Cold Iron Read online

  This climax, when it came, was deeper and longer lasting that the one before, but he gave her no time to recover. He guided her, still trembling, onto her hands and knees. He did not try to touch her mind, but when she closed her eyes she was naked on the forest floor, being taken from behind. The image he had shown her in the gallery. Ancient and primal. Hunter and prey. But when he finally let go inside her, it was she who cried out in triumph, and he who groaned his submission and collapsed atop her.

  They stayed in bed until late afternoon. Every time she thought she was wrung out, couldn’t possibly respond to him again, she proved herself wrong.

  Finally, Conn suggested that they should eat something. She sprang up from her bed, and used to living alone, headed, naked, for the door.

  “Elada is still out there, Beth.” Conn threw her discarded robe to her.

  The television, she realized, was no longer on in the living room. “Oh my God, I forgot. He must have heard me when I—”

  “No doubt,” Conn said, amused, as he searched the room for his clothing. “Hope for his sake that Miach allows him to keep a woman in South Boston. The sorcerer holds his allies too close, I fear.”

  “That’s why Liam and Nial went along with Brian,” Beth said, remembering the argument in her living room during the kidnapping. “Miach won’t let them leave, won’t let them see women outside the community, or pursue their own interests.”

  “You feel sorry for those who kidnapped you? Allowed the Prince Consort to torture you?”

  “No, but I empathize with them. My own family was working class and anti-intellectual. They didn’t want me to go to college, even though I had a full scholarship. They wanted me to stay home and make a life in the town where I grew up. But it was too small for me. I know they were trying to protect me from hurt and disappointment, but they stifled me, the way Miach is stifling his sons.”

  “Liam and Nial aren’t his sons, Beth. They’re his grandsons. Great-grandsons, really, several generations removed. I don’t think Miach has fathered a child himself in decades, perhaps longer.”

  “Oh.”

  “It becomes more and more difficult, the older we are.”

  “Oh.” She needed to sit down.

  “It is likely for the best, Beth. Fae pregnancies are precarious and difficult. They develop fast and often end . . . badly. Miscarriage is frequent, and prematurity common. I would prefer not to put you through such travail.”

  “Frank never wanted children,” she said. She had never been certain she did either, with Frank anyway, but the thought of not being able to have children, not being able to pass on the Druid heritage she was only now discovering, made her startlingly sad.

  “The vow I made, Beth, it was binding on me, not on you. If you should want a child with someone else—”

  “No!” She didn’t want anyone else, ever. But Conn might. “You’re Fae, you’ll outlive me by hundreds, maybe thousands of years. You can’t possibly keep such a vow.”

  “When we bind ourselves to mortals, we share their mortal span. When you die, I’ll die.”

  “I don’t understand. What happens? I mean, if I get hit by a car tomorrow do you just . . .”

  “No. More like the landlady’s sister. I won’t have the will to live without you.”

  “How could you do this—make this sacrifice—without explaining that to me?”

  “How is it different from what you would share with a mortal man?” he asked sensibly. But she didn’t feel sensible. She knew that elderly people, after they’d been together for decades, tended not to outlive each other for very long, but this . . . She realized the enormity of what he had done.

  The last few hours had been so damned perfect, just the two of them, and now the world was back, and so were the questions she had to ask.

  “What else haven’t you told me?”

  I love you. It was too soon to say such a thing to a mortal, but he had lived for millennia, knew himself and the world so well that there was no room for doubt. He loved her.

  But that wasn’t what she meant. And to say it now would smack of avoidance, so instead, he said, “Your family, though they had probably long forgotten it, had good reason to keep you close, to try to limit your education and your ambition. When the Romans began to subdue the Celts, they encountered the Druids, and knew victory hinged on breaking them.”

  “I know that much. The Romans wiped out the Druids in the first centuries A.D. Their politicians and chroniclers waged a propaganda campaign against them, accused them of human sacrifice.”

  “Not the Romans alone, Beth. Oh, they were brilliant tacticians under the Caesars, make no mistake. They did excellent reconnaissance. They knew the Druids had magic, knew there was something hidden in the hills that gave them power. And if it gave them power, it must also be a vulnerability. So the Romans raided the mounds when the Druids were busy ‘worshipping.’”

  “You mean tapping magic from the imprisoned Fae,” she guessed.

  “Yes. Even had the Druids the best of intentions, drawing power out of a living thing is never a pleasant process. As it was, the Druids had no reason to be kind to us. We’d exploited them for millennia. But when the Romans raided the mounds, they found and freed the tortured Fae. And we helped them complete the slaughter.”

  “That must be where the Roman propaganda about the Druids comes from—finding them torturing the Fae in their mounds. Not human sacrifice, but close enough.”

  Now was the hard part. “No. That part wasn’t propaganda, Beth. Magic comes naturally to the Fae. It’s part of us. But the Druids were human, in the beginning. They had to get their magic elsewhere, and unlock its potential in themselves. Power like that requires sacrifice. Nothing less than the taking of a life will release a Druid’s full powers.”

  She paled. “You mean someone has to die for me to . . .”

