Iron (The Warding Book 1) (42 page)

Oh, that narrow staircase: my sworn enemy.

I thought back to another chastised walk of shame up those stairs, from months earlier. I had thought I had been filled with the pinnacle of self-loathing and anxiety then, but boy had I been wrong. They didn’t hold a candle to the newest knot in my stomach. Facing Kaine had been clown shoes, compared to the confrontation that lay before me.

The memory of my last words to Gannon echoed in my head, bitter and filled with anger. I had made amends with Kaine, true—but I wasn’t so sure this bridge would be as easily repaired, if at all.

When I crossed over the threshold into the training room, I found Gannon deep in practice. My presence didn’t make him miss a beat. Watching him run through his flawless series of katas was breathtaking. He moved like the wind, like deadly poetry in motion as his blade flashed through the swathes of moonlight. It made my chest tight.

I had so much more to learn, so much more he could have taught me, but I wasn’t sure that would ever come to pass. Truthfully, I wouldn’t blame him. I had been cruel. I wasn’t sure I deserved his forgiveness. I turned to leave, frozen in place by his voice as it rang out; somehow whisper soft even across the distance.

“Tuesday, 7 o’clock.”

Tears stung my eyes. It was hard to get the words out around the lump that formed in my throat. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

I headed back down the stairs with a smile.

If you enjoyed
Iron
,

be sure not to miss the upcoming sequel

Faster

The Warding: Book 2

by Robin L. Cole

Chapter One

There comes a time in every girl’s life when she reassess the choices she’s made so far.

I’m talking about the big picture choices. Not the little things we mull and obsess over every day, like “Was that skirt a bit too short for the office Christmas party?” or “Am I going to hate myself tomorrow for eating that greasy double cheeseburger—with a side of large fries…and a strawberry milkshake?” I’m talking about real choices. Those important decisions that have far-reaching consequences that you just know will come back to bite you in the ass, but you willfully ignore because you’re all caught up in the moment. Like, “ignoring your better judgment and taking home that guy from the club because he’s just too fine to pass up a night of naughty gymnastics with” big. Maybe even “quitting your horrible soul-sucking job without having another one lined up” big.

For me, that moment came as I hung upside down in a building along the Hudson River.

I didn’t know what it had been home to in a previous life. Maybe some sort of a clothing manufacturer, given some of the odds and ends entombed within, but that hardly mattered anymore. It was a monument to disrepair: old, abandoned, and, if the scritchy little sounds I heard in the dark below me were any indicator, likely rat infested too.

Gross.

We had found enough suspicious scraps and discarded bones to confirm that our quarry had once called the building home. If it was still indeed in residence was the million dollar question. We had searched all three upper levels to no avail. Other than decomposing furniture, a shit-ton of dirt, and disgusting heaps of debris I didn’t even want to try and identify, the building appeared empty.

That left the basement. The staircase leading down to the lower level had fallen away long ago. Was that the unfortunate side effect of time or a cunning move to make it impossible for intruders to stumble upon a private nest? Who knew? Not me, that’s for damned sure. It didn’t much matter in the long run. One way or the other, we were taking a look. It was a huge pain in the ass that needed to be circumvented.

The solution?

Lower Caitlin down into the dark, of course.

The cavernous space before me was pitch freaking black, except for a weak shaft of light coming from the stairwell above. Even with one wall perilously close to me, I felt disoriented. My brain just couldn’t handle the overwhelming darkness. It didn’t help that I was gently swinging back and forth, suspended from an honest-to-God harness like some trapeze artist. The damn thing was digging into my gut in all sorts of uncomfortable ways, cutting off the circulation to my legs. I guesstimated I was halfway between the floor above and the ground below, but it was hard to tell.

Maybe it was better that way. I really didn’t need to know how far the fall to my death would be, should Gannon’s grip fail.

The whole shebang was far from my idea of fun, but a necessary evil. Upper body strength and I had only recently become acquaintances, and though Gannon was all lean muscle, I had no faith in my ability to keep him aloft had our positions been reversed. Truth be told, I hadn’t been too eager to let his strength by my sole anchor either, but—what could I do? One of us had to play spelunker and see if our unwelcome guest was still living below. Two little girls—twins, fresh out of kindergarten—had gone missing earlier in the week. Of course, the police were focused on tracking down the sicko who had taken them, but they were hunting for a run-of-the-mill abductor. We knew better. All signs pointed here and to a monster that needed to be stopped. Pronto.

“See anything?” Gannon’s voice was pitched low but it reverberated in my brain, loud and clear thanks to my snazzy top-of-the-line Bluetooth earpiece.

I had finally stopped swaying. My face was starting to feel hot as all the blood pooled in my head, so I wanted to make the sweep quickly. I pried the flashlight from its pocket on my harness and said a silent prayer. We hadn’t been able to come up with too clear a plan on what to do if the creature actually was hiding down there. I was armed with my trusty stilettos but they weren’t going to be of much use to me while caught in mid-air. Gannon couldn’t exactly come to my rescue either. Not without dropping me on my head.

I clicked on the light and shone it around in quick jerks, trying to cover as much of the room as possible. More trash, droppings galore, and some hulking machines I couldn’t even begin to identify filled the large, high ceilinged room—but nothing moved, as far as the eye could see. I had to admit, when nothing leaped up at me from the dark, I let out a small sigh of relief. “Looks clear.”

I heard him curse. It wasn’t exactly the answer either of us wanted. Hours and hours spent on a futile hunt pleased neither of us.

“Hold on. Let me take a good look before you go yanking me back up.” I slowed my search and tried to make my sweeps methodical and even, leaving no inch untouched. I held my breath, carefully cataloging every little sound I heard: the creak of the rope keeping me aloft, the faint drip of water hitting cement, that eerie ambient buzzing you get in your ears when things are just too damn quiet. Nothing out of the ordinary. Unless this thing was hunkered down behind something, holding its breath, I was pretty sure we were the only living things in the building.

