Stone Song

by D. L. McDermott

  If he had used a pen, then the ink was on top of the surface of her skin. And she might be able to resonate it by humming, to break the lines up into dots and scatter the ink.

  Or, in the dark, using a power that was admittedly not fine-tuned, she might flay her own throat open. Which was probably preferable to what Finn had in mind for her.

  She hummed cautiously at first, trying to figure out what ink sounded like, and then found it, or at least the ghost of it, the sound of the felt tip squeaking across her skin, hours ago. And the resonance of the ink itself, the sound of it drying as it hit the air. She thought of it like leaves and pebbles and dancing swirls of dirt, and with a feeling a little like a razor skimming along her skin, she made the pinpoints of ink start to dance.

  Then she could feel the ink circling her neck in a cloud, close but not touching, and the magic in it struggled. It wanted to wrap itself around her neck. She struck at it with a ferocious, closed-mouthed sound, and the cloud burst. She could feel the ink as moisture on the air, powerless and slightly chemical smelling, and she breathed in relief when it hit the floor like a spatter of paint.

  Her voice was free. She could feel it in her throat. It wanted to shatter the lock on the door and splinter the wood, but she bade it rest a moment while she gathered herself. She was bruised and aching and something felt not quite right in her back—an injury, most likely, from her encounter with the pillar in the Commandant’s House. She needed to be ready when she broke out, because the house was full of Fae and she was going to get only one chance to free Elada.

  She was still gathering her strength when she heard someone approach. The tread was familiar but she couldn’t place it. She tried to send her hearing out in the direction of the sound but now she discovered what Miach had warned her about when he was training her to hear. Seeing with your hearing was an imperfect science, because you had to recognize sounds of objects when you heard them. If she had never heard a bicycle, she might not know what one sounded like and she’d never be able to guess what it was.

  The basement beyond her door was a jumble of unfamiliar objects. The materials were identifiable, wood and plastic and metal and cardboard, and there were washers, dryers, and in a corner a small pile of inert porcelain on cast iron—old bathtubs, perhaps. Not a Fae-friendly material, that.

  But much of what was out there was unknowable, and there was someone moving around in the maze. No, two someones. One of them Fae. The heartbeat was too slow to be human. And he was hiding, darting around the obstacles she couldn’t quite make out.

  The rustling outside went on a long time, then stopped. Suddenly feet were approaching with purpose, and then the lock sprang open and the door swung wide.

  The light, weak as it was, was blinding. “Who’s there?” asked Sorcha.

  “It’s me, Nieve. I’ve come to help you escape.”

  She knelt in front of Sorcha, and that’s when Sorcha heard him approach, a Fae she had glimpsed the night before, but whose sound she had not caught in the chaos.

  He was tattooed and muscular and obviously no courtier, but he had the same brittle brilliance about him as the Prince and in the dark his eyes were luminous with interest.

  “What, I wonder, will Finn and Garrett say about this?”

  “Nothing,” said Sorcha, pulling Nieve to the floor behind her.

  She struck the note she had used to shatter Deirdre’s illusions and added something with more focused intent to it. The Fae snarled and turned, but then his knees buckled and he clutched his head. A second later he slumped wordlessly to the ground.

  “Did you kill him?” asked Nieve, who appeared to be unhurt. Evidently all that practice had paid off.

  “I can’t tell,” admitted Sorcha. “It’s too dark, but usually there’s a lot of blood.

  “Mother of Dana,” said a voice in the darkness behind them. Sorcha cursed. She hadn’t heard Garrett approach. “What the hell did you do?”

  Garrett stepped over the body of the Fae to enter the room, then cursed again. “Get away from my wife, Druid.”

  “Shut up, Garrett, and take us to Elada, or I’m going home with my son and never coming back.”

  Until now, Sorcha had only seen the physical resemblance between Miach and his granddaughter, but now she saw their similarity of character as well.

  “You would have me disowned by my father, forever?” asked Garrett.

