Blade Dance (A Cold Iron Novel Book 4) (3 page)

“Sean went to Garrett,” said Nancy, “but your son refused him.”

Finn silently cursed his son’s obstinacy. And Iobáth for taking his own sweet time answering Finn’s summons. If the bloody swordsman had come a month ago, Finn and Garrett would be reconciled and Sean would never have sought out some rogue mage to tattoo his boy. “Who was this wild-eyed sorcerer, then?”

She looked away. “He was horrible, something ferocious, but I don’t know what he was,” she said, face turned to the gathering darkness.

Not a rogue mage, then. Something worse. Much worse.

Druids.

“Sean would never deal with a Druid,” said Finn automatically, but even as the words left his mouth, he knew that was wrong. Sean had never been quite sane after the Druids had tortured him. The man was capable of just about anything.

“My husband thought our boy was too soft, with his books and poems and stories. He wanted to make a fighter of him. So he invited one of
them
into our house. They were supposed to all be dead.”

But they weren’t. Finn hadn’t believed the rumors at first. Not until he had seen it for himself. He had hunted the Druids almost to extinction but been persuaded by Miach to spare the untutored children, who the sorcerer insisted would never be any threat. Two thousand years later, Miach had been proven wrong. The Druids were back. Finn looked across the street at the ruin of his house. He could take no pleasure in being right.

“I’ll do anything,” she said, taking a step forward. “
Anything
to protect Davin.”

She put a hand on his chest, slid it down.

He was Fae. His appetites were prodigious. He wanted what she was offering, but he did not want
this
woman. His desire had been fixed on another for several months now, a redheaded schoolteacher who had the good sense to stay away from him. As soon as his house was in order, he would seek her out. Celibacy was not in his nature, but since meeting Ann Phillips, he had found no substitutes appealing.

It hadn’t been just her looks that had caught his eye—though he found those deeply appealing. It was her fearlessness. She’d walked right into his parlor and confronted him. She felt the same responsibility for her students that he felt for the Fianna, the same obligation to protect them, even at cost to herself. And she drank whiskey neat and savored it.

He took Nancy’s hand from his chest and pushed it gently away. “Where can I find this Druid, Nancy?”

“I don’t know.” She looked relieved that he didn’t want her.

“What was this Druid’s name, then?” he asked.

“They never spoke his name. Sean said he would kill me if I told anyone, but I couldn’t let him do this to Davin.”

“What did he look like?”

Nancy shuddered. “Like a junkie. Skinny, strung out. His clothes were filthy, just rags. And he didn’t have any shoes. I didn’t want to let him in the house, but Sean insisted. And the Druid is coming back next week to finish his work.”

“When?”

“Saturday.”

Five days. If Iobáth didn’t turn up in that time, they were fucked. “What kind of Druid was he?”

“I don’t know.”

Finn didn’t have enough followers to take down a Druid. If the creature was a magic user, if he had a powerful voice, he would be able to command any Fae who’d been imprisoned by the Druids in the past. They all bore the marks the Druids had carved on them, powerful spells of subjugation and control.

Garrett’s sorcery was the only effective way to fight this creature. Half-breeds and those born after the fall had not been marked, but they were no match for a powerful Druid.

No matter how things shook out, it was going to be bloody. And without Garrett, they didn’t stand a chance.

“You should get out of town, Nancy.” He plucked a roll of bills from his wallet. “Leave Davin with your parents and go tonight. Pay cash. Don’t use Sean’s cards. He could track you that way.”

She shook her head. “I can’t leave Davin.” She moved close again. “I know you have . . .
needs
. I don’t mind. I’ll do whatever you want, if you’ll just protect my son.”

He took a deep breath. The physical temptation, after all he had been through recently, was strong, but it was one thing to formally discipline a captain who had betrayed him—who had betrayed the Fianna and brought a Druid into their midst—it was another to bed that captain’s woman.

And as the bruise on her cheek told, Nancy McTeer was human and frail and all too likely to get hurt or killed if she got caught in a fight between the Fae and a Druid. Or if she crossed her unhinged lover again.

“I’ll take care of things, Nancy, but if you stay, I can’t protect you from Sean.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Lay a trap for the Druid and kill him.”

