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

  Then she launched herself at him.

  And crashed headlong into the table full of computers. It went skidding across the floor and hit a shelf full of glass jars that toppled to the ground and shattered, blood and other strange fluids exploding on impact.

  She felt a wet, hot line of pain across her back and screamed in frustration and fury, but the sound died on her lips. Her ears popped. She whirled to find the Druid there, knife in hand, smiling.

  And then Finn was there in the room, standing behind the Druid, sword in his hands, and he stabbed the creature through. The Druid opened his mouth but no sound came out. He dropped to his knees, raged silently, and then vanished.

  Finn threw his sword down and rushed to Ann, and she cried out when he took her in his arms, but there was still no sound. There was a cotton wool quality to the silence, as though she had been deafened by an explosion or her ears were plugged from altitude. Then something popped and sound came rushing back: the hum of the computers and the tones of Finn’s voice speaking soothing nonsense in her ear.

  Pain came rushing back, too. Blood was still flowing from the wounds in her arms and across her stomach and back, and she suddenly felt cold and light-headed. The room spun, and she felt Finn lowering her to the desecrated floor.

  She registered the arrival of more Fae: Sean and Garrett and Miach and Patrick and Iobáth and several of the Fianna she did not know by name.

  “What is this?” asked Sean, standing over the effigy of his brother and son, locked in a silver embrace.

  “He saved Davin,” said Ann. “I think.”

  Miach was kneeling beside her, pushing back her sleeves and peeling her sweater off, and everything hurt. “They’re going to be fine,” he called over his shoulder to Sean. “But Ann won’t be unless I give her my undivided attention. The Prince can wait.”

  “But my son,” said Sean.

  “Is alive, and somehow, your brother shared his enchantment with him.”

  “Did you know he could do that?” asked Sean.

  “No,” said Miach. “But I am not surprised. The Silver Skin was the Queen’s greatest accomplishment, an enchantment unexcelled by any Fae.”

  “We’ve got to get you outside, as soon as I can stop the bleeding,” said Miach.

  “Fine by me,” said Ann. “But there are things I need to show you, in the passageways, and there are iron bars in our way.”

  “We’ll pass to get outside,” said Finn. “Just sit still and let him work.”

  Miach’s hands were examining her wounds, pressing on them in a way that made the pain sharp and fresh, and it was all she could do to stop herself from curling into a ball. She shut her eyes tightly against the sight of the gash in her tummy. Then she felt a buzzing warmth where his hands touched her. It felt a little better, gradually, the way the cramps from her period slowly receded after she downed a bunch of painkillers. It didn’t feel better enough for Finn to be lifting her into his lap, and she protested in language that was definitely not suitable for the classroom, but he ignored her and then suddenly they were outside, and she could hear the ocean and see trees overhead and smell the pine sap in the air.

  The cold, damp air felt good. It felt clean. It flowed into her lungs and gave her new life. Or maybe that was Miach’s hands, which had folded her bloody turtleneck back over her stomach and ripped open her sleeves to get better access to the wounds there. Now his touch was firmer. The cuts burned for a second, then the skin of her arms seemed to stiffen and stretch, then she felt a surprising amount of relief and realized that all of her pain was gone and all she now felt was the warmth of Finn’s embrace.

  She looked up into his face.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” he asked.

  “I love you, too,” she said.

  “Right,” said Miach. “I am going to drain a few trees and then, Dana help me, I’m going to restore the Prince Consort to life.”

  “What about Davin?” Ann asked, starting to sit up, then thinking better of it. Her head spun when she lifted it.

  “You’ve lost a lot of blood,” said Miach, “and it’s not practical for me to replace all of it here. You’re going to have sit this round out. You’re part Fae, so you should be able to draw a little strength from the trees and underbrush here. Davin will be fine. Unfortunately, so will the Prince, once I pull the knife out of his heart. And not even I’m hardhearted enough to thrust it back in before the eyes of a seven-year-old.”

  “You might change your mind,” said Ann, “when you see what’s inside the mound.”

  Finn didn’t care what was in the mound. He didn’t care about the Prince Consort. He was glad the child was safe, but if Ann had died . . .

  “Whatever it is can wait,” said Finn.

  “There are plans for the wall,” she said, sitting up like the stubborn little berserker that she was. “We found them in a chamber on the way to the Druid’s lab. There’s a whole room where the walls have been cut and inlaid with glowing lines, and the Prince said they were like blueprints for the wall between worlds. He said he would study them until he found a weakness.”

  “Destroy them,” said Finn.

  Miach sighed. “I doubt they can be destroyed. If they really are plans for the wall between worlds, they’ll exist, just like the wall does, in both planes.”

  “Then seal the mound,” said Finn. “Blow the damned thing up. We have C-4 on the docks in Charlestown. Bring the mound down and let the Prince dig through a hundred tons of earth if he wants to study them.”

