Silver Skin (A Cold Iron Novel) Read online

  Helene looked down at the blood covering her arms, her legs, her clothes. “I’m afraid, too,” she said.

  Deirdre shook her head. “You don’t know what they’re capable of.”

  “I think I do. Even if I didn’t suffer as long or as badly as you did, I’m capable of empathy. Apparently the Fae aren’t.”

  “That isn’t fair,” said Kevin.

  “I can’t afford to be fair,” replied Helene. “Brian is half-Fae and his Druids are insane. I can’t rescue Miach without help.”

  “Then go to Finn,” said Deirdre.

  “I’ll go with you,” said Kevin, rising.

  “No,” said Deirdre. “You won’t.”

  He kissed the crown of her honey-gold hair. Despite their enthusiasm for novelties and “sharing,” Helene was more than ever certain these two loved each other deeply.

  Deirdre tilted her head back and claimed Kevin’s lips with her own. Her hand slipped around the back of his neck. For a second they looked like a living sculpture, something out of Ovid chiseled by Bernini, two lovers caught in a fleeting embrace.

  Then Deirdre’s hand flew back. Helene heard a cord snap. A braided leather thong dangled, broken, from her fingers. And a black iron ring struck the floor of the studio, bounced on the snowy-white paint tarp, and rolled to a stop at Helene’s feet.

  Kevin’s face was a picture of stricken betrayal.

  “Sit down, my love,” Deirdre ordered.

  Kevin obeyed.

  Deirdre turned to face Helene. “You would do the same, to protect the man you loved, if it was in your power,” she said.

  “No,” said Helene. “I wouldn’t violate his will. I had the opportunity. Miach was chained in cold iron. I wanted to stay with him, even if that meant making him vulnerable to Brian. But that isn’t what he wanted.”

  “And now he’s going to die for your weakness and stupidity.”

  “No. I’m going to save him.”

  “Go, then.”

  “I need money. And clean clothes.”

  Deirdre turned to Kevin. “Stay here.”

  “Don’t let her go, Deirdre,” said Kevin.

  The Fae ignored her lover and swept past Helene. “Come with me.”

  Helene stooped to pick up Kevin’s ring as she went and followed Deirdre down the hall.

  The Fae led Helene into her bedroom. It was a magnificent space, heaped with the artistic spoils of two millennia and a number of paintings that Helene had thought were in major museums.

  “Copies,” said Deirdre as she noticed Helene’s questioning glance, although she did not say which were copies—the ones in her bedroom or the ones in museums.

  Deirdre opened a drawer filled with currency and rooted through Spanish doubloons, British pounds, Revolutionary War scrip, stock certificates, and, finally, American dollars. She tossed a bundle of bills on the bed. Hundreds. Then more. Thousands.

  “Some twenties would be nice,” said Helene. “For cab fare.”

  The Fae ignored her. She opened the double doors of a wardrobe and turned to Helene.

  “Finn will hurt you,” she said.

  “I know,” said Helene.

  “He has been at war, on and off, with Miach, for two thousand years. He thinks Miach double-crossed him over Nieve. You will not buy his help with coin. Only suffering.”

  “I’d like to wash as well,” said Helene, ignoring the Fae’s warnings.

  “There’s soap in the bathroom,” said Deirdre. She started pulling garments out of the wardrobe. It was like a curator’s costume collection. Sequined flapper frocks from the twenties hung alongside silk shantung go-go sheaths and a long velvet gown, with pointed sleeves and gold-wire embroidery that might have belonged to a Saxon princess, spilled out onto the floor.

  “These should fit you,” she said, flinging an assortment of dresses on the bed. Then she looked Helene up and down with a cold, assessing eye. “Your chances of surviving the night are slim. Finn’s grievances run deep.”

  “Thank you for the advice,” said Helene coldly.

  Deirdre left her. Helene went into the Fae’s gleaming tiled bath and stood under the shower. She turned it on before she even removed her clothes, wanting the water to wash away all feeling. She shucked her skirt and tank top under the hot spray and let them lie in a wet heap beside the drain. The water ran red for a long time as she washed the blood out of her hair and off her arms and legs.