  “Either his heart will soften, as Miach’s has, or it will not, but, yes,” said Nieve. “I am asking you to choose between your father and me and what you know is right. Sorcha isn’t anyone’s enemy, except perhaps the Prince Consort’s. And Elada is like a second father to me. And he was there for our son when you were not.”

  Finn’s son sighed. “We have to get Garrett out of the house first. If we free Elada, my father will likely hold our son hostage.”

  Nieve’s expression became unexpectedly tender. She kissed her husband on the cheek. “I love you,” she said. “And your father will unbend. Eventually.”

  Garrett didn’t look so sure, but he said, “Find our son and get out. I’ll lead the Druid to Elada.”

  “I can find him myself,” Sorcha said. She didn’t like the idea of the little boy being in danger, and she wasn’t sure she could use her voice if he was in the house. It was still too difficult to control.

  “What about him?” Nieve asked, looking at the Fae on the floor.

  Garrett rolled the Fae over. “He’ll live.”

  “Should we lock him in?” asked Sorcha.

  Garrett shook his head. “He’s Fae. He’d be able to break out of anything we could lock him in and I don’t have time to ensorcel the door or the lock.”

  “Then get your son,” said Sorcha.

  Garrett looked at her quizzically. “How do you know where Elada is?”

  “I can hear him. And everyone in between me and him.”

  Garrett took Nieve’s hand and tugged her back. “Let’s go,” he said.

  Sorcha wondered if all the Fae she met in future would look at her like that, with fear. Elada never had, but then he’d never seen her splitting rocks. He’d only seen Deirdre with a mild headache and felt the bite of Sorcha’s cláirseach.

  She set off toward the washroom. She’d long since mapped her route to Elada. Lying in the dark, gathering her strength, she’d sent her hearing out in every direction, trying to figure out the surest path to rescue her lover. She couldn’t rely on her voice to overcome every obstacle that she met. She’d never used it offensively until tonight. And it was a hell of a time to practice.

  There was no getting out of the basement without crossing through the room with the television. That had been filled with Fae and half-breeds earlier. Now it was just filled with half-breeds, including the odious Patrick, playing video games and drinking beer and cursing like sailors.

  There was no point in trying to approach silently. They were going to hear her. The question was, would they try to stop her?

  The boy Deirdre had felled last night was the first to notice her. His head was bandaged and his jaw was wired shut and he was sitting alone at one end of the sofa. The sound he made would have been comical under other circumstances. No one heard it above the roar of guns firing in the game, and then she was upon them.

  Patrick dropped his game control and picked up an empty bottle of beer. “What are you doing out, Druid bitch?” he asked.

  She didn’t bother with words. Anger gave her confidence. She created a note of force and purity and caught it in her hand, then flung it at Patrick. He went down as though she’d punched him. She took out the other three with the same technique, because to have sung at the whole room would have been to hit the boy on the sofa with the wired jaw, and he’d been taught enough lessons for one week.

  At least that was how she’d felt when she’d walked into the room. But using her power felt g
ood. She didn’t feel bruised or beaten anymore. Her back no longer ached. Every note she threw seemed to invigorate and tempt her at the same time, because notes were alive and they wanted to belong to something larger than themselves, to tunes, to songs, to whole symphonies of beautiful destruction.

  She climbed the stairs. There was a mirror in the hall. Finn’s house was beautiful. It was full of glittering things that would resonate if she sang at them. The whole house could become an instrument, an orchestra for her gift.

  An old woman with a tray piled high with sandwiches rounded the corner. Sorcha could hear the tray, the plates, the bread being buttered an hour ago, the resentment in the kitchen over the constant demand for meals, for snacks, for beer for the hooligans and half-bloods and true Fae who ran roughshod over the human staff.

  The old woman looked at Sorcha and blanched. She dropped the tray, gave a little sob, and ran back into the kitchen.

