Blade Dance (A Cold Iron Novel Book 4)

by D. L. McDermott

  She still felt like she might vomit. Or fall over. She wasn’t going to pass again if she could help it. “No. Thank you. I’ll walk.”

  “Your home is a mile from here.”

  “How do you know where I live?”

  “Charlestown is mine,” he said. “I know about everything I take an interest in.”

  “Then it’s a shame,” she said, turning her back on him and walking downhill toward the street, “that you didn’t take more of an interest in Davin McTeer.”

  Finn watched her go. She was taking the long way home, he realized, so she wouldn’t have to go by his house or share the journey with him. If she continued to do things like that, crossing Sean would be the least of her worries. Finn knew the dangers that lurked around every corner in Charlestown at night, because the Fianna were behind most of them.

  And so he followed her at a distance, keeping effortlessly to the shadows, alert for any signs that she had attracted the attention of predators, Fae or human. He would make it known tomorrow that the red-haired teacher with the temper was not to be touched. For tonight, he would see to it himself. The idea that other women not fortunate enough to have his protection might walk this same path every night did not sit well with him. He wondered, idly, why he had never considered that before.

  She stopped to buy milk at the grungy little chain store on her way home, and Finn clenched his fists when she emerged and the teens who lurked outside made a mockery of opening the door for her and offering to carry her groceries. It was a penny-ante prelude to a mugging. If they could intimidate her into stopping, into handing over her groceries, they’d run off with the bags and probably her wallet as well. Fortunately, Ann ignored them, and when one tried to block her path, she sidestepped him and kept going. Smart girl.

  When the thugs dropped back, Finn saw that two of them were half-bloods, members of the Fianna. Patrick’s boys, in fact.

  Tomorrow he would definitely be speaking to them.

  The thought brought him up short. He had never really done such a thing before. He’d always let the Fianna have the run of Charlestown. Occasionally, if the humans he did business with entreated him, if a girl was too young, if there was the risk that the authorities across the water in Boston would become interested in their business, he might intervene.

  But he’d never stepped in like this before. Not over the treatment of a woman.

  Ann was different. There it was. It was more than physical attraction. Her concern for Davin, her blind need to protect the boy, had touched a chord in him. Ann’s concern was more than a reflexive maternal instinct, though he would have found that alone admirable. Garrett’s mother hadn’t possessed one at all. It didn’t excuse Finn’s failures as a parent, he knew that. But he’d have made less of a mess of it if he’d had someone—anyone—to share the job with.

  He had made mistakes with his son. He could admit that to himself. He hadn’t been prepared to be a parent, had never really been one before in any real way. Brigid had raised their Fae children, all of them long dead at the hands of the Druids. He had never tried to start another real family.

  Finn had barely known Garrett’s mother. They’d spent a single night together, if you could even call it that. He’d met Aerin in New York, at a gathering convened by the Prince Consort, who claimed he had discovered a means, at last, to bring the wall between worlds down and free the exiled Fae Court.

  The Prince had talked about computers, of all things. Of public records and searches. Of Druids. He thought he could find enough of their descendants, dispersed, latent, and tame, and turn them into instruments to open the gate and free the captive Fae.

  As soon as Finn had arrived in New York, he had found himself wishing that he had refused the Prince’s invitation. It was foolish to dream of the return of their bitch Queen and her Court. The world of the Fae was gone, and Finn was done with tearing things down. He’d had enough of it. Enough death, enough killing. Enough to learn that there was no such thing as enough revenge. It was a hunger that fed on itself. All he had wanted after the Druids were routed was to build something.

  Watching his half-bloods harassing Ann Phillips outside the convenience store made him wonder if he had built the right thing.

  He thought back to that fateful visit to New York. To leave after the Prince’s meeting would have been to show weakness. The Fae could scent that kind of vulnerability, were jealous of one another’s territories, so he bided his time and accepted Donal’s invitation to spend the night at his town house on Washington Square.

