Cold Iron

by D. L. McDermott

  Chapter 6

  Conn snarled and twisted his body to shield Beth from the Fae sorcerer’s eyes. She pulled her gown up to cover her breasts, wondering how long he had stood there watching her and Conn.

  “No,” she said firmly to Miach. “I won’t do that to myself again, become some man’s willing slave. Once, with my ex-husband, was enough.”

  “Resisting the geis will drive you mad,” Miach said, still standing in the door. “Take her now,” he advised Conn, “and get it done.”

  “Get out,” said Conn, through gritted teeth.

  “Only, do it quickly,” Miach said, ignoring him. “It’s almost dawn. You should travel while you are strongest. Word of your little Druid will have reached Finn and his family, the Fianna, by now.”

  “The other peninsula,” Conn said, when it was clear Miach would not leave. He buttoned his jeans and stood up. Beth hated the fact that her traitorous body missed his warmth. She felt strangely chilled, even though she knew the room was sultry and warm.

  “The Fianna tyrannize Charlestown,” Miach agreed. “They are stupid and dangerous, and too often they attract the attention of the law. We flourish here because we rule quietly. We take no lovers from the city proper, only willing ones from within the bounds of South Boston.”

  “Is all your family content with such a tiny demesne?” Conn asked.

  Miach glanced back in the bar. “My son has no doubt already run to the Fianna to tell them all about your Druid. Brian is nearly full-blood Fae. His mother was a half-breed. More Fae than mortal, he longs for our past glory and the return of the Court. There are those among the Fianna who think the same.”

  “And the island in the harbor? Who does that belong to?” Beth asked.

  Miach’s brow knitted. “The island is mine, but I haven’t used it in a hundred years. It was a convenient bolt hole during witch hunts. Now, however, only the Gaels know we are here, and they like our protection too well to argue with the liberties we take.”

  “No,” Beth said, her stomach knotting. “It didn’t feel abandoned. There are Fae there.”

  “Not by my authority, there aren’t,” Miach replied.

  Conn helped Beth to her feet. “Come,” he said. “We must find your ex-husband and my sword before the Fianna find us.”

  The car was gone when they emerged from the bar. Miach’s two younger sons stood outside.

  “Where is the Porsche?” Conn asked them. Beth found his outrage amusing. For a man—no, a Fae—who was thousands of years old and didn’t need a car at all except when he was hauling her to and from dive bars, he’d become very attached to the Porsche.

  Miach followed them out. “In Quincy. In pieces.” He tossed Conn a set of keys. “Don’t ever park a stolen Porsche outside my bar again,” he warned. “We do not court the notice of Boston’s finest.” This last he threw to the two young men.

  “But you do steal cars,” Beth pointed out. Or at least know how to break them down and fence them, speedily, she thought.

  Miach smiled. “We accept gifts.”

  “I suppose parking a Porsche in this neighborhood is pretty much making a gift of it to someone.”

  “What are these to?” Conn dangled the keys Miach had tossed him, reminding Beth of the keys hidden in her own pocket. Specifically, the iron key. She felt for it. It was still there, weighing down the silk on that side of her gown. The iron felt cool and reassuring, but it didn’t change her perception of Conn or Miach, and she realized she’d been seeing them as they were since Miach had dropped his glamour earlier that night.

  And she wasn’t repulsed by their true forms, or afraid of them.

  Conn looked at her. He knew what she was doing, touching the iron. He sent her a faint smile, tossed her the mysterious car keys. “Wait in the car, whatever it turns out to be,” he said. He turned to Miach. “A request.”

  They conferred in low tones, and Beth couldn’t hear the rest. One of the “boys”—surely well past twenty, but she thought of them that way because Miach treated them so—held open the door of a sleek black Mercedes. It would be as much out of place in her Somerville neighborhood as the Porsche, but in a quieter, less obvious way.

  She felt chilled in the night air, so she slid into the sleek leather interior.