  Sorcha turned to look at the mirror. Her face was smudged with dirt. Her hair was wild. Her arms were scraped, her blouse torn, her knees bloodied, her skirt a tattered fringe.

  But her skin had never looked as luminous, her cheeks as rosy, her eyes as bright.

  This was real power. Listening was for children. Striking, scorching, shattering with her voice was what she had been made for.

  Two sets of feet pattered down the stairs. Whispers peppered the air. Nieve and Garrett rounded the banister with their son in his father’s arms. Nieve took one look at Sorcha and gasped.

  Garrett shook his head. “Don’t stop, Nieve. We need to go, now.”

  “I don’t think she’s okay,” said Nieve. “Sorcha? Are you all right?”

  She was wonderful, beautiful, alive as she had never been before. Her lips parted to say as much and she felt the voice roiling inside her, ready to come forth.

  She held it in. She nodded. “I’m okay,” she said, but her voice had too many notes in it, and she knew that it wasn’t hers alone. That others were being channeled through her, Druid voices, the vast flood of knowledge and lives and learning that Miach had told her she’d inherited when she’d killed Keiran.

  Sorcha had never been able to access it before, but it was here for now. On your side, it assured her. Kill them all, it whispered.

  She ignored it. “I’m going for Elada,” she said.

  At the back of the house she could hear the kitchen staff, clanking with stolen silver, getting into their cars.

  They thought she was the end of this house, of Finn, of Fae control of Charlestown.

  “I just want Elada,” she said, as much to herself as to Nieve and Garrett. “And a house in Quincy,” she added, this time to the Druid voices, who seemed to require some explication.

  “Ooh-kay,” said Nieve. She tugged her husband down the rest of the stairs, then they slipped around Sorcha toward the door. Nieve stopped there and turned to look at Sorcha, then back at Garrett.

  “Take our son to my grandfather,” said Nieve. “I’m staying with her.”

  “You can’t, Nieve. He’ll kill you if he catches you.”

  “No, he won’t.”

  “You don’t know him like I do,” said Garrett. “He wants me to give you up and find someone else to get more children on.”

  “I know,” she said. “He wants a family, like my grandfather has. That’s why he’s not going to hurt me. I’m pregnant.”

  Garrett cursed. “Don’t do this to me, Nieve.”

  “Trust me, as I once trusted you when we left the old man’s house.”

  “That didn’t work out so well,” he said.

  “This time it will,” she said.

  She closed the door on Garrett before he could reply and turned to Sorcha. “I’m not going to let you kill anyone,” she said.

  “I wasn’t planning on it,” said Sorcha. Yes, we were, said the Druid voices in her head.

  “Of course not,” said Nieve. “And Mrs. Kenny is stealing the silver and the Porsche because she thinks you’ve come to take tea with Finn. We saw them outside the upstairs window. Come on.”

  But it was Sorcha who led Nieve, because she knew where Elada was and she was the only one with a weapon.

  Chapter 18

  The tiny garden behind the house was silent, but there were forks and knives scattered over the path to the driveway gate, like a trail of silver breadcrumbs.

  Sorcha didn’t follow it. The servants had been leaving. Elada had said that the Boston Fae had no unwilling dependents. It may have been true of Miach’s domain in South Boston, but it did not appear to be true of Finn’s. The servants hadn’t warned their protector; they’d fled with his silver.

  There was a range of low garages at the end of the property. All she’d been able to tell from underground was that they were brick. Now she could see that they had once been stables and she could hear back in time to when they had horses and then cars and sometime in between light industry, a small factory making cordage for the Navy Yard.

  They were filled with stolen goods now and the walls whispered with cunning theft. Fell off the back of a truck, said Patrick of the microwave he had gifted his human girlfriend’s mother to keep the woman sweet while he had her daughter upstairs in her girlish bedroom. They’ll never miss one case, said another of the Fianna, about a crate of Kentucky whiskey.

  It was too much. She could hear everything, which meant, if she didn’t focus, she would hear nothing. She would miss what was important. The whisper of a blade being unsheathed, the creak of a door, the sound of Fae running.

