“Then he’d better not find me,” she said.
This time when she stood, he pushed his chair back and stood as well.
He was tall. Well over six feet. And broad. Imposingly so. She’d liked strong men before she’d met that Fae in Manhattan, been attracted to that kind of blatant masculinity. The kind who could wear fur and fringe and beads and still project strength and virility.
But ever since that night she’d avoided it. Gravitated instead toward slender wiry men like Tommy, who had been her on-again, off-again lover for years now. She and Tommy had found comfort together, but never the heady thrill she felt from this Fae towering over her. And none of it was the pull of his glamour, because she was wearing cold iron close to her body, and she could see through any illusion he might be casting.
She hated the way she felt drawn to him.
“I’m here,” he said, “to make sure the Prince doesn’t find you.”
“I don’t need help from a Fae.”
“What do you plan to do?” he asked. There was that note of concern in his voice again. If it was feigned, it was well feigned.
She shrugged as though it meant nothing at all to her. She wasn’t going to tell him her plans. And she didn’t want him to guess at her panic.
She was going to run. She had some money set aside. She could always rent Gran’s house out. The thing was to get away as fast as possible. To put distance between her and this Fae and the Prince Consort he had warned her about. It had worked the last time. It would work again.
He guessed her train of thought. “You can’t outrun the Prince, Sorcha. If he’s looking for you, he can follow you anywhere.”
Sorcha doubted that. Gran’s executors had spent months trying to find her. But musicians who lived one gig to the next, who didn’t own a cell phone or a laptop, who walked from town to town or hopped a bus when the distance was too great, who paid cash for their tickets and meals, were tough to track. Even now Sorcha had no credit card, no bank account. She paid the taxes on Gran’s house in cash every year. She didn’t own a car or have a driver’s license, just a passport, and that had no address.
If she walked out of the Black Rose tonight, and especially if she didn’t tell Tommy where she was going, she could get clean away. All she needed was her harp and a suitcase. She’d lived out of a single bag for years. She could go home to Jamaica Plain, pack, take the T to South Station, and get on a bus, any bus, leaving town. New York held bad memories for her but there were gigs up north, especially in the college towns. She could stop in Portsmouth and Bangor and head for the border to Montreal and then Quebec. There might be Fae there, too, for all she knew. The cities that had a big enough traditional music scene to support her unfortunately also seemed to attract the Gentry, but she could always move on if they found her there.
“Thank you,” she said, “for the warning.” She took care to keep her fingers on the strings of her harp as she rose. She still wasn’t certain that he would let her walk away.
He cocked his head, studying her. “I haven’t convinced you, have I?”
Gran hadn’t convinced her either. Only experience had. “I’m a terrible listener,” she admitted.
Sorcha pivoted on her heel and sought Tommy’s face in the crowd. When she found it, his angular features were half-turned away and she couldn’t parse his expression. It was the last she would see of him for a long while and she wished she could watch him smile one last time. They were not in love, but they were the best of friends, and there was a deep intimacy between them.
There was no time for sadness now. She had to leave before the Fae tried to stop her. She thrust herself through the crowd, trying to protect her harp from the bobbing beer glasses and drunken students.
Sorcha headed straight for the back door. She risked one look behind her to see the Fae still standing at his table. He made no move to follow her. Good. She wanted to put as much distance between them as possible. She pushed the back door open and scurried out into the crisp cool night.
And straight into the Fae she had just left behind at the table.
Which was impossible.
But real. Beneath her hands his chest felt hard as marble. She took a breath, a lungful of pine and rosemary—his scent, she realized—and backed away, trying to reconcile the evidence of her senses with reason.
He’d been at the table a second ago when she’d glanced back. Now he was out in the alley, ahead of her. Looking cool and collected and utterly unperturbed. The street lamp picked out the golden highlights in his hair, the moon shimmered off his silver-gray eyes.
“How did you do that?” she asked.
“I passed,” he replied simply. “And if you didn’t know the Fae could do that, then you don’t know enough to protect yourself from the Prince.”
She hadn’t wanted to show her hand, but she had no choice now if she hoped to get away. Sorcha plucked the bass strings of her harp. The first note rang deep and low through the narrow street, echoing off the brick walls. She could feel it in the air, against her skin.
The Fae in front of her shivered, as though he’d been buffeted by a cold wind. The note decayed and died away.
He shook himself and took a step toward her.
“Don’t make me hurt you,” she warned him.
He raised a skeptical eyebrow. “I don’t think you have enough iron strings on that thing to give me more than a bad headache.”
“Do you really want to find out?”
“No, not really,” he admitted. “I’ve tasted too much iron in my life already. But you won’t be able to stop the Prince Consort with a few notes on the cláirseach. Let me help you, Sorcha. Let me take you to Miach, before the Prince finds you and discovers your secret.”
“What secret?” she asked. He couldn’t possibly know.
“You have the voice. The singing voice. You’re a stone singer, aren’t you?”
It almost happened then. She could feel the voice rising up inside her, clamoring to get out. It wanted to kill.
