by R. F. Long
Iron born and iron bred. Trust not iron, it will see you dead.
Rowan Blake could really use a magic wand to keep her struggling art gallery afloat. But the faerie key she stumbles across is far from a lucky charm. It’s a magnet for danger, and by touching it she’s unwittingly put herself in the middle of a war between the forces of light and dark. And in the arms of its rightful owner, Prince Daire.
While searching for his brother, Daire finds himself trapped in the Iron World with a mere mortal woman who ignites his passion like no other. Each stolen kiss deepens their attraction and sends him spiraling closer and closer to the edge of his inherent dark desires. Desires that act as a homing beacon for the Dark Sidhe, who are intent on forcing him to fight on their side.
The longer he lingers in her arms—and in her bed—the closer his enemies get to her door. And the greater the risk that the gateway to the Faerie Realm will shift, destroying not only his power to protect her, but his very life.
Warning: Contains enchantments, danger, some very scary monsters, a trip to the dark side and hot, soul-transforming sex with an immortal prince.
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Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
577 Mulberry Street, Suite 1520
Macon GA 31201
Soul Fire
Copyright © 2009 by R. F. Long
ISBN: 978-1-60504-619-8
Edited by Deborah Nemeth
Cover by Anne Cain
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: July 2009
www.samhainpublishing.com
Soul Fire
R. F. Long
Dedication
To the friends and family who helped this happen.
To my Divas, especially Dayna, Lee, Crystal and Chi. To Emer for keeping on believing. To the members of my crit group past and present. And to my husband, for being there for me all the way through.
Irish Pronunciation Guide
Many of the names used in Soul Fire are Irish and follow the usual Irish pronunciation rules. A fada or accent over a vowel (i.e., á) lengthens the sound of that vowel. Most names used are pretty self evident (Úna, Aidan, Finbar, Lorcan, etc.) but some are a little trickier, so this is how I would pronounce them. The Irish language being what it is, the names would vary in pronunciation from region to region.
Aynia Ní Fuamnach — Eye-NEE-ah NEE FU-am-nock
Cathal — KA-hal
Daire — DAH-rah
Fionnuala — FI-noo-lah
Leanán Sidhe — LI-ann-AWN SHEE
Seelie — SEE-lee
Sidhe — SHEE
Síne — SHEE-nah
Sluagh — SLOO-ah
tine anama — TIN-ah ah-NAM-ah
Unseelie — UN-see-lee
Chapter One
Unfurling the veil between worlds never bothered Daire. The act of stepping through that gap, however, always made his stomach jerk like a fish on a hook. A Sidhe prince had no business walking in the Iron World of men. Neither did his little brother, Aidan, a youth blessed with more luck than common sense.
Daire slipped through the shadows between the trees, trying to orient himself to this time and place. Standing stones ringed the gateway. An old place then, one where the inhabitants knew and respected old ways. Or once did, anyway. Even in the forest the air felt tainted, heavy with chemicals, with iron. He could only imagine how much worse it would be outside the line of trees. The last time he’d walked in the Iron World, the factories had only just begun spewing their pestilence into the skies. Though he heard from his kin that things had become much worse, he never imagined a place could be this poisoned.
The breeze shifted and the leaves overhead whispered songs of autumn. Within their susurration, Daire caught a new scent on the air, not a smell of man’s iron, nor of the Fae Realm. Jasmine and orange blossom intermingled, tugged at his heightened senses. Such aromas had no place in this climate and region. While his instincts for danger were not fooled, he felt compelled to follow the beguiling scent. Beneath the floral top notes lurked something else, an alluring musk, a promise of passion. It beckoned him onwards.
A warning spell activated in a blush of heat against his chest from his acorn pendant. This magical key allowed him access to the gate but also warmed whenever danger was near. Daire drew his sword, feeling the familiar weight of the bronze blade like a grounding force. Too many years on the front line against the Dark Sidhe had taught him to be wary of what might lurk beneath enticing beauty.
But Aidan would not react so. Cosseted at home, the young prince would follow a scent like that as readily as a mortal girl would follow the enchanting music of King Finbar’s harp.
Aye, Daire could guess where his little brother hid. And what had led him there.
Tracking Aidan through the trees while the leaves reeled around him, Daire came within sight of a cottage. A mortal dwelling for certain, and yet its windows blazed with light and the door stood open. This close to the veil, he could only imagine the owner had turned to madness and desired to have his wife and children stolen away, his babes taken for changelings. The stones told him the locals knew of the gateway. Had the world changed so very much that they no longer feared it, that they thought the Sidhe without powers in their new iron-infected world?
Then Daire heard the voice, raised in anger, shaking with frustration.
“I don’t care what his excuse is, Paul! He can’t just withdraw from a show. The gallery signed him months ago. I’ve shelled out hard cash to meet his requirements for this installation.”