  There was a party in progress when Finn arrived. There was always some kind of party at Donal’s. This one was thoroughly Fae. Finn should have felt at home among so many of his people, but he’d moved through the rooms like a foreigner who didn’t speak the language or understand the customs, though they were familiar enough to him from his life with the old Court.

  The entrance hall of the redbrick mansion was crowded, a line of statues running down one side of the tiled foyer. Only, they weren’t statues. They were beautiful young human men and women, pets, under the influence of Fae glamour and ordered to stand perfectly, utterly still, naked on their cold marble pedestals.

  If Brigid had been alive, they would have negotiated the tricky political waters of the party together and then laughed about it in private later. Everything was harder without her, even two thousand years after her death. They had been true partners, supporting each other through the complex, dangerous game that was life among the Fae. That night, going it alone, it was all too easy to see why Miach declined to participate in what remained of their world, why Deirdre shut herself away with her lover in her town house on Beacon Hill.

  He’d wanted a beer and nothing more. He’d found one in the kitchens and, beyond that, a television room refreshingly free of the gilded opulence of the rest of the house. It contained a half-dozen Fae watching a football game. There was an empty spot on the sofa, and he decided that there were worse ways to spend an evening.

  Thinking back on it, the TV room had been the most human part of the house. Aerin had been sitting on the floor. He knew her vaguely as one of the Fae born in the first centuries after the fall. She was black haired and, of course, pretty—as a pureblood Fae, she could hardly be otherwise—but she possessed the kind of callow arrogance that had been tortured out of the oldest members of his race. When the game was over, she stretched like a cat and rolled over; then, as the room emptied out, she climbed onto the sofa and straddled him.

  For just a second she had reminded him of Brigid, the way she had taken charge and taken what she wanted. For a few minutes afterward, sated, he’d been overcome with nostalgia for the way things had been. He’d tried to put his arms around her, but she’d snorted her disdain for his tenderness and rolled off of him.

  That was the last he had seen of her until she’d turned up in Charlestown, heavily pregnant with Garrett and resentful as hell about the whole thing. And maybe, he realized now, a little frightened.

  Fae pregnancies were dangerous, not just for mortal women, and often ended badly. He’d had no choice but to call Miach, and even at the time Finn had taken it to be a bad omen that his first son in centuries had been born under the sorcerer’s roof. Nothing, though, could overshadow the experience of holding his child for the first time. He’d been overwhelmed by it, forced to take the babe outside and down the street to the beach so no one would see Finn MacUmhaill crying over a newborn. But he had cried, for Brigid and everything he had lost.

  By the time he got back to the house, Aerin was gone, completely uninterested in him or the babe. He had not seen her since. And Garrett . . . well, Garrett had been the best thing to happen to him since Brigid. He’d given the boy everything he could. Too much, maybe. And too little in other ways.

  Ahead of him, in the dark, Ann Phillips rounded the corner to her street. He knew that she lived in a flat in a converted fede
ral house, the ground floor of one of those boxy little clapboard structures.

  From across the street he watched her lights go on. Hall, parlor, kitchen. There was something appealing about the yellow glow that made him want to follow her inside. He’d had lovers among the human population of Charlestown but couldn’t remember feeling like this before. He was even surprisingly curious about Ann’s apartment. He wondered what kind of furnishings she favored, if her home was cluttered or spare, frilly or modern, eclectic or uniform in style. From the street, all he could make out were the pale colors of the walls.

  There was an alley running along the side of the house. The gate was unlocked.

  He let himself in, followed a narrow cobbled driveway, and found a tiny patio and a small porch around the back. Terra-cotta pots dotted the bricks, overflowing with bright green herbs making a brave show despite the early frost. A light went on in the window directly overhead, and Finn slipped back into the shadows. Then the door opened.

