Silver Skin (A Cold Iron Novel) (18 page)

Nieve shook her head. “Not a mortal span.
That
mortal’s span. They’re going to kill us, Helene. And when I die, Garrett will die.”

“I don’t understand how that can be.”

“Brian’s right. I’m a thin-blood. Almost human. But Garrett is a true Fae. The vows the Fae make aren’t just binding; they’re words made flesh. When a Fae promises to share his life with you, he means it literally. He’s sharing part of the magic that gives him life. And when you die, a part of him dies with you. He sickens and follows you to the grave. That’s why I released him. At least now he can use his talent and become a sorcerer like the old man.”

“Why couldn’t he before?”

“I’m sorry,” said Nieve. “I thought you understood. Garrett can’t be a sorcerer without a right hand. And sorcerers are bound to their right hands, just like man and wife. Their lives are tied. When one dies, the other follows. A sorcerer can’t marry, and neither can a right hand. Fae or mortal—makes no difference. The connection would mean that if any one of them died, they all would die. That’s why Garrett and I did it, married in secret, because Granddad told him it was time to choose.”

Helene hadn’t known. Miach hadn’t told her. She doubted Beth knew either. But she didn’t feel betrayed by the revelation. She felt sorry for Miach and sorry for Elada, who had been denied the chance to love fully and freely.

“I wish I could have seen him one more time,” said Nieve. The tears were pouring down her face.

“Brian is wrong,” said Helene. “Garrett will come for you. I saw the look on his face when he was bargaining with Miach at the Commandant’s House. It won’t make a difference that you’ve freed him. You mean everything to him.”

“I don’t want him to come,” said Nieve. “They’re Druids, Helene. They’ve got cold iron. You saw what it did to the old man. If Garrett comes, they’ll poison him and then they’ll cut him. My family thinks I don’t know the stories, what it was like for the old man, but I’ve overheard them whispering. I know what they went through. I don’t want Garrett. My little boy needs a father.”

Helene didn’t want anyone to die. Not Garrett or Miach or Nieve and certainly not herself. Her phone was still in her pocket—Brian had seemingly forgotten that—and he hadn’t blindfolded her or put her in a trunk. Once Miach saw the carnage in his house, he would probably guess they’d been taken to the address in Winthrop she’d given him on the phone. They were already through the tunnel and passing the airport, the water visible in the distance.

She was going to observe and remember everything. How many gates, doors, men, weapons there were. And then, when she was alone, even if Brian locked her in a four-foot-square closet in a basement, she was going to keep her wits about her and call Miach to warn him what he was up against.

They crossed a narrow body of water, and then they were in Winthrop proper, the neat little nineteenth-century clapboard houses all on small lots, more spacious than the crowded dwellings of Southie and Charlestown, but still urban. Then they turned again and they were heading south toward the water.

At the end of the street was a stone wall with a set of wrought-iron gates. Helene hadn’t known there was an estate this size in Winthrop. The internal road wound around scrubby parkland to a circular drive in front of a sprawling Tudor Revival.

The house was completely hidden from the road by the stone walls, and it had an unobstructed view of the sea. It was desolate and cut off from the family bustle of Winthrop, which itself was isolated from the rest of Boston by the water that surrounded the tiny peninsula. There was no good way of getting in or out of Winthrop.

And the place had a sinister, disused air to it. Like the compound of a cult. Cars were parked haphazardly on the lawn. The grass needed mowing; the hedges needed clipping. Sheets and newspapers hung in the windows as though the inhabitants were just squatting there.

The Druids who streamed out of the house, two dozen at least, were as unkempt as the compound. They wore sweatshirts and pajamas and sported unwashed hair and beards. There were few women, and Helene doubted any of them would be sympathetic to her plight. They looked strung out and disturbingly eager. Helene didn’t want to think for what.

Brian yanked Nieve out of the van and threw her to the waiting Druids. “You can cut that one open,” he told them. Then he pulled Helene out of the van. He didn’t need to, but he enjoyed the revulsion she showed when he touched her.

The Druids started to drag Nieve toward the house.

“She’s Finn’s daughter-in-law!” shouted Helene. “Do you want the Fianna here?”

One of the women gave her a demented smile. “We’re ready for the Fae,” she said. “They can’t stand cold iron.”

“You think the Wild Hunt is going to like this?” she asked Brian, incredulous. “Druids with cold iron torturing Fae?”

“The Court won’t care about Finn and Miach MacCecht, who left them to rot in the void. They won’t care how we released them, just that they’re free.”

