Silver Skin (A Cold Iron Novel) (25 page)

And unlike the Fae she had met in New York, this one was trying to blend in.

Kieran had always dressed like an eccentric rock star. His wardrobe had rivaled the Metropolitan Opera’s costume department in size and extravagance. He had never worn anything made in this century except very expensive, very well cut jeans. More often he had donned embroidered peasant blouses in jewel-colored silks or snowy white cotton, velvet frock coats that swirled around his knees, Persian-lamb toppers, or coats with beaver shawl collars.

This Fae was nothing like that. He wore thoroughly modern clothing. His jeans were practical and well worn, no fake fraying or impossible-to-maintain indigo hue. These looked washed, in a real washer. His plaid flannel shirt was faded and buttoned over an equally washed, soft-looking tee. He might have blended in with the college students, might have looked almost cozy to snuggle up to, all warm, comforting masculinity if there hadn’t been a feral cast to his face. It gave him a thuggish aura, made him look more like one of the toughs who hung out near the South Boston docks than a preppy school boy.

Tommy put a hand on her shoulder, breaking the Fae’s spell. He leaned over and whispered, “‘Danny Boy’ for starters. And if he gives us any trouble, it’ll be ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’ for him.”

• • •

E
lada had never been so
close to Sorcha Kavanaugh before. He had admired her from afar in the past, long before Miach MacCecht had identified her as a potentially powerful latent Druid.

He hadn’t told anyone about his trips to the Black Rose except Miach’s granddaughter, young Nieve. His visits to the Irish bar were . . . private. It was the music that had drawn him, the high, clear woman’s voice that had floated out of the low door and stopped him in his tracks that winter day. He’d been collecting protection money from the merchants in the Haymarket, the ones who paid tribute to the
Aes Sídhe
, and had decided to cross through Faneuil Hall on his way home to grab a cup of coffee. The day had been cold, Christmas lights already threaded through the trees and his breath visible in the air when he heard her, forgot all about the coffee, and ducked inside the Black Rose.

She’d been seated on a high stool on a low stage, her black hair falling like a veil over her shoulders, singing without accompaniment into the microphone.

The crowd in the bar had been rapt.

They didn’t know what they were listening to, only that it was sad and beautiful and that it conjured a lost world none of them had ever known but some among them might remember in their bones. Elada’s world. The Fae Court before the fall. Not the decadence of the cruelty in it, though there was that too, salt in the sweet of her voice, but the life and color that had been the birthright of the Fae, the vivid, blistering pageant that had once been the hallmark of his race.

Some instinct had stopped him just inside the door of the Black Rose and kept him from coming any closer to Sorcha Kavanaugh on that occasion. And every time since. She might not know what he was—few outside the Irish enclaves of South Boston and the hinterlands of the old country believed in the
Aes Sídhe
anymore—but most intelligent creatures instinctively feared the Fae. And he was afraid that if he alarmed her, the next time he came to the Black Rose she would be gone.

So he had always remained at the back of the bar, near the door, in as unthreatening a manner as he could manage. It was better that way for a whole host of reasons, the most important being that he was attracted to her, and he was living with another woman at the time.

It was over with Maire now, but there were other reasons he could not act on his attraction to Sorcha Kavanaugh. Unfortunately they were difficult to remember when he looked at her. She was pale as any Fae and possessed the night-black hair so prized by his kind, falling in soft waves around her shoulders. Her eyes were a deep, almost black brown. She wore dark lipstick that made him think of raspberry wine, lush and intoxicating.

And if he frightened her away now with a clumsy come-on, he and Miach might lose a powerful ally in the fight to keep the wall between worlds standing.

He tossed off his whiskey to blunt his desire and called for another even as Sorcha Kavanaugh opened her luscious mouth and began to sing. He discovered that he was jealous of the microphone, just inches from her lips, and he shifted in his chair. His task tonight was to convert her to their cause, not get her in his bed.

Fortunately she was singing a maudlin and sentimental ballad that helped to dampen his ardor. “Danny Boy” wasn’t exactly her style, though it sounded well enough coming from her. She and the fiddler followed this with another musical travesty that somehow inspired the whole house to sing along with them.

The effect was curious. He could still hear her under hundreds of ragged, drink-soaked voices.
Even when she stepped away from the microphone.

Suspicion woke in him, unnerving and unwelcome.

Elada wanted Sorcha Kavanaugh the way a man wants a woman, but Miach MacCecht, the sorcerer to whom he had bound himself two thousand years ago, with whom he had weathered the betrayal of the Druids, and with whom he shared the last two millennia, wanted her for an acolyte. Miach wanted to train her as a Druid and channel her formidable power toward preserving the wall between worlds, the barrier that kept the corrupt Fae court on another plane, in well deserved exile.

Miach thought Sorcha Kavanaugh was a
latent
Druid. Tame. With no access to her power. Much as Beth Carter had been a year ago when they discovered her.

Miach had fixed on Sorcha, among all the possible Druids identified by the Prince Consort’s search, because she possessed that most Druidic characteristic: a passion for study. After her formal schooling she had traveled the world, seeking out further instruction, different modes of thought about music. It was the hallmark of her