  “You don’t have to do anything, Beth. You can remain as you are, and I will protect you from anyone who tries to force you to release your power.”

  “I don’t want to kill anyone. I couldn’t.”

  “But you could be made to, by a Fae who was strong enough.”

  “The Prince Consort,” she whispered. “He told me to grow stronger.”

  Conn swore. “I have to find the Summoner. Until I do, you won’t be safe. Miach is right; without it, I’m weak, and no match for the Prince Consort. And until the sword is found, there is always the chance you may fall into the hands of half-breeds or Fae who will force you to use it.”

  They dressed and went out into the apartment, discovered that Elada had taken up residence in Beth’s tiny office. “Does he have to be here?” she whispered to Conn in the kitchen.

  “Miach was right,” he whispered in her ear, kissing the back of Beth’s neck as she tried to find the salt on the cluttered shelf above the sink. “You distract me. And until I find the sword and resume obedience to my geis, I am doubly handicapped. If Miach knew I had bound myself to your mortality, he would insist we shelter with him in South Boston, and he would be right. But I find I am too selfish to accept his wisdom. I want to be here, alone, or as alone as possible, with you.”

  His mouth trailed down her neck. She tried to ignore him, reached up on tiptoes to grasp the saltshaker. His hands circled her waist and untied the belt from her robe. The cotton fell open, and her belly touched the cool wooden countertop.

  “Conn!”

  “If I am going to put up with Elada’s presence to compensate for my distraction,” he said, cupping her breast, “then I am entitled to be well and truly distracted.”

  Her fingertips grazed the saltshaker, his grazed between her legs, and she shuddered, knocking the shaker from the shelf to clatter off the countertop and land with a crack on the floor. Salt spilled everywhere, but she didn’t care. What he was doing to her was too good. She felt the buttons on his jeans di
gging into the small of her back, reached behind her to tug them open, then froze when she heard the boards creak in the hall.

  Conn didn’t stop. He growled and looked over his shoulder at Elada, standing in the hall.

  “I came to check on the girl,” Elada said, taking up a firm stance and eyeing the salt on the floor.

  “She’s fine,” Conn bit back, still stroking. She should stop him. There was someone else in the room. She was shielded from Elada’s sight, but it was still wrong, wicked, and totally irresistible.

  Elada didn’t move.

  “Tell him,” Conn said tapping her clit, “that you are fine.” Tap. Stroke.

  “I’m fine,” she gasped.

  The boards creaked again and Elada was gone, and in another second Conn was there, where she needed him.

  In the morning Beth dressed and went to work, Elada trailing her at a discreet distance. Conn left to see Miach. “He is our best hope of tracking your errant ex-husband,” Conn explained. “He knows the Fae in this region, and he has the resources to find a man on the run.”

  She wasn’t entirely certain what she would find when she got to the museum. The opening in the Maya gallery had been on a Thursday night. She’d missed a day of work on Friday, nothing unusual among the curatorial staff who came and went as their outside commitments dictated. But she had also missed the meeting with Frank and Dave Monroe, at which her fate had probably been decided.

  She was shocked to find Helene at her desk, coiffed and calm and looking for all the world as though she had never been abducted and abused by Miach’s fractious family.

  “Frank never turned up for his meeting with Dave, and he hasn’t returned any of Dave’s calls, so as long as you don’t raise the question of the stolen artifacts again, I suspect your job is safe for now.”

  “That’s a relief,” Beth said. “But how are you doing?”

  “Me? I’m fine. Why?”

  That’s when Beth noticed the flowers in the trash. An enormous arrangement, hundreds of dollars of roses and orchids and baby’s breath crushed beneath a vase that looked suspiciously like Waterford.

  “Because we were both kidnapped and held overnight on an abandoned island and you were out of my sight for hours and obviously traumatized.”

  Helene smiled pertly, wrinkled her nose in that dismissive way she did sometimes, and said, “I’d rather not talk about it.”

  “I’m not sure it’s the kind of thing you just don’t talk about.”

  “Remember when you turned up at my house with a suitcase, and you insisted you couldn’t remember what happened with Frank and Egan? It’s like that. I don’t remember.”

  It was like that, and it had been a mistake, burying it. Beth knew that now, so she took a deep breath and said, “I did remember, but I didn’t want to remember.”

  Helene looked at her blankly. “Is that supposed to make me open up? I told you I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Then Helene’s lip curled. She was looking past Beth’s shoulder, and when Beth turned, she almost jumped out of her skin. “What are you doing here?”

  Liam and Nial stood in the doorway. Nial looked unhappy to be there, and Liam looked embarrassed. “We’re here to apologize.”

  “The old man sent us,” Nial added, spoiling the effect.

  “He asked how you liked the flowers.”

  Beth couldn’t stop herself from looking at the trash.

  “Oh,” Liam said. “Hopefully you’ll like this better.”

  He placed an enormous box on the chair in front of Helene’s desk and backed out of the room. Nial trailed after him.

  “I’ll tell security not to let them back in,” Beth said.

  “Don’t bother,” Helene said, her voice finally breaking. “Those assholes can glamour their way past. There’s no getting away from them,” she whispered.