Sorcha didn’t. Never again. And certainly not this Fae, who seemed almost kind, who might genuinely want to help her, but who wouldn’t anymore, once he found out about Keiran.
There was only one thing she could do to stop the voice.
She plucked all five of her iron strings at once, a crashing chord that rattled the windows overhead and brought the Fae in front of her to his knees.
And then she ran.
Chapter 3
Elada tasted blood. His ears rang. His vision went red. He felt the ground rear up in front of him, and he cursed his own stupidity, because the cláirseach was a magical weapon, and its power depended on that of the Druid bard who wielded it.
And Sorcha Kavanaugh was a powerful bard. Perhaps not trained, perhaps not controlled, but full of a raw and dangerous energy that she could channel through the instrument’s iron strings.
For a long time all he could do was crouch on the smooth round cobbles of the street and breathe in and out, in and out, his chest aching, pain cascading through his body. No doubt figures crouching on the pavement outside the Black Rose were a common enough sight. A few college kids stopped to ask him if he was okay and he managed to use his voice on them, to assure them that he was fine, just the worse for drink and waiting for a ride.
On a battlefield he would have been dead by now. Incapacitated by the harp and finished off by his foes. He had been spared that fate during his time with Miach because the sorcerer cast protections on them when they fought in tandem.
It was the partnership that had defined most of his existence. He’d been bound to Miach for two thousand years. When a sorcerer and his right hand fought together, the warrior protected the mage from physical attack so he could be free to cast his spells. And in return the mage protected his right hand from magic.
The system had not saved them from
the Druids during that bloody revolt. Their vassals had planned long and well how best to defeat the Fae. They’d wrought ingenious weapons with cold iron and used them to overthrow their masters.
After it was over, the Druids had hurled most of the Fae into the Otherworld, but some, like Miach and Elada, they had kept chained inside their mounds to experiment upon, to divine at last the source of the power of the Aes Sídhe.
Each of the mounds had been overseen by a family of Druids. Elada’s captors had been careless with him for a fatal instant. He had watched them and waited for his moment, assessed the weaknesses and strengths of each of that Druid clan, and when the moment had come, he’d broken his iron chains. They had not used additional magic to hold him, thinking that as the right hand of a sorcerer, he had no extraordinary powers, that his only attributes were Fae strength and speed.
They forgot loyalty and determination. The Druids had experimented on him, searching for the secret of Fae prowess. They had sliced through muscles and tendons, waited for them to reknit or hurried the process along with magical healing, and then cut him again.
Elada could guess what they might do if they were searching for more than the source of physical strength, could imagine what they were doing to Miach. Elada had fought his way free, and then he had gone in search of his mage.
When he found the sorcerer, the cruelty of the Druids had proven equal to that of the Fae. They had been carving the sorcerer open from neck to navel, searching for the source of his magic, and allowing him to heal, over and over again. They sought to isolate, identify, stimulate, and understand the source of Fae power. For only then could they steal and harness it.
Elada had killed all the Druids holding Miach and freed the sorcerer, and they had been together ever since, until a few months ago, when Miach had severed their magical tie.
But not their friendship.
Elada crawled to the gutter at the edge of the street and fished his cell phone out of his pocket. Fortunately human technology was not affected by cold iron.
The voice that answered was masculine and familiar. “How did it go?” asked Miach MacCecht, the most powerful Fae sorcerer on this side of the wall, and perhaps anywhere, and at present the patriarch of South Boston’s reigning crime family.
“Badly,” rasped Elada, wincing at the way his throat burned when he spoke. Sorcha Kavanaugh was more dangerous than they had imagined.
“She’s got a fucking cláirseach. Iron strung. And she doesn’t mind using it.”
“How badly are you hurt?” came Miach’s sharp reply.
“I’ll live.”
“Can you pass?”
Elada considered. The Fae could pass injured, but the results were often . . . unpleasant, especially if they were bleeding. “No.”
“I’ll come now. Helene can follow in the car.”
Helene was Miach’s lover, a completely mortal woman with no magic at all. Her human frailty had almost gotten Miach killed once already. Elada wished he could warm to her, but he couldn’t, because she was a liability in their war with the Prince Consort.
“Send Liam or Nial,” said Elada. “I think there may have been other Fae here tonight.”
Liam and Nial were half-breeds, but they had Fae weapons and could take care of themselves.
“Liam and Nial aren’t close enough. I’m coming now. Helene will bring the car.”
And then, a second later, passing through earth, water, air, and stone, Miach MacCecht stood in front of him, brown-black eyes blazing with anger, black hair tousled.
He looked at Elada and cursed. Inventively.
“You look like you took on an army,” said Miach, crouching in front of him and unbuttoning Elada’s shirt. Elada felt the sorcerer’s hands on him, warm and soothing. No doubt any tourist who chanced to look down the street would think they were seeing an indiscreet hookup in an alley.
“Just one small girl with a harp,” said Elada. Of course, he was almost certain she had more weapons at her disposal than the harp. The fact that she had panicked, had struck at him with the iron music and run, was very likely proof that he had guessed right. She had the voice. Perhaps the single most dangerous kind of Druid, if you wanted to keep the wall between worlds standing.
