Silver Skin (A Cold Iron Novel) (16 page)

She supposed that if you were immortal and had already lived three thousand years you would be comfortable almost everywhere you went. And that very little would surprise you. She said as much.

“Places and things rarely surprise me,” Miach replied. “And the Fae are, by and large, a predictable race. That is why we are so drawn to your kind. Because occasionally you do surprise us.” He smiled. “Sometimes in the most interesting ways.”

The meal was excellent, and afterward Miach had Nial drop them off at the house and take his girlfriend home in the Porsche. With the house apparently to themselves, Miach poured them each a whiskey and took Helene on a tour of his art collection.

There was a picture gallery on the second floor. Miach’s taste ran to nineteenth century American landscapes and mythological subjects, and he had some enviable pictures. There was an Edwin Austen Abbey, a scene from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, which Helene particularly liked.

“I meant to woo you with them,” Miach admitted. “To approach Beth with a major donation for the museum, because I knew you would be obligated to spend time with me. I was determined to show you a different side of my world.”

He had, unintentionally. He had shown her Nieve and Garrett, and Deirdre and Kevin. And fraught as those relationships were, there was beauty there.

“And now?” she asked. “Will you still donate the pictures?”

“Now,” he replied, putting his drink on a hall table and taking hers away as well, “I think you should woo me
for
them.”

Chapter 12

I
t was a game. An invitation to play a role with him, to explore another facet of what it might be like to be with a Fae. She still wasn’t certain she could live in his world with him. This brief interlude while she needed his protection from her magical assailant was probably all they would ever have. And she wanted to make the most of it.

There was a large mirror at the end of the gallery with an ormolu table beneath it. She took Miach’s hand and led him to it. He looked intrigued. She unzipped her dress and dropped it on the floor. Now he looked more than intrigued. She reached down and unclasped the iron torc from around her ankle, setting it on the table with a decisive click.

His eyes opened wide. Evidently she
had
surprised him. In an interesting way.

“You wanted me the night we met,” she said. “You drew a
geis
on me so you could find me again. If Brian hadn’t abducted me, if you hadn’t tried to kill Beth, if she hadn’t placed the
geis
on you, what would you have done next?”

• • •

T
he Fae were not known
for their self-control. There was rarely any reason for them to resist temptation. He’d seen—no, he’d felt—how much Helene had enjoyed exploring her sexuality. His piercing had shocked her at first, but then she’d warmed to the adventure.

She was inviting him now to push her boundaries. If he intended this to be a short-term affair, he wouldn’t hesitate. But he was looking forward to waking up next to her in the morning, and they had all the time in the world to experiment, to discover what they liked together.

Then it struck him that she didn’t think about this as he did. That she believed this
was
going to be a brief liaison. And she might well be right. He intended to keep her safe, to make her experience at the Commandant’s House the very last brush she had with Fae magic and true danger. If he failed, she would probably walk away from him and his world, with good reason.

He had to make a choice: to take everything she was offering at this moment, because it might be all they ever had, or to rein in his Fae impulses, the hedonism that was natural to his race, in the hope and belief that they might have a future together.

To prove himself worthy of her trust.

Which meant using his voice . . . to give her what she wanted.

“Tell me,” he said to her, “about your fantasies. Tell me what
you
want me to do to you.”

Her breath hitched. She was visibly excited. And entirely under his sway. His voice would sound like music in her ears, and her body would want to join the dance.

“I want,” she said, “the end of the chase.”

Apparently his voice was not the only one that could trigger fantasy, because the image that filled his mind was compelling and uniquely Fae. He was hunting her. Through the forest. Barefoot. Everything verdant and smelling sweetly of spring. And he was close now, almost upon her.

“Turn around, Helene,” he said. “Put your hands on the table, bend over, and look into the mirror.”

She licked her lips and obeyed him, hands splayed on the white marble, elbows balanced at the edge. She danced to his tune, and they both knew it, the cold iron torc in plain view, both in and out of her reach now, there on the tabletop.

For a long moment he studied the pure line of her arched back, the firm globes of her ass, the curtain of her hair as it fell over her shoulders.

