Cold Iron Read online

  Miach swept the table before him clear. “Fine. Quicksilver. I need light, too, and the needle. Liam, Nial,” he called.

  It was the two younger half-breeds from outside once more. They came, one carrying a lamp, another carrying a glass vial of silver liquid and the most beautiful and terrifying implement Beth had ever seen.

  The “needle” was silver, one hand span long, a stiletto that ended in a point so fine it was nearly invisible. The grip was sinuously shaped and finely wrought, a stylized, blooming lily, terrible and beautiful at the same time.

  She couldn’t take her eyes off it. Until Conn lifted her onto the table and whispered in her ear, “Don’t look at it. This has to be done.”

  Despite the rustling yards of silk she was wearing, she felt naked and vulnerable with Conn and Miach standing over her.

  Miach ran a whetstone over the needle. “You’ll have to compel her to stay still.” Beth swallowed hard.

  “I can’t,” Conn said. “Her mind throws too many barriers against me. She’ll tear herself apart fighting me before you can finish the mark.”

  “I thought you said she was toothless. That she had no power.”

  “She has power,” Conn admitted. “But she can’t harness it. She’s all instinct and intuition.”

  “Whiskey, then.” Miach nodded at the barman, and a bottle appeared.

  “I don’t drink. Not spirits, anyway,” Beth said. She’d only tried whiskey once. The stuff had burned her throat like liquid fire. And she didn’t like the feeling it gave her, of being out of control.

  “Some Druid you’ve found,” snorted Miach.

  Conn poured her a glass and pressed it into her hands. “The Druids used intoxicants to access their latent powers,” he explained.

  “Could I do that?”

  “Unlikely. Your people passed their learning down through their blood. A body of knowledge larger than a man could learn in a lifetime was written into them. You would call it DNA. Knowledge and wisdom, though, are not the same things. Practicing Druids studied twenty years as initiates, almost from birth, to learn to access and use that knowledge. But the whiskey should dull the pain.”

  The idea of that forgotten heritage filled Beth with a strange sense of loss. She steeled herself to swallow the whiskey, tossed it off, then choked. Before she could catch her breath, Conn was pressing another glass into her hands. She shook her head. She couldn’t possibly drink another.

  A look passed between Conn and Miach. Then strong hands were gripping her shoulders, tipping her head back, pouring whiskey down her throat. Another glass, and then another. Too fast to choke, it flowed into her like wildfire.

  It took a minute to hit her. Then her head spun. Hands, gentler now, lowered her back to the hard wooden table.

  The room, of course, looked different from that perspective. Rooms often do. She hadn’t noticed the tin ceiling, which was painted and peeling but still quite pretty. Or the fans. They looked about as old as the pressed tin, and unlikely to work. The lights above them were shaded by etched glass globes, and the tin tiles above those were stained. Gas jets, she thought, long since supplanted by the electric fixtures dotting the walls.

  Miach swam into sight above her, holding the bottle of mercury in one hand and the wicked needle in the other. “Hold her down,” he said.

  Conn’s hands came down over her forearms and pinned her to the table. The needle dipped into the pot, came out slick and tipped a darker shade of silver. Beth turned her head. She didn’t want to cry in front of these creatures, most especially not in front of Conn.

  The first jab wasn’t too bad. The second hurt more. Started to burn. She risked a glance at Miach. His face seemed somehow softer, less menacingly beautiful, now that it was focused wholly on this task. She’d seen that look on a man’s face before, when the museum had an artist in residence one winter who had carved ice sculptures in the frozen garden. He’d worked, chisel in hand, with that same intense focus.

  Miach sensed her watching him. “You can cry if you wish,” he said, his eyes never leaving his work. “Most do.”

  She bit her lip to stop the tears coming, caught the quick dart of Miach’s eyes in her direction, the crinkle at the corner of his lips. Approval from an unlikely source. She didn’t dare look at Conn. He’d be able to see how close she was to breaking down. He had admired her bravery, and she was loath to lose his regard.

