Cold Iron Read online

  She looked down at the coat in her hands, then back up again, to find him gone. She waited a few minutes but heard nothing in the darkness, so she slid first one arm, then the other into the luxury of the silk lining. Light as air. Warm as down. She fastened the silver buttons, which felt like living metal, warm to the touch and chased with a pattern of curling leaves. It was like slipping into him.

  They had made no bargain about the sword, but he had warned her not to trust him. She was desperate for the warmth and security of her apartment, or at the very least her office, but she knew she would be a fool to set foot outside the iron bars tonight.

  There was a bench, a hideous scratchy upholstered thing, bolted to the floor in the middle of the room, graceless and institutional, and she felt like a pagan sacrifice lying on top of it. But it was that or the cold stone floor, so she curled up on the bench in his coat, and breathed deep the pine and rosemary scent of him captive in the cloth.

  She wanted him. There was no hiding from it. Wanted to feel him wrapped around her like the coat, in a warm and protective embrace. But she was afraid of him, too. And afraid of herself, because the voice she had used to throw him across the room in Clonmel, her strange ability to find ancient sites on maps, her reaction to the sword, were unnatural. There was something wrong with her. Something that had drawn Frank to her, because he could use it, and something that had made him treat her cruelly, because she was a freak.

  She dozed fitfully, her mind full of Conn and at the same time anxious about what would happen in the morning. Tomorrow was going to be the fight of her life. Even the gold and the sword might not be enough to bring Frank down. He could be so very plausible.

  The screech of the iron hinges woke her. Her first thought was that Conn had come back, but she felt none of the sweet tension that rang through her body when he was near. Her second was that it was morning and she needed an excuse that would placate the early-shift security supervisor. But the gallery was still black with night, even the case lights gone to sleep in the quiet dark.

  They flickered on now, revealing two men standing in the open gate door, her ex-husband and his disturbing friend, Jack Egan. The sickly light revealed something else as well: Egan’s arms were full of gold. He had the drinking vessels and the torcs from Clonmel.

  “How did you find the gold?” Beth asked. She stood up stiffly, putting herself between Frank and the case with the Summoner. She was trying for intimidating, but her legs had gone to sleep on the bench and she wobbled, spoiling the effect. As she found her balance and straightened, gravity found her gown and dragged it low over her breasts.

  Egan smirked and snickered, which made her blood run cold. She knew what she must look like—what Egan must be thinking—with her crushed hair and crumpled clothes. She pulled her gown up and Conn’s velvet coat closed around her.

  She had seen very little of Frank’s loathsome best friend since the divorce, but she remembered him vividly, and he was little changed. He still possessed the kind of blond, all-American good looks that made him seem approachable, harmless—safe—but deep in her bones Beth knew better.

  Frank examined her with clear disgust. “Security said you came down here with your Irish boy toy a few hours ago.” He held up a set of keys and jingled them in front of her face. “Told me you signed these out this afternoon. Scythian Gold and Arms and Armor. Now what, I asked myself, would Beth want with them?”

  “Conn isn’t my boyfriend.”

  “Conn? Could you be any more pathetic? Hooking up with the Lord of the Dance and bringing him back with you? You’re a little old for teen rebellion. What next? A tramp stamp? Nose ring?”

  “Get out,” she said, wishing the voice she’d used on Conn in Clonmel was hers to command. “Before I call security.”

  “Security’s packed it in for the night. There’s only Dick Fuzzy Ears sleeping off his champagne at the loading dock.” Frank took a step toward the cases, and she slid in front of him.

  Now he looked at her, really looked at her. For the first time, maybe in years. His eyes widened and his brow knitted in disbelief. “Did you fuck that guy?”

  “None of your business.”

  “I thought you said this thing was ancient.” Egan had slipped around her while she confronted Frank. He stood over the case with the sword, and turned to face them with the blade in his hand.

  “It is,” Frank said.

  “Looks brand new.” Egan touched the edge with a finger. “Sharp, too.”