  She thought about the sofa in Miach’s office, the grandeur beneath the grime of the rundown bar, the other luxuries she’d seen lying fallow in that place. The desk had been Sheraton, the lamp Tiffany. She wondered if the Fae were magpies, or addicted to luxury.

  She shivered again, thought about starting the car and turning the heat on but decided against it. She watched through the window as Miach and Conn argued. Then Miach made a short, sharp gesture, and the boy who had held the car door open for her—Liam, she remembered—ducked into the bar. He returned a few minutes later with a small box he passed to Miach and something soft draped over his arm.

  He waited a moment, but when it was clear the sorcerer needed nothing more, he slunk furtively back to Beth’s side of the car. She lowered her window, and he passed her something soft as a kitten’s belly. “I saw you shivering,” he said, low and sheepish, like he was afraid someone would catch him being kind to the Druid.

  “Thank you,” she said. It was a shawl, feather light and toasty warm. Even in the dim light she could tell it was cashmere. “Won’t someone miss this?”

  “Someone did miss it. Actually, they missed about twenty gross of them.”

  “Fell off the back of a truck?”

  Liam grinned widely. “Nah. We jacked it before it got to the truck, straight off the docks.”

  At least some of Miach’s brood were honest thieves.

  Another curt nod from Miach and Liam shot her a cocky grin and disappeared back into the bar.

  Conn slid into the driver’s seat. A few days ago, Beth would have insisted on driving—it was her town, after all—but after being skewered by a Fae sword, tattooed by a Fae sorcerer, and nearly ravished by her new Fae master, she felt cold and tired and couldn’t stop shivering. She wanted the heat on but didn’t want to remove an inch of her skin from the toasty shawl.

  Conn turned it on before she could even ask, then pulled smoothly away from the curb. He seemed to know the way back, so she didn’t bother giving him directions. She supposed she’d been running on adrenaline up to this point, and it had finally run out. That explained the shakes.

  “What did you get from Miach?” she asked.

  Conn favored her with a smile. “You don’t miss a thing, my cow-eyed beauty.”

  “Did you call me a cow?” It was the last thing she should care about at this point in the night, but Frank had never appreciated her curves, and Conn had—up to now—acted as though he enjoyed them. Then again, Frank had hid his dislike for her figure at first. It wasn’t until they were married that he began hinting, then telling her openly, that she was too voluptuous. She’d grown up on a steady diet of ancient art, and her body never came off badly next to a classical Venus. Sometimes she thought she was the last woman on earth with a healthy body image. Leave it to Frank to change that.

  “Cow-eyed,” corrected Conn. “Luminous, brown, beautiful. I want to watch them widen while I enter you for the first time.”

  His words made the geis on her shoulder pulse and tighten. “Are we back to that again?” she asked, trying to hide her reaction.

  “That,” said Conn, handing her a hinged silver box, “is why I asked Miach to find these.”

  It was the size of a jewel box, but chased with the same leafy silverwork as the buttons on Conn’s coat. She opened it. Sitting, rich black against gray velvet, were two iron rings, the workmanship impossibly fine for the material. The rings were exquisite, the curves faintly chased with a fine pattern of knot work. “Please tell me these go in my ears,” she said, remembering Conn’s pierced nipples.

  He
laughed out loud. There was nothing smug about it. This was a genuine sound of delight, the first she had heard from him. “If I were to pierce your nipples, I’d give you rings of silver with diamond drops, so I could suckle them.”

  “Thank you for the offer, but I just got my first tattoo. I think nipple rings might be a bridge too far tonight.” She traced the tiny hoops. “These are cold iron. You can’t touch them, can you? That’s why they’re in a silver box.”

  “I can’t touch them without a great deal of pain. They won’t dull the effect of the geis, but they can protect you from my glamour, allow you to see me clearly, give you back some measure of control.”

  It was a thoughtful gift. He needn’t have made it. The geis gave him a hold over her. She felt its pull even now, but one question troubled her. “Why would the Fae make something like this?”

  “They didn’t.”