The gleam in her eye told him that she wanted that as much as he did, and with good reason. When the Druids had turned on their masters and enslaved the Fae, they had slaughtered all of their human followers and half-breed children, who they saw as tainted.

“Thank you.”

“If you see the Druid again before Saturday, call me,” he said. “And for Dana’s sake, stay the fuck out of Sean’s way.”

She promised that she would, and then she looked right and left, peering into the gathering shadows to make sure that no one was watching, before she set off down the hill. He wished she had taken the money and left. Chances were good that Sean would hear of her visit to the Navy Yard tonight.

Last year he could have dealt with a single Druid handily. Garrett could have cast a silence over the bastard, and the Fianna could have diced the Druid into pieces. Not now. He had no Garrett and no force of numbers. Only his pride kept him from calling Miach, although for all Finn knew, this Druid was one of the damned sorcerer’s own pets. He was training enough of them in South Boston, and the fool believed that they were tame, that they could be allies in the fight to keep the wall between worlds standing.

Once, Miach and Finn had been friends and allies. They had known each other as children. They had both lived through the Druid revolt, both been captives in the gruesome mounds, both known torture. After their escape they had worked together to free the rest of the captive Fae and hunt down and destroy the Druids. Finn had been determined to destroy them root and branch, but after many years of the hunt, Miach had lost his taste for revenge, and the resulting quarrel had lasted nearly two millennia.

It was a relief to get inside his house. He had hoped that Garrett would move into the house after the renovation, even if he brought his dangerous minx of a wife with him. Finn knew that his son was a product of the twenty-first century and would not want to live like his father did, with an army of servants and a vast, old-fashioned kitchen. Finn had lived like that because he had
always
lived like that, the chief of a large and successful band of fighters.

Now he understood the appeal of modern conveniences. In his brownstone, he had never known true quiet. There had always been the hum of activity, of servants washing laundry or making beds or cooking meals or doing dishes. The coming and going of tradespeople. The swish and pop of doors opening and closing and opening again all over the house.

Here, all was absolute peace. He’d had the three-story gambrel-roof house moved back from the street for privacy, fitted the windows with noise-deadening storm casements, restored the gracious proportions of the interior with its wide pine floors and fine painted paneling, and added recessed lighting, tiled baths, and a state of the art kitchen.

He thanked Dana for it now, because all he wanted was a cold beer, a comfortable chair, and peace and quiet. All three were at his instant disposal. A woman would have been nice, too, but his situation was already complicated enough. As soon as it was uncomplicated, as soon as he had the Fianna in hand and his son back, there would be room in his life for a woman, and that woman would be Ann Phillips.

He drank his beer standing in the kitchen. Just as he was popping the cap on his second, the doorbell rang.

If it was Nancy again, he decided that he was going to have her. Likely standing up in the hall, with how he felt at the moment. A very bad idea. He wished the beer had blunted his desire, but it hadn’t.

He opened the front door to a very different woman. And who else but the one he had been thinking about with increasing frequency for several months now.

Ann Phillips was a head shorter than Finn, but she wasn’t built small. Her hips were wide, her shoulders broad but delicately molded, her breasts full and round. She had a body that was athletic and distinctly,
pleasingly
feminine at the same time.

She had intrigued him from the minute she had first turned up on his now shattered doorstep, with her long red hair and pale brown freckles dusted over luminous skin. The little dots frosted her collarbone and shoulders and made Finn want to trace them with his hands.

“Ann Phillips,” he said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“School business,” she said, wearing a prim expression that he recognized from their last encounter. That expression wouldn’t last long. Ann Phillips wasn’t naturally prim, no matter how hard she tried to seem that way. She was vibrantly alive, and her arrival felt like a refreshing breeze after all of his troubles with Miach and the Fianna and, now, this nameless Druid. Her nose scrunched beguilingly when she was angry, and he almost hoped he could make her so, wanted to see her eyes light up the way they did when she was riled.