  She tried to focus on something other than the stabbing pain. Dimly she could make out the other inhabitants of the bar. She began counting them. Most of the half-breeds had returned to their drinking, except for the three they’d met outside. The oldest of them, the surly one who had been none too pleased to admit them, locked eyes with Beth and licked his lips, clearly savoring her pain.

  The two younger ones hovered nearby, ready to take the needle and the quicksilver away when Miach was finished with them. They appeared sickened. Despite their Sídhe looks, they were all too human.

  A last, breath-stealing jab tore her attention away from the youths. Then a strange pulling sensation coursed through Beth’s shoulder, like thread being drawn through a stitch.

  “It’s done,” said Miach, handing the bottle and the needle off to his sons.

  Beth finally forced herself to look. The wound was gone, vanished completely, not even a scar to show where the Summoner had cut her, but surrounding the place where it had been was a silvery pattern, fiery with pain, a complex knot of countless folds that wound down over the top of her breast and up to loop over her shoulder. Sinuous, beautifully drawn, intricate as anything in the Book of Kells.

  Conn’s symbol. She knew it at once, without ever having seen it before. It pulsed slightly, and she saw that the flesh around it was livid and raised. Tattoos looked like that when they were new, she recalled. She’d never gotten one before, but she’d seen them on other people, the fresh ink brilliantly colored. But never like this.

  The mercury was . . . mercurial. Changeable as the sky. Black one moment, tinged with blue the next. She lifted a hand to touch it, but her limbs felt leaden, unresponsive, and it occurred to her that she was dead drunk for the first time in her life, in a dive bar, in Southie. Sporting a flashy new tattoo.

  Miach and Conn stood looking down at her. Conn lifted sweaty tendrils of hair off her face, stroked her cheek and brow. She found it comforting, and she allowed her eyes to drift closed and her mind to float free.

  Above her Miach said, “I see why you want to keep her. I’ve never marked a human who could stay silent beneath the needle. She would last a long time. Months, maybe years, before she broke.”

  “I don’t want her for revenge.”

  Miach snorted. “That’s right. I forgot. You’re a Druid lover.”

  “You know I’m nothing of the kind. I want the girl. For the same reason you wanted all the human women you must have had in this place. An accomplishment,” Conn said, with something that sounded suspiciously like envy to Beth. Children, thought Beth dreamily. Conn wanted children. Frank had never been willing even to discuss the idea. “What are the youngest?” Conn asked. “The tenth generation? The Court would love them. Stronger than ordinary humans, but just as passionate. Perfect playthings.“

  She didn’t know why Conn was trying to antagonize Miach or what he was suggesting, but she hoped he knew what he was doing, because there was an army of Fae half-breeds between them and the door.

  “Those were different times,” Miach said.

  “You stand now where I stood then,” Conn replied.

  It was like listening to an opera in another language, Beth thought dreamily. She understood the broad sweep of emotions but didn’t know the whole story.

  After a pause Miach said, “And if the Summoner is used? If the Wild Hunt returns? With whom will you stand this time?”

  “It won’t come to that.” But she heard the doubt in Conn�
�s voice.

  So did Miach. “Is the little Druid so good in bed you’d risk the return of the Court? After you destroyed your name and fame to bring them to heel?”

  “That I cannot say,” said Conn, with a trace of wry amusement. “For I haven’t had her in my bed yet.”

  Miach laughed. “Well, you’ll have the pleasure soon enough. The mark is good work. She’s drifting now, but you can take hold of her mind. She won’t be able to resist you. Not with your geis on her.”

  “Now is not the time,” Conn replied, frosty as winter.

  “Then send her to sleep. She needs it.”

  Beth didn’t want Conn in her mind. She could find her own way to sleep. She tried to open her eyes, to form the words that would stop him, but she couldn’t. That’s when she realized he’d already slipped inside, threaded the suggestion of sleep into her thoughts, and with it, something else.