A slim, feminine figure marched down the path leading away from the house. Her clothing seemed as intentionally designed to shock as her mannerisms, her form-hugging trousers and masculine shirt emphasising rather than hiding the woman within. Outlandish garb. And she sounded like she might utter a war cry at any second, rather than the gentle tones expected of a female. Daire watched through a gap in the shaky fence as she stopped, listening to a small device she held to her ear. A green light which put him in mind of a glowworm’s brightness illuminated half her face. Her features were young, attractive, and very angry. Far too angry.
“No! No way! You tell him if he does, I’ll sue him until he has to start doing chalk pictures on the street. And he’ll need to borrow the chalk! Do you understand? Paul?” She paused and looked at the light in her hand. “Damn!” With a deft swing of her arm, she flung the slender box away. Its light fading, it sailed over the fence and Daire darted aside to avoid it.
“Damn,” said the girl again, more quietly this time. Tears silvered her face in the evening light. Her anger deflated and she dropped gracelessly down onto the grass, her head bowed as she wept.
Daire’s heart thundered. She wept pure tears, the tears of grief and despair. They were like a magnet for his kind, drawing him to her. His body trembled with the need to comfort her, with the need to help her and dissipate the pain.
The Sidhe forever felt the draw of human emotions, the fire and sparkles of feeling that came directly from the soul. The soul he, and all his kind, lacked. The fire. Human emotions burned so much more brightly than those of the Sidhe and though his people prided themselves on their logic and control
, they envied humans too much to admit. On its chain around his neck, the acorn key warmed against his skin, reminding him of his place, warning him once more.
Seven hundred years fighting the Dark Sidhe on the fringes of the Otherworld had inured him to most lures, but even he struggled for that moment. In another time, another place, such a woman, such a beauty, crying alone in the night would draw to her every Sidhe in the vicinity.
Daire shook his head, clearing it of the fog seeping in at the edges. If he was another person, perhaps he would have acted on his instincts. If he had not seen all that he had seen in his life.
The rustling of leaves and crack of a stick brought back his wandering attention, directing it farther along the edge of the woods, where the fence was broken. Someone else was watching her covertly.
Well, not terribly covertly. Not for a Sidhe.
Aidan.
Daire edged through the trees, skirting the fence and the garden’s edge, silent as the lightest breeze. Aidan watched the girl in rapt attention, every muscle poised to go to her, to comfort, to seduce.
Idiot, Daire growled inwardly, to risk so much, to be so close. No good could come of it.
Daire moved in a blur, as only a Sidhe warrior can, his speed negating the moments needed to pass between here and there. He clapped his hand over Aidan’s mouth and dragged him back into the safety of the woods.
Aidan struggled, finally regaining the wherewithal to sink his sharp teeth into his brother’s skin. Daire shook him off. Once free, Aidan turned to attack, years of combat training readying his body. But he lacked experience.
Daire seized Aidan’s shoulders before the youth could execute even the most basic defence and drove him back against a tree. “What on earth do you think you are doing?”
Aidan shared the bright blue eyes of their mother. The alarm in them faded as he recognised his eldest brother. “I did no harm coming. I only wanted to see.”
“Well, your little trip has our parents demented. They called me back from the battlefront to find you.”
“’Tis only a day past!” Confusion made him look even younger. Though two hundred years of age, Aidan was little more than a child by Sidhe standards. He certainly acted the part.
“You display more ignorance than is fitting in a prince,” said Daire. “A day here and a day there are different things. The veil steals time as you pass to and from our Realm. Damn it, Aidan, did you not think to find that out first? And why risk the Iron World of men? It’s a sickening place.”
Aidan shook his golden head. “Not so, brother. It must be true that war has killed your heart. Did you not see her?”
Daire frowned, shaking off the jibe. His heart was his own matter and it had died long before he joined the war.
“The wailing woman?” He released an exasperated breath. “Did you truly only come here chasing a mortal skirt, Aidan? Are you naught but an infant yet?”
“She’s beautiful!”
“She’s mortal. A true Sidhe would cast a glamour, take whatever she offers and come back. Not linger like a sick pup.”
“You can’t do that, Daire. Not in this day and age.”
“We have no place in this day and age,” Daire scoffed. “We’re an anathema, made only for our own war. We’ve certainly no place among mortals. They’re mayflies, Aidan. Wave them aside and come home. Our enemies are advancing, and without a front line defence, they will overrun us all.”
Aidan sighed, his gaze drifting back towards the girl and her home, and Daire scowled at the expression.
“You think only of war, brother,” said Aidan. “Perhaps it is all you were made for. Did you ever know how to love?”
“Love?” The word escaped his lips like a curse. “You’ve never met this girl and, like as not, you’ll forget her in the blink of an eye. What’s her name? What colour does she favour? Would she smile or scream if you stepped from the dark? I’ve known love, Aidan, and remember what my lady love tried to do to our kind.”
“But she is nothing like Aynia, Daire. She glows with light, she feels like—”
“Like any woman, no doubt. Like a mortal—less than Sidhe, less than you deserve. Now come on!” He seized his brother and pulled him through the trees, back towards the veil.