“If this is about my nephew’s truancy, Miss Phillips,” he said, recalling the purpose of her last visit, “you’ve come to the wrong place. He’s living with his mother in South Boston.” Little Garrett was actually Finn’s grandson, but he didn’t expect Ann Phillips to understand that a man who barely looked thirty could be thousands of years old. She wasn’t a local, and she hadn’t been admitted to the secret that Charlestown’s Irish kept from the world: the presence of the Fae in their midst.

“It’s not about Garrett,” she said. He remembered now how much he liked her voice. It was husky and mellow, like honey wine. “But it is school business.”

“You teach second grade,” he said. He’d taken the time to find out all about her, in the hope that in better days, he might renew their acquaintance. “Don’t you think it’s a little late for school business?”

It was full dark, in fact. The lights around the monument had come on, and they burnished her red hair gold. She was wearing it piled high on her head, and it looked like a fiery halo. He imagined she was aiming for a chaste, schoolmarm’s appearance, but he found everything about her, from her silk blouse to her pencil skirt to her tall leather boots, sexy as hell.

“I didn’t have an easy time finding you,” she said. “It was still daylight when I arrived at your former address.” She cocked her head to indicate the scaffolding behind her. “But your contractors weren’t exactly forthcoming about your whereabouts.”

They wouldn’t be. He used locals. Workmen who knew what he was, what the Fae were owed for protecting the Irish in Charlestown these last two hundred years. “How
did
you find me, then?”

“I went to your place of business,” she said.

The bar. He didn’t like to think of her at the bar. It
was
where he conducted his business, but his business was theft and robbery and extortion. “That’s no place for a schoolteacher.”

“Evidently your bartender agreed. He wouldn’t serve me.”

She eyed the beer in his hand.

He remembered the day she had come to his house and drunk whiskey in his parlor. He’d liked that about her.

“I can repair the deficiency, if you’d like to come in.”

She hesitated on the doorstep. “Dozens of people know where I am,” she said. “I texted friends this address.”

“Really? What house number did you give them?”

She fixed him with a baleful stare. “There
is
no house number. I gave them the GPS coordinates.”

Ah, the modern age. “Then I suppose you’re perfectly safe,” he said, standing aside to let her pass. He hoped she was nothing of the sort, at least when it came to his bed.

Chapter 3

A
nn hesitated on the doorstep, remembering her last visit to Finn’s house. The day they had met, she and Finn had been talking in the second-floor parlor of his far grander residence across the square. He’d been trying—she was pretty sure—to charm her, or at least seduce and distract her. Then there had been a deafening noise and somehow they had been
outside
, across the street, on the grassy slope below the Bunker Hill Monument. Ann still couldn’t sort out exactly what had happened. She’d heard later that it had been a gas explosion, but something about it didn’t add up.

Common sense told her to turn around now and go home, but the thought of Davin’s ravaged arms strengthened her resolve and carried across the threshold. That, and she was parched for a beer and tired of walking the length and breadth of Charlestown in search of this intriguing, infuriating man.

She followed the crime lord inside. The interior wasn’t at all what she had been expecting. His brownstone had been grand, full of overstuffed furniture and swathed in velvet and silk draperies, like something out of a decorating magazine. It had felt more like a showplace than a home.

This house was different. It was immediately welcoming and comfortable. The wide pine floors were sanded to silk beneath her feet and dotted with colorful braided rugs. The paneling on the walls was painted in a soft palette of gray and blue. She glimpsed a comfortable-looking sectional covered in pewter twill through one door, a dining room with a maple table and Windsor chairs through another.

The home was like its owner: quietly seductive. Ann wished she wasn’t intrigued. Criminals were not supposed to be sexy. Bad boys were bad news. She had come to tell Finn that she was going to report Davin’s father to Child Services—and dare him to do his worst, now that all of Charlestown had seen her march up to his front door—but already something was off the rails; things weren’t going to plan.

Because she found something about him bewitching, his charm so difficult to resist.

It was more than his physical appeal, although that was impossible to ignore. She’d never encountered a man like him in the flesh. His body was the stuff of billboards and movie posters: broad shoulders and defined muscles and a neat, narrow waist over lean hips. His clothing moved with his body, a soft flannel shirt in forest green and rich indigo jeans that fit as though made for him. The piercing gray eyes and thick wavy hair didn’t hurt, either.