  He was in the last garage and her hearing told her that something was keeping him there. Cold iron. That was okay. She could handle cold iron. They reached the wide garage doors. They were old-fashioned and opened at the middle, and it took both Nieve and Sorcha to drag them apart.

  The doors groaned but they didn’t drown out the running feet. Fae. A half dozen of them, coming from the house at a run. The patterns of footsteps were confused but resolving themselves, finding consensus, heading their way.

  That’s when Sorcha saw Elada. She’d been right. Someone had gone to work on him. His shirt was off, his torso was bruised, and his lip was cut. There was no car in the garage, just toolboxes lining the walls, an assortment of spare parts piled up in the corner, and her lover chained to one of the beams overhead with cold iron.

  There was a shout in the yard. “Close the doors,” said Sorcha. It came out an order and she didn’t bother to find out whether Nieve obeyed. She knew the girl would, because she’d said it in her Druid voice, and while it might not have the power of Miach’s voice, it was still potent.

  “Sorcha,” said Elada. The look on his face was part hope and part wonder and all love and she was going to earn every ounce of all of those things.

  “I’m going to get you out of here,” she said. “Unfortunately, it’s going to hurt.”

  • • •

  Elada tugged the chains that held him bound. He had no idea how Sorcha thought she was going to get him free. “Finn has the key,” said Elada.

  “They’re coming,” said Nieve. She’d dragged the doors shut on Sorcha’s command, but Elada could see the Fae filling the yard through the windows. And there was no other way out.

  “You’ve got to leave me, Sorcha,” Elada told her.

  “No.” It was a flat response, but her voice was unusually rich and layered. Like a Fae voice, but different. And as she turned to face him fully, he was awestruck by her radiance.

  She had always been beautiful to him, but now she was like a dark goddess. Her hair rippled over her shoulders in glossy black waves. Her cheeks were rosy, her lips tinged with cherry, her eyes bright and luminous. This was what Druids looked like in the full rush of their power. He’d seen it before, with Beth Carter when she’d almost drained Miach’s son Brian dry, and then later after she’d banished the Prince Consort into
the Otherworld. It was dangerous, unnatural, and sexy as hell.

  “I can get the shackles off,” she said in the rich husky voice that had music in it, that sounded like a chorus. “But I don’t think I can do it without getting a lot of iron in the air. How long can you hold your breath?”

  “It wouldn’t just be my breath. They’d be on my clothes and skin and hair. Probably not enough to kill me, but enough to slow me down. I wouldn’t be of any use to you. It won’t work. You have to leave.”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  That one word carried force, and the voice sounded like hers alone.

  He’d never seen her do what she did next, but he’d seen Druids do it two thousand years ago. She opened her mouth to form a note. It came out high and pure but diffuse, and she brought her hands up to shape it and then threw an invisible projectile of pure force at the chains overhead.

  A link snapped, but Elada was ironbound and didn’t have the strength to pull it open. Sorcha cast another note and threw it at the same link, and it exploded in a burst of fine iron dust.

  His arms fell to his sides. The pain, after a night hanging, was excruciating, and he forgot to hold his breath. The iron burned his lungs. He did his best to back out of the path of it as it rained down from the ceiling, but he caught plenty of it on his shoulders and outstretched arms.

  Then something struck him in the chest. Water.

  “Sorry,” Nieve said. She had a hose in her hands. The water was cold as ice but he leaned into it like dog in a sprinkler on a hot day and let her blast the iron off him. “But it’s what the old man always told Garrett to do. Get to water. Wash it off.”

  Good advice, if rarely practicable.

  Something crashed against the doors. Nieve had thrown the bar across them but it wouldn’t hold against Fae strength for long. He thought about what would happen to Nieve and Sorcha when the doors opened and angry Fae burst in. It was why Miach had given him the silver dagger, to take her life as a mercy before she endured unthinkable torture.