Iron (The Warding Book 1) (34 page)

“Why the hell not?”

“Kaine would never ask that of them. This is not their fight.”

Something hot and bitter roiled in my belly. I could almost feel the burn of bile in the back of my throat. “But if that bastard tells the king about me, he’s going to come after me. Kaine promised to stop the King from finding out about me. You need to tell him about this. We can’t just give up now!”

The quiet bit into me like a knife. Seana was looking down at her lap, refusing to meet my eyes. Gannon’s jaw ticked, a sure sign of anger, though whether with me or something else, I couldn’t tell. A long moment passed before he said, “Kaine is aware of Liam and his return across the Veil. He considers his end of the pact satisfied.”

“Like hell it is!” I was on my feet, notebook and pen falling to the floor. My hands were balled into fists and I was five feet and four inches of righteous fury. “I’ll show him ‘satisfied!’”

I pushed past Gannon and made it less than two feet past him into the hallway before he caught me by the arm. “Caitlin, don’t do this.”

“Let go!” I yanked my arm away. He fell back a step. I was quivering with rage. “You promised me. You promised me you would find him.”

He jerked his head to the side, as if I had slapped him. Good. “I tried.”

Bitterness welled up in my throat. “Yeah, well, that’s not good enough.”

He didn’t try to stop me again as I stormed down the hall. Livid was too shy a word to describe the rage that coursed through me. I was damn near shaking with that rage as I took the stairs at a machine gun pace. I was already having a knock-down-drag-out fight with Kaine in my head when I threw open the door to his study. I barely managed to keep a grip on the doorknob to prevent it from slamming into the wall. My teeth were clenched, my shoulders heaving in time with my breath.

Kaine was seated in front of his desk, for once, in a chair facing a merrily crackling fire. He had a book in his lap, which he looked up from slowly, not the least bit ruffled by my hell-hath-no-fury entrance. He closed it and let it rest on one knee. “Can I help you?”

Oh, that smug motherfucker. I was ready to spit nails and he was looking at me with the detachment of a psychologist dealing with a delusional patient. This was going to get ugly.
It took every last shred of willpower I had in my body to gently close the door behind me, rather than breaking it clear off the hinges. I clasped my hands behind my back so he wouldn’t see them shake. “Gannon told me Liam has crossed back over.”

Kaine inclined his head, frowning in an oh-so-proper approximation of shame. “Yes. I am very sorry he was unable to locate him before he left this realm.”

“Sorry is nice, but it won’t keep me alive once your High King knows I exist.” He did not deny my claim. His silence only made my blood burn hotter. God damn, it was hard to keep my temper. I wanted to rant and rave and throw his goddamned book into the fireplace, but instead I swallowed the lump in my throat and said, “You have friends here, fae friends who have been helping you. I need you to send someone back there, to try and stop him before my life is put in even greater danger. Please.”

He looked back to the fire, lips pursed. My heart fluttered with hope for the briefest of moments before a curt shake of his head smashed it to the ground. “I cannot ask any who aid us here to risk their life.” Maybe blood-curdling rage was the cure to his freaky fae wiles, because there was no inkling of attraction in me when that vibrant turquoise gaze met mine. “Our allies here are citizens of my realm; commoners who wished to live their lives out among humans. They are not warriors. To ask any of them to cross paths with a Guardian, even a disgraced one, would be far too dangerous.”

I let my head loll back, my eyes locked on the ceiling as I took a long, slow breath. Put that way, I couldn’t very well protest without looking like the most heartless bitch ever. Still; I wanted nothing more than to knock that demeaning calm right off his face. I didn’t care what sort of noble blood he had or how important he was back in his home world—here, he was a smug dick.

“I am sorry, Caitlin. Gannon feels terrible, to have gotten so close, only to have his quarry slip away at the last moment.”