“They won’t care who released them, either,” said Helene with sad certainty. “They’ll turn on you, Brian. The way you turned on your father. Because you’re right. You are more Fae than he is. You don’t have an ounce of his humanity. Or Nieve’s. You’d let these things”—she couldn’t think of these wild-eyed lunatics as people—“kill a young mother who was your own flesh and blood, whose son is as much Fae—
more
than you are.”

Ransom Chandler looked surprised. “That one bred with a Fae?” he asked, taking new interest in Nieve.

Helene felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. Chandler’s interest turned her stomach.

Brian shook his head. “
Once
. She bred
one
half-blood. And she can’t breed another. She’s too torn up inside.”

“I’d like to see that,” said Chandler, with an unwholesome light in his eyes. “Take her to the lab.”

Nieve fought them until Brian used the Taser on her. Then the Druids picked the helpless girl up and carried her into the house.

Helene and Brian followed them down a long hall. The Druids turned off into what had once been a kitchen, all art-deco white tile and green counters. There was something disturbingly institutional about it. A family had never cooked in this place nor gathered here for meals. This had been the domain of servants.

Then Helene saw the table at the center of the room. It had leather straps fixed to the sides, and the floor around it was stained with dried blood. The Druids tossed Nieve on top and Helene reeled, sick to her stomach.

Brian thrust his hands into Helene’s hair and dragged her down the hall to a low door. He opened it, and the damp and mildew met her in a wave. The stairs were steep, wooden, with no rail, and as he pulled her downstairs, she fell twice, bruising her shins.

There were, as Brian had promised, many tiny closets in the basement, and he took care to find the smallest one, even as she hyperventilated and shook, and then locked her inside a brick enclosure too narrow for her to even sit down.

It took her precious minutes, she didn’t know how many, to master her breathing. She knew that if she reached for her phone while her hands were shaking, she might drop it. And the space was narrow, so confining, with her shoulders touching the walls on both sides, her back and breasts scraping the brick, that if she dropped the phone, she wouldn’t be able to pick it up again. There was barely room to bend her knees a few inches. She was standing in an upright coffin.

No. She couldn’t think like that, or she wouldn’t be able to get the phone. She closed her eyes and thought of the beach near Miach’s house, of trails she liked to hike in the woods west of Boston, or bicycle rides and fresh sweet air. Then she slid her hand in her pocket, found the phone, and brought it up to her face.

The light when she turned it on blinded her, and that was good, because she didn’t want to see her surroundings, didn’t want to see how close the walls were, touching her back, her elbows, her wrists.

She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, she focused on the phone and shut out her surroundings. And then she sobbed, and began shaking, and put it back into her pocket and let the tears come.

She had no signal.

Chapter 14

L
iam MacCecht was glad for the opportunity to get out of the house. He escaped before Nieve could press another bag of toddler supplies on him. He didn’t understand the giant bags mothers carried nowadays. His mother hadn’t hauled around that stuff for him, and he’d turned out just fine. And on the occasions when he had taken Garrett’s bag with him, he’d never opened it.

The beach was nearly empty today and Garrett had all the space he needed to run free. And Liam had time to think.

He’d been planning on moving out before the business with Conn of the Hundred Battles and Beth Carter, but then the mess with Brian had happened. No one wanted to say it, but everyone in the MacCecht clan knew: Miach had been badly shaken by the betrayal of his son. So much so that no one commented on his fixation with Helene Whitney. No one challenged Miach for breaking his own laws, for courting—or to Liam’s mind, stalking—a woman outside the tiny world of South Boston where the Fae were known and accepted.

Liam had expected Miach to tighten his hold on his family, to forbid Liam from seeing his girlfriend in Cambridge, accepting the place at Harvard Law that he had earned. Instead, Miach had told Liam to bring Amy to the house so he could get a look at her.

Liam hadn’t known what to expect, but the old man had made polite, charming small talk with the girl and paid Liam’s law school tuition when the bill came. It was difficult to juggle what was known to be an all-consuming graduate degree with his obligations to his family, but Liam was managing. There were advantages to being part Fae, and he seemed to have inherited Miach’s quick grasp of difficult concepts and ability to absorb texts with preternatural speed.

But Liam had known better than to press the old man for more. He’d planned on waiting until the end of the first year to declare his intention of moving to Cambridge, and in with Amy.

Now there was this fresh nonsense with Helene Whitney. If he expressed his desire to move out, it would sound like he was judging the old man’s choice. It didn’t help that Helene Whitney was still wary of Liam and Nial, and with good reason. When he thought back to the night he had helped Brian kidnap the women, he felt deeply ashamed.

Liam bought Garrett an Italian ice from a cart. They’d been gone an hour and a half already, walking the beach and picking up shells and rocks and building sandcastles, and Liam figured an hour more would give Nieve the break she needed. Of course, if the old man ever learned that Liam and Nial had known about Nieve and Garrett when that Fianna was living under their roof, there would be hell to pay.