She had never felt this way about a man before. She had found her previous boyfriends cute, like puppies or kittens, but not the stuff of her deepest fantasies. And even then, while dating men she found only passably attractive, she’d been hungry for them to touch her. With Finn she felt more than hungry. She felt ravenous—and it frightened her.

“Hungry?” he asked her.

“Yes, actually.” For more than food, but she could hardly say that. She worried that it was obvious enough without putting it into words. And it was hardly a position of strength from which to bargain over the well-being of a child.
Remember what you’re here for, Ann.

“Walking back and forth across town twice without dinner will do that to you,” she supplied, letting her eyes roam his athletic form again as he turned toward the kitchen.

The fridge was a stainless-steel behemoth, a restaurant model scaled down for a home kitchen. Finn opened it and handed her a beer, icy cold and dark. Next he produced an artfully arranged platter of meat and cheese decorated with pieces of cut fruit and vegetables carved into the shapes of flowers.

She raised an eyebrow when he placed the food on the counter. “Do you have Martha Stewart squirreled away in one of the cupboards?”

“I have a housekeeper,” he admitted. “Though she’s used to managing a larger residence. Until the foundation of the brownstone is stabilized and the gas can be turned back on, there’s nothing for her to do but cook and clean for this place, and since it’s just me here,” he said, taking a bite out of a carrot carved to look like a rose, “she’s got some extra time on her hands. Possibly a little too much.”

That explained the vegetable sculptures, but not the condition of the brownstone. “What cracked the foundation on your house?” she asked.

“Gas explosion,” he said.

She still didn’t buy it. “I was there that day. I don’t remember smelling gas. And I don’t remember seeing any flames.”

He grinned at her. It was a slow, sexy expression that went all the way to his eyes. He took another swig of his beer, then said, “All right, then. What do
you
think it was?”

Good question. “I think you were cooking meth, or something equally dangerous, in your basement, and it went wrong.” That was the rational explanation for what had happened.

“If I wanted to cook meth, I wouldn’t do it in a residential neighborhood where people could get hurt.”

“So you’re a civic-minded criminal,” she said.

“Let’s say I take care of my own.”

“That’s just a romantic way to describe a protection racket.”

“Or feudalism or
government
. Yours didn’t treat the Irish very well when they flocked here in the nineteenth century. My kind did.”

“Your
kind
are racketeers.”

That slow grin again. “Is that what the teachers at your little school call us?”

The Fair Folk. The Beautiful People. The Good Neighbors.

“No,” she said. “They call you dangerous.” Somehow they were now standing very close, Ann realized.

“That isn’t all they call us,” he said. “The Irish here have got half a dozen quaint euphemisms for me and mine. The Irish are afraid that if they say our true names, we’ll come at dusk and take their prettiest children away.”

She was only inches away from him now. His proximity had an undeniable effect on her. She could feel the pulse beating in her neck, hear her breath coming quicker.

He closed the distance between them and reached for her.

“Fairy tales are for children, Mr. MacUmhaill,” she said, trying for some composure.

“It’s Finn.” His hands had wandered. One was tracing the path of her freckles down her neck. She shouldn’t allow that.

But she didn’t want him to stop.

“You’re too smart to deny the evidence of your own eyes, Ann Phillips. You heard a voice before the house exploded that day. I’m sure you know that some opera singers can shatter glass with a perfect note. Now imagine such power amplified by a force that can draw on all the energy in living things. It’s called stone song, and it’s a kind of weapon. A lost art. One that should have remained so.”

He was right. She’d heard the note, felt it vibrate through the floor, the walls, the furniture, her body, and she’d been . . . electrified by the sound. She had felt like that note had struck a sounding board in her—and that,
that
had terrified her. Almost as much as what followed.

“And the way we . . . got out of the building that day?”

“That is a gift possessed only by my kind. The power to
pass
through solid matter.”

She shook her head, still reeling a bit from the memory, and more so from his proximity and touch. “No. That’s impossible.”

“You’re denying it because the human mind recoils from the experience. I would not have done it if I’d had any other choice.
Passing
often has an untoward effect on your race. It seemed an acceptable risk, however, when the only alternative was dying in the blast.”