  The blade hummed in the enclosed space, but neither man seemed to notice it.

  “Put it down,” Beth said. “It doesn’t belong to you.”

  “Finders keepers.” Egan swung the sword through the air like a baseball bat. It rang like a bell, the noise setting Beth’s nerves on edge.

  “Give me that.” Frank snatched the sword, held the blade up in the flickering light, and examined the runic chasing along the edge.

  “Frank,” Beth said. “It isn’t an ordinary sword.” She searched for some explanation she could give him that didn’t involve Conn or the Fae, neither of which would make a difference to Frank, and found one. “It isn’t like the gold. It’s too distinctive to sell on the open market. Buyers won’t pay much. They’ll want to know where it came from.”

  He shrugged. “My buyers don’t ask those kinds of questions.”

  A prickle of foreboding ran up her spine. “And who, my clever Beth, do you think might be of a mind to buy?” Other Fae, of course. Ones who would use the sword to summon the Court.

  And feckless Frank would sell it to such a buyer without a second thought.

  “I won’t let you leave with the sword.” She took a step forward, putting herself square in front of him.

  The shock was plain on Frank’s face. She never stood up to him. Only that once, when she’d refused to identify another site for him. And he’d cooked up a piece of nastiness that had put her—oh, how it had put her—back in her place. Not anymore. “Give it to me.” She held her hand out, a plain demand.

  For a second Frank looked quite affected. He offered her the weapon, hilt first. When she moved to take it, he snatched it back and spluttered with laughter.

  “You didn’t really think I was going to hand it over, did you? What? So it can gather dust in some museum in Dublin? What do you care, Beth? You’re not going to get the credit for the dig. You’re never going to get the credit for a dig. And if you go on slumming with that Paddy, next time I won’t even let you come along.”

  He took a step toward the door. Her anger boiled over. She grabbed the hilt of the sword, below where his hands clasped the cross guard, and pulled. He pulled back. In a game of tug-of-war with a man a foot taller and seventy pounds heavier than she was, she didn’t stand a chance. If she played fair.

  But Frank never played fair, and tonight Beth wouldn’t either. She was wearing heels. Not spiky or high, just a two-inch kitten, but she stomped down on his instep with all of her pent-up fury.

  Frank howled and doubled over but didn’t relinquish his grip on the sword.

  Neither did Beth. As Frank lurched forward, his weight drove the foible of the blade down, the razor-sharp edge heading straight for Beth’s neck. She dove to the side but not fast enough.

  The blade whispered past her ear, and sliced through hair, velvet, sinew, blood, and bone.

  Chapter 4

  He had let her go. Again. And allowed her to keep the sword.

  Madness. But not the kind Conn was used to. Not the madness of age, of boredom and a surfeit of depravity. This was the madness of youth, something he had left behind thousands of years ago. Infatuation.

  It would pass, of course. The Fae did not tie themselves permanently to mortals. But the fizzing exuberance he felt when he thought of Beth, the way he looked forward to seeing her again tomorrow, was an exciting novelty, and he savored it.


  And he tried to deny that it was anything more. To deny the sense of . . . kinship he had felt when she had spoken of her isolation. She knew the taste of betrayal, the ache of loneliness. He had stifled an impulse, standing before the iron gate, to confide in her, to tell her his history, to seek something he had never desired from another being: solace.

  Instead he had given her his coat, and even now he continued to imagine it wrapped around her body, embracing her.

  He tested the connection with her, established when he had touched her mind in the gallery. It was still there, a gossamer thing of sense and impression rather than words and meaning. She had told him to stay out of her head and, curiously, he wanted to honor her wishes. So he resisted the impulse to invade her thoughts and instead feathered the edges of her consciousness with . . . what? It wasn’t entirely desire, though it was that, too. Regard, he decided. She had his regard, his brave, fierce little scholar.

