Cold Iron (24 page)

On hands and knees she inched forward, leaving a thick streak of blood in her wake.

Her hands were numb, her vision blurring. Her fingers met silk. Pointed toes. Embroidered shoes. Gray
peau de soie
with silver wire. She had seen them before.

She had been here before. On her hands and knees, looking up into the face of the Prince Consort.

T
here were six Fae approaching
the house. Two true champions, Conn decided, based on the swords on their backs and the animal grace with which they stalked up the drive. He recognized them vaguely, because at one time he had fought everyone worth fighting. For each of them, the occasion was likely more memorable—a contest that had grown more closely matched in retrospect, or a bitter loss to be avenged. For Conn it had been a day like any other, a diversion from the boredom of Court intrigues and petty pleasures.

They were followed by three lesser warriors, unknown to him, but well-armed, and to judge by the way they carried themselves, well-trained.

And with this war party came one Fae luminary: Donal. Conn seethed. Here was another Druid promise broken, that all those who had been witness to his daughter’s destruction should be forced into exile, confined in the Otherworld. Yet Donal was free. No doubt the Druids had counted him too useful to banish. Conn hoped he had suffered in the mounds.

Donal was obviously the leader of the Manhattan Fae. The two champions flanked him; the other three Fae followed a little behind.

“The odds are not in our favor,” Miach said, too quietly for the approaching Fae to hear. “We should try negotiation first.”

“I will not negotiate with Donal,” Conn replied.

“The past is past,” Miach advised. “Put it behind you. Nothing will bring your daughter back. We cannot be certain of victory here, and if we fail,
Beth
will die. Even if we prevail today, slaughtering these Fae will not secure her future safety. Extracting oaths of loyalty and protection will. Where Donal leads, others will follow.”

He was right. Conn didn’t like it, but he was right.

Donal stopped twenty feet short of them. Today he wore the fashions of an urban bohemian, block-printed silks and soft-fringed leathers trimmed with beads, but he had not changed in two thousand years. His eyes were still liquid brown, his hair a gold-shot chestnut. His finery offered a frayed counterpoint to his finely wrought beauty.

“You have come a long way for nothing,” Miach said. “As you can see, the Summoner is no longer for sale.”

Donal’s eyes darted to the blade in Conn’s hands. “I am disappointed, naturally,” he said, shrugging, as though the sword was of no consequence. “But not surprised. I have not the misplaced faith in my human get that you do, dear Miach.”

It took Conn a second to make the connection. “Frank Carter shares your blood,” Conn stated. It was obvious now when he looked at him. Carter possessed only a shadow of Donal’s dark, slender beauty, but once you saw the similarities, they were unmistakable.

“No more than a dram,” Donal replied. “And he has no awareness of the
Tuatha Dé Danann.
Which is as it should be.” Another pointed barb at Miach. “But he has been useful in the past, retrieving lost trinkets. Imagine my surprise when he offered to sell me the sword and I learned that it was not Carter, but his ex-wife, who was such a talented antiquities hunter. If I had known that all of his finds came through her, I might have realized earlier that his Fae-sniffing bitch was a latent Druid.”

Conn’s grip tightened on the Summoner.

“Steady,” said Miach. “We’re not looking for a fight. The Druid belongs to Conn.”

Donal laughed. His clear, cruel timbre conjured nasty memories of the Court. “But you’ve always been a Druid lover, haven’t you, Betrayer? Tell me, what does it feel like to bury your cock in a two-faced whore?”

“How would he know?” Elada called back. “He hasn’t fucked your mother.”

Donal snarled, his beautiful face contorting into a grotesque mask as he drew the glittering sword slung across his back.

“Are we still negotiating?” Conn asked, raising his own weapon.

“No. I believe Elada just wrapped up negotiations.”

“You take the three at the back,” Conn said. He raised the Summoner and moved toward Donal. The Fae champions on either side of their leader advanced to flank him. Three against one. A classic attack.

First the Fae on his right made a draw-cut feint with his sword. Conn ignored him, lunged hard left at the warrior who hoped to skewer him through the back, and thrust his sword into that Fae’s belly. Then with a single fluid motion he slid the blade free to drive the hilt of the two-handed weapon back into the other Fae’s skull.

