Blade Dance (A Cold Iron Novel Book 4) Read online

  A blue glow illuminated the end of the passage. Beyond was a small chamber much like the horrible lab they had passed through earlier, but this one was occupied and the unmistakable iron tang of blood hung in the air. There was also the low hum of electronic equipment. At the center of the room stood one of the ancient tables she had seen earlier, but this one was covered in monitors and laptops. A thick rope of tangled extension cords hung from an opening in the ceiling above, and a satellite dish was perched on a ledge of rock high in the chimney.

  Ann gave a little cry. At the far end of the chamber, Davin McTeer sat on the cold ground, head resting on his knees. Her chest constricted and her throat closed. She realized that she hadn’t really believed they would find him alive. It was a gift from some higher power and she had never felt so grateful in her life.

  Ann forgot caution. She dropped her knife and ran to him.

  “Davin?” she said.

  The boy looked up, and Ann knew that he didn’t believe his own eyes for a second. “Miss Phillips?” he asked in a perplexed whisper.

  She knelt on the floor in front of him. “Are you all right, Davin?”

  He bit his lip. “I didn’t want to go with him, but the ink made me,” he said, rubbing the tattoos that now reached all the way to his wrists. “I had to do what he said. I have to do the things he says. Forever.” Tears welled in his eyes.

  “No you don’t, Davin,” said Ann. “We’ve come to take you home. And we’ll figure out a way to remove your tattoos. I promise.”

  She wasn’t certain he heard her. He was looking past her, and Ann turned to see the Prince standing in the doorway.

  “That’s your uncle,” said Ann. It was odd to describe the Prince in such familial terms, but there was no denying the resemblance. They shared blood, this little boy and the magnificent figure with the sword.

  “My mom says that my uncle is a prince. Are you really a prince?” asked Davin, climbing to his feet. “Like in stories?”

  The Prince seemed at a loss for words. He stood frozen in the doorway, staring at the little boy.

  “He likes stories,” prompted Ann.

  “So did his father,” said the Prince. “Just like in stories,” he told Davin.

  “What kinds of stories are those?” asked a voice from the doorway. It had a strange resonance, one that made Ann’s head hurt, as though it were comprised of many voices, each one a beat out of sync with all the others, all of them subtly, undeniably wrong.

  The speaker was as disturbing as the sound he made. He was tall and gaunt, and while he had nothing about him to suggest the beauty of the Fae, there was something about his eyes that suggested their cruelty. And yet he was human. Or had started out that way.

  His hair hung lank around his face, hacked raggedly off at the shoulders. His skin was pale and chalky, and his lips were chapped. He was wearing a fisherman’s yellow rain slicker, but it was covered in brown and green stains. Beneath it, his chest was hairless and bare, covered in gray tattoos that appeared to move in the blue light of the computer monitors. They made Ann think of snakes. His pants had once been wool suit trousers, but the cuffs were caked in mud and tattered, long threads hanging around his bare feet.

  “In our stories,” the Druid continued, “you are not the Prince but the villain.”

  “And in ours, you are the monster,” said the Prince. “Did you really think you could keep this secret from me?”

  “I did,” said the Druid. “For months. You’re only here now because I’m finally ready for you. Did you like my welcome mat in the passage?”

  “Iron dust is a coward’s weapon,” said the Prince.

  The Druid laughed. “Spare me your tinsel Fae honor.”

  “You’ll be lucky if I spare your life,” said the Prince. “I want all of this, everything you have found here, packed and on its way to the compound, now.”

  Now the Druid sneered. “No.”

  “Everything here,” said the Prince, “is mine. I trained you. I funded your research. I fed and clothed you, and evidently you aren’t capable of doing that for yourself. Everything you are, you owe to me. You were a fucking engineer before I found you.”

  “Yes. And because of that, I can tell you to an ounce how much iron you breathed in to get here. Would you like to know? Enough, I’m certain, to make it impossible for you to pass. You’re my prisoner, just like the boy, and your blood will yield up even more secrets than his has.”

