Cold Iron Page 6

  “Receiving a geis always does. Even if it is only drawn in ink. And especially if you resist. The magic tightens like a noose around your throat until the design is complete. These,” he brushed his fingers over the marks on his shoulders, “once bound me inside the walls of the mound. The Druids held me down with their magic and carved them into my flesh. These,” he touched a cluster of thick raised lines that interrupted the design, “freed me. Also courtesy of the Druids.”

  The bitterness in his voice was palpable. She decided she didn’t want to see what he would do if he got hold of a living Druid.

  “And these,” he pulled back the velvet cuffs of his coat, rolled the needle-tailored sleeves of his shirt to reveal bands of thick scars around his wrists, bracers of intricate Gaelic knot work carved into his flesh. “These bind me to the sword. But most geis bind one being to another. Slave to master. If the Fae who took the landlady’s sister marked her, he would have drawn his personal symbol on her. It would have compelled her to want him, and him alone.”

  “And when he abandoned her,” Beth realized, the thought sickening, “she had nothing but her beauty, nothing else to keep her in this life, so she pined for him, and died. And you want to do that to me.”

  “I did,” he admitted. “When I first saw you in Clonmel, I wanted you. If I had taken you, and if you’d pleased me, I would have marked you so that you wanted me, and me alone. You would have accepted it by then. The pleasure to be had in a Fae’s bed is difficult to resist. And you might not have gone mad afterward. As I said, you are no farmer’s daughter. Even the old woman’s sister had a chance: had she fallen pregnant by the Fae, she might have had something to live for.”

  His words chilled her to the bone. He had wanted that for her, and she’d come so close to succumbing.

  “And now?” she asked, though she dreaded the answer.

  “I want you still.” He paused, and Beth watched the confusion playing over his face. “More even than I did in Clonmel, but I find that I want you to desire me without compulsion. I would not mark you now. Even if you were to ask.”

  “I wouldn’t do that. Ever. I don’t have a death wish.”

  “Neither, I would wager, did the landlady’s sister. Nor most of those who bind themselves to the Fae. They beg for it anyway.”

  “I don’t believe that. There’s no such thing as sex worth dying for.”

  “It’s as I thought.”

  “What, exactly, is as you thought?”

  “You’ve never been satisfied.”

  She could feel her face turning red. “Don’t be absurd. I’m nearly thirty. Of course I’ve been satisfied.” She had no intention of telling him that she’d only ever been satisfied by her own hand.

  He grinned. It was a slow, sly, smile, creeping across his face. He knew. Somehow, damn him, he knew. “Only in darkness, and solitude.” He took a step forward, closed the distance that had been growing between them. “Let me pleasure you, Beth.”

  Her whole body flushed now with the memory of his hand between her legs in Clonmel. Probably not worth dying for. Probably. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.” Actually, it sounded like the best idea in the history of the world, if it wouldn’t lead to madness and death. “I’d rather not have you in my head again.” Of that, she was certain.

  “I promise not to use my glamour or my voice. There’s no danger for you if I don’t mark you or try to compel you. Just pleasure.”

  It was so tempting.

  She was nearly thirty. And she’d only ever been with Frank. That, of course, hadn’t worked out well, but she’d been too naive to know that it could be better.

  Everyone loved Frank. Collectors craved his opinion. Colleagues cultivated him. Men wanted to be his friend. Women fell at his feet. The problem must be hers, she’d always assumed. When she’d lost her faith in Frank, she’d reassessed all of her assumptions—and realized that the problem hadn’t been her. She’d tried dating after the divorce, but after a few meetings, whenever the relationship began to turn physical, she always cried off.

  Eventually, she’d given up, decided that something in her had broken while she was with Frank and that she was unlikely to find a man to fix it.

  But Conn wasn’t a man.

  “Promise to stay out of my head.” She swallowed. “I do want you to touch me. I do want to know what it’s like, but I can’t give up control like that. I can’t.”

  He stepped closer again. “You can keep hold of the key the whole time.”

  “And you’re sure you can make me . . . ,” She trailed off. She didn’t think she’d ever used the word out loud in that context.

  “Come,” he supplied. “Yes. I’ll even make a bargain with you. Let me touch you. Let me pleasure you. If you’re unmoved, I’ll take the Summoner and never approach you again.”

  “You told me Fae bargains are never fair.”

  “They aren’t. You’re certain to lose. And when you do, you’re mine.”

  He had her now. He wished there was time to savor the moment, but he knew better than to let a bargain go unsealed. She reached for him tentatively, but the time for hesitation was over. He bent and swept her into his arms.

  She squeaked, a little noise of surprise, the kind a kitten might make. But she didn’t struggle or try to break his hold. And he knew she was no kitten. More like a caged lioness.

  “Where are we going?” she asked. Her hands were trapped against his chest. He felt her move them, explore him. She was looking up at him wide-eyed, and he realized she was completely unconscious of what she was doing. Touching him because she could not resist doing so. It was powerfully arousing, her awakening sensuality.