  Pleasure. Warm and sweet. It lapped at her like waves on the beach. Pulled her under. And before she could break free, she was drowning, deep inside an erotic dream.

  He hadn’t meant to do it. She needed sleep. He’d been testing her mind, seeking an opening, the whole time he was talking to Miach. She’d been stoic in the gallery after her miserable excuse for a husband had left her bloodied on the floor. She’d chosen pain and uncertainty over an easy death when he’d offered her the choice in the car. And she’d endured Miach’s needle in silence when most men would have screamed for mercy.

  She deserved better than what he had just done. No matter the things her ancestors had done to him and his. She might carry their legacy, their encoded learning, but she had not made the choices they’d made.

  But she was marked now, and that could not be undone. So he’d tried to use that connection, the easy access to her mind, the obedience the geis demanded, to grant her the relief of her sleep.

  The geis had other ideas. And they were always sexual. Anything so intimately printed on the body had to be. It was why a true Fae like Miach was so intensely drawn to her despite his hatred for her kind. The Druids had marked all their captive Fae, carving a deep connection, twisted and erotic, between the races,. It explained Conn’s attraction to her, the deep physical pull he felt when he was near her, but not this unexpected tenderness. That was something different, something more.

  Her chest rose and fell in the confines of her gown, his mark silver and beautiful over and above the swell of her breast. She was deeply asleep, and deeply aroused. Her body twisted and arched on the table, a sinuous curve he longed to fit himself against. Miach was watching her through slitted eyes, and Conn felt instantly jealous. This thing she was about to experience was for him, and him alone.

  This was not how he had wanted her. He’d wanted her to choose him, to come to him freely. He’d thought that if he couldn’t have her clear-eyed and clutching cold iron, able to see him as he truly was, then he didn’t want her at all.

  How wrong he had been.

  Her hand drifted over her breasts, then lower, into the silk of her skirts. This was definitely not for Miach’s eyes. Conn lifted her off the table and carried her through the open door at the back of the bar. There was an office, and a wide, silk sofa with curving sleigh arms. The shape and ornament were at least a hundred years out of date, but it was deep enough for the two of them to lie side by side.

  He settled her next to him on the plush upholstery, and she immediately rubbed against him like a cat. There was a part of him, deeply Fae, that wanted to use her like this: unconscious and unable to resist the pull of the geis.

  And he was repulsed by that part of himself.

  More difficult to resist was the urge to touch her, to help her along toward completion. He wanted to fold back the silk of her gown and take her nipple into his mouth, suckle until she arched her back and offered herself, then slide a finger along her slick folds and rub until she found release.

  He didn’t. Human ideas of right and wrong had never much interested him before, but here, now, with this woman, he knew it would be a mistake to touch her. So he gathered her into his arms and held her until she shuddered and sighed, and tumbled at last into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  Beth dreamed. She was on Granny’s old sofa, the pink one in the parlor, the room no one ever used anymore except bookish Beth because it had no television in it. And she was naked, knees drawn up, legs open, touching herself.

  But that wasn’t quite right. She turned and a man lay beside her. First, it was her high school beau, the mild, sweet-natured boy who had never done anything more than sneak a furtive hand up her shirt. It shocked her that his touch was so skilled and arousing. Granny must be in the other room. Beth could hear the television, but she felt no fear of discovery and no shame, only a simple, uninhibited pleasure. Yes, she thought, exultant, this is how it is supposed to be. How she had been, before Frank.

  She looked again and the boy was gone, replaced by a man so handsome it hurt to look at him. He didn’t know she was watching him. His face was unguarded, tender, even. She should know him, but she couldn’t remember his name. “Don’t stop,” she said, feeling her climax building.

  “I won’t. Ever.” He spoke, but his lips didn’t move. There was something wrong with that. Ever. That was bad. She should stop him. There was a reason she should stop him, but she couldn’t remember it. Then she didn’t care. She was too close.

  Then she shattered into bliss.