  Ann backed out, using her delicious taut bottom and lush hips to push open the screen door and shimmy onto the porch. She was still dressed in her work clothes, but her feet were bare and she padded gingerly over the cold bricks to the edge of the stairs. When she knelt, he got a glimpse of lacy panties beneath her skirt.

  He almost stepped out of the shadows then. He wanted her, badly, and that enticing glimpse of embellished silk roused him powerfully. Their attraction was mutual, and if he revealed himself, she might even let him in. But he remained out of sight because he knew that would be a mistake. Some things were worth waiting for. Brigid had been. Somehow, he knew—certain and sure—that Ann Phillips was, too.

  He watched her set two porcelain bowls on the bottom step and then scamper back inside.

  Finn waited until the door closed behind her and the light went out in the kitchen before prowling forward. What he saw on the bottom step of the porch made him smile. Ann Phillips might feel ambivalent about her attraction to Finn, but she was at least convinced of the existence of the Fae, because inside the bowls were gifts to his kind: milk and honey.

  Chapter 5

  Ann’s walk home ended up being nerve-racking, and she almost regretted not accepting Finn’s offer to pass her there. She couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was following her, but whenever she tried to surreptitiously check over her shoulder, there was no one.

  Stopping at the convenience store had been a mistake. Normally she would have gone straight home, but it hadn’t been a normal night. She’d bought the milk and set it out along with honey on her back porch by way of apology and as an offering, an attempt to make peace with the world she had disbelieved but had proven all too real.

  As real as the young toughs who’d tried to intimidate her outside the store. She wished she owned pepper spray or had taken a self-defense class, but it had always seemed too dangerous, given her temper. She thought back to the playground incident that had gotten her kicked out of school the first time, when the bully of the fourth grade, Tyler Stuart, had struck little Paul Murphy, the smallest kid in the class.

  One minute she had been standing on the playground, toe to toe with Tyler, fists clenched in anger, and the next . . . she’d been sitting outside the principal’s office, listening to Tyler’s ragged wail. The bully, twice her size, was crying in great breathless jags, tears streaming down his face, lips torn and purpled, blood dribbling from his mouth.

  She’d knocked his two front teeth out.

  And she couldn’t remember a thing.

  The principal had told her about it afterward, described the fight, but it had sounded to Ann like a story, like something that had happened to someone else.

  Her foster parents had tried, they really had. But two more ugly incidents—in hindsight, Tyler seemed to have gotten off easily—and two schools later they were done with her. She bounced back into the system and got lucky. Her caseworker had been a juvenile offender before straightening out and had put in overtime to get Ann the counseling she needed.

  It had worked.

  By the time Ann had entered high school, she knew how to manage her anger, how to back away from confrontation, how to avoid a fight. Sometimes it was a daily struggle, but it was one she had been winning for a long time.

  Self-defense training might give her the upper hand in a mugging—maybe even let her keep her cool and do less damage to those she did tangle with—but what seemed certain was they’d create, even if only for teaching purposes, exactly the conditions that triggered one of her episodes. The very last time it had happened, during middle school, she’d broken a girl’s arm in three places. All she could remember was seeing Effy Cooper put a cigarette out on a sixth grader’s arm. After that, Ann had made a vow that she would never hurt anyone ever again.

  Ann realized now that it was probably a little late for pepper spray. She’d just spent the evening with Charlestown’s most dangerous mobster, an organized-crime boss who had proven to her beyond all shadow of a doubt that he wasn’t quite human.

  Finn was Fae. And even children knew better than to bargain with fairies. The craziest part was that she’d struck a deal to sleep with him. Jumped on the chance, to be perfectly honest with herself. Even though she knew how that would end.

  The way it always ended. In humiliation and rejection. She’d stopped fighting in high school and found a circle of friends, but in her junior year she’d destroyed any chance of having a boyfriend until college. Her prom date had been her secret crush for years, a sandy-haired athlete named Seth. They’d gone to the beach after the party and she’d been ready—more than ready—to lose her virginity with him. She’d been excited about it. Too excited. And aggressive. Too aggressive.