Leaving Donal an opening. A quick strike, a glancing blow off Conn’s ribs. Painful, but not crippling. Taking out the two flanking Fae had been worth it. Now he could close and focus on Donal.

It was not a fair fight. Real fights seldom were. And the Summoner always redefined the terms of single combat. Untreated wounds from the blade killed, and only a fool counted on being able to find a sorcerer willing and able to heal them. So Donal was forced to fight defensively. He could risk no attack that required him to lower his guard.

If this were an exhibition fight, or a duel in front of the Court, Conn would be obliged to make allowances, to follow rules that handicapped him in the same way. He’d have picked another blade. He was under no such obligation here. Today he fought solely to kill.

To do that he must lure Donal close. Allow the Fae to bloody him a little. That part was easy enough. He endured another glancing blow across the ribs, a cut to his shoulder blades, and then, when Donal came too close for a third attack, he struck.

He’d intended a killing blow, but Donal spun too quickly, and Conn only hamstrung him. Donal went down. Conn kicked his sword out of his grasp, brought the Summoner’s tip to Donal’s throat, then wavered. His daughter had not died quickly. Why should Donal?

“Enough,” Miach said. Conn hadn’t heard him approach. He knew that the other Fae must be defeated if Miach stood beside him, but he could hear and see nothing through his rage, undimmed after two thousand years.

“Kill him or bind him to you, but don’t torture him. We don’t have the time. Think of Beth.”

“Was it not enough for you, Betrayer, to damn us all once?” Donal spat. “Over some slut you sired on another slut?”

“It will never be enough.
Never
,” Conn said.

“His oath is worth more than his life.” Miach’s measured voice cut through Conn’s red haze. “Think about Beth’s safety,” he urged. “She has trumpeted her existence to the world. Every Fae sword will be turned against her. She needs allies. Donal can be one. Can’t you, Donal?”

Donal licked his thin lips. “I’ll honor her as I would any woman belonging to the Betrayer.”

“This is not a time for artifice and doublespeak,” Miach chided. “You are not bargaining with humans. You are bargaining with Conn of the Hundred Battles. For your life.”

Donal sputtered in disgust. “I shall be the Druid’s ally,” he said sullenly.

“Not good enough,” Conn said. Beth’s power, her growing control over the
gaesa
her ancestors had left woven into Fae flesh, was not without limits. Once located, she could be taken in her sleep or unaware, or dealt with by half-breed or mortal agents.

And plans to locate and deal with her would soon be set in motion. To live and serve at the whim of a Druid again was intolerable—Beth’s very existence, an affront to any Fae who valued his own life and liberty.

“Swear,” Conn instructed, “that you will never attempt to harm the Druid,
Beth
, who is Conn’s woman. That you will not plot against her, and that you will defend her from others who do so, even at the cost of your own life.”

Donal, with no other choice but poor grace, swore. Miach countered the magic of the Summoner’s wounds. And it was over.

Conn turned toward the house. He knew better than to
pass
while he was bleeding. He suspected their surviving Fae attackers would also be too weak to
pass.
But he didn’t care how they left, so long as they left.

Miach ran after him. “Your ribs,” he said, offering his hand.

Conn shook his head. “Save your strength for Beth.”

“It is a small thing, and then you can
pass
to her,” he said.

Conn stopped and allowed the sorcerer to place hands on him. He felt a moment of warmth and comfort, then a short sharp pain. “Sorry,” Miach said. “One of your ribs was broken.”

And now it was healed, and the wounds gone. Conn
passed
into the library.

Beth was not there. He quickly searched the bloodstained blankets, as though somehow she could be hiding in the tangle. Then he followed the trail of blood.

The library carpet was patterned in droplets, dark red against Persian ochre, in a patch leading to the door. A bloody handprint marked the panels, and the knob was slick with blood.

In the hall the trail alternated between splotches of red sunk deep into the dingy gray rug and smears of drying brown on the green walls above the wainscoting. His heart hammering, Conn followed. Drop, drop, drop. Smear, smear, smear.
Beth, Beth, Beth.