  “You’ve only known pleasure alone in the dark,” he said. “Let me take you into the light.”

  “Um, it’s dark out, and it will be for hours. And if you turn lights on, security will come.”

  “Real light. Not your false day.”

  He carried her to the center of the Roman gallery, where there was an altar, finely carved, beneath a domed oculus, bathed in moonlight. He mounted the platform on which it stood and sat on the stone with Beth in his lap.

  She squirmed. “You can’t sit on this. It’s two thousand years old.”

  He ignored her protest. “I’m older still. And it’s stone, Beth. It has weathered worse.” Then he stood back up abruptly. “Unless you scream loud enough to shatter the stone.”

  She rolled her eyes and struck his shoulder. “That isn’t going to happen.”

  “You threw me into a wall in Clonmel,” he teased, still holding her above the stone.

  “You’re mistaken,” she said, her whole body suddenly tense in his arms. “Put me down.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You’re misremembering what happened in Clonmel.” There was a note of raw panic in her voice.

  “Am I?” He had not considered that she might be aware of something different inside her, something that set her apart from other humans. And that she might be frightened of it.

  “Let me go.” She twisted like an eel in his arms, and he feared she would fall and hurt herself on the stone floor.

  “Easy, Beth.” He lowered her to the ground.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I changed my mind. I don’t want to do this, Conn.”

  “Beth.” He reached for her. Had not realized until now that the pleasure of having her in his arms was more than anticipation, more than desire. He couldn’t put a name to it, could only name its absence: desolation.

  She backed away, shook her head. “No.”

  He considered telling her pretty lies but knew it would not serve. “If this is about the voice you used in Clonmel, then I agree with you. Your abilities are better kept secret.”

  She eyed him warily. “What abilities?”

  “The ones you hide so well. The
voice you used to throw me across the room at the inn. That’s one. But there are others, aren’t there? You know, I think, the names of all the trees and flowers you encounter, without ever having studied them. You can tell when a woman is pregnant before she herself suspects. And you know how to find us—the Fae.”

  She backed away from him. Her breathing had changed. Now she was truly a hunted animal, her instincts telling her to fight or flee. He was an experienced hunter. He must not move a muscle, or she would be gone.

  “How do you know all that?” she asked.

  Patience was what was needed here. Not his strongest suit. But she must come to it on her own. “Wrong question, Beth. Try again.”

  “No. I don’t want to know. Whatever it is, it isn’t anything good. Tell me about the sword instead. The Summoner. Can anyone use it?”

  The change of subject took him off guard, and he answered her honestly. “To kill, yes. To summon the Court, no. Only a Druid,” he hesitated, then added, “or the most powerful of Fae sorcerers, can use the sword to summon the Court back from their exile.”

  She took another step back from him. “You said the Fae are all underground or imprisoned.”

  “It’s been thousands of years, Beth. Wards fade. Spells dissipate. Bonds can be broken. I told you I didn’t take the old woman’s sister, remember? There are Fae roaming the earth. That’s why you have so many legends about encounters with them. Cautionary tales. If the wrong one got hold of the Summoner, you wouldn’t like the results.”

  “This is North America, not Ireland, not Europe. Fairy mounds aren’t thick on the ground here.”

  He raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Have you ever looked?”

  She hadn’t. She’d never scrutinized a map of North America for ancient Celtic sites, because everyone knew where the Celts had settled: Europe, Britain, Ireland. But she had sometimes had that same feeling, that clenching deep in her belly, when she drove through the New England woods or passed by a grand and ancient house. If there were Celtic remains in North America, if she could find them, it would be the greatest archaeological discovery of the age.

  Conn’s knowing question fired her imagination. If she rescued her career from Frank and oblivion first, she could use her skills to find Celtic sites where no one had ever looked before.

  She knew better than to talk about her disturbing abilities—with anyone. As a girl, before she had found a use for her strange powers, they had frightened her. Sometimes they frightened her still. When she’d tried to tell Frank about her uncanny knack for finding sites, he had mocked her. When she’d shown him, used her skill to locate their first discovery, he had refused to acknowledge what she’d done. Anytime she’d raised the subject, he’d treated her to a frosty silence.

  Except for that night. The dinner. The wine. There had been maps. She remembered that much. And Frank coaxing, forcing her to look at them. And later Egan—but she didn’t remember that. Didn’t want to remember that. When Conn had teased her about her abilities a moment ago, she’d felt buried memories threatening to surface and had not wanted to be touched. At all. By anyone. Ever again.

  What had happened with Egan and Frank had happened because of her strange abilities. They never would have drugged her otherwise. She did not think about the events of that night, because she could not think about the events of that night. There was no way she was going to talk about her strange talents with this even stranger creature.

  “If you take the sword and the gold, I’ll lose my job. Dave Monroe will think I’m an addict, or crazy, and fire me.”

  “I can glamour him into forgetting what happened tonight, compel him to allow you to keep your job.”

  “That won’t free me from Frank, won’t show the world what he is. Let me keep the Summoner for a day,” she said. “Just one day. It won’t leave the museum. It’s not like you can walk through the streets of Cambridge with a sword on your back, anyway.”