And Miach did. Miach had a family here. Half-bloods, some of them almost entirely mortal. And his fragile human lover, Helene. If the Fae Court escaped their exile, they would deem such offspring and liaisons abominations. At best, the Queen would slaughter them on sight.
At worst she might make pets of the half-breeds, as she had in times past, when the beauty and strength of the Fae coupled with the emotional vulnerability of humans had made them desirable playthings, dooming them to live, while the Queen pleased, in torment.
Miach could not afford to let a stone singer like Sorcha Kavanaugh fall into the Prince Consort’s hands. And there was one simple way to ensure that she didn’t.
Miach pressed on Elada’s ribs and the warrior couldn’t contain a hiss. But he said nothing about the little musician’s suspected talents. Instead, he asked, “Do you have her address?”
“Sorcha Kavanaugh’s?” asked Miach, raising one black brow in skepticism. “You don’t usually date women who crack your ribs as a form of foreplay.”
“I’m afraid she’s going to run,” said Elada. And he was afraid that if she did, and Miach heard about her talent without meeting her, he might order her killed.
He wasn’t going to let it come to that.
“Our friends in the police department,” said Miach, who had several of Boston’s finest on his payroll, “can track her for us. You don’t need to chase after her tonight. And after what I’ve got to do to your ribs, you’re not going to want to.”
The motion he used was a short, sharp jab, but it was the magic he channeled into Elada’s body that hurt like hell. Enough to make him black out for a few seconds. When he opened his eyes again, light flooded the narrow street from the headlamps of Miach’s Range Rover, and Helene Whitney was bending over him, her long blond hair brushing his shoulders.
Elada watched her slip her hand into Miach’s in a gesture of comfort. He must look very, very bad. He felt awful. “How bad is he?” she asked.
“A few ribs broken,” said Miach. “Some internal bleeding, though I think I’ve stopped that. And a concussion.”
Helene untied the scarf from around her neck and dabbed at the blood on his face. He’d known his ears had bled, but evidently his eyes and nose had as well. Elada recognized the colorful square of silk. Miach had sent him to the Hermès store in Back Bay to pick it up as a birthday gift for Helene. And Elada doubted that Helene, who loved fashion, would be using such a luxurious gift to sop up blood if there wasn’t an upsetting amount of it.
In the end Miach had to help him into the Range Rover. It hurt too much to sit up, so he lay across the backseat and allowed them to drive him home to South Boston.
From his vantage point in the back he saw Helene reach across the console and put her hand on Miach’s knee, then give him a reassuring squeeze.
He envied their intimacy. It was something he’d seldom known. Maire had always given him comfort and understanding, but she had never loved him. No one would ever take her dead husband’s place. She’d only accepted Elada into her life because he was Fae—not human, not a man—and on some deeply personal level, didn’t “count.”
“I’m fine,” Elada said again, as they rolled over the bridge across the Fort Point Channel.
“You will be fine, with some rest, after I’ve had another pass over those ribs,” said Miach.
“Then I’ll go after the girl,” said Elada.
Miach shook his head and found Elada’s eyes with his in the rearview mirror. “Liam and Nial can fetch Sorcha Kavanaugh. Her iron harp won’t have any effect on them.”
Miach was right. Sorcha’s iron harp couldn’
t harm Liam and Nial. They were half-bloods, and their human heritage made them immune to the crippling power of iron. But Sorcha Kavanaugh was terrified of the Fae, and if her harp wouldn’t work, she might resort to something that would. Stone song.
And Liam and Nial would die.
“You can’t send Liam and Nial,” said Elada.
“Why not?” asked his oldest friend, whom just a few minutes ago he had planned to deceive. But not at the cost of the boys’ lives.
“Because she’s frightened, and untrained, and if the harp doesn’t work on Liam and Nial, she may lash out in a different way.”
A beat. Then Miach asked, “How?”
“It’s only a guess on my part,” said Elada, hedging.
“But an educated guess, no doubt, old friend. What is it you suspect?”
“I’ll tell you when I’m certain.”
And not before. Because if he was right, it would be her death sentence. He suspected that she was the deadliest of Druids. He suspected Sorcha Kavanaugh was a stone singer.
• • •
She ran. She didn’t know how long the Fae would stay down. And she didn’t want a repeat of the thing that had happened the last time one of them had attacked her. The thing she couldn’t control, the thing she still saw in nightmares. Especially since this Fae hadn’t seemed quite so alien, quite so inhuman.
He’d been civil, actually. Of course she had told him upfront that she was wearing cold iron, so perhaps he hadn’t bothered with the Fae mind games. But her attacker in New York had progressed quickly from ensnaring her to imprisoning her and using physical violence to keep her in line, and this Fae hadn’t.
Not even when she’d struck that first note in the alley. They moved fast. He probably could have snapped her neck before she’d completed that shattering chord, and he hadn’t.
Of course, refraining from physical violence didn’t make the Fae a nice guy. None of the Fae, as far as she knew, had anything like a human conscience. Not according to Gran and not according to the old men who had taught her to sing. And certainly not according to her experience with Keiran.
Stone Song Page 3