The hall led to a door: heavy, glass, and also streaked with blood. Beyond was a terrace: stone, damp, and wide, overlooking the rolling lawns. The gory trail led across it, one long zigzag streak, as though she had crawled the last several yards to the edge of the stairs.

There it ended in a bright red puddle. Lying in the center of that crimson stain, moon pale and glimmering with Fae magic, was a scattering of silver, leaf-shaped beads.

Chapter 12

B
eth sat bolt upright in terror. She was naked. On silk sheets. In an unfamiliar bed. She had no idea where she was. Or what had happened to her.

The air was warm and sweet with newly cut hay, the light filtering through the snowy white bed curtains was soft and diffuse. She was swaddled in silk. Silk sheets, silk pillows, silk bed curtains. Carved and gilded bedposts supported a carved and gilded canopy worthy of a papal baldachin. The rococo paneling she glimpsed beyond the bed hangings would have been entirely at home in Versailles. The domed and painted ceiling played host to a pantheon of frolicking gods and their mortal conquests, disporting themselves across blue skies on sunlit clouds.

She was a long, long way from home. “This isn’t New Hampshire,” she said out loud.

“Would you have preferred that I left you to die?” The voice came from the other side of the bed. The Prince Consort lounged in a gilded velvet chair, his elegant court shoes resting on a footstool. The coat he wore today was slubbed gold silk with gored panels of wire embroidery. It was open at the waist, revealing the bare skin of his chest. His long black hair was plaited with the silver beads she remembered from the island, pale and glittering.

He was so beautiful, her teeth ached.

And she remembered. The desperate journey to Portsmouth with Helene. Her friend’s selfless gesture. The ploy that had bought her enough time to reach the clinic. Frank, anxious and disheveled. Egan appearing from behind the carriage house. Backing her into the hall. The heady rush of the drug and then—

“No,” she said out loud. The blood and the pain and the loss and that terrible, wonderful flood of knowledge. Conn had come, and Miach. The sorcerer had given her as much power as he could spare, and Conn and Miach and Elada had gone out to face long odds and defend her.

All for nothing, their brave fight, if she died. And she had been dying, with life-giving earth and grass and trees just beyond her grasp.

“What happened?” she asked.

The Prince Consort rose gracefully. Everything he did was graceful, a perfection of form and function. He came to stand at her side of the bed and she gathered handfuls of silk to cover herself.

“Coyness,” he said, “doesn’t suit you. We made a bargain.”

She remembered.

The cold stone of the terrace. His dreadful beauty towering over her. The blood running down her legs, her life running out of her.

“You are finally of use to me, little Druid. What a pity you won’t live out the hour, that you won’t even make it down the stairs,” he said, leaning against the weathered balustrade and looking out over the rolling lawns.

She knew he was right.

“I could carry you,” he went on. “There’s a green patch over there, sunlit, so verdant you can taste it in the air. Sage and sassafras. Would you like that, little Druid?”

“Yes.” More than anything.

He knelt on the second stair, still so tall, even crouched like this, that she had to look up to see him. “Then let us make a bargain,” he said.

“I won’t summon the Court.” Her ancestors had possessed the courage to face extinction rather than that.

“We’ll speak of our reunion with the Court later. If I carry you out to the lawn, you must accept a
geis
never to draw from me without my explicit permission.”

She opened her mouth to speak, to agree.

He forestalled her. “Do not accept this lightly. You are wholly Druid now, bound by the same forces as the Fae. Any oath you swear will be binding. To break it will result in your destruction. What we call magic, your age has renamed physics. Both are exchanges of matter and energy. And both are bound by immutable laws. Think before you accept this obligation.”

She thought. Where there was life, there was hope. She swore.

He lifted her, unconcerned about the blood soiling his silk finery, and carried her down the slick marble stairs. She felt the sunlight on her face, so bright it blinded her after the darkness of the porch, smelled the green grass in the air, felt the soft earth beneath her back as he lowered her to the ground.