It was nearly time to go home when the Fianna pulled up to the beach in their cars, eight of them, carrying baseball bats and two-by-fours, and led by Finn himself.

Liam texted Angus and Kermit, then pushed Garrett behind him. The boy was too small, too trusting to tell him to run, and there was no one who could protect him from a Fae like Finn except the old man, who was half a world away this morning. The only choice was to face them and hope Angus and Kermit got there fast.

“You’re a long way from home,” Liam said as they approached, Finn in the lead.

“We’ve come for the boy,” said the Fae as old as Miach MacCecht. And while Finn might not have the powers that Miach did, he was a formidable fighter, a charismatic leader, and lightning quick to anger. Miach always said that emotion made Finn stupid—and dangerous.

“This isn’t your day with Nieve and Garrett,” Liam countered. “And they don’t look like social services to me.”

“You can keep your sorcerous slut,” said Finn. “We only want the boy.”

“What is this?” Liam asked. He couldn’t believe that Garrett would have any part in abducting his own son.

Garrett loved Nieve. Liam knew that. He’d watched them together for months, growing closer, trying to resist the thing blossoming between them, and finally giving in. He’d known the night it had happened, had seen them from the window of his room, overheard Miach earlier explaining to Garrett that he must find a right hand if he wished to practice sorcery, if he wished to study further with Miach.

And then Liam had overheard the part that explained so much about the old man, the cruel truth of what it meant to be a sorcerer, the price of such power. Once Garrett was bound to another Fae, he could never form another such alliance. Could not bind himself permanently to a lover, human or Fae, because when that partner died, his death would consume Garrett, too. And with Garrett would die his right hand.

Which meant that Miach and Elada had never had the option of loving another being with their whole hearts. Liam had gone up to his room then, shaken, and cried distinctly human tears for the Fae who had raised him.

And that’s when he had seen Garrett leave the house with Nieve, under cover of night. She had come back changed. Glowing. Happy, as he had never seen her. Liam had kept their secret for months.

“Nieve released him from their vows, not an hour ago,” said Finn. “Miach has double-crossed us.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Liam. Nieve hadn’t so much as looked at another man these past two years.

“Have you ever seen a Fae who’s been released by a mortal?” snarled Finn. “It’s like snapping a taut cable. All that power blasting back into you with the sting of rejection to follow it up. He’s in a bad way. I warned him that any get of Miach’s would be a treacherous whore. There’s nothing I can do but bring him his son. Now give us the boy, and no one has to get hurt.”

To be fair to the Fianna, they tried not to hurt him any more than necessary, but it took three of them to hold him down and Garrett’s half brother couldn’t resist putting the boot in.

He was crawling to his knees watching them climb back up to the road when Angus and Kermit and the boys pulled up and blocked their path, and that’s when the real fight got started.

• • •

M
iach opened his eyes on
a blue sky. He could smell smoke and sulfur and burning stone and iron. It disoriented him. He hadn’t woken up to that smell since the day Elada had rescued him from the mound.

He turned his head and saw the granite wall of a Druid temple, and his mind was hurled back two thousand years to a scene of devastation. He had been a special prisoner for the Druids, the sorcerer who had trained so many of them. Only their highest priests could be trusted to handle him, even chained, naked, in cold iron, starved and cut and cut and cut again. They feared his power.

Needlessly. He had not been able to rescue himself. He had bled and suffered for nearly a year, and then a day had gone by when no one had come to torture, abuse, or interrogate him in the endless Druid quest for knowledge. True, a quest could be a noble thing, but this was not.

Then he’d heard the feet on the stone floor, running, coming closer and closer, then the light, sudden and bright. Torches. The high priest who had been his jailor raised an iron sickle over Miach’s head and then froze, the point of silver sword bursting through his chest, and Elada’s familiar, youthful face—they had been bound less than a decade then—covered in dirt and blood revealed in the flickering light.

He had only fragments of the memory of Elada breaking his shackles and carrying him outside. Did not remember withering the circle of wheat he lay in, or the trees at the edge of the field. The temple complex beside the mound with its forges and bakeries and huts and longhouses was a smoking ruin, and there were bodies everywhere. Dead Druids. And walking among them, the Romans in their bright armor and snowy white tunics.

Miach opened his eyes again.

Elada. The explosion. The Prince Consort’s compound.

Miach turned his head and saw the smoking ruin of the complex. And a few feet away, the broad back of Conn of the Hundred Battles kneeling in the grass. With Beth Carter.