  Ann felt sick with horror. Davin shrank back against Ann, trembling. The Prince said nothing but he moved with efficient speed, despite his poisoned state. He unsheathed his sword gracefully and lunged at the Druid.

  His thrust met empty air as the Druid vanished.

  Ann felt the ground tremble. There was a deep rumbling in the earth. Iron bars shot across the opening they had come through and across the oculus at the center of the chamber.

  “What the hell just happened?”’ asked Ann.

  “He passed,” said Davin. “Like my dad does, only he shouldn’t be able to.”

  “No, he shouldn’t,” agreed the Prince. “But he can. And apparently the Druid machinery in this mound is still in working order.”

  “How can he pass if he isn’t Fae?” asked Ann.

  “It’s one of the powers the Druids coveted most, and apparently, the Druids in this mound must have discovered how to acquire it. I suspected as much when we arrived. This place is too remote to come and go easily except by passing. Who knows how many years after their destruction on the mainland this group continued their work?”

  “Where has he gone?”

  “I don’t know,” said the Prince. “But evidently he’s not worried that we’ll be able to get away, and for the moment, he’s right about that. These mounds were built to hold the Fae. The bars can’t be shifted by anyone but a Druid. We’re trapped until I’m able to pass us out of here, or Miach and your lover follow the trail of breadcrumbs we left for them. Unless you feel a berserk coming on, of course. That would be handy, especially if you can bend iron.”

  “I can’t make it come when called. And I doubt that I can bend iron.” The bars were rusted but thick, covered in strange symbols worked in repoussé.

  “You’d be surprised,” said the Prince. “I’ve seen berserkers perform feats impossible for even the Fae. It’s one of the reasons we deigned to mingle our blood lines with them.”

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you, then. There wasn’t much call for bending iron in my classroom.” She hugged Davin close to her, wishing they were both back in that safe, warm place.

  “A pity. When, exactly, were you expecting Miach and Finn to turn up?”

  “They were going to try to follow you by scrying, but Miach said that would be tricky. It’s one of the reasons I hitched a ride with you when you passed. I was worried that you would look for the Druid first and Davin second. I loaded an application onto Finn’s phone that could track mine—or at least that could have tracked it if there was a signal here. I was going to text him as soon as we arrived. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out.”

  The Prince nodded toward the cords hanging through the chimney. “There’s a wireless router in that mess, so the Druid has some kind of network set up. See if you can use that to send your text.”

  “Won’t it be password protected?”

  “From who? We’re on an unknown island in the Irish Sea.”

  “Good point.”

  The Prince was right: the Druid’s network wasn’t password protected. Ann found it and tried her text again. Her heart nearly a skipped a beat when she heard the whoosh. A second later, her phone told her that her message had been read. Now all Finn needed to do was open the tracking application she’d downloaded onto his phone and he’d be able to find her, even if they moved from their current location.

  She smiled when she saw his reply: Where
the hell are you?

  On an island in the Irish Sea. She typed in the GPS coordinates. Trapped in a Druid mound. Iron bars. Iron filings. Be careful. This Druid can pass.

  She waited to see that it had gone through. And she was surprised, minutes later, when he texted back: I love you.

  Her heart truly did skip a beat. No one had ever said that to her before. No, that wasn’t true. Her real mother had said that, twenty years ago. There had been bars between them then, too. Her chest ached at the memory.

  She started to text him back, but the Druid appeared again. He flickered past Ann, an iron knife similar to the ones Nieve had brought from the forge in his left hand.

  “None of that now,” he said and gave a hysterical giggle. He grabbed her cell phone and slashed at her, and for a second she thought that he had missed, then pain erupted across both her forearms and red stains blossomed through her sweater.

