Cold Iron (5 page)

But Beth was not weak-minded, not stupid enough to compare herself to such empty images. If she did not think herself beautiful, it was because a man, a man who could only see what others pointed out to him—Frank, no doubt—had convinced her so.

That should have made her an easy mark, ripe for flattery and seduction, but she was too intelligent for that. “No,” she said at last. “You let me go in Clonmel. No matter what Mrs. McClaren says about your kind, I don’t believe you would have pursued me after I refused you.”

Her faith elicited an unfamiliar emotion. He recognized it through the haze of memory as shame. Because he was not entirely certain she was right. His vanity told him he never needed to pursue a reluctant woman, but his conscience told him that not every woman he had taken over the years believed she had a choice.

“I came for the sword.” He was surprised to find himself admitting it, but something about her made him want to deal honestly with her. “I hoped you had taken it because you wanted to be chased.” He remembered how his pulse had quickened at the thought, how very alive it had made him feel. Hungrier than when he had hunted the deer. He took a step closer to her, so she could feel the heat of his body, the velvet of his coat brushing her bare shoulders and the tops of her breasts. “Because you understood the old ways,” he said. “Because you wanted me to run you to the ground and take you on the forest floor. Like this.”

He used their connection, her hand in his, skin to skin, to flood her mind with images. For a second they shared one mind, and she was in the woods, running, breathing hard, fighting her own dark desire. She
wanted
to be caught. A current of pure sensation slid through her body, a wave of dark pleasure, like the crest of a sexual climax, but faster, more fleeting. He shared in it, and before the connection between them broke, he caught something else. Fragmented, buried images. Ugly, painful, pushed to the back of her mind, but tangled hopelessly up with sex and desire. Another unfamiliar emotion licked at him. He wanted to call it possession, but knew it from eons ago as protectiveness. Fierce and sudden, it shocked him to the core.

“Stop that,” she said, taking a step back, wrenching her wrist out of his grasp and stealing away the intoxicating emotions. “I didn’t take your sword. My ex-husband did. But I can’t give it back to you. I need it to prove that he’s a liar and a thief.”

Conn was still trying to process the sudden and overwhelming desire he felt to protect her, to avenge her. As he had not been able to protect or avenge another woman a very long time ago.

They were no longer touching, but the connection remained. He could feel the fierceness of her anger against the man who should have been her lover and friend but had become her tormentor.

As he would become, if he took her. A voice from the past whispered:
It was not always thus
. But he silenced it. That was the past. This was now.

So he surprised himself by offering her a compromise. “Keep the gold for now. Use it to prove your ex-husband a thief and a liar. And then let me deck you in it, naked. But I must have the sword, tonight.” He would not bother explaining the blade’s significance. She would never understand.

“No. Frank is too clever for that. The gold could have come from anywhere. There are similar pieces in other collections, and on the antiquities market. I need the sword. It’s distinctive. I’ve never seen another like it.”

“That is because there is no other like it, and I cannot allow it to become a pawn in this contest with your husband. Show me where it is, and I will glamour the man I just spoke with into believing anything you wish about Frank Carter.”

He saw how tempted she was, and how foolishly high-minded she was as well. She was going to refuse. She opened her mouth to speak, and he did what he had to do. He grasped her wrist and pushed it back into her pocket, then squeezed the fine bones there. Hard enough to make her gasp. Hard enough to make her release the iron key into the silk of her gown.

And the way was clear for him to compel her.

“Take me to the sword,” he said. There was no music in the voice he used. It was pure compulsion. He recognized the emotion that clouded her eyes when she realized she would not be able to resist him: betrayal. And he recognized the strange feeling it kindled in him in response.

Regret.

A
mo, amas, amat. Uno, duo,
tres. Armavirumque cano. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind
 . . . a lifetime of memorized texts swam into her mind, and she clung to them like a drowning man in a sea of floating wreckage. Running through schoolgirl recitations until she had none left, then counting backward. From one thousand.

Her feet moved. Corridors flowed past. Carpet and paint gave way to glass and stone. She was leading him to the sword, against her will. The surface of her mind could not refuse his command. His control was ancient and primal. Her resistance, she realized, was a product entirely of her education. The habits of a trained mind. They allowed her to think and to plan. And to observe him.