  “Helene, I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Just get out. And take that with you.”

  Beth did as she asked. The box was heavy but manageable, and when she got to her office, she closed the door and untied the wrappings. Curiousity overcame any finer feelings.

  The coat inside was silver Persian lamb, fashionably cut, the lining embroidered with Helene’s initials. Beth knew that things like that cost more than she made in a year. And that the dramatic style and striking color were definitely Helene. A gift calculated to placate and seduce. The note tucked in the pocket read: With apologies for the cold night you spent in my house, Miach.

  Miach was not at the bar. Conn followed the directions he was given to City Point and immediately spotted the warded house overlooking the harbor. It was a sprawling Victorian, limned with porches and crowned by half a dozen cupolas of varying size. The style appealed to his Fae love of ornament and chaos, though his own taste in human architecture ran more to the classicism of the Greeks and Romans.

  Miach received him in a second floor office with an impressive view out over the harbor’s choppy gray water.

  “Frank Carter has disappeared,” Miach said. “Likewise his friend Egan. We attempted to trace the man, but he’s a dubious character. Trained as a doctor, used to be affiliated with a tony addiction clinic at one of the local hospitals, but lost his standing there when one of his patients died after changing her will in his favor.”

  It did not surprise Conn. “So what do we do now?” Conn asked.

  “We wait. My contacts in New York say Carter went to meet the Manhattan Fae at one of their Hudson River compounds, but, wisely, didn’t take the Summoner with him. He demanded a higher price than they had originally agreed upon. Naturally the Fae acquiesced at once, since they intended to kill him in any case. But Carter must possess enough Fae blood to be sensitive to such things, because he never returned with the sword.”

  “So the Manhattan Fae will be hunting him, too,” Conn surmised.

  “The sword,” replied Miach, “and the girl. I must insist that you bring her here where she will be safe.”

  “And where she will be convenient to hand if you decide she must be killed,” Conn guessed. “Her name is Beth. Do not think I have missed the fact that you never call her by it. She read you well. You shrink from killing women. But you are trying to harden your heart to kill this one.”

  “I cannot promise you that I will not do so. I have my family to think of.”

  “Forgive me, sorcerer, if your family does not engage my sympathy.”

  Miach looked out the window, across the water, to the unseen island where his son was stranded. “Brian, for all that he has human blood, is Fae—as we were before the fall. Petty, puerile, and cruel. Because he can be. Because everyone he has ever known, save Elada and myself, is weaker than he is, and no one has ever thwarted his will. I know that he is a monster, every bit as much as the Prince Consort. But this monster is my son.”

  “He is also a fool. The Prince Consort would as like kill him as look at him if it suited his purpose. Your family is mortal and vulnerable, Miach, as mine was, but if you help me find the Summoner, I’ll stand with you against any who would do them harm. Even the Prince Consort. I swear it.”

  Another geis laid upon himself, another commitment to honor, but hopefully not one that would conflict with any of the others and lead him down the path to ruin that Cú Chulainn had walked.

  “Thank you,” Miach said carefully, turning to face Conn. “I accept your pledge. However, there is another solution. If the girl were trained, if her power were released—”

  “It would destroy her. To release her power, she would have to participate in murder.”

  “Not murder. An execution,” Miach soothed. “I could bring her a felon. Someone deserving of death. A worthy—that is to say, to others worthless—sacrifice. And she needn’t wield the knife. I could do that. All she would need to do is accept the power. And afterward I would train her
myself, as I did so many Druids before the fall. I could teach her to defend herself from any Fae who tried to bend her to his will. Even the Prince Consort.”

  “I can protect her from the prince,” Conn insisted.

  “Only by keeping her under glass, and she will never tolerate that. She has too much spirit, but that is part of the reason she has such potential. There is only myself and Elada here. You know as well as I that half a dozen true Fae could overcome us, then cut my family down like flowers in the field. You know they would do it, for sport or for spite, depending on their whim. Your Druid could fight alongside us, if trained.”

  “She will not be.”

  “You say that becoming a full Druid would destroy her, but you cannot know that. She may be stronger than you think.”

  “It is not a question of strength. It is a question of conscience, and character.”

  “Human terms,” Miach said dismissively.

  “She is human. Mostly,” Conn added, remembering her wild appearance in that kitchen on the island.

  “And she is exciting, because she is beautiful and dangerous,” Miach observed. “But ask yourself this, Conn. Are you protecting her, or yourself? At the moment she is a blade without an edge. Lovely to look at but unlikely to kill. If she became a full Druid, would you still be able to enjoy her in bed, knowing she could drain you with a touch?”

  He didn’t know.

  “Speak with her about it. You owe me that much. My family was safe here before you came,” Miach said.

  “No, Miach, they were not safe. Brian must have been in communication with the Prince Consort long before Beth and I arrived. You have kept your family too close here. They are shamed and quiet for now, because of how Brian treated the women, but they will not stay cowed for long.”

  “I give you my word that Beth will be safe from my family beneath my roof,” Miach said.

  It was a vow, and binding. “But Elada is not of your family, and you do not give me your word that you will not order her killed if you think it necessary.”