  The sleep that followed was deep and dreamless, the kind that came on the darkest, coldest nights. She didn’t wake up muzzy headed in a cold room, though, but clear-minded and snuggled into the warmth of another.

  Conn.

  They were tangled together on a deep, silk sofa, her head tucked into his shoulder. The upholstery smelled of dust and dry cotton batting, a memory of childhood, sweetly familiar. That’s where Granny’s parlor must have come from in the dream.

  Conn’s eyes were open, studying her.

  “I had a dream,” she began.

  “I hope I was in it,” he answered, then dipped his head to kiss her.

  “I haven’t brushed my teeth!”

  His tongue slipped into her mouth, explored, then withdrew. “You taste like Miach’s best whiskey,” he said.

  It felt so natural, this teasing expression of intimacy, considering he’d never kissed her before. So natural, she shifted to get closer to him—and felt the telltale slickness on her thighs.

  Sick terror shot through her and she pulled away, but found herself trapped by the high back of the sofa. “What did you do?”

  He made no move to pull her back into his arms, and that disappointed her. She’d never felt so confused about another person in all her life. With Frank, she had worshipped him, then loved him, then experienced the slow erosion of her love until there was nothing but disappointment and then bitterness left. With Conn, she didn’t know how she felt.

  “I carried you in here and held you while you slept,” Conn said.

  Beth knew that wasn’t the whole story. “In my dream—,” she started.

  “You came,” he finished. “In your dream, you came. I hope it was for me, in the dream, but here, in the world, I only held you. I won’t do more until you’re ready.”

  He said it with the certainty that she would be ready.

  Miach. The geis. It all came flooding back to her. She looked at her shoulder. The quicksilver tattoo still looked angry and raised. She touched it gingerly. The slightest pressure stung. She didn’t think it should still be so raw and painful. She wondered if it could be infected.

  But she had bigger worries than that. “What will happen to me now that I have your geis?” she asked. The choice had been simple last night: accept the geis or die. Nothing was simple this morning.

  “You’ll want me, physically, whether or not you desire me in spirit. It may be frightening now, but you’ll come to accept it in
time.”

  “Slave to master.”

  “Do you doubt that I would be a gentle master?” he asked. Careful not to touch her geis, he pushed the silk covering her breast down. It sprang free, the nipple swollen and taught. He rolled it beneath his finger, and she moaned and went boneless for him.

  “You have needs, Beth. Long buried. The geis channels them. Fixes them on me. And I, in turn, am gratified when I bare you and find my mark. My property.”

  “Not property,” she gasped. Her mind screamed to fight him, to push him away. Her body overruled it.

  “My prize, then,” he said, before lowering his head and fixing his mouth over her nipple. She threaded her hands through his silken hair, whimpered when he peeled back the silk on her other breast, and rolled the nipple between his thumb and forefinger.

  He lifted his head. “See? This isn’t so bad, is it?”

  She shook her head. No. Not bad. Unbelievable. Like nothing else she’d ever experienced.

  “Can you come like this?” he asked, before lowering his head back to her nipple. He suckled hard, then let her breast pop free from his mouth. “Can you? Or do you need more from me?”

  “More,” she begged.

  A rustle of silk, cool air tickling her knees, her thighs, then, “Oh!” His fingers found her. And it was more. Much more. More than the muted pleasure she’d experienced in her dream.

  For a moment he stopped. She opened her eyes to find him crouched over her, freeing himself from the midnight jeans, lowering his heavy sex to rest on her slick folds. He captured her eyes and said, “The geis won’t be denied, Beth. Your need for me will become intolerable if you don’t allow me to satisfy it.” He rolled his hips forward, gliding through her arousal. “Put me inside you, Beth.”

  She wanted to. So badly she thought she might die if she didn’t take him inside that second. But she’d been a man’s slave once before. “No.”

  He didn’t move a muscle.

  “I want you, I do, but I can’t accept this.”

  “Then your mind will break,” Miach said, standing in the door.