  “The sword is easily hidden by my glamour,” he explained patiently.

  “One day is all I am asking for.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. The words tumbled out of him as though he was unfamiliar with the taste of an apology. She suspected the Fae did not apologize often, or maybe ever. But she couldn’t let that sway her.

  “I’m sorry, too.” She was. She wanted what he had to offer but was too broken to accept it. She hated him, too, in that moment for promising something she could not have.

  She gripped the iron key in her hand, then turned on her heel and ran. Her identity card was hanging at her hip. She reached for it, held it out so it would touch the scanner plate as she hurled herself against the thick glass door leading deeper into the ancient wing. Heard the click. Didn’t dare look behind her as she shoved the heavy door open and slid through. She ran, flat out, no looking back, for the iron gate that guarded the entrance to the Arms and Armor Room.

  It loomed up out of the darkness like a spiked black castle, gilt tipped and menacing. She unlocked the gate, flew through the opening, and slammed the door shut behind her with a mighty clang. The case lights, triggered by motion detectors, flickered on one by one until the entire nave, transported stone by stone from some long-destroyed English abbey, was bathed in ghost light.

  For a moment she was alone in the strange room, arrayed with daggers and pikes and halberds and blades of every kind, and she could only pray she had guessed right: that the iron would protect her, that he could not pass through the gate as he had her door in Clonmel.

  She didn’t hear him approach. Conn simply appeared out of the darkness, his skin seeming to drink in the ethereal light. He walked with preternatural silence, his booted feet impossibly quiet on the polished stone. He stopped short of the iron grille and drew back, then shocked her by laughing. “Very clever,” he said. “I take it you have the sword with you in your cold iron cage.” He prowled back and forth in front of the bars, but he didn’t come too close.

  She nodded. “I won’t let Frank have it. I promise you. He has no idea what it is anyway. Frank just likes shiny things he can sell,” she said.

  “But didn’t he take it for that reason, to sell? And who then, my clever Beth, do you think might be of a mind to buy?”

  A chill breeze wafted through the nave, and she shuddered in her bare-shouldered gown. The answer was obvious, but ludicrous at the same time. Another Fae, of course. One who wasn’t bound by the same covenant. One who might use the sword.

  But planning to find a buyer like that would mean Frank knew the Fae were real, had known, before he decided to steal the sword. And if that was the case, it suggested he had probably known Beth’s powers were real, for a very long time.

  It was a monstrous betrayal, and she had no time to dwell on it now. Even if it was all true, it would take more time and planning to find a Fae buyer for the sword than Frank had since Clonmel . . . unless he had a particular customer already in mind. He could have been selling Celtic relics for a while now, after all. As long as they had been digging together.

  It was a risk she had to take, an abstract danger, where the threat to her career was real and pressing. “Collectors,” she said. “Crooked dealers. That’s who Frank will go to.” Not that she knew anyone like that, but she could imagine them, cobbled together in her mind from movies and television, stage villains with pinky rings and fluffy white cats.

  Conn sat down gracefully on the bench outside the iron gate. “You,” he said, “are the most exasperating woman I have ever encountered.” But he didn’t sound exasperated. He sounded . . . amused. Almost pleased.

  “You live under a hill. I doubt you get out much.”

  “And yet I have watched mountains rise and fall, empires wax and wane. In the vernacular of this age, I get out plenty. I just do it on a slightly different time scale.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Eons,” he said, then smiled, sly as he had be
en in Clonmel. “But I do like a good sleep. You have a thirst for knowledge, Beth. Come out of your cage and I’ll tell you everything you ever wanted to know.”

  “Tomorrow,” she said. “If you take the sword away tonight, I’ll lose everything here. I’ll look like a drug addict or a lunatic or Frank’s jealous ex-wife. Probably all three. My job and my reputation will be destroyed.”

  “Are those the only things that are important to you, Beth? Your role and reputation?”

  “They’re all I have,” she said. It was the truth. And it had been enough, until she met Conn, damn him. He made her want more.

  “What of friends, family, lovers?” Conn asked. He appeared to be genuinely curious.

  “My lover betrayed me, my friends, except for Helene, deserted me in favor of him. And I made choices—to take my own path in life—that cut me off from my family. I don’t regret them, but if I allow my career to be destroyed, I’ll have nothing.”

  Conn appeared to consider, then stood abruptly and shrugged out of his green velvet coat. He held it out to her, though he kept well away from the bars. “Here. You’re cold. Take it.”

  She hesitated. How close could he come to the iron bars?

  He read the question in her eyes. “You’re safe. I can’t cross the iron. It sets my teeth on edge even to be near this much of it.”

  She reached through the grille and snatched the coat.

  “Let no one touch the blade,” he warned. “And do not touch it yourself.”

  She clutched the velvet, warm and soft, to her breast, still reluctant to put it on. “What do you want in return?” she asked.

  “Foolish woman,” he chided. “Never make bargains with the Fae.”