He sat up, slowly, because he could feel a rib that was still broken. He thrust his fingers into the rich soil and focused on the pattern of blood and bone, on reknitting what the explosion had shattered.

It was small-change damage, considering the force involved. He knew explosives. He sold them sometimes, bought them others. His injuries had to have been more extensive. Which meant that his little Druid—although Conn would not like him to refer to her that way—was learning fast.

He climbed to his feet and came to stand over the Druid and her lover. Elada lay on the ground between them, breathing shallowly, his lips blue and the veins in his arms black.

His oldest friend. The man who had rescued him from hell. Who had put Miach ahead of everyone else for two thousand years. “How bad is he?”

Beth Carter looked up, her eyes wet with tears and wide with fear. “I don’t understand this. I’ve never seen a Fae sick.”

“It is iron poisoning,” said Miach gently, displacing her at Elada’s side. “There were iron filings in the building, probably quite close to the bomb. It was rigged to kill Fae.”

He prayed to Dana it would not kill Elada.

“I know how to reknit broken bones,” said Beth. “And how to close wounds and regenerate organs. I don’t know how to deal with this.”

“You have to channel life into him, while his flickers, and then wait. Time is the only cure for iron poisoning.”

Miach took Elada’s hand, threaded his fingers through it, brought their crossed palms to the Fae warrior’s chest and gave. As much as he could spare if he was to face what was coming.

Elada’s eyes didn’t open, but he was breathing, and that was hopeful.

“That is all we can do,” said Miach. “It’s best not to move him until he’s stabilized. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Where are you going?” Beth Carter looked shaken, but he had to tell her.

“I think Helene and Nieve are in danger. Thirty-six Druids departed here for Boston, not one. And there was no answer just before the explosion.”

Conn rose to his feet. “I’ll come with you.”

Miach wanted to accept, but the little Druid’s life was too important. If Miach fell, if these renegades tried to bring the wall down, someone had to stop them. Or Miach’s family was doomed.

“No. It’s too dangerous to leave Beth and Elada here. There could be other traps. Or Druids on other parts of the estate. They will have heard the explosion. Move them both to Clonmel as soon as it is safe.”

He reached for his phone to try Helene again but the explosion had shattered it.

“Ours as well,” said Beth. “You could try the phones in the complex.”

“Too dangerous,” said Miach. “If I had wired this place, I’d have placed more than one device. They may all be live now. Stay away from the buildings and get into town as soon as you can.”

He
passed
then, to avoid argument and delay.

He knew something was wrong the second he arrived in his library. The safe was open, the painting lying on the floor beside it. The box containing the Prince Consort’s silver arm was gone. It had probably been among the Druids’ goals from the very beginning.

There were speckles of blood on the carpet near the door.

He reached for his knives. He knew how to use his sword because his father had thought it a requisite part of every Fae’s education, but it was not his weapon of choice. It had a limited range, for one thing, and he liked his hands free for casting for another.

There was no one on the stairs or in the hall, but at the foot of the steps lay Nial, with Liam kneeling over him, the smell of blood thick in the air.

Liam looked up. “Granddad.” The relief on his face was plain.

“What happened?”

“They shot Nial and they’ve taken Nieve and Helene. They were—”

“Druids,” Miach finished for him. “I know. Tell me exactly what happened.”

“I was at the beach with Garrett,” he said, shame in his voice. “I should have been here.”

“Never mind that, Liam. You couldn’t have guessed.” But Miach could have, and he hadn’t. He hadn’t anticipated the bomb at the Prince Consort’s complex in Clonmel, or this attack on his home and his family.

“Nial was still conscious when I got back.”

Miach found the bullet in Nial’s chest. It was very near the heart. Miach’s hands were slick with blood. He had already given as much of himself as he could spare to Elada, but he had no choice now, or Nial would die. He had to focus and draw the bullet, and then pour life into the dying boy.

He almost faltered when Liam said, “Brian was leading them.”

His own son had done this. Miach hardened his heart and focused and went on weaving flesh and blood back together, making red cells and white for his grandson. Great-grandson. No, Liam and Nial were great-great, and he could remember their great-great-grandmother with joy and laughter, a girl who had come straight off the boat from Ireland and into his bed with a sunny smile and generous heart despite losing four children to starvation in the old country. Her descendants were cut from the same cloth.

And Brian—who had more of his blood than these nearly human boys—was a monster. His monster. His mistake. He had cultivated all that was Fae in the boy, taught him the arts of their race. How to use his voice and cast, though Brian’s magical talents were weak and his martial skills were mediocre. What he had excelled at had been cruelty, which came in handy when you ran a crime family, in which hard men had to be disciplined by harder men.