Blade Dance (A Cold Iron Novel Book 4)

by D. L. McDermott

  Nieve sighed. “She doesn’t know herself. It happened when Garrett was in her second-grade class. It was after the winter concert, in the parking lot at school. Shamus Kenny’s father turned up to the concert drunk and sang along with the choir. His wife, Rita, was so embarrassed. Out in the parking lot, she told him all about how humiliated she’d been, and he punched her. Ann saw, and she jumped him from behind. Smashed his head into the hood of his car. He never saw what hit him. And Ann . . . Ann was in some kind of fugue state. She came out of it after the Kennys drove off to the emergency room. Rita Kenny told the police they were mugged but she didn’t see their attackers. I’d never seen a berserker, but I’d heard about them from Grandfather, and Ann fit the bill. She didn’t remember a thing afterward. I told her she’d slipped on the ice and hit her head.”

  “Why didn’t you tell your grandfather? Why not give her to Miach?”

  Nieve laughed out loud. “Send one more beautiful young prodigy Grandfather’s way? His wife would have gutted me. And Granddad’s no warrior. He wouldn’t have known what to do with her, whereas you used to lead berserkers. And you seemed so lonely.”

  “Lonely? With the Fianna?”

  “Lonely,” repeated Nieve. “In that big bustling house with followers but no family.”

  She surprised him by standing up on her tiptoes and kissing him on the cheek. “I don’t think I’ll ever manage to call you dad, but maybe with Ann, you’ve got a good chance that Garrett will start thinking of you as his father and not as his enemy.”

  She headed into the house, leaving him staring after her.

  He found Ann in the kitchen, standing at the counter, eating a crème brûlée and watching Mrs. Friary whisk eggs.

  “It’s all in the motion,” his cook was saying.

  “I’m pretty sure the electric mixer has the same motion,” said Ann.

  “Nope,” said his silver-haired and decidedly human chef. “It doesn’t. Ask him”— she nodded at Finn—“who’s been eating his mousse hand whisked for two thousand years. He knew the first time I used the damned machine, and that was the last, too. He took one bite and threw the rest out, thought I wouldn’t notice two pounds of chocolate mousse down the disposal.”

  “Didn’t it clog the drain?”

  “Yup,” said Mrs. Friary. “That, and he ate a quart of ice cream out of the freezer to make up for it. Loves his dessert, does the lord of the Fianna.”

  “It’s your cooking that tempts me, Mrs. Friary,” he said, diverting the spoon Ann was raising to her mouth into his own. Then he kissed her, so she could taste the burnt sugar on his lips.

  “Now you’ve spoiled your appetite for crème brûlée tonight,” he chided her.

  “Yes,” admitted Ann. “But I’m totally ready for chocolate mousse.”

  Dana willing, in a few short hours, they would have little Davin back. Finn didn’t much like the idea of handing him over to the father who had invited his Druid abductor into their community, but that would be a good dilemma to face. And he and Ann could start doing normal things, like eating chocolate mousse in front of the television. He wanted time alone with her like that. It occurred to him that he didn’t have to move back into the big house across the square when the foundation was repaired. He could use that house as an office, a gathering place for the Fianna, and he could live here, with Ann. The idea filled him with a sense of hope and purpose.

  He led her into the dining room where their allies had gathered. The table was spread with a map held down at four corners by silver blades. Miach and Garrett stood on either side of the table in wary silence. Nieve stood beside her grandfather, three iron knives fanned out on the table before her. Iobáth lurked in the door to the hall. Sean slouched in a corner with Nancy’s head buried against his chest.

  “Where is the Prince?” asked Finn.

  “On his way,” said Iobáth. “He followed us to the library and back.” The Penitent cast a black look at Miach. There was more to their library expedition than Iobáth was telling, but that was Miach’s business, and Finn wasn’t going to interfere in it.

  “Why didn’t he just pass?” asked Finn.