An indignant squeak and the scratching of tiny nails on concrete echoed from somewhere to my left reminded me that was untrue. Fine then; it was just us and the rats.

“I’m not seeing anything. Want to lower me down? I can do a pass on foot.” It was the furthest thing from what I wanted to do, but I didn’t have any better ideas.

I could tell he was considering it for a moment by his pause, but he said, “No. Too risky. I wouldn’t be able to get you back up and that harness is too tricky to manage in the dark, alone. I think we’ve seen enough. It’s not here anymore.”

Fuck. Who knew when—
if
—we’d pick up its trail again? The thought of those poor kids burned in my gut like a straight shot of Tabasco. I knew it was likely too late to save them—so likely that it was a pipe dream to expect anything else—but bringing them justice would have been something. Ever one to beat a dead horse, I continued to sweep the room as I was hoisted back up. I was dizzy as hell but determined. Unfortunately, that gumption got me nowhere.

Once the light began to return, I was able to gage my surroundings once more. The smell of marginally fresher air was a treat after spending so long in the damp cavern below. I tucked my flashlight away and reached up to grasp the rope with both hands. I managed to pull myself upright, wincing as the harness straps cut into my thighs in a whole new way. I was not a fan of the spelunking shit. I made myself a promise to start pumping iron. Next time, Gannon was going to be the one taking the plunge if I had anything to say about it.

The lip of the hole loomed above me and I reached out to get a good grip on it, helping guide myself up and over before the rope went slack. I flopped back on the concrete and laid there for a moment, waiting for my bodily fluids to redistribute themselves properly while trying not to think about all the dust and grime currently caking itself into my hair. Gannon crouched beside me, undoing the locks of the harness. It was the closest he had been to me in a long time, save for when we were kicking one another’s asses in the training ring.

I shoved that thought away quick.

The whole situation really bugged me. We had come so close. The remains we had found on the lower floors proved some sort of bestial fae had certainly been living here. Who else could it have been, if not our serial killer? Given just how many stashes of picked clean bones we had found, the damn thing had called this shithole home for quite a while. There had even been a few suspicious looking piles in the basement, making me wonder where the damn thing had slept. Didn’t that old adage of “don’t shit where you sleep” apply in the fae kingdom? Actually…

I wondered aloud, “How would it have gotten down there in the first place, if the stairs are missing?”

Gannon paused for half a second. Over the last few months I had learned to read my teacher well. With him, that small tick was damn near an admission of guilt. He seemed to shake it off as undid the last strap and stood. “Kludde can fly.”

“Fly?” I sat up. He had taken two steps away, back turned. I shimmied out of the remaining straps about my thighs. Those he had left alone. What a gentleman. Chivalry wasn’t about to make me forget the bomb he had just dropped. The mental image of some feathered freak soaring up out of the darkness, beak agape, was emblazoned in my mind and would probably haunt me for days. “Gee, that’s good to know. Nice of you to warn me before I went down there.”

He shot me a look that was disbelief balanced by an equal amount of thinly veiled contempt. “Does it matter? One way or the other, one of us was going down there. You said it yourself; you weren’t going to the one hoisting me up in this thing.” He shook the rope for emphasis.

“Yeah, well maybe it would have changed my opinion just a little! I wouldn’t have been so eager to be dangled in the dark like a worm on a hook, thanks.” I shot him a peeved look, which earned me an eye roll. That was Gannon-speak for “stop being a drama queen,” which only irritated me even more. I snapped, “Don’t you think that’s some information I could have used before we turned this place over from top to bottom?”

“Perhaps, but I didn’t think it relevant.”

“Oh yeah? And why not?”

“You’ve never showed interest in preparing yourself for a hunt before.”

I might have recoiled visibly, if I had been on my feet. As it was, I froze with my mouth hanging open. He casually turned his back to me, as if he hadn’t just given me a verbal five across the eyes. I glared daggers into his broad back. My face burned.

To say that our relationship was a rocky one would be something of an understatement. Gannon was my teacher and I was his unexpectedly capable student, but there the warm and fuzzies ended. From day one, we had run hot and cold with one another. We were usually civil and had found that we worked surprisingly well together when out on the prowl but beyond that, the lines of communication between us were a bit... strained.

They had become even more so ever since the night we had hunted down a black dog (which was pretty much exactly what it sounded like: a gigantic, slavering fae hound). I had acted like an ass and nearly gotten myself killed by blithely ignoring the dossier he had so painstakingly prepared for me the night of that particular hunt. The danger my laziness had put us in had led to one of the most severe dressing downs he had leveled upon me to date. The blow-out of that night made this insult seem almost flippant.

So, as much as I wanted to bite back after that not-so-subtle dig, I deserved it. Knowing firing back would just spark another war between us, I tried to be the bigger woman and swallowed my pride. Believe you me; that was hard for me. Really, really hard.

I climbed to my feet and picked up the discarded tangle of harness. It weighed next to nothing. He was on his own with the rope. I stalked off across the room, muttering uncharitable things under my breath once I was out of earshot. I needed to put some distance between us before I said something honest. No one had the power to infuriate me quite like Gannon. Even Kaine—whose princely ass remained at the tippy top of my shit-list—didn’t make my skin itch like a wool jumpsuit.

I shouldn’t have been too surprised, of course. Ever since the Warding had manifested in my life, letting me see through fae glamours in addition to being immune to their freaky magical abilities, my life had been one giant problem after the next. You would think that I would have adjusted to being around them damn near 24/7, but; no. Navigating the ins and outs of fae etiquette was nowhere close to being my strong suit.