  “That may not be practical,” said Miach. “I don’t know what kind of effect the Silver Skin enchantment will have on the boy. I have to release them both from it now or risk lasting harm to the child. Even if you left this minute and brought back explosives and allies, the Prince would have time to do the same. He would bring back his courtiers and his Druids. Or, if he was smart, he would bring back a high definition camera and photograph the plans and laugh while we dynamite the mound.”

  “Then there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle,” said Ann.

  “Probably not,” agreed Miach. “But if the Prince can study the plans for weaknesses, we can study them for them ways to strengthen the wall.”

  “There are wards in the tunnels,” she warned him. “And there’s iron dust in some of the passages.”

  Miach nodded. “We’ll proceed with caution. And I’ll check in on you at Finn’s house this evening.”

  He passed, and Finn was left alone with Ann. Her clothes were in tatters and soaked in blood, and her hair was wild.

  “You’re so damned beautiful,” he said to her.

  She laughed and hauled herself to sit up a little straighter against the tree at her back. “I look like hell,” she said.

  “You look like a berserker, bloody from battle, and that’s beautiful to me. To any Fae, really. But I wish to Dana you hadn’t come with the Prince. When I think what might have happened . . . Never again, Ann. Promise me that we’ll make decisions together. That we won’t keep secrets from each other like that.”

  “I promise,” she said. “As long as you promise never to forbid me from coming with you again.”

  “I can’t promise you that. I don’t want you anywhere near a creature like that Druid ever again. Or the Prince Consort, for that matter.”

  “So does that mean you’ve retracted your invitation to join the Fianna?”

  He sighed. “No. It means that I can’t lead them effectively if I’m worried about you. And I will worry about you until I know you can summon your power at will.”

  “You mean with Fae ink.”

  “I mean with training, and, yes, with some ink from Miach.”

  She bit her lip and looked away.

  “Ann,” he said. “Your gifts, the berserker inside you, that’s what kept the Druid occupied long enough for us to g
et there. That’s what saved Davin. If you hadn’t been able to keep him busy, he could have pulled the knife out of the Prince’s back and killed the child. Why don’t you want to embrace that power?”

  “Because I’m afraid of it,” she said.

  “But why?” he asked. “You’ve never hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it. I’m sure of that.”

  “But my mother did,” she said.

  Chapter 17

  She sat with her back against the tree, feeling the damp, cool air on her face. Finn’s beauty, framed by the wildness all around them, struck her forcefully. As did his concern. She could read it in every inch of his body. This man was her lover. She’d been more intimate with him than with any living being, ever, but somehow it was easier to share bodies than to tell the story of her childhood.

  Because she was afraid that he would reject her. She wanted another night with him before that, another night to feel loved and cherished and free to be herself with a man. But that was selfishness talking, and cowardice, because tomorrow she would want another night. And then another. And the problem was not going to go away.

  “What were your parents like?” she asked, prolonging the inevitable, trying to figure out how to put it all into words.

  “Mine?” asked Finn. “They were country Fae. They were old when they had me, and I always had the impression that they were surprised to have me.”

  “Did they love you?”

  He seemed to consider it. Then he said, “I’m certain they did, but they were old-fashioned, formal, distant with me, although not, I think, with each other. They had a language of their own in a way, a manner of communicating. They thought the same way. They had been together a long time by the time I arrived, and I was very much a visitor in their lives. Welcome, but a visitor all the same. They did things according to the old ways. We never even had Druids to oversee our lands. My parents and I hunted and we had orchards, but they were suspicious of fields and the vast serf populations needed to tend them. That was all the Queen’s doing, and they remembered the old monarch, from when the court was smaller and less powerful.”

  “But the example they set for you as adults was one you weren’t afraid of growing into,” she concluded.

  “Not afraid,” he agreed, “no. But I didn’t necessarily want to follow it. It was Brigid’s family who opened my eyes to what a marriage could be. Her parents did love each other, unfashionable as that was with the Queen, and the warmth of their home was something we wanted to re-create together.”

  “I didn’t have that,” said Ann. “I had the opposite. I never knew my father. My mother was promiscuous. I learned that word from a social worker when I was five. My father was just one of hundreds of men she slept with. She couldn’t remember their names. Nothing was regular, safe, or secure about living with my mother except the pattern of poverty and flight. That was always the same. She could never hold down a job for more than a few months at a time. She never finished school, so the jobs were never very good. Grocery bagger, dishwasher, parking attendant. It didn’t matter. She could never keep them. She’d get mad and then she’d get into a fight and then she’d hurt someone. She’d get fired, we’d fall behind on the rent, and then we’d be evicted. And I’ve always been afraid that I’d end up like her.”

  “You’re nothing like your mother,” said Finn. “You finished school. You hold down a job. You have a temper, I’ll give you that, but you control it.”

  “Only because I’ve built my life around controlling it. And my mother was in control, too, for weeks, months, sometimes years at a time, but it only takes one slip. It was a rotten childhood, all in all. We were never warm, we never had enough to eat, but we had each other, until my mother slipped, and then we didn’t even have that.”

  “What happened to her?” Finn asked. He was standing very close to her, rubbing her back, and when she shivered, he pulled off his flannel shirt and put it over her shoulders, pulling her into his warmth.