“And what happens when we find the Lynx? If I get you home, will you let Gannon go after that asshole?” My mind was once again whirling, wondering how I could possibly step up the search, when we had had such little success for so long. If I could only find him, if I could somehow get them home soon, perhaps there was still a chance Texas Pete would be intercepted before my fate was sealed…

“No.”

I stared at him, open-mouthed. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “
What
?” I sputtered. “What do you mean ‘no’? Why the fuck not?”

Again, that cool, detached gaze as he stomped on my hopes. “Gannon will have other duties once we are returned. I cannot spare him.”

“But we had a deal!”

He spread his hands. “I have fulfilled my part of the bargain we struck.”

“Are you kidding me?” My voice had risen to a screech. There was a damn good chance everyone in the house could hear my hysterics, but I didn’t give a rat’s ass. “You swore you’d protect me! You swore that you’d keep the King from finding out about me!”

“By hunting the troll down and making sure he could not tell the High King about your Gift, yes.”

My mouth snapped shut so fast I nearly bit through my tongue. Those were the exact words I had spoken. I could remember him repeating them back to me, as clear as day. Suddenly, Seana’s warning made the most awful kind of sense. At the time, I had taken her advice as caution against angering their sovereign lord. Now I realized there had been so much more weight to those words. The troll was dead.
He
could no longer tell the High King anything. I had never considered he would employ another to do his dirty work—and our pact had made no mention of friends.

I had been had.

I could barely speak. My jaw seemed to have fused shut in its attempt to keep a backlash of anger inside. I had never been good at dealing with authority figures and blatant abuses of power. This was no different. I adopted the sickeningly sweet passivity I usually saved for those smart-ass moments where I was about to get canned or dumped no matter what came out of my mouth. “I see. That must be terribly convenient for you. And now that your end of the deal is ‘fulfilled’ what, exactly, do you expect from me?”

“The same as before. You will help us find the Lynx.” He never wavered. The fucker never so much as blinked. “That was your bond.”

Good God damn, did I ever want to hit him.
So
hard. There was no malice in his response but that only made it worse. He had no compunction when it came to refusing me the help that might be the difference between my eventual life and death—but he also felt no remorse. He had lived up to the letter of his promise and was required to do no more. I, on the other hand, had no excuse to call off my end of the deal—which also suited him just fine, of course. My lips drew back in a snarl. “Oh yeah? And what if I refuse? What if I say fuck you and your backstabbing bullshit deal?”

He remained impassive, that steady gaze never wavering. He didn’t have to say anything and he knew it. He knew I couldn’t back out. Who would stand with me against the creepy crawlies if I walked away now? Sure, I could likely defend myself one-on-one—but what if they came in twos or threes? Argoth might be dead and Liam was beyond my reach, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t had connections here. Who knew who else out there might still know about me and where I lived? It didn’t matter what kind of crazy faerie mojo might be waiting for me if I tried to break my end of the damned pact. Even that had become moot. I was completely dependent on him and the bastard knew it.

I stood there for another moment, dumbstruck. I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. I wanted to stomp around in a crazy, stompy rage. It was all so incredibly unfair that I wanted to fall to the floor and never get up again. Instead, I curtsied at the lord of the manor—making it all that much more of a mockery in my tank top and yoga pants—before I turned and left. I only stopped long enough to grab my coat and purse from the alcove by the door before I headed down the front stairs two at a time.

No one tried to follow me.

I slid into my car and threw my purse into the passenger seat. I had the key in the ignition before I froze, wondering just where the hell I intended to go. Gilroy’s? Jenni’s? Home? The world around me was an unfriendly blur and all I wanted was something familiar. Something normal. Maybe that was just a pipe dream, but I had to believe it still existed out there, somewhere.

I don’t know how long I sat there, staring off at nothing as the tears dried on my cheeks. The harsh light of day had finally pierced through to the center of me and I had no more lies to hide behind; no more fluffy dreams to shroud the cold truth of reality. There was no one else in this world that cared as much about my fate as I did. No one was going to save me. Perhaps I had always known that. I had been careless and stupid, letting my life get intertwined with that of these weirdos. Maybe I had wanted excitement and adventure, but I hadn’t stopped to consider the costs. Didn’t matter now, of course. It was too late for take backs.