  When she got out, she dressed quickly in a navy-blue gauze halter dress. It was probably mid-thigh on Deirdre but it fell to Helene’s knees and would blend in on Boston’s chic but conservative streets. She rummaged in Deirdre’s wardrobe for a handbag, selected a leather satchel, and put her cell phone and the money inside. Her own sandals would have to do; luckily she’d managed to scrub most of the blood out—with Deirdre’s toothbrush.

  She left without saying good-bye, opening the gates to the driveway and making her way up Pinckney Street to Joy, then over the top of the hill at Mount Vernon Street, which Henry James had once called the most beautiful in America, though its beauty did not move Helene now. She descended Joy to Park, where the hill met the Common, and where she walked into the street and hailed a cab.

  “Bunker Hill Monument, please.”

  Nieve had told her where Finn lived, in one of the giant town houses on Monument Square. And Nieve had told her something of her father-in-law’s temperament. Finn was quick to anger, prickly in his honor, almost human in the violence of his emotions, but Fae in the coldness of his actions. His fame had been not as a champion like a Conn, but as a war leader, with the charisma and luck that drew fighting men to his banner.

  When they were off the Hill and on their way through town, Helene pulled her phone out of her bag and called Beth.

  “Thank god,” said Beth, when Helene told her she had escaped from Brian.

  “I’m going to get Miach out,” said Helene.

  “You should wait for us,” said Beth. “Two of the Druids tried to break in and Conn killed them, but the other two are still casting spells on the house, keeping us inside. They conjured some kind of beast, a dog with a snake’s head, inside the inn earlier, but I figured out how to dispel it. As soon as we’re able, we’ll come to you.”

  “I can’t wait for you to come back,” said Helene. “I’m going to Finn’s.”

  There was silence on the other side of the line. “Helene, please don’t. Miach wouldn’t want you to do this. He released Elada from their bond. He knew he was going to die when he went back for you.”

  She hadn’t known. She didn’t know as much about the Fae as she ought to, but she could guess that self-sacrifice wasn’t a common Fae quality.

  “I have to try to save him,” Helene said.

  “This is bigger than Miach,” said Beth. “The Druids in Boston are only the vanguard. Brian and the Prince Consort found more. Ones like me. Ones who could be powerful. They have agents out looking for them now, recruiting them.”

  “Then you’ll need Miach to fight them, when the time comes,” said Helene and hung up.

  The cab sped through the nighttime streets of Boston, down Staniford to the Charlestown Bridge. Nieve had told her that the Fae couldn’t cross the old bridge—there was too much iron in it—and that Finn owned the old rotting warehouse on the Boston side of the channel, the one that everyone said was prime real estate and should be redeveloped, but never was. He used it to keep the cars he drove in Boston, and he crossed back and forth by boat when necessary. He had another fleet of cars for use in Charlestown itself.

  The cab let her off at the base of the monument, and she decided that Finn’s house had to be the brownstone on the north side with the suspiciously large number of young chestnut-haired men loitering in front. Nieve’s stroller was also parked outside.

  Climbing the steps was like running a gauntlet of Fae half-breeds, but the five outside let her pass, until she reached the double doors with their frosted glass panels. The half-blood at the top lo
oked her up and down and said, “I think you’ve got the wrong house, sweetheart.”

  “I’m here to see Finn,” she said. “With a message from Miach MacCecht.”

  The half-blood tried to hide the surprise in his eyes, but he had too much of his patriarch in him, and Helene could read the uncertainty on his face.

  “If it’s about Nieve—” he started.

  “It’s not about Nieve,” she said. “It’s about Miach and Finn. Now tell him I’m here.”

  “Wait here,” he said.

  He disappeared inside the house. Helene willed herself not to turn around and look at the half-bloods behind her. She knew that here, in Finn’s domain, if she wanted to get what she had come for and survive whole, she couldn’t show fear.

  The door opened. The half-blood beckoned her inside.

