and Egan leaving the library. She didn’t have much time. She grasped the aluminum chair, hid behind the door, and waited.

Her mind wanted to go spinning off in all directions but she forced herself to focus on the door.

It opened. She put everything she had into lifting the chair high in the air and bringing it down on Egan’s blond head, then swinging it hard at Frank. Egan went down like a rag doll and Frank staggered and fell. She dropped the chair, scrambled over the tangle of limbs blocking the door, and ran.

To the end of the hall, down the stairs, into the library. Her heart raced. Her vision swam. The sword. The sword. There it was, on the desk beneath the window, wrapped in a blanket.

Frank and Egan came barreling through the door. They were shouting, but they sounded distant. The drug again, coursing through her system, scrambling her senses. She could
taste
the Summoner, all silvery death wrapped in flannel wool, and
smell
the dust clinging to the quilted tarp Frank was holding, but the sound of her breathing was unnaturally loud and everything else was dull and muffled.

They circled her, Frank and Egan, wary after her attack with the chair. She tried to gather up the sword and edge toward the door, but her fingers were clumsy and she couldn’t keep hold of the wool. Then Frank rushed her, throwing the tarp over her head and bearing her down to the ground.

Her ears popped, the sound came back, and she screamed and kicked and fought in suffocating darkness to get him off her, but his weight was impossible to shift.

“Hurry up,” Frank snarled.

“Hold her still.”

She felt Egan jab her with another needle. This time the dose hit her more quickly, and harder. Her head throbbed, her teeth ached, and the euphoria took on a painful aspect, everything too bright and loud. They held her down on the floor until they were sure she was done fighting.

And she was. The room spun. She tried to kick off the tarp, but her feet snarled in it. Her hands were heavy and her fingers numb.

“She’s no use this way,” Frank complained.

“She’ll perk up.” Egan said. “Might as well have some fun with her in the meantime.”

Her stomach cramped. Her body jerked—an involuntary reaction to the pain. It came again, short, sharp, and vicious. Like being kicked in the gut.

“The maps first,” Frank insisted. “Give her something to wake her up.”

She heard someone whimpering, wondered at that a moment, then realized it was her.

“I am awake,” she tried to say, but her tongue felt leaden, and the words came out garbled.

“What the hell is wrong with her?” Frank asked. He whipped off the tarp. “Jesus.”

Beth curled into a ball, shivering now without the tarp, though she hadn’t been cold before. She looked down. Blood slicked her skirt, ran down her thighs. And the cramping continued.

Egan crouched next to her, rolled her onto her back. It hurt. Everything hurt. “Placental abruption.” He said with clinical amusement. “A classic side effect of drug abuse in early pregnancy.”

Another cramp.

“Jesus Christ,” Frank swore. “What do we do?”

Egan shook his head. “Nothing. She’ll miscarry. Then probably bleed out in a few hours. Faster if she moves around much. No harm in letting the weirdos talk to her now, if they turn up. Maybe they’ll pay extra for the privilege.”

Another cramp. This one worse than the others.

“What about the maps? Can you sober her up enough to look at some maps?”

She sobbed, curled into a tight ball. A fresh rush of blood between her thighs, and a final, ineffable emptiness.

The baby was gone.

She felt the end of that fragile life and
knew
.

A sacrifice had been made in her name.

A door at the back of her mind opened, and knowledge cascaded in. Images and ideas flooded her brain—too many, too fast to process. A lifetime—
lifetimes
—worth of learning. No wonder the Druids trained for years. They had to be the librarians of their own minds. It was too much for any one being to comprehend all at once. Facts and formulas whirled past her. She grabbed at the ones she needed now, knowing she would have to work hard, later—if she lived—to learn how to access the rest. It was as though her brain was the processor of a computer and the Druid learning was a vast store of memory.

“If I give her anything else, she’ll hemorrhage faster, bleed out before you get anything useful from her,” Egan was saying.

“Then put her out until it’s over,” said her ex-husband, “so we don’t have to listen to that.”

Until she was dead, he meant. She’d been married to this man.

Frank was only inches away from her. She could feel the dilute trace of magic, of power in him. Fae blood. Of course. It explained so much about him. His charisma. And his coldness.

He had some Fae magic. Not enough for her to heal herself, but perhaps enough for what she needed to do. She grasped his ankle and
pulled
at his power. Not gently, not carefully, because Frank didn’t deserve gentleness or care. She pulled to hurt. She pulled every trace of Fae energy that flowed in his watery half-breed blood.

And Frank screamed.

Useless,
said her Druid voice.
Need more magic. True Fae magic.

She understood now how she’d thrown Conn across the room in Clonmel. She’d drawn from him. Instinctively. He was full-blooded Fae, so the power to hurl him a half dozen paces had been only a tiny sip of his vast reservoir; she could have drained Frank dry and not gotten enough to knock down a child. She didn’t have enough to fend off Egan and Frank, and Egan—Egan was preparing another dose to finish her. There was only one thing she could do.
Call for help.

Conn hadn’t fully explained all the markings on his body. She knew that now. When the knowledge inside her began to float to the surface under the drug’s influence and then the dam burst with the taking of that tiny life, she’d glimpsed what the marks had meant.
Obedience.

Her Druid ancestors hadn’t been fools. They were too smart to unleash a dog that could still bite. They’d laid
gaesa
upon their captive Fae, compelling them to obey Druid commands. And they’d done unspeakable things with that power, such as carve Miach open.

The irony of it was breathtaking. She didn’t need to mark Conn. Her ancestors had already done it for her. And with her voice liberated at last, she could compel his obedience. And that of every “free” Fae that the Druids had left aboveground.

She opened her mouth, and the voice that came out this time was Druidic—
and
her own. A command. “DEFEND ME!”

C
onn heard it. The voice
rang like a claxon in his head. Beth, and not Beth. The woman he loved, but changed. The voice commanded obedience. Her ancestors had seen to that. His heart commanded the same. But the chains kept him rooted to the floor.

Every Fae within a hundred leagues had heard and felt the command tug at them like a
geis.
The closer, the more compelling. Every Fae aboveground had heard and understood. A Druid’s voice had been lifted again in command. Atenuated by distance, yet it bespoke power and danger—an unwelcome surprise that called for investigation, if not outright obedience.