  Of course they didn’t. “Miach took them from a Druid,” she guessed.

  “It was a long time ago, Beth, and he is not so bloodthirsty anymore.”

  “I heard you talking. You said he stands now where you stood then. What did you mean?”

  Conn hesitated, then spoke haltingly. “The Fae seldom have children with one another. We are an old race, and all but bred out. Even so, seeing the print of your face on another . . . it feeds our vanity.”

  She wondered if it merely fed their vanity, or if the Fae were more human than they wanted to admit.

  He went on. “We breed with humans. As Miach has, but even then we aren’t fecund. And most Fae view thin-bloods as pretty toys.”

  He stopped again. She’d never seen him have difficulty doing anything before. “I had a half-breed daughter. There was another champion at Court who could not best me, so when I was away fighting, he placed a geis upon her and . . . degraded her. Shared her with others. Allowed the Court to torment her until her mind broke.”

  They were the barest facts, but Beth felt a visceral horror. “I’m sorry.”

  “I killed him, but there was no satisfaction in it, because the Court found that amusing, too. Drama. An avenger’s tragedy.

  “My daughter’s fate, the Court’s reaction, it was intolerable. And my kin would make no redress. The Fae have no laws, only customs. Only the Druids were willing to bring us to heel. In my anger, I believed them when they told me they would force the Court to accept human laws, acknowledge some basic rights.”

  “A sort of Fae Magna Carta,” Beth said.

  “But they intended no agreement. As soon as the Court was driven beneath the ground, the Druids sealed the threshold with their magic and entombed the Fae most useful to them in the mounds, readily to hand and well-leashed. The Druids were no kinder masters than we had been. We none of us can change our natures, Beth.”

  But Conn was trying. She fitted the little iron hoops in her ears.

  And he was wrong, of course. Beth had changed her nature. She’d been confident, competent Beth when she’d met Frank. He hadn’t changed her. She’d changed herself, shriveled to the size of Frank’s regard for her. Hid from the memories of his worst betrayal, hid from pleasure because it carried the risk of pain.

  She was done with all that, but she had to know something first.

  “The geis,” she began. “It binds me to you. Does it bind you to me?”

  “I will take no other women while I remain with you,” Conn said.

  Beth sighed. “That’s a telling evasion. It’s a sort of one-sided marriage, then. I know all about those. Don’t the Fae have any true form of union?”

  “With one another, yes, though it is rare, and never truly monogamous. We live too long for that, Beth.”

  “So is there a mark somewhere on your body from a Fae woman?”

  “You can examine me thoroughly in private.”

  “I still haven’t decided to let you make love to me.”

  “You decided five minutes ago, when you put the rings in your ears.”

  He was right. And infuriating. And his sensual confidence was so damned appealing. She caught a glimpse of dawn in the rearview mirror. It reminded her. “What did Miach mean, about traveling when you are strongest?”

  “He knows I’ve broken my geis, lost the Summoner. It weakens me, to be in violation of its edict. But the true Fae are strongest at dawn and dusk, and the geis’s burden weighs lightest then.”

  “That’s when they always come in fairy stories. To steal away children. To claim their lovers. At dawn and dusk. The in-between times.” A curious fancy took her, that Conn was stealing her away to Elfland. She’d broken all the rules. She’d let him touch her. She’d accepted drink in one of their dwellings. She’d allowed his mark to be written upon her.

  But it was only a fancy, because a few minutes later they pulled up in front of her apartment.

  Despite the coming dawn, it was even colder out than when they had left the bar. She opened the radiator valve in the hall, then the living room, then her bedroom, desperate to get warm.

  Conn remained in the living room. She watched him through the open door. He was examining the books in the shelf beside the fireplace, most of which, in one way or another, were about him. Celtic art, Celtic mythology, Celtic archaeology. Myth, legend, and material culture. She’d studied it all her life. Even as a young girl she’d poured over the few library books available to her on the subject, memorized the heroes and place names, always hoping to become like Schliemann, the archaeologist who went looking for Troy in the pages of the Iliad, and found it on the shores of the Aegean.