  Finn’s town house was Victorian like Miach’s, but Monument Square was a world away from Southie. Miach’s mansion had been a lone outpost of wealth and ostentation in an otherwise steadfastly working-class neighborhood, built, she had learned, by an Irish whiskey magnate in the nineteenth century who had been determined to make the old neighborhood fashionable. He had only partially succeeded. Wealthy sons of Erin, boys from Southie who had made good, had built their homes on the peninsula, but Boston’s Protestant elite did not. They dispersed from Beacon Hill to the filled in Back Bay and later flocked to the streets around the Bunker Hill Monument in a patriotic fervor. And their wealth, long established from privateering and the China trade, dwarfed that of the rising Boston Irish.

  It showed in Finn’s house. The cladding was stone, the ground-floor ceilings were sixteen feet high. The parlors on the ground floor were dark, but she could see their grandeur even in the green gaslight filtering through the sheer curtains from the street.

  The half-blood led her up the stairs to a parlor with a view of the monument, all cream and gold and polished mahogany. It was not lined with books like Miach’s library, nor paintings like Deirdre’s house, but there was a profusion of gilding and ormolu fixtures that gave the room richness and warmth.

  Finn stood in front of one of the windows, looking at the monument. The casements were open to the night air and the silk panels fluttered in the breeze. He didn’t turn around when she entered, and she bit her tongue to keep from speaking, because she didn’t yet know the rules of this engagement, and she was determined to come out ahead in any Fae bargain they struck.

  Finn turned, wordlessly, from the window when the door behind her shut. She had the opportunity to study him closely for the first time. She had been too terrified at the Commandant’s House, and then in too much pain, to observe him in any detail.

  He was brawnier than Miach, though not as muscular as Conn. She could see how he had become a great leader of men—Fae men, that is. There was a stillness in him that suggested that he was perfectly focused, ready, at a moment’s notice, to spring into action and lead an advance. His Fae beauty was almost feminine, his chestnut waves falling to his shoulders: his leonine mane made him look like a young Alexander the Great.

  He looked her up and down and smiled. “So you decided to take me up on my offer.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m here to beg for your help.”

  “Charity is not in the nature of the Fae,” he said. “If you’ve been sharing Miach’s bed, you should know that.”

  He prowled to one of the lolling chairs flanking the fire, black lacquer with gilded swan’s head arms, and sat, crossing his legs. His pose, the classical style of the chair, and the details of the room all conspired to make him look like a victorious Roman general. When he steepled his hands, he looked as though he were deciding how to dispose of the spoils of war.

  “Come here,” he beckoned, and now he had gone from general to emperor.

  She paced to the center of the room, but declined to stand in front of his chair for inspection.

  “Miach’s son Brian has brought a band of Druids to Boston. They kidnapped Nieve and me, and now they have Miach.”

  “But you and Nieve are free,” said Finn pleasantly. “And my old enemy is reaping what he has sown. His own son leads these Druids.”

  “They aren’t ordinary Druids. There’s something wrong with them. Miach said they were made wrong, that the Prince Consort broke their minds when he created them. They’re rabid.”

  “But not, I think, strong enough to come after me and mine.”

  “Not yet,” said Helene. “But they have a list of names. More Druids. Hundreds.”

  “If the Druids have come back, the Fae will all flock to my banner.”

  “But you will have no sorcerer to fight with you.”

  “Only because Miach MacCecht will not train my son.”

  “Your son seduced his daughter.”

  “His daughter was old enough to know her mind,” replied Finn smoothly.

  “Garrett and Nieve can be forgiven their bad decision-making. They were children. You and Miach are not.”

  “Ours is not a childish feud,” said Finn, “and it began long before my son entered his house.”

  “You fought Druids together once. How can you let Miach fight them alone now?”

  “If Miach had listened to me, there would be no Druids left to fight. We would have destroyed them, root and branch, two thousand years ago.”

  Helene remembered Deirdre’s words: “You killed them all when you freed me. I never got to strike a single blow, slit a single throat. They were all dead. Even the small ones.”