He did not like what he was doing.

She noticed other things as well. Her hand was tucked into the crook of his arm. A courtly pose on the surface, old-fashioned, but not, with him, affected. It also kept her from reaching into her pocket for the iron key. He had let her keep it, that spar of cold metal that was her only defense against him. She wondered why. He could as easily have allowed it to drop on the gallery floor.

His posture changed when they left the new wing; it became less brittle, more at ease. When they entered the echoing stone halls of the old galleries, he placed a possessive hand at the back of her neck and rubbed small circles there. His touch was warm and comforting, though it should not be so. She wanted to shake him off, but found she couldn’t. Another part of the compulsion, she hoped.

She stumbled. The effort of keeping part of herself free of him, of retaining any measure of free will, was taking a physical toll. Her temples throbbed. The beginning of a blinding migraine. Her jaw ached; her cheekbones felt pummeled. Tears formed at the corner of her eyes. Suddenly he pulled her up short and turned her to face him.

“You’re hurting yourself by resisting,” he said. “Accept my control and the pain will recede.”

She gritted her teeth and shook her head. “I can’t.” She couldn’t. Something about his compulsion was impossible for her body and mind to accept. Her reaction was instinctual, ingrained, and agonizing. Her vision swam. She felt cool stone against her back, knew he was holding her up against the gallery wall, could feel his intense scrutiny.

He released her, withdrew his power so abruptly her ears popped. It was like surfacing after being pulled under by a strong wave and nearly drowning. She took in deep lungfuls of air and sagged against the wall, then eyed him warily.

He was wearing his Fae glamour, a shimmering aura that blurred the air around him, softened his harsh beauty, and made it tolerable to look upon him. It was false. She knew that now. So, she suspected, was the handsome human face he had worn at the party. His true face was the cruel, alien perfection she’d glimpsed in Clonmel, when her hand had brushed the iron bedstead, and back in the gallery when she’d been clutching the key in her pocket.

That he could have taken from her at any time.

He was so alien, she realized, so removed from normal human emotions, that
not
hurting her required care on his part.

“Thank you,” she said at last, acknowledging his action and taking in their surroundings. They were in the middle of the vast echoing European Paintings Room. Beyond were the galleries of the ancient world, and past that, the Arms and Armor Room and the sword.

She reached up and tentatively touched her face. Her temples ached. Her cheekbones throbbed from the effort of fighting him. No wonder most people didn’t bother to try. Then his hands replaced hers. His fingertips circled and stroked, breaking up the lines of tension, massaging away the pain. She knew she ought to keep her guard up against this creature, not allow him another opening, but the relief was too sweet.

“I didn’t intend to hurt you,” he said. He looked puzzled for a moment, then added, “But most mortals are like beasts of burden. They prefer the certainty of servitude. They welcome being yoked to the plow.”

“I’m not an ox,” she said.

“No,” he laughed. “
You
are not. But as you saw in the gallery, most people are. You don’t explain your purpose to your car, do you? You get in and turn the engine on and drive.”

He was right. Most people, like Dave Monroe, preferred certainties, even when their certainties were wrong. And while she’d been under Conn’s control, she had been free of the burden of choice. Of responsibility for her own actions. It was part of what was so seductive about him.

“That doesn’t make it right,” she said. More to herself than to him.

But he answered her with a shrug. “My race is older than your concepts of right and wrong, good and evil. It was unlikely you would understand why I needed to reclaim the sword.”

“Try me,” she said, struggling not to close her eyes under the sweetness of his fingers massaging her temples. “I already know the sword is powerful.” She recalled the way the weapon had sung to her even through muffling layers of cloth. “I just don’t know how.”

“It makes the wielder an unstoppable warrior. The magic in it marries thought to deed, drives the blade home through sinew, blood, and bone. It has cut a red swath through a thousand battlefields. So steeped in death is its edge that even a scratch, untreated, can kill an ordinary man.”

She didn’t doubt it for a second. Some instinct had told her not to touch the thing. Thank goodness she had kept it wrapped in cloth, had hidden it in a location where it would not, by the very nature of the place, be touched by anyone: in a museum. She knew a little of ancient weaponry, enough to ask, “What is it called?”