  “Because I finished warding the house,” said Garrett. “Now, if the Prince attempts to double-cross us, we at least have some safe harbor to fly to with the child.”

  “He isn’t going to double-cross us,” said Sean. “Davin is his flesh and blood.”

  The doorbell rang.

  “I hope you’re right, Sean,” Finn replied. But he very much doubted it.

  Iobáth disappeared down the hall and returned with the Prince, who was armed to the teeth with small silver knives strapped to his arms and thighs and a broadsword across his back.

  Finn had encountered the Prince only a handful of times over the last several centuries. Even before the fall, Finn had never cared for court life and had always kept the Fianna as far away as possible from its corrupting influence. When the Queen used to make her progress through the home territories, feasting, fighting, and fucking, a scourge on the land they ruled, Finn would take his band into the field or even to foreign shores to avoid the Wild Hunt.

  Today he was struck by just how little the Prince had changed. Like Iobáth, he wore his hair long, in the Fae manner, and bore the weapons he had earned—ensorcelled by his own hands—openly on his person. But Iobáth carried their lost world on his shoulders like his burden. The Prince flaunted it, from the silver leaves woven in his hair to the wire roses embroidered on his coat to the finery of a dozen centuries he wore as carelessly as rags.

  Finn suddenly felt aware, now as never before, of how much he had changed. How much more like Miach, with his ties to the human world, he had become since Garrett had been born—never mind that his son was entirely Fae. And now Finn was in love with Ann, who was—in part, at least—human.

  The Prince eyed the gathering with unconcealed amusement.

  “How it must gall you, Finn,” said the Prince, “to be forced to welcome me into your house.”

  “You aren’t welcome,” said Finn. “You’re tolerated. For the child’s sake.”

  “We want a blood oath,” said Miach.

  The Prince shrugged. “I am happy to take it, but the Queen’s enchantment makes it difficult to draw my blood without iron.”

  Nieve tossed one of the newly forged iron knives into the air, showily intending to catch it to show her mastery of the blade, but to Finn’s horror, it was Ann who caught it and took a step toward the Prince.

  Chapter 13

  “Now that does make things interesting,” said the Prince.

  Ann knew she needed to be close to him for her plan to work, but the glittering Fae terrified her. She hoped that he couldn’t see the fear on her face. She hoped that no one could see her hand shaking, see how the iron blade trembled.

  She’d expected it to be cold, the little black knife. It was forged from a single piece of iron, handle and blade, and it felt strangely warm in her hand, as though it held some life of its own. Perhaps it did. To cut the Prince’s flesh, it had to be made for that purpose, Nieve had told her. And once used it would never hold an edge again, such was the enchantment that protected the Queen’s lover. Half-bloods, fortunately, could handle cold iron.

  “I’ll do it,” said Ann.

  “No,” said Finn.

  The Prince smiled. Their discord pleased him, showed them to be at odds when they should be united, and it gave him the upper hand.

  “Yes,” said Miach. “Ann has ties to the boy. Nieve doesn’t. If Ann is the one to draw the Prince’s blood, it will add force to the oath.”

  “I don’t like it,” said Finn. It was plain to see that he wished the Prince didn’t know of Ann’s existence at all.

  “None of us likes any of this,” said Miach, “but this is the predicament we find ourselves in. Threatened by Druids. Something
I have been trying to warn you about for years now.”

  “It wouldn’t be a problem at all,” said Finn, “if you and I had done a thorough job of it two thousand years ago.”

  “It’s two thousand years too late for that,” said Garrett. “And the clock is ticking. Ann is willing, Dad. Let her do this. Ann cuts the Prince. He takes the oath. We hand over the photos.”

  “Photos?” asked the Prince.

  “I took photographs of Davin’s tattoos, the ones the Druid inked,” she said.

  “Clever,” said the Prince. “Have you ever cut into a living being before?”

  He was trying to undermine her. She mustn’t forget how dangerous this creature could be.

  “I teach second grade. I’m not afraid of the sight of a little blood.”