“It was a trick of some kind,” she insisted.

All the playfulness went out of him. “Think back, Ann. First we were in my house, drinking whiskey.”

“You grabbed me. I remember that.”

“Like this,” he said. He placed a warm hand at the small of her back and drew her close. She didn’t push him away. “Do you remember what happened next?” he asked.

“And then we were outside,” she said, her breath short. “On the slope beneath the monument, but we must have walked.”

“Can you recall walking out of the house?” She could feel his breath on her face, warm and sweet.

“I was in shock. That’s why I don’t remember how we got out of the building.”

Somehow her hands had come to rest on his chest. She was such a fool.

“This is the second time you’ve come to me, Ann Phillips. If you mean to involve yourself in my business, then you need to understand who and what I am.”

“I know you’re a criminal.”

“That’s not all I am.”

She could feel all that he was: the warmth of his body, the solid muscles of his chest. “I’m not sure I want to know any more. I’m a schoolteacher. Getting involved with a man like you could ruin my career.”

“Oh, I’ll ruin you, Ann Phillips, I promise you that.”

Finn’s mouth covered hers. Warm and wet. Lips and tongue. Licking fire into her. Kindling heat low in her belly and between her legs, where she suddenly, alarmingly ached to be touched. She had not felt anything like this, anything so immediate or revelatory since her first heart-pounding fumblings as a teenager; and it was so transporting, so consuming, that it felt almost supernatural.

He broke away. She opened her eyes, thoroughly dazed, to look up at his face, and felt a frisson of sublime terror. Finn MacUmhaill was beautiful. The high cheekbones, the pale-gray eyes, the full lips and masculine jaw were in fact
too
perfect. Seen from this angle his beauty was inhuman and cruel.

The hand at the small of her back drifted up to her shoulder, then gripped her painfully tight. His other hand stroked her cheek, caressed her jaw, pain and pleasure in one embrace. Then he said, “Close your eyes.”

She did, because she wanted more.

She didn’t get it.

The ground shifted beneath her feet, and she cried out but the sound was swallowed by the earth. She was falling. And flying. And suffocating. She was part of the ancient wood of the house, of the soil beneath it, of running water deep underground. She was growing through tree roots and out of blades of grass and then she was in the open, shaking with terror and shivering in the cool evening breeze.

They were standing in the middle of a park on scrubby grass. Or Finn was standing; she was clinging to him for support.

She pushed him away and stepped back. Her knees wobbled, and she staggered up the dirt path. She could feel the breeze tickling her skin, but seconds ago she had been . . . buried alive. And yet moving
through
the earth. Her mind reeled. She felt for the cool silver of the whistle at her neck and tried to get her bearings.

They were in the old training ground. The little park was crisscrossed by dirt paths and bordered on all sides by homes. Light shone from the windows of the grand brick mansions on the high slope and peeked around the shades in the tiny, two-story row houses on the other side.

Everything about the scene was oddly peaceful. Somehow their arrival, which had felt like a cataclysm to Ann, hadn’t even disturbed the birds in the trees.

Or Finn.

“What—What did you just do?” she demanded.

“The same thing I did the day of the explosion. I
passed
. It is one of the gifts of the Fae.”

“Gifts? That’s not a gift. It’s . . . ” She didn’t know what it was. “Horror. Pure horror.”

Finn shrugged. There was a coldness about him she had not perceived before, an alien quality that marked him as a member of a race apart. “Mankind does not generally find it pleasant, but you have uncommonly high tolerance for the experience. It drives some humans mad.”

“Being buried alive would drive anyone mad.” Then the real horror of it struck her. “What would have happened if you’d let go of me?”

T
he thought made Finn feel
as queasy as Ann looked. It had been a favorite trick of the Queen’s,
passing
with some mortal who had disappointed her, or amused her, or simply happened to be in the wrong place at the time when the whim was upon her. Finn had always found the idea repugnant, but he’d raised no objections to her casual cruelty, or that of the Court she led. In fact, she’d done it to
him
once—when he was a boy, before he had fully mastered that art—left him buried alive in a hillside for a terrified instant before retrieving him and depositing him in the center of a circle of snickering sycophants.