  He liked her city. It was old. Not as old as Clonmel or Dublin, but rooted deep in the soil. Gray granite and black earth. Circled with rivers. Crowned by hills. He had spent time today exploring it, a rabbit warren of twisted streets here, an elegantly laid-out grid as perfect as any Druid pattern there. He had twice encountered telltale signs of other Fae, and quickly turned from the path he was on to be sure not to encounter them. He wondered if Beth would care that his people had once called him champion, and now called him traitor.

  He found the local customs more familiar than he expected, considering how mixed the peoples of this Boston were. But so many of them were Gaels, no doubt they’d had some influence on their surroundings. It had taken him only a few hours in Clonmel, seated in the taproom at the inn, tasting the ale and being served—cautiously—by the deferential locals, to master contemporary patterns of speech, observe the new fashions in dress, absorb the new fashions in ideas. After that the Boston vernacular had been easy to acquire.

  He had learned that Boston was really two cities. The city proper, and across the river, Cambridge and its mighty universities. Centers of learning. Exactly where he expected to find Beth.

  Her museum had puzzled him. An unattended temple to heroes, where great deeds went to die. It was a sorry place for an archaeologist, a lover of the ancients, more of a tomb than his mound in Clonmel. Sorrier still was Beth’s master, one of nature’s beggars, this Dave Monroe. No matter what she said, Conn planned to glamour the man into treating her better.

  His ramble took him through the warren of red-brick buildings that made up the center of the university, then farther, past the timbered houses of the early settlers, glossy with paint and studded with small-paned windows. He walked down to the bank of the Charles, the river that seamed the two cities, knelt on its pebbled strand, and ran his fingers through the soft current.

  He understood Beth’s desperate need to defend her reputation. She had done great deeds, and another man had claimed them as his own and been rewarded for them. The Druids would have said that only the deeds mattered, that fame was fleeting vanity. For all their wisdom, Conn reflected, on that account the Druids had known nothing.

  He reached out again with his mind and found her. No longer sleeping, but awake and . . . angry.

  With him? No. Someone else.

  His heart sped in time with hers. The connection allowed him to feel as she felt. A moment of exultation as she asserted herself, strong and confident. Followed by the sting of insult and injustice, the sweet rush of her fierce anger, then—

  Pain, sudden and blinding, severed their connection.

  Something, someone had hurt her. Conn’s reaction was instant and instinctive. He passed. Through water, wood, and stone. Faster than any mode of travel known to man—it had never seemed so slow to him before. He knew every blade of grass, every drop of water, every pebble, as he went. And he cursed them for being between him and his goal. Beth.

  Then he was inside the museum, but he had forgotten about the iron cage. The sickly gaseous lights inside the cases were spluttering on and off like swamp fires. He could see broken glass on the floor, splintered wood, and Beth, standing dazed in the middle of the wreckage.

  He could not get to her. He had recognized the priest-gate when he first saw it. A pathetic, last ditch defense against his kind. The early Christians had possessed no magic to fight the Fae. They had not known what to make of the stragglers of his ancient race, the ones who had broken free of the mounds and wandered the earth causing mischief. The Druidic learning was lost. Only the memory of cold iron remained to the Christ followers, so they built their altar gates out of it, girded their doors and dwellings with it, because they knew no other way to keep the Fae out.

  It was crude, but effective. He could not go in, so Beth must come out. But she was standing in the center of the wreckage, her back to him, swaying slightly.

  “Beth,” he said softly. He sent his senses out into the dark corners of the room. No danger lurked. He should have checked the moment he passed into the building, but his only thought had been for her. They were quite alone.

  She didn’t hear him. “Beth,” he said again, this time a little louder.

  She stirred, tipped her head back, and saw him. “They took the sword,” she said. Her voice was strained, deep and throaty with pain, not passion. “Frank and his friend, Egan. You have to go after them.”