  “This isn’t quite the same as a skinned knee,” he said.

  “No,” she said evenly. “I expect this is going to hurt a lot more.”

  A perverse smile flitted across the Prince’s face. “You should have accepted my offer, Ann Phillips. Finn doesn’t deserve you.”

  “Enough,” said Finn. Ann could hear the anger and the jealousy in his voice. She hated doing this to him, but he was focused on the danger from the Prince, and that meant he wasn’t thinking clearly—and that he wouldn’t be able to anticipate her plans. “Draw his blood and be done with it.”

  The Prince stepped close to Ann. Far closer than he needed to. His black hair fell around her like a curtain. He held his wrist up between them and folded back the fine silk sleeves to reveal porcelain pale skin veined with blue.

  “Cut deep,” he said. “And twist the knife.”

  A wave of nausea swept her at the thought, but she fought it back and laid the knife against the Prince’s arm. She ran the blade in a straight line from elbow to wrist. It sliced his skin open, but the edges of the wound turned silver and closed and he was whole once more.

  The Prince looked into her eyes and grasped her wrist, plunged the knife, still gripped in her hand, into his own flesh.

  There should have been more blood. It was like cutting into meat, into a plucked chicken or a tied roast, already long since bled dry. Only the faintest gloss of crimson coated her knife.

  The Prince’s face was set in hard lines. “Twist the blade,” he said.

  Ann twisted. A single fat drop of blood flowed down the handle. Miach was suddenly there at her elbow holding a silver vial. He caught the drop as it fell. Ann twisted again and made the mistake of looking up into the Prince’s face. He was smiling at her now, and she experienced an unsettling insight. He was enjoying the pain. The way she had enjoyed the kiss of Finn’s belt.

  And he knew. The Prince knew. Somehow he could see into her. Or maybe he just knew her kind. An affinity born of long acquaintance. It was Ann who hadn’t known herself, but that was changing already.

  “We’re ready,” said Miach.

  Ann withdrew the knife. The Prince’s flesh closed, leaving his pale skin unblemished. Magic. It was still difficult for Ann to credit the evidence of her own eyes, but there it was.

  Miach dipped a silver pen—ingeniously wrought to look like a quill—in the silver bottle of blood and handed it to the Prince. A piece of paper, the linen rag edges rough and unfinished, lay on the table in front of them. The top half was written in a shimmering ink that seemed to dance and move, the characters from an alphabet Ann had never seen before but that somehow seemed familiar.

  “Copy it out,” said Miach to the Prince, “word for word. No elaborations or omissions. If you deviate from the text, the paper will burn itself to ash, and we will have no bargain.”

  “Ingenious,” said the Prince. “And unnecessary, in this case. But if it pleases you . . .”

  Ann watched him copy out the text. He wrote in a bolder hand than Miach, his pen moving briskly, each character finished with an elegant flourish. Ann knew that Japanese calligraphy, when painted by a master, could be an art form. She suspected that the Fae language, in the hands of someone like the Prince, could be the same.

  Ann didn’t stray from his side. No one seemed to notice that. Even Finn had finally taken his eyes off her, intent on watching the Prince, alert for any sign of a double-cross.

  Finally he was done. “There.” The Prince handed the pen back to Miach. The sorcerer examined the document. His face betrayed nothing. The silence in the room was absolute. Finally Miach passed the blood contract to Garrett, who studied it just as carefully, just as expressionlessly. At last he nodded.

  “Satisfied?” the Prince asked.

  No one spoke. Garrett left the room and came back with the photographs. He spread them out over the table in front of the Prince.

  Everyone stared at the pictures. They couldn’t help it. Ann understood that, because she’d felt the same way when she’d first seen the tattoos running from Davin’s shoulders to his elbows, the inky leaves twisting around his small limbs: stricken. But Ann was inured to the effect of the images now, and she chanced a look up at the Prince.

  His face was unreadable, and that chilled her. “When were these tattoos done?” he asked.