  Conn was her Troy.

  But he was also a man. The first one she had ever brought to this apartment. It was her first real home, and though it was shabby, it was a reflection of her, and she was proud of it. She’d gone from her parents’ chrome-and-laminate-filled mid-century ranch, to a dorm room full of institutional furniture, to Frank’s steel and glass condominium off Harvard Square. None of those places had really been her.

  The triple-decker was. She’d fled Frank’s house with nothing but a suitcase, crashed for three months at Helene’s, and found, once she’d talked to a lawyer, that she would walk away from her marriage with more or less exactly what she had brought into it: nothing.

  Her apartment hunt had been a revelation. She couldn’t afford new or luxury, but neither of those things mattered to her. Good light mattered, but old houses in Somerville had that, even if the windows were a little cranky and leaked on occasion. A stove didn’t have to be new to be good, quite the opposite, she decided, the first time she’d fired up the antique enameled range. The floorboards creaked, but she found that reassuring, like the apartment knew that she was home.

  There had followed an odyssey of thrift-store shopping for furniture and household items, and the gratifying discovery that natural materials of any age married well with one another and the result was a harmonious—if shabby—whole.

  She was probably going to take Conn to bed here, on top of the soft cotton quilt one of the docents at the museum had made for her. She touched the earrings in her ears. The geis pulsed on her shoulder. Yes, she was going to take him to bed. But not because the mark told her to. Because she wanted to. Because there was a whole world of physical desire she had cut herself off from, and she wasn’t willing to live like that anymore. She didn’t think the panic that had gripped her in the gallery would come back. Conn knew her secret now—knew more about the power inside her than she did.

  She shivered again. Okay, maybe she was going to take him to bed beneath the soft cotton quilt. After a shower. A hot one. She shucked her tattered dress in the pink-tiled bathroom, ran the water until it steamed, then realized a shower would get water on the geis and she didn’t think that would be any good for it, so she ran a bath instead.

  She got in, but it wasn’t hot enough. She ran more hot water. Then more. Then finally gave up and got out of the bath, wra
pped a towel around herself and emerged from the bathroom.

  Conn was lying on the bed. He’d rolled back his sleeves and opened his shirt, so the geis that bound his wrists and the golden rings in his nipples were visible in the soft morning light. He sat up. “Ready to make your inspection?”

  “Yes.” Her mouth felt dry. She knelt on the bed, still clutching the towel to her chest. The room felt cold. She wanted to touch Conn, to be warm. She reached for him, and his expression turned quizzical.

  “You’re shivering,” he said.

  “I’m cold.” Duh.

  He sat up, gripped her arms, steadied her, but still she shook.

  “Beth,” he said. His voice sounded small and far away.

  He shook her. Didn’t he know that wasn’t helping? She was already so cold, she was shaking. The shaking was making her tired and she wanted to lie down.

  “Beth,” he said, low and urgent. “What is wrong?”

  She didn’t know. She hadn’t felt this way since . . . Mexico. The Yucatán. Malaria.

  “Beth,” he said. “You must tell me what is happening. I will call Miach.”

  A tiny hiccup of laughter bubbled out of her throat. “Not Miach,” she managed to say, though her teeth were chattering now. “Malaria. Call Helene. She’ll know what to do.”

  She’d survived a wound from a mythic sword and managed to stay conscious while a psychotic Fae sorcerer tortured her with his needle only to be brought low by, of all things, a mosquito. It was ludicrous. And it was her last thought before she passed out.

  He found Beth’s cell phone and called the blond Amazon first.

  “Does she have a fever?” the woman asked.

  “Yes.”

  “There are pills, in her medicine cabinet. Get her to take them. Then call an ambulance. I’ll be right there.”

  Then he found the cell phone Miach had given him and called the Fae sorcerer.

  “She passed out? Before you had her? A piss-poor seducer you’ve become, old friend.”