“It has had many names,” he said. “But in your language, it would be called the Summoner.”

That didn’t sound so bad. “What does it summon?”

He didn’t answer her at first. He looked her up and down, considering. Then he appeared to reach some decision. “Do I frighten you, Beth?”

The question took her off guard. “Yes.”

“How did you feel when I compelled you?”

There was no point in anything but honesty here. “Helpless. Terrified. Sick with fear.”

“What did you fear?”

Another unexpected question. “What?”

“What were you afraid would happen when I was using my voice on you?”

She had not thought it through, and now that she did, she felt the icy dread of it all over again. “I was afraid that I would give in.”

“And lose yourself. Forever. Become nothing but a hollow shell. And yet, my appeal was such that you were tempted.”

“What does the sword summon?” she asked again, dreading the answer.

“I’m the finest warrior the Fae ever produced. I have never known defeat in single combat. But I’m no sorcerer, no bard, no singer of real seduction. Beth, do you understand what I am trying to tell you?”

She did, but she hoped she was wrong. “What does it summon?”

“The Fae Court.”

Chapter 3

T
hat’s a fairy story,” she said, clinging to childhood reassurances. There is nothing under the bed. In the closet. At the bottom of the stairs. “A folk tale. A myth.”

He took her hand and drew it to his chest, then slipped it beneath the velvet of his coat and inside the fine cotton of his shirt. “Do you still doubt the evidence of your own senses?”

His skin was warm to the touch, his heartbeat strong, the muscles of his chest flexed and firm. She wanted to run her fingers over him, to find the gold rings that pierced his nipples, to make him gasp with pleasure as he had in Clonmel. Her mouth felt dry, parched, and she realized that she was thirsty—for him. A thing of dreams and nightmares. “You’re real,” she said. It came out a throaty whisper.

He smiled, and she realized that he knew what she wanted, perfectly understood his own appeal. His hand still covered hers. He drew it down, and together their twined fingers found the tiny ring in his nipple. His nostrils flared, his eyes became heavy lidded, and he used the pads of her fingers to pleasure himself.

His shameless sensuality was frightening. Sex with Frank had always been a distant experience, impersonal. Pleasure was something she found by herself. This was different. Raw, uninhibited,
intimate
.

She tried to draw away, but he stepped closer, settled his weight against her, pressed himself, hard and ready, into the cradle of her thighs. He lowered his head to her ear and spoke, his breath dancing hot over her neck.

“You’ve made the Fae a toothless bedtime story, because the truth would keep you up at night. We ruled you once, through the Druids. A rule neither kind nor benevolent. We are an old race, with atrophied emotions, and we used you to
feel
,” he rolled his hips forward, and she felt his erection, thick and hard. “Mortal men, the Druids thirsted for power. They studied our magic, harnessed it with learning. They turned it against us and drove us underground, where most of the Fae dwell still, immured, ever seeking a way out. Save the ones like me, who the Druids imprisoned in their mounds. They thought they could use us, bargain with us.” He smiled ruefully. “But we are a sly race, and often outwitted them.”

“Fairy bargains,” she said. “Rumpelstiltskin.”

“Fairy bargains,” he agreed, “are never fair. And never to the benefit of mortals. Save the one the Druids made with me,” he added bitterly.

“They gave you the sword,” she guessed. “To summon back your kin. What did they want in return?”

“The Romans were hunting them down and destroying them with ruthless efficiency. The Druids were nothing if not wise. They knew their end was near. The sword could not be destroyed. They had invested it with too much power. But it had to be safeguarded after they were gone. Of course, they could have used the sword themselves, called upon the Fae to rise and repel the invaders, but they chose to accept their own destruction rather than have us return. That alone should tell you how dangerous we are.”

“The Druids trusted you,” she said.

“Don’t spin a fairy tale about me, Beth. They trusted only in my self-interest. I owed fealty to none. They chose me for my skill in battle, my talent for killing. They removed the wards from the mound, but they bound me to the blade. If the Summoner is ever used to free the Fae, I’ll be buried in the earth forever. I bought my freedom, at the price of my race’s. Altruism,” he added ruefully, “is not a Fae virtue. We value loyalty, beauty, our own pleasure, and nothing else.”