Or was it?

My life in Riverview was in shambles, yes, but there was a great big world out there. What would I be leaving behind, really? A job I hated? People who didn’t give a shit about me? The thought of never seeing my family again, however estranged we were, made my chest ache but perhaps that too would be for the best. They’d be safer.
I’d
be safer. Maybe that whole distance making the heart grow fonder crap would heal the wounds between us. Maybe I’d be able to drop in on them one day, when I had become less of a liability.

I didn’t know what I’d do or where I’d go, but I could figure that out as I went. Surely the High King and his hordes wouldn’t be able to find one little human among billions, right? Hell, even if they could, that didn’t mean I had to sit around at the center of the bull’s eye, waiting for them to strike. I wasn’t sure which was making me lightheaded: the fear or the excitement. Either way, it was good to be feeling something.

For months I had been letting myself be lead along, like a passenger in my own life. Now there was something I could decide on for myself. There was no going back and I was tired as hell of sitting still. Why not shake things up? The contents of my life would fit neatly in the trunk of my car and, while I didn’t have too much money squirreled away, I probably had enough to get me a few states away. I could find work, a cheap room for rent; something to pass the time, where no one knew me and there weren’t soul-sucking creatures lurking around every corner. I pictured myself tucked away in some dusty, rural place where there were miles between houses, waiting tables at some mom-n-pop diner until I had enough money to move on to the next town. The picture wasn’t that bad. I should have felt scared of such uncertainty but I didn’t.

Goddamn. I let out a long, shaky breath. Was I really going to do this? Was I going to make a run for it and leave everything I knew behind? It was batshit crazy, but what in my life wasn’t? Maybe another dose of crazy was exactly what I needed to fix the mess the old crazy had made of me. What was stopping me?

Other than a blood oath to a backstabbing fairy son of a bitch, of course.

I still needed to find them their Lynx. That elusive bastard was the last hurdle between me and a fresh break—a break I hadn’t realized I wanted quite so badly until that very moment. I needed to find him, so I could put some distance between myself and the Caitlin Moore I had once been. I didn’t know how long I had before Texas Pete spilled the beans and a host of angry fae came hunting for my ass but I didn’t want to wait around to find out.

I fished my phone out of my purse. I didn’t even wait for a greeting when the ringing cut off. “Mai, I’m outside. Get dressed. We’ve got work to do—and fast.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Another week of failure.

I tossed my purse onto the chair by the door and threw myself down on my borrowed bed. I screamed my frustration into the pillow until I was breathless and needed to come up for air, rolling over on my back to stare up at the ceiling. This sucked. I was exhausted, cranky, and just generally longing to throw things. Not even at a particular target, really. The wall would do. I was so frustrated. I might have made up my mind to take charge and get shit done but that didn’t mean dick.

Fate wasn’t letting me go that easy.

Every day felt like a lifetime. Each minute that passed was a step toward the gallows; another step Texas Pete made on his way to rat me out to the High King. Mairi had assured me that there was no direct passage from my realm to Tír na nÓg proper. It was marginally comforting to think that the smarmy bastard would have a long journey ahead of him before could even begin to seek an audience with the king. I hope it rained the whole time.

That didn’t solve much in the long run, though. It only gave me a month or two of a head start, tops. Given how many failed attempts we had made to locate the Lynx, the numbers weren’t coming in on my side. Seana had tried to soften the edges of my hysteria with a reminder that the king was indeed mad. There was a good chance that he wouldn’t believe a word Pete said. My bloodline was supposed to be long gone, and a banished ex-Guardian’s tale of a human girl in a far off city possessing it might be passed off as a wacky scheme to extort royal favor. That was all well and good, but what crazy, paranoid monarch would ignore the possibility of such a threat to his throne? No one had been able to argue against that point. Score one for me. (Yay.)