  It was so hard to talk about it. She wanted to tell him, but she couldn’t do it now. She was tired and cold and she’d never get through the story in this condition without breaking down into tears. “I’ll tell you later,” she said. “I promise. For now, I want to go home.”

  Ann stood up slowly. She felt light-headed at first, but she grasped the tree to steady herself. Somehow she seemed to draw strength from it. “Hang on,” she said. “I never knew bark could be so comforting,” she joked.

  “That’s because you have some Fae blood,” he said. He was hovering over her like she was a child taking her first steps, and she was unsteady enough to be grateful for it. “You can draw from living things. Not as efficiently as a Fae, probably, and certainly nothing like the way Miach does, but enough to make a difference.”

  “Ginger tea,” she said.

  “What?”

  “It’s like ginger tea. The kind you buy in packets at the Chinese market. It’s honey powder and dried ginger, and you mix it up in hot water and it makes your nausea go away like magic. That’s what it feels like clutching the bark.”

  “If you’re nauseous, then we stay put,” he said.

  “How about if I’m starving and nauseous?” she said.

  “You can’t be both at the same time.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  “Mrs. Friary will have a meal ready when we get back,” he said.

  “I don’t want Mrs. Friary’s cooking tonight. I want pizza in front of the television. My television. And beer. And my own bed.”

  “Mrs. Friary will be making chocolate mousse,” he reminded her.

  “How about we take it to go?” she said, thinking of her bed in the attic beneath the skylights.

  “I can’t, Ann. I called the Fianna together today to rescue Davin. I led them into the very last place on earth any of them ever wanted to go again: a Druid mound. You’ve seen the tattoos on my shoulders. They’re the mantle of responsibility. I have to thank those Fae and half-bloods and break bread and drink with them because there is a fight coming, a fight to keep the wall standing, and I finally know what side the Fianna and I should be on.”

  “Did you really mean what you texted me? Or did you just send that message because it was too late to tell Brigid?”

  The words left her mouth before she realized what she was saying. It was too raw. She saw the meaning hit him like a whip. He closed his eyes and let out a breath.

  “I’m sorry,” said Ann. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m not very good at this. No one has ever said they loved me before. No one except my mother. It’s made me greedy and selfish.”

  Finn opened his eyes and stepped close. He took her face in his hands. The warmth of his touch made her realize how cold she was.

  “I love you, Ann Phillips. Never doubt that. But I have to do what is right or I will be weakened, and without the Fianna, the wall will come down. Tonight, we sleep in my bed. Tomorrow, it will be yours. I promise.”

  Chapter 18

  Iobáth was not looking forward to his interview with the sorcerer. He was finding the Fae in Boston and the complicated, dangerously entwined houses of MacCecht and MacUmhaill far trickier to navigate than he had anticipated. And Miach MacCecht had always been the trickiest of Fae sorcerers.

  They had conferred briefly before deciding how best to storm the Druid mound. Passing to an unknown location could be challenging. Translating Ann’s GPS coordinates to something that a Fae mind could fix on, to wind and rain and surf and sand and tall pines, was the bread and butter of a modern mage like Miach, so they were able to arrive on the island’s shores whole and hale.

  It was still a shock to find himself inside a Druid mound after all these years. He had heard that Conn of the Hundred Battles had burrowed like an animal into his, sleeping for centuries at a time. The leader of the Fianna in New York, Donal, had described it to him in the terms of the age
, as “depression.”

  The Druid was gone, untraceable, according to Miach. And, more important, the berserker was bleeding from a belly wound. Finn looked stricken. Iobáth had thought himself inured to that kind of suffering, but he felt the old grief well up in him and he had to turn away so that no one would see his face when Miach said that she would live, and the three of them passed out of sight.

  Iobáth knew that he ought to examine the notebooks and computers the creature had left behind, that it was his sacred penance to prevent the creature from doing any more mischief, but all he could think was how different the Druid he’d met at the library, Diana, was from the people who had built this mound. She’d been what the Druids once were, a scholar, fiercely attached to her books. Maybe he should return the book to the girl and take leave of the houses of MacCecht and MacUmhaill and go to one of the old cities, the ones that had been little towns before the fall, like London or Paris, or even great centers of empire, like Rome or Athens, where familiarity would give him some ease. It might be wise to find a woman as unlike Diana Seater as possible. He did not deserve the comfort of a woman who remembered his name.

  Miach returned without Finn and the berserker and ordered Garrett to search the Druid’s computers and notes. “And fetch Liam and Nial here so we have half-bloods who can remove the iron dust and get those bars rolled back safely. And when you’re home and have a cell phone signal, call Conn and ask if he will bring Beth. It would help to have a Druid who can interpret the plans of the wall.”

  Iobáth stepped forward. “We need to have a word.”

  Miach nodded. “As soon as I release the Prince.”

  “You’re not going to just let him go, are you?”

  “I don’t see that we have a choice,” said Miach.

  “He saved my son,” said Sean, who had not left the silver effigy’s side since they arrived.