Then he ripped her panties off, the tearing of fabric loud in the still room, exposing the taut, tanned flesh beneath. Helene whimpered, hot with need. He ran a finger along her cleft, found her wet and waiting for him.

He kicked her feet apart and poised to enter her, but then he stopped. He reached over her arching back, lifted her hand, and placed it over the cold iron torc.

“Tell me,” he said, “that this really what you want.”

“Yes,” she said, with her hand curled around the cold iron.
“Yes.”

He plunged inside.

• • •

H
elene woke the next morning
to the telltale sounds of a man dressing. Of belt buckles and clinking change. Or, more accurately, she woke to the sound of a man trying to dress quietly.

The meaning of that sound, she well knew, was entirely dependent on context. If the man was in your bed, quiet dressing generally indicated that he hoped to leave your apartment without speaking with you. If, on the other hand, you were in his bed, the quiet dressing meant that he didn’t want you to wake up and leave.

Not that she could leave Miach’s house without him until her Fae persecutor was caught. But it was a nice feeling, all the same.

She stretched and opened her eyes. The illusion of domesticity evaporated. Miach was no ordinary lover. He was Fae. And the metallic sounds she had heard were less to do with spare change and belt buckles and more to do with a half dozen silver blades that he was strapping to his body.

Still, he was trying to do that quietly, and that must count for something.

“I was trying not to wake you,” he said.

“I see that. Where are you going?”

“To Ireland.”

She sat up. “For how long?”

“A few hours. No more. I can
pass
there in an instant.”

She had forgotten that. “Why?”

“Conn and Beth have discovered something at the Prince Consort’s house near Clonmel. Elada and I will return as soon as we can. You should be safe as long as you stay in the house. And Nieve came back this morning, so you’ll have company. And Liam and Nial are here to protect her.”

“From what?” Helene asked.

“From her husband, and perhaps from Finn. I lifted the
geis
I placed on them, that forbade them from seeing her. But they may not be content with the new bargain we struck. I doubt Garrett likes the idea of spending half his week under my roof. They may try to take her. Magic can’t get through my wards, but that won’t stop the Fianna from breaking the door down.”

And he was still going to Ireland, even when danger might threaten Nieve, which meant that Conn and Beth had found something important. He was also, according to other Fae, the most powerful sorcerer his race had ever known. Two nights ago he had walked into the territory of his mortal enemy with nothing but a penknife in his pocket. This morning he had strapped a silver dirk to each thigh, throwing knives to each of his wrists and ankles, and what appeared to be a leaf-bladed broadsword to his back.

“Why all the weaponry?” she asked.

“A precaution,” he said evasively.

“Against what?”

“Against the thing the Fae fear most. Druids.”

• • •

M
iach wished he had been
able to get out of the house without waking Helene, but he couldn’t find the silver dirks without opening drawers and he wasn’t foolish enough to go without them. It was arrogance that had been his race’s undoing, twice over. First had been the way the Fae used their power. They took and took, and gave nothing in return. Second had been their obliviousness to the plotting of the Druids.

He and Elada passed to the Prince Consort’s sprawling palace near Clonmel. The pale Georgian granite had a desolate, disused air about it. The grass in the parterre was growing wild, the hedges had lost their neatly manicured shapes. The flower beds were choked with weeds.

When the Prince Consort had abducted Beth to this place, she had been dying, bleeding out from an internal hemorrhage. Her ex-husband, who had turned out to be a weak half-blood Fae, had poisoned her and caused her to miscarry Conn’s child. The Prince Consort had healed her and taken her here to force her to open the solstice gate in the Druid mound on the estate.

By the time Miach and Conn had rescued her, she’d wanted nothing more to do with the place. And Miach had been too concerned with the Prince Consort’s silver severed arm to make a complete inspection of the house and grounds. Which was, he now suspected, based on what Conn and Beth had described, a mistake.

“Conn said it was on the other side of the mound. Some kind of research facility.” Elada pointed and they set off.