She drew. The earth beneath her trembled. The trees at the edge of the lawn groaned and split. Her body drank in the energy. Life. She was going to live. She opened her eyes. She was lying in a burnt brown circle of grass edged by broken trees. Red and gold leaves swirled around her, dead maple and birch shedding their foliage in a violent shower of color.

The bleeding had stopped. She was kitten weak from the trauma, and there was no more energy left within her reach. But she was alive.

The Prince Consort strolled across the lawn, his court shoes whispering through the dead grass. “Remember your oath, little Druid,” he said, and caught her, limp as a rag doll, up in his arms once more. “Take a deep breath,” he said.

She didn’t.

He
passed
.

She wanted to die. He sank through the earth and she was buried alive, suffocating, pressed to death, every inch of her body smothered first by soil, then rock, then water, then wood, then grass, then cold, cold granite, and then . . . free.

She was free. They were out. Her mind screamed while her lungs heaved. She breathed but she couldn’t feel it. There was air but she couldn’t taste it. There was light but she couldn’t understand what she saw. Light and marble and paint and gold and grandeur beyond all comprehension after darkness and death, and she went for a brief second completely mad.

Mercifully, as though tripping a fuse, her overloaded senses flared and failed. She lost consciousness.

And woke up here. The memory of the journey, and the journey’s end, was so vivid she had stopped breathing.

The Prince Consort was still standing beside the bed.

“You
passed
. And you took me with you,” she said.

“Yes. Did you enjoy it?”

“No.” She never wanted to do that again. Ever. “I thought the Fae couldn’t carry much with them when they
passed
.”

“Most can’t. I am, you may find, in all ways
extraordinary
,” he said. “As are you, little Druid. You
passed
with a Fae and you did not lose your mind. For very long, anyway.”

Miach had called him dangerous, but the word was insufficient to describe this creature.

He pushed back the bed curtain that had been shielding her and sat on the edge of the mattress. Now that she was not covered in blood, she could smell him. Sunlight and oranges. Sweet, with a hint of spice. Cinnamon, perhaps. He was not moon pale, like Conn, but golden. Tanned. Perfectly, evenly tanned. His chest was smooth and hairless, the muscles like cast bronze beneath the softer gold of his open jacket.

She was staring at him. She shook herself. Staring at him was wrong. Being in his bed was wrong. Reflexively, she felt for the iron rings in her ears. They were gone.

“How did you take my earrings?” she said. “They were iron. You can’t touch iron.” And if iron didn’t work, she had no defense against this creature but her will.

“My human servants removed them,” he explained. “And bathed you and made you comfortable.”

She shifted. They’d done more than bathe her. Her skin was oiled and scented. Her body felt smooth and hairless.
Everywhere
. His servants hadn’t done
that
for her comfort, but for his pleasure. The thought made her panic.

“Your glamour shouldn’t affect me like this,” she said desperately. “I have my power now.” She would never forget the cost of it. It sobered her for a second, helped her to see him clearly. If his beauty surpassed Conn’s, so by several orders of magnitude did his cruelty.

“You have acquired the Druidic learning, true, but you remain weak from your ordeal, and I can keep you so until you see reason. You are a fledgling sorceress, Beth, and I am the most desirable creature the Fae have ever produced. The only Fae able to captivate and satisfy the queen. Most of my own kind covet me. No mortal has
ever
denied me.”

His hand whipped out and yanked the sheet away from her breasts. She snatched it back, scrambled away from him to the center of the bed. “There’s a first time for everything,” she said. “Where is Conn?”

“He has the Summoner now, Beth, and is in compliance with his
geis
. Dear, treacherous Conn has no further use for you.”

“That isn’t true. He came for me.”

“He came for the Summoner. You have known Conn a few short weeks. I have known him for millennia. Now that he has the sword, he will return to his barrow and nurse his dusty grievances against the Court. He has done precious little else for two thousand years, and the members of my race are nothing if not creatures of habit.”

“Conn has changed.” She was sure of it. He had given her the earrings. Bound himself to her with an oath.

But she had released him from that vow . . .

“Has he? While you lay bleeding out your life, he was exacting revenge for a slight that happened two thousand years ago. Revenge for another woman—and to assuage his own wounded pride. He was outside slicing Donal into ribbons, slowly, and savoring it. Donal, who was among those present when Conn’s daughter was destroyed.”