  The Druid blinked out of sight again and reappeared across the room. Ann pushed Davin behind her. The Druid dashed her phone against the wall, shattering the case and screen. The pieces showered to the floor, and crazily Ann thought: I haven’t paid that off yet. Then the Druid lifted the iron knife to his lips and licked it, closing his eyes and sighing, horrid delight written across his gaunt face.

  “Berserker blood,” he said, like an oenophile who has just tasted a rare vintage. “There are jars of it here, you know. Fae blood as well. I’ve sampled it all. They knew how to draw it, how to preserve it, even, but they didn’t understand it. They kept it to store the organs in. The hearts. And livers. And spleens. They were brilliant scholars, my ancestors, but hampered by the misconceptions of their age. They believed that the ability to pass, the gift of the berserk, the resonance of the Fae voice, must reside in some discrete organ. They didn’t understand that it was all about the blood.”

  “There are more Fae on the way,” said Ann, holding her arms together to apply pressure to stop the bleeding.

  “Rallying to the aid of the Prince Consort? Difficult to imagine. His own people despise him almost as much as mine do.”

  “They’re not coming for me,” said the Prince. “They’re coming for the berserker and for the child.”

  The Druid shrugged. “They won’t want their corpses. And they won’t want you. And while I may be able to find a use for berserker blood . . . ”

  He blinked out of sight once more. Ann knew a moment of pure terror. She felt the passage of the air around her when he passed again, but he moved so quickly that she didn’t see the knife until he slashed it across her stomach.

  “. . . it doesn’t have to be fresh.”

  Chapter 16

  Finn passed the cell phone to Miach. “The Druid has her. She’s in a mound,” he said. His voice sounded far away.

  Miach shot him a look and took the phone out of his hand. “This is not the fall,” he said, reaching for a pencil and bending over the map on the table. “Ann is not Brigid. We will get her back.”

  Finn understood the words, but he didn’t believe them. He had survived too much, traveled too far, to lose Brigid that day. In the years since he had wondered what he could have done differently, how he could have come to her rescue sooner.

  His own captivity, he later estimated, had lasted a little more than a year. He had been one of the first that Miach and the Prince had come for, because his was a famous name and his freedom would rally others. They had already freed too many Fae whose spirits were as broken as their bodies, and they needed fighters if they were to turn the tide quickly enough to destroy the Druids.

  The advantage belonged to the Druids. They had planned their revolt so carefully over so many years and with such precision that the Fae were taken almost without a fight. Iron, of course, was their weapon of choice, and they had been forging it in secret, devising ever more grisly ways to use it.

  The Prince, Finn, Miach, and Elada had known that the key was to move quickly. If they took out Druid mounds one by one, if they left no survivors, if they could keep ahead of word of their escape, they would be able to take each cluster unawares.

  It was the marks that made them most vulnerable. All but the Prince, whose skin would not scar, bore them, carved into their flesh while they were incapacitated by iron dust. The marks compelled obedience to the Druid voice. The only way to counter them was to have a sorcerer cast a silence.

  Every raid took the same shape. The Prince would enter the Druid steading first and draw their attention while Miach cast a silence over the entire community, with Elada at his side to protect him.

  Then they would start killing. They did it efficiently, but Finn was ever on the lookout for high-ranking Druids who might be spared for interrogation. Because he was searching for his wife.

  He’d wanted to go immediately south when he was first freed, because he’d hoped that Brigid and their children might have escaped. She was a formidable swordswoman, his wife, and resourceful. If anyone could evade capture, she could. The Prince and Miach, though, convinced him that their defeat had been utter and complete. No Fae remained free. The Queen and her Court were beyond the wall. Everyone else was dead or captive in the mounds.

  But Finn knew Brigid was not dead. She was his other half. They had been together too long. He would have known if she had departed the earth. He would have followed her into death; they were that closely bound.

  Finn had known Miach and the Prince were right, but when they had neared his old lands in their campaign, he’d been unable to resist the lure of home. Finn had slipped away in the middle of the night to search for his family.