  The Summoner. Yes. He must retrieve the sword. The pattern covering his wrists, the geis that bound him to the blade, pulsed in harsh reminder. His fate, if the Summoner fell into the hands of another Fae, would be living death and eternal entombment, alone. Not the shared imprisonment most of his race endured, the parallel Otherworld where they dined and drank and fucked and fought—and plotted, endlessly, for thousands of years, their revenge on the race of men. No, his fate would be far, far worse.

  And right now he didn’t give a damn. “It will keep,” he told her. Frank Carter would not be difficult to track. “You’re hurt. Come here and show me,” he said. The suspicion gnawing him was too terrible. He willed it to not be true, but he was not a Druid or a sorcerer and could not will things into being or unbeing.

  She stepped carefully over the broken glass, her gown rustling, the hem playing music with the shards. She was swathed in silk and scented with blood and walking through a battleground. A vision of perfection. And yet it did not delight him at all.

  She passed through the gate. When she reached him, her eyes were bright with pain and her hands clutched his coat tight to her breast. He placed his own over them, pried her fingers from the cloth. She looked away.

  Then he saw why. Her fingers were slick with blood. The wound, which was not killing deep, scored her pale shoulder, a line of crimson nearly black in the poor light. But it was the edges of the wound that told him. True black. Night black. The starless sky. The infinite void. A rift that could not be healed.

  She’d been cut with the Summoner.

  “It’s already stopped bleeding,” she said.

  He could hear the hope in her voice, and his chest constricted. He wouldn’t lie to her. “It isn’t the blood loss that kills you.”

  He pushed his coat off her shoulders, baring her entirely, and searched for other cuts. There were none. A single wound. No opportunity for the blade’s cursed magic to weave a pattern, gain strength from itself. That meant she had a chance. A slim one, but a chance.

  “If you can, help me call an ambulance,” she said. “Then you can go.”

  She expected him to abandon her. Frank Carter had a great deal to answer for. And answer he would.

  Conn tipped her chin to face him. “No,” he said. “I shall not go. And I will not let you die.”

  She felt no sting when the Summoner bit her shoulder. That came a second later, when Frank slid the blade free. A blaze of white-hot agony. She fell back, grabbed at one of the cases to steady herself, couldn’t find her balance, clutched wildly, and brought it cra
shing down with her to the floor.

  Wood splintered, glass shattered, the impact knocked the wind out of her. She sprawled on her back in a tangle of silk and stared up helplessly at Egan and Frank.

  “I hope you got your tetanus shot,” Egan quipped, gathering up the Clonmel gold.

  Frank crouched over her. She mouthed a wordless plea for help, but he wasn’t looking at her face. His eyes were fixed on her bloody wound. All at once she was catapulted back to another time. They’d been married a year. Maybe less. Things had started to change the day they were wed. It was as though a switch had flipped in Frank and he no longer needed to pretend he liked her.

  Up to then he had courted her. Not with flowers or dinners—though he gave her those, too—but with gifts and gestures calculated to appeal to her scholarly passions. He invited her to meet private collectors and examine their treasures, brought her rare monographs on Celtic art and literature, took her to lunches and dinners with academics in their field and on behind-the-scenes tours of her favorite museums.

  And he told her he loved her.

  But after they were married, things changed. That first week following their honeymoon, they’d gone ice-skating on the Common with Frank’s friends, Egan and an older woman Egan was dating. One of his patients, Beth later discovered, rich and plain but aristocratic in that stolid Boston Brahmin way, and very obviously high as a kite.

  They’d been drinking at her shabby town house on Beacon Hill, which smelled of dust and dogs, and things had started to get . . . uncomfortable. The woman was all over Egan. And Frank, too. And he didn’t stop it, or seem to mind. That’s when Beth suggested they go skating, and the other woman had latched onto the idea with drunken fervor.

  They’d trooped down to the Frog Pond, sparkling white in the winter snow, donned their skates, and begun clowning. Beth was competent on the ice. Enough to skate and enjoy the twinkling lights in the trees, the tinny holiday music on the speakers, the laughing families passing her on the ice. To ignore Frank’s now open flirting with Egan’s girlfriend.