  “Last week,” said Sean.

  “They may have been altered by now,” said the Prince. “It shouldn’t matter, since I’m tracking the maker, and not the recipient, but it would help to have something of the boy’s as well.”

  Nancy McTeer pulled the little Bruins hoodie out of her handbag. The Prince took it, but he said nothing about the obvious bloodstains inside the sleeves, brown and crusted, where Davin’s scabs had bled.

  Ann almost missed the sign when it came, the slight shimmer in the air around the Prince. She was distracted by the way he carefully folded Davin’s hoodie and put it in his pocket, then ran his hands over the photographs. Where his skin touched the images, the paper became blank, as though he had absorbed the ink into his body. She felt the hair on the back of her neck rise, as though electrically charged, and knew that this was it. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Finn realize a moment too late what she intended. He moved to grab her. She threw herself at the Prince and wrapped her arms around his waist.

  And passed with him.

  It was far, far worse than with Finn. For one thing, no one was holding her. She had her hands clasped together behind the Prince’s back but she felt as though a gale force wind was trying to tear them apart. Without Finn’s sure and steady embrace she met the full horror of being buried alive, drowned, and entombed. It lasted longer than when she had passed with Finn, as though they were traversing a greater distance and hurtling through a wider variety of substances, and every few seconds they seemed to emerge, only to be plunged back into the maelstrom again.

  Then the world exploded around her, chill and wet and too bright for her tortured senses.

  They were standing on a beach. A gray, chilly beach, hard and rocky. Ann had never stood upon a spot so desolate. There were no buildings or people in sight. The surf pounded relentlessly. The water was dark and forbidding and it stretched unbroken to the gray and cloudy horizon. Her cotton sweater did nothing to stop the wind, and her trouser cuffs were quickly becoming sodden from the damp sand.

  Ann shivered and turned to find the Prince sitting up against a dune, head back, eyes closed. “That was very stupid,” he said, without bothering to open his eyes.

  “Probably,” she agreed. She slipped her hand into her pocket, tapped her cell phone to send her text, waited for the whoosh that would tell her that her message had been sent.

  It clanked instead. Not the sound she was hoping for.

  “I was wrong about you and Finn,” said the Prince, opening his eyes but not moving. Ann thought he might look even paler than usual. “He does deserve you. I’ve been trying to kill Finn MacUmhaill for centuries, but a woman like you will get the job done in a decade. You tried to text him our location, didn’t you?”

&n
bsp; “Yes.” Ann pulled her cell phone out of her pocket. “But there’s no signal.”

  For a second a single bar appeared on the screen, but it winked out almost instantly, and her message remained unsent.

  “Good,” said the Prince. “The last thing I need is your lover and my insane brother to blunder in while I’m trying to kill a Druid.”

  “You don’t look up to killing a fly,” she said.

  “No thanks to you,” said the Prince.

  “I don’t understand,” said Ann. “I know passing can be difficult, but Finn carried me across Charlestown and it didn’t have this kind of effect on him. What’s different about what we just did?”

  The Prince opened his eyes and examined her. “Passing is an act of will. It requires focus. It is the conquest of matter by magic. The transmutation of the body from one place to another. Very few Fae can carry anything with them when they pass. Distance adds to the energy required. Clarity of mind is paramount. Suddenly discovering that you have a passenger is not, to put it mildly, ideal. Tracking adds another layer of complication, because I’m following the signature of another living being blindly, and this Druid laid traps for us. He has never come here directly. We followed him through a number of intermediate points, all intended to tire and confuse me. He might not have gone to so much trouble if he’d known I was carrying a mad berserker with me.”

  “I didn’t realize that coming with you would make it harder for you to track the Druid.”

  “So Finn did not approve this little hitchhiking expedition.”

  “No. This was my idea.”

  “Why?”

  “Because someone should be looking out for Davin, and you have some hidden agenda.”

  “One that does not conflict with saving the child,” he said.