They both skirted the glimmering granite walls of the mound, staying as far away as the tree line permitted. Conn had not been tortured by the Druids in their temple complexes, and he felt no aversion to them. He had been hidden away with his grief, sleeping through centuries, in the quiet of what had been meant to be his tomb. But most Fae, including Miach and Elada, despised the places, the scenes, for almost all the free Fae, of their degradation at the hands of the Druids.

The Prince Consort, though, had built a veritable palace near his own mound. He must have looked out upon it every day that he’d spent in his sprawling Georgian manse. It spoke of either obsession or madness. Possibly both.

On the other side of the mound, hidden from the main house, they discovered a little complex of modern structures, like a miniature office plaza, all cinderblock, concrete, and glass.

The cubicles, conference tables, and generic desktop computers did, in fact, give the interiors the banality of a business park, but the grass was clipped and the grounds were neatly maintained, indicating more recent occupancy. The flickering light at the end of the first narrow structure came from an enclosed office, and it was here that Beth and Conn now sat, poring through a database.

“The Prince Consort spent millions trying to find Druids,” Beth said. “Tapping into government records and private data. Creating programs to sift information and find patterns that might indicate Druid heritage.”

The hairs on the back of Miach’s neck rose. “How many did he dig up?”

“A few dozen,” Conn replied, looking up from the computer. “I printed their records.” He indicated the stack of papers in front of Beth.

“It doesn’t make sense,” said Beth. “There can’t be only a few dozen Druid descendants in the world. Even if only one family survived—and I’m evidence that one did—there would have to be tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people living today with a Druid heritage.”

“May I?” asked Miach, picking up a handful of files. He flipped through the folders. The first was a circus performer. The second was a psychic. The third a stage magician. Several were tattoo artists.

“We combed through the results of his search,” said Conn. “His program must have had a significant flaw, because it never identified Beth.”

It was typical of the Prince Consort. He was the purest kind of Fae, lacking empathy for other creatures and, as a consequence, failing to comprehend them. “The Prince Consort never understood the Druids,” said Miach, who had trained so many of them. “He was looking on the surface, for the trappings of Druid lore, not the substance. His search was intended to find magical talent, because he thinks our enemy used magic to defeat us. But they didn’t. Not really. They used scholarship. Research. Years of study. The Prince Consort was looking for mediums and sideshow acts. He should have been looking for people like Beth Carter.”

“It appears that they eventually realized that,” said Elada, who had been engrossed with something on another computer these past few minutes.

“Here.” He pointed to the screen. “This is a query on a new search. Dated three months ago. Not thousands, but hundreds of names. Scholars and librarians mostly.”

Elada’s penchant for hacking video games clearly translated into more useful arenas. “Was he in contact with any of these potential Druid descendants?” Miach asked.

“We don’t know,” replied Beth. “Conn checked to make sure the buildings were empty, but this is the only one we’ve had time to search so far.”

“Print the records, Elada,” said Miach, “and transfer the databases to our servers in Boston. You understand this stuff.”

Then another idea struck him. “Beth, call Helene and ask her to cross-check the names of these Druids with the museum’s donor and member databases.”

• • •

H
elene knew better than to
tempt danger and leave Miach’s house, no matter how badly she wanted to go for a run on the beach or stretch her legs in the park. She joined Nieve, little Garrett, Liam, and Nial for a subdued breakfast in the dining room, where the floral wallpaper and Duncan Phyfe furnishings were comfortably homey and worn.

Liam and Nial were still sheepish around her. They offered to take their meal in the kitchen if she preferred, which would have been absurd considering that the dining room seated twenty. Still, she couldn’t quite feel at ease around the brothers.

She knew that Miach had ordered them to protect Helene as well as Nieve, but they’d been protecting her and Beth the last time, when their older sibling—or really cousin, Helene supposed, as Liam and Nial were grandchildren or great-grandchildren or more and Brian was Miach’s son—convinced them to betray their patriarch and kidnap her.

Miach trusted them, had forgiven and forgotten the episode. That much was clear. Helene couldn’t do the same. If her Fae attacker was a stranger, she expected they would obey Miach’s orders and protect her. If the assailant turned out to be Brian MacCecht, Helene wasn’t as certain.