Aidan made to protest, but another sound interrupted him. A woman’s scream. No sworn guardian could resist such alarm, whether the source was human or Sidhe. It moved like electricity through their bodies, spurring them, forcing them into action. Age-old enchantments racing through their veins, Daire and Aidan sprinted back to the edge of the garden.
–—
Rowan lifted her head to the tree line, sniffed and used her sleeve to wipe her face dry. What would Grams say? Sitting out here like some sort of madwoman, crying to the trees about her troubles, instead of getting up off her behind and doing something about them.
Rowan pulled herself to her feet and wiped her hands on her jeans. It wasn’t just the betrayal. Peter had betrayed her in so many ways over their five years together that one more time should not have surprised her. If anything, she should have expected it, but, naïve to the last, she’d expected that he would at least be professional about business. Getting him to commit to her gallery had been a coup which had backfired royally. She had followed every last one of his requirements to the letter. The advertising, lighting, caterers for the launch, everything combined was going to ruin her. She might as well hand the gallery right over to the bank. And her cottage too.
Just because precious Peter Clarke had a better offer from a London gallery, one she couldn’t match. She could sue, but that would cost more. Even if she won, by the time the money came, it would be a moot point.
Never ever trust an ex, especially one who has an axe to grind and a novel new way of doing it. But it couldn’t be personal. It couldn’t! He couldn’t be so petty, so vindictive, so…
So Peter.
Rowan put her hands against the small of her back and stretched. Her head pounded and her eyeballs ached with the pressure.
What on earth was she going to do? She had struggled for years to make this gallery work, her one dream, her only love since leaving the city. The art world might laugh, say a fine art gallery could never survive in a backwater like Weathermere, but she wanted to be here, near Grams and away from Peter.
Since Grams died, she wanted it all the more.
No. This was not going to happen. She was not going to let him destroy her through a single act of his typical nasty selfishness, not after she had worked so hard.
A gust of wind burst from the trees beyond the fence, swirling dead and dying leaves in a riot of russet and bronze. But the scent of autumn didn’t follow it. More like a stench of decay, of rotten mulch and scorched earth. A line of ice rippled down Rowan’s back, setting the sensitive hairs on her skin standing to attention, straightening in alarm.
The wind rose, a whispering murmur, like a voice. A voice which shivered across her body and stole all heat from her body.
Come and play, little girl, come and play.
Rowan backed up, suddenly aware that the house was some distance away, far up the end of the path. She could run, couldn’t she? If she ran flat out, sprinted…she could make it home and slam the door.
But that would mean turning her back on the trees, on the encroaching night, on that swirl of dead leaves.
The swirl of dead leaves that was coming closer. With it came the whispering voice, calling the same thing over and over again.
Come and play, little girl, come and play.
Two points like glowing coals blossomed out of the darkness. And beneath them, the spiralling leaves moved like lips, smiled and opened to reveal sharp, glistening teeth.
“Come and play.”
Rowan screamed as it lurched towards her. She ducked under a flailing limb of leaves, moss and shadows and slipped in the dirt. Her hand brushed against a fallen branch thick as her arm. She snatched it up as the creature from the forest bore down on her a
gain.
Daire burst from the tree line, Aidan right behind him. The broken fence reared before him but offered no resistance. He tore his way through the narrow gap, breaking the wood on either side. The girl lay on the ground beneath a localised tornado of leaves, swiping at it ineffectually with a branch. Within the shadows and movement, two fae eyes glowed, full of desire and malevolence.
“Aidan,” Daire ordered, “get her to safety.”
Aidan nodded succinctly, his blade already in his hands.
Daire gritted his teeth and leaped to attack. The girl’s face stretched to a second terrified scream as her eyes fixed on him through the shadow. Her attacker turned, signalled by her reaction, and parried the sword blow expertly. He stepped back and, to Daire’s surprise, sketched a mockery of a courtly bow.
Behind him, Aidan ducked down next to the woman, his hands gentle. “Please,” he whispered, the charm of trust he wrought glowing with the words falling from his mouth. “Let me help you.”
The girl swallowed hard, glancing to where Daire and her attacker circled each other, her chest moving erratically with fear. Then she nodded, her chestnut hair falling over her parchment-pale face. Aidan pulled her to her feet, his hands supporting her, helping her away.
But the Dark Sidhe didn’t attempt to follow. “Taking our toys away, Daire?” asked the rasping voice from inside the gyre of leaves and shadows. “That’s not the way to play, is it?”
“Reveal yourself.” Daire took a step closer.
His opponent released his illusion and a familiar face shimmered into view—his cousin, Lorcan. Once a beloved kinsman, now a traitor. A chill of suspicion worried at the pit of Daire’s stomach. For if Lorcan was here, his companion Cathal would not be far behind.
He glanced behind him to where Aidan was running for the trees, the girl sprinting by his side. The trees promised safety to any Sidhe. Always had. Of course Aidan would lead her there. Any Sidhe would do the same thing, wouldn’t they? Dark or light.