She had lain there so long, come so close to death . . . but doubt was a weapon the prince could use against her. “Good, then. I’m sure Donal deserved everything he got.” A chilling thought struck her. “Were you there, too?”

“No. But not because I did not care for the sport. The queen is a jealous bitch—and let us just say that Conn’s daughter had all of his beauty and none of his boorishness.”

She could see why Conn had wanted his whole race punished. It was like what the landlady in Clonmel had said. “You’re as rotten inside as you are beautiful without,” Beth repeated.

The Prince Consort laughed. “Whatever romantic notions you entertain about the Betrayer, know this. He is Fae to the core. He exults in violence. He is ancient and jaded, and he fucked you because it was a dangerous thrill to toy with a toothless Druid. But there is nothing at all appealing to the Fae in bedding a creature that can drain us with a touch. Conn would not have you now if you begged him.”

“I’m not that easily manipulated,” she said. “Conn loves me.”

“Such words and affectations come easily to the Fae. Miach wanted you as well, did he not? But only when you were powerless. We have all suffered at the hands of the Druids. Demeaning one who didn’t even know what she was, enslaving her with pleasure, keeping her in ignorance, would be a nearly irresistible temptation to any Fae. They wanted you for what you were, not who you were. That is not love. It is lust. Or a mere diversion. And they will not want you now. You have become a true Druid, a creature with the power to bend and banish us, the stuff of our collective nightmares. You are everything the Fae fear most.”

There was some truth to what he said. Conn had admitted as much. But all attraction was based, at first, on the superficial. The Prince Consort was trying to wear her down for his own purposes. She did not imagine for one second that things would ever be the same with Conn. The power inside her was wondrous and exciting—but also cruel and intoxicating. There was a very real possibility Conn would not love what she had become, but she could not afford to show even a sliver of doubt to the beautiful Fae poised on the edge of the bed.

“If that’s true, then why don’t you fear me?”

“You swore an oath not to draw from me without my permission. And I am the only Fae free who does not bear the mark of Druid obedience.” He shrugged out of his coat, revealing the unblemished expanse of his chest, his arms, the smooth planes of his stomach.

“How?’ she asked.

“An enchantment even the Druids could not break. My queen desired it done. I hated her for it at the time, because
gaesa
are not only obligations and curses, they can be brave undertakings, marks of prowess. To be denied the needle and knife was like being gelded.”

“You make them sound like dueling scars,” she said.

He reached across the bed and touched the quicksilver on her shoulder. It pulsed in response to him. And desire stirred, in spite of her resolve, in spite of the fact that this same man had once injured her, caused her excruciating pain.

“Would you be rid of his mark now if you could be?” he asked.

No. She wouldn’t. It was part of her. She had endured it, and that made her proud, taught her that she could do what she set out to do. It was a physical connection to the hidden world of the Fae, a tangible symbol of the birthright she had been denied, and only now—with her unborn child’s sacrifice—reclaimed. She watched his finger trace it. She couldn’t bat him away without relinquishing the sheet, but under it her nipples were tightening into hard peaks. The silver began to dance under his fingertips, the way it did for Conn.

“No.”

“I’ve seen inside your mind, Beth. You have always known you were different. Even from your family. They shared your Druid blood, but not the spark to seek us out. That is what makes you unique. Not your heritage. We didn’t kill you all, try as we might. There must be thousands of Druid descendants in the world. You are special because you were clever and brave enough to find the Fae. Think how many generations of your family must have passed, content with their lot. Others of your line must have felt the stirring of their power, and turned away from it, out of fear. But not you. How lonely you must have been as a child. Bookish Beth. Always shut up in the parlor with some dusty tome. They mocked you, the people who should have loved you best. Mocked your accomplishments. Mocked your ambitions. And when you won that scholarship to college, told them what you were going to study and where, they laughed at you for putting on airs. They broke you, your family. Not Frank Carter or Jack Egan—you were easy prey by the time they came along. It was your family who convinced you that you had no worth.”