  “So you will let him die now because he wasn’t callous enough to kill children then,” said Helene.

  Finn’s expression didn’t change, but his voice was cold as ice. “You think I liked doing it? You think I took pleasure in killing children in their cradles? You think Miach is the hero because he wouldn’t? I did what had to be done—what others could not bring themselves to do—so none of this would happen again. But it was all for nothing, because it is happening again, now, because Miach could not stomach the killing then.”

  “Maybe Miach chose the less certain path,” said Helene. “But what’s done is done, and if you allow him to die, you will have no sorcerer to fight the Wild Hunt when the wall comes down.”

  “You make a pretty argument for your lover,” said Finn. “But you offer me nothing.”

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “There are many things I want from Miach MacCecht,” mused Finn. “But few that you can give me. Take the dress off.”

  Chapter 17

  Helene stiffened but didn’t move. She had known their bargaining might come to this, but she hadn’t expected such a direct command. And if she hadn’t taken Kevin’s ring from the floor of Deirdre’s studio, she would have been powerless now to resist it.

  Finn smiled. “Are you wearing cold iron?” he asked, looking intrigued. “Or do you have the skill to resist my voice?”

  “I’m wearing cold iron,” she admitted.

  He looked disappointed. “A pity. I would enjoy breaking Miach MacCecht’s lover.”

  “You are tied to him by marriage,” said Helene. “Your grandson shares his blood. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  “We are no longer tied. Nieve released my son.”

  “Because she thought she was going to die.”

  “Nevertheless, he is free. Free to live a Fae span, and enjoy other women. He is welcome to keep Nieve. She is nearly human and makes a pretty thrall. And the child is charming.”

  She had been lulled by dealing with Conn and Miach and Elada, but there was no humanity in Finn.

  “The Fae may flock to your banner,” said Helene. “But Miach is worth ten of you.”

  Finn laughed. “Oh, now you do intrigue me. You are devoted to him. And not under his compulsion, if you wear cold iron. Remove it, please.”

  She had thought this terror behind her. That once she had killed Ransom Chandler, she would be free from magical summoning. But she had no choice now. She took a deep breath and slipp
ed Kevin’s ring off her finger. For a moment she held it in her palm, then she placed it on the marble fireplace mantle.

  Finn gestured with his hand to indicate that the dress should come next. He did not, she noted, use his voice.

  It was another test. She had proven she was willing to face him without cold iron. Now he wanted to see how far she was willing to go to save Miach, if she would obey his commands without the use of his voice.

  She reached for the halter clasp behind her neck and unfastened it. She hadn’t worn a bra. Hers had been covered in blood, and Deirdre’s wouldn’t have fit.

  Helene stood in front of Finn’s chair and lowered the navy-blue gauze top of her dress until it hung from the cinched waist, exposing her breasts. She waited for further instructions but Finn remained impassive.

  It was only her body. She’d been prepared to give that to a Fae she had come to care for. She was prepared to give it to a Fae she did not, in order to save Miach.

  “Promise you will rescue him,” she said.

  “I promise nothing,” said Finn. “Please me and I will consider your request.”

  She could walk out the door and leave, but she knew he would not call her back. He had the opportunity to see his enemy humbled—starting with his enemy’s woman. But she could choose not to be humbled by the experience.

  She untied the cord at her waist and allowed the dress to drop. She wasn’t wearing panties, either. Finn’s eyes were level with her sex, and she had to force herself not to blush or cover herself with her hands or react in any way that might give him satisfaction.

  He rose from his chair and circled her. He had not used his voice to compel obedience, because he wanted her to tremble and be afraid. She was not going to oblige him.

  He stopped behind her and lifted her hair off her neck, then traced the symbol Miach had drawn on her shoulder.

  “I would take you from behind, the first time, so I could see this while I was fucking you,” he whispered in her ear. “So I could enjoy it before it faded. His symbol on you. His property.”

  “I’m not his property,” she said. “But even after it fades, even if I agree to your terms, I’ll still be Miach’s.”