  He’d found his children left to rot in the fields and the house where they had been born. The Druids had killed them, and his horses, too, slashing their throats, as though Fae and beast were all livestock.

  Miach had come upon him there, sitting in the empty shell of his manor where nature had already begun to reassert herself and saplings grew in cracks between the floor tiles.

  “She isn’t here,” he’d said to his oldest friend.

  “Then she may still live,” had said Miach.

  “She lives.” He’d been sure of it then.

  They had found Brigid in a mound in the west. She lived for three days after Finn carried her out, and Miach worked that whole time to save her, pouring life into her until his lips were cracked and his hair fell out, and still she died. The Prince had stood by, silent for once, but Finn had known they risked the unraveling of their whole enterprise by staying there, because as soon as the Druids became aware of their escape, they would not be so easy to best.

  He was holding her when she died. It was not a peaceful death. It was out under the open sky, a small consolation, but she convulsed twice and struggled to breathe and went still, her eyes glassy and unseeing. Blood, more than seemed possible, had poured from her open mouth.

  He had wanted to bury her. He had wanted to take her home and bury her under the house where they had been so happy. He had wanted to wash her body in running water and anoint it with precious oils and wrap her in fine cloth embroidered with gold. There was no time for it. He knew that. They had already tarried too long. So they burned her on a pyre, and let the fire cleanse the blood from her desecrated body.

  It was decades before he could remember her any other way, before he could recall what she had looked like in life, beautiful and vibrant and strong.

  “There is nothing there,” Miach said, recalling him to the present. “It is a spot in the middle of the Irish Sea.” He drew an X on the map to mark the spot.

  “She said it was an island,” said Finn.

  “One cloaked in magic and not by me,” said Miach.

  “Give me the phone,” said Finn.

  Miach handed it over. “She is a berserker and unmarked, and she is with the only Fae born before the fall who is not subject to Druid command. Chances are good that we can save her and t
he boy.”

  Chances were good, but they were not certainties, and so he typed his message out and said a silent prayer to Dana that Ann saw it: I love you.

  Ann tried to take a step toward Davin, but the pain from the Druid’s knife cuts hit her all at once. She crumpled to her knees.

  The little boy screamed.

  The Druid sighed. “I grow weary of such caterwauling,” he said.

  Ann watched through a haze of pain as the Druid passed. He flickered out of sight, but there was no doubt where he would reappear. As Ann watched with held breath, the Prince stepped in front of Davin, dropped to his knees, and pulled the child into his arms, just as the Druid materialized at his back. Ann saw the Druid’s knife move in a smooth arc, intended for the boy, but blocked by the Prince’s body. It went in through the Prince’s shoulder blades, and the point came out through his chest.

  Davin’s eyes, level with Prince’s pierced heart, went wide with horror. The wound glowed silver.

  “Don’t be afraid,” said the Prince.

  The silver traveled from his pierced heart to his shoulders. Davin’s eyes followed its progress as it ran down the Prince’s arms—and up his own. It flowed over the fresh tattoos and up his face, freezing the child’s features in an open-mouthed expression of wonder.

  The Druid circled the frozen pair, tapped the Prince’s silver shoulder with a dirty fingernail, then turned his bloodshot eyes on Ann.

  She was going to die. Finn wasn’t going to get there in time. She was on a remote island with a psychotic killer. The Prince was incapacitated. But Davin was safe in his unexpectedly heroic uncle’s silver embrace, and Finn was on his way.

  And she wasn’t going to see him again.

  Something burst inside her. Anger, cleansing and bright, washed over her, and the pain in her arms and across her belly faded. She stood up and faced the Druid, who was as stupid as Sean Silver Blade. He just stood there, waiting for her to do something.

  He thought she was weak. He thought she was powerless. He was wrong. She was pure strength, pure power. She could feel it in her fingertips, at the roots of her hair. For a second she enjoyed the potentiality, the feeling of being released from long captivity.