“If that was true,” she said, “you wouldn’t have let me go in Clonmel.”

S
he was right, of course,
and that gave him pause. He’d let her go in Clonmel. Most of his kind wouldn’t have. Most of his kind would have seen it as an opportunity to take revenge on one of
them
.

He could have had her. He was certain of it. Could have driven her no-longer-husband from the room. The old woman would have clucked, but accepted it. And his seduction could have proceeded. Beth was starved for pleasure, and her fierce rejection of him, her instinctive use of her buried power, had only whetted his appetite for her.

But her steady gaze, the way she had met his eyes and said she did not want him, had given him pause. He did not want this forthright woman by trickery or glamour. He could have squeezed the fine bones in her wrist until she released the headboard, could have flooded her mind with desire, and taken her.

He hadn’t. He’d wanted something different. He’d wanted her to wrap her hand around that iron headboard, look at him, really look at him, and see him, stripped of his glamour, mute of his compelling voice. And say she wanted him still.

A strange new perversity on his part, to want her to desire him like that. Humans did not care to look upon the true faces of the Fae.

If he couldn’t have her like that, he didn’t want her at all. If she was only a way to satisfy his appetite, there were easier conquests to be had. The blond Amazon, for one. He pictured her long tan legs spread to welcome him, and felt nothing.

It was disorienting, this lack of desire for any woman but Beth Carter. It went against his Fae nature and left him searching for some fixed point on the horizon.

“Grasp the key,” he said on impulse.

“What?”

“The iron key. In your pocket. Wrap your hand around it.”

She was suspicious, because she had a keen intelligence and had been hurt by men before. He knew that much from the brief contact with her mind. But she obeyed him. He could sense the moment her fingers wrapped around the cold iron, the moment the haze of desire cleared for her, and she saw him. She did not recoil.

He stepped back.

“Is this a trick?” she asked.

“No trick. No glamour. No compulsion. Do you still want me to touch you?”

She blushed and looked away. “In the gallery,” she said, without meeting his eyes, “you looked like an ordinary man. Not as beautiful as you look when you’re trying to compel me, but not fox-faced, like now.”

“It’s another glamour,” he explained. “We can look like ordinary mortals when we choose. Pass undetected among you.”

Now she looked him right in the eye. “Why me? Why me and not Helene?”

She wanted wooing.

It came to him more easily than he expected. “I admire you.” He surprised himself. This wasn’t a glib falsehood, devised to lure her to his bed. It was the truth. “Your body appeals to me. Your courage and thirst for knowledge do as well. And your desire to protect your friends. And because when you look at me now, stripped of my glamour, you still desire me. But I won’t touch you again unless you’re holding cold iron, and you ask me to.”

T
he fog that descended over
her mind when he was using his glamour had burned away like morning mist when she grasped the key. And she still wanted him. His face was alien and cruel and so beautiful it hurt, but she still wanted him. She missed the warmth of his body pressing her into the stone wall, missed the heat of his breath on her neck, in her ear, missed the feel of his taut muscles and the hard planes of his chest.

But without the compulsion, Mrs. McClaren’s warning rang in her mind. “The landlady in Clonmel said that one of the
Aes Sídhe
seduced her sister. That he left her on the streets of Dublin, starving, in rags. That when they brought her home she wouldn’t eat or drink. That she wasted away and died.”

He stiffened, spoke cautiously. “Are you asking me for another fairy story, Beth?”

“I’m asking if that is what you would do to me.”

He stepped back awkwardly. It was the first time she’d seen him anything less than graceful. “You are not the landlady’s sister. You’re not a farm girl from Clonmel. It is unlikely the Fae who took the girl chose her for her lively mind or her broad interests. He wanted her body. No doubt she was a great beauty, if she attracted the attention of a Fae. Many women are content to be admired as such. Content with that.”

“And the ones who aren’t?” she asked.

He looked away.

She shuddered, recalling the way her ears had popped when he’d freed her. The weight of his mind on hers had been crushing, like being buried underground. The thought of enduring that for months brought her headache roaring back and made her feel sick to her stomach. There would be nothing left of her after that kind of mental imprisonment. “Is it so easy for the Fae? Controlling humans?”