  In her eagerness, she’d wrenched his shoulder and broken his nose and gotten labeled, within twenty-four hours, a total psycho nymphomaniac, without ever even losing her virginity. He’d told the tale to all of his teammates, and for the rest of high school they’d called her “beast.”

  College had been only marginally better. A string of boyfriends had found her “unladylike” or “unfeminine” or “too rough.” The guy she’d finally slept with had told her to “tone it down.” And when she hadn’t been able to, he’d gotten out of bed in the middle of their lovemaking and left. Humiliated, she’d decided she’d rather be single than be given pointers on how to behave in bed.

  She doubted that a supermacho crime lord like Finn would appreciate a woman who was both uncontrollably aggressive and completely unskilled in the sack, which meant, she supposed, that he’d get exactly what he deserved out of their bargain. Maybe that was something, but damn, she wished it made her feel better.

  Finn passed home from Ann’s backyard. There were still two beers sitting on the kitchen counter, just where they had left them, and the little platter of meat and vegetables that Ann had found so amusing. The house felt emptier than it had before her visit. After the gathering at the Navy Yard earlier that night, he had wanted nothing but peace and quiet, but now the empty house just felt oppressive.

  He took his beer into the TV room, which had once been the taproom back when the building had served as a tavern and still sported a yawning fireplace and Georgian paneling. There, on the pewter-gray sectional, sat the Fae he had been waiting for.

  Iobáth had made few concessions to changing fashion or human society since the fall. He wore his nearly white blond hair long. Unbraided, it would undoubtedly touch his knees. His sword was the same enchanted blade he had carried before he had surrendered—uniquely among his race—to the Druids. His tunic was spider silk, embroidered with silver wire. His jeans looked new, but to Finn’s eye they were the only thing about him that was not distinctly Fae.

  The Aes Sídhe called him the Wandering Penitent, this warrior who shunned his own kind and spent his days making amends for his role in the drama that had destroyed their world. He was, apart from Conn of the Hundred Battl
es, the finest Fae swordsman this side of the wall between worlds. That put him on an equal footing with Finn. And made him a dangerous person to deal with.

  “How the hell did you get in here?” asked Finn.

  Iobáth’s expression didn’t change. He said simply, “There are no wards on the house.”

  Of course there weren’t, because Finn’s son wasn’t speaking to him and that meant that the Fianna had no sorcerer to cast such protections. They needed Garrett back. There was a Druid on the loose, for fuck’s sake. “That is part of the reason I summoned you.”

  “Understand this,” said Iobáth. “No one summons me. Not even Finn MacUmhaill. I go where my conscience dictates.”

  A Fae with a conscience. Finn had always been baffled by the idea, but just lately, in the wake of his falling out with his son, he’d begun to understand a little. “Then it is part of the reason I appealed to your conscience,” said Finn. He was a leader of men. He knew well how to draw warriors to his banner. But Iobáth was no ordinary warrior. He was not motivated by the same desires as other Fae.

  “Your message indicated that there was a threat to the wall between worlds.”

  “None of us wants the Queen and her Court back,” said Finn. He wasn’t sure whether the chill that ran down his spine at the thought was for the Queen or the cold in the room, so he crossed to the hearth and began to make up the fire.

  Iobáth cocked his head. “No? The Prince Consort seems as eager as ever to be reunited with his eternal love, though rumor has it that his sojourn in the Otherworld was not the reunion he had hoped for. Donal would have the Queen back because he despises human weakness and misses exercising power without restraint. You . . . you have never much cared about freeing the Court. Only hunting Druids. And exacting revenge.”

  He did not say her name. Finn appreciated that. He did not like hearing her name from others. It was sacred to him. His private mantra. He had repeated it for years. He even talked to her shade, when he was alone and did not know which way to turn, though he had no belief in ghosts or an afterlife. But speaking to her gave him comfort when nothing else did.