“Yes.” There was a chord of guilt in his voice. It surprised her.

“And me?” she probed.

“No. It is not easy to control you. You have a trained mind. It defends itself, throws up barriers to keep me out. Our usual prey, however, are rarely so learned. It’s easier to slip inside their minds, to take over their will. But even with a simple mind, maintaining control requires a measure of effort, and we are an indolent race. The Fae who took the landlady’s sister probably saved himself the trouble of keeping constant hold on her mind and simply marked her with a
geis
.”

She’d read, naturally, the entire body of Irish mythology, knew what
gaesa
were. “You mean like Cú Chulainn. One
geis
forbade him to eat dog meat, and the other forbade him to refuse food from a woman. When the Morrigan assumed the guise of a woman and offered him dog meat, he had no choice but to break one
geis
or the other. He ate the meat.”

“And fell to his enemy. Breaking his
geis
weakened Cú Chulainn,” said Conn, his eyes growing distant, as though he had been there. “Made him vulnerable in battle. Brought him to his death.”

“Stories with
gaesa
don’t usually end well,” Beth said.

“To violate a
geis
is death and destruction. The most powerful
gaesa
are written on the body. This,” he parted his shirt, traced the pattern of scars that mantled his shoulders, “is a
geis
.”

The marks she’d traced with her fingers. The pattern she now realized had graced the walls of the mound in Clonmel. They danced over every inch of his chest and shoulders, fine white scars incised with masterful skill. Her twenty-first century mind had not made the connection before, but these were not the casually acquired vanities of a neo-pagan poseur. They had not been done under anesthetic, in a sanitized setting with the safety of antibiotics. These had been cut into his flesh with a sharp blade. She touched them gingerly now, felt the raised bands beneath her fingertips. “Did they hurt?”

“Receiving a
geis
always does. Even if it is only drawn in ink. And especially if you resist. The magic tightens like a noose around your throat until the design is complete. These,” he brushed his fingers over the marks on his shoulders, “once bound me inside the walls of the mound. The Druids held me down with their magic and carved them into my flesh. These,” he touched a cluster of thick raised lines that interrupted the design, “freed me. Also courtesy of the Druids.”

The bitterness in his voice was palpable. She decided she didn’t want to see what he would do if he got hold of a living Druid.

“And these,” he pulled back the velvet cuffs of his coat, rolled the needle-tailored sleeves of his shirt to reveal bands of thick scars around his wrists, bracers of intricate Gaelic knot work carved into his flesh. “These bind me to the sword. But most
geis
bind one being to another. Slave to master. If the Fae who took the landlady’s sister marked her, he would have drawn his personal symbol on her. It would have compelled her to want him, and him alone.”

“And when he abandoned her,” Beth realized, the thought sickening, “she had nothing but her beauty, nothing else to keep her in this life, so she pined for him, and died. And you want to do that to me.”

“I did,” he admitted. “When I first saw you in Clonmel, I wanted you. If I had taken you, and if you’d pleased me, I would have marked you so that you wanted me, and me alone. You would have accepted it by then. The pleasure to be had in a Fae’s bed is difficult to resist. And you might not have gone mad afterward. As I said, you are no farmer’s daughter. Even the old woman’s sister had a chance: had she fallen pregnant by the Fae, she might have had something to live for.”

His words chilled her to the bone. He
had
wanted that for her, and she’d come so close to succumbing.

“And now?” she asked, though she dreaded the answer.

“I want you still.” He paused, and Beth watched the confusion playing over his face. “More even than I did in Clonmel, but I find that I want you to desire me without compulsion. I would not mark you now. Even if you were to ask.”

“I wouldn’t do that. Ever. I don’t have a death wish.”

“Neither, I would wager, did the landlady’s sister. Nor most of those who bind themselves to the Fae. They beg for it anyway.”

“I don’t believe that. There’s no such thing as sex worth dying for.”

“It’s as I thought.”

“What,
exactly
, is as you thought?”

“You’ve never been satisfied.”

She could feel her face turning red. “Don’t be absurd. I’m nearly thirty. Of course I’ve been
satisfied
.” She had no intention of telling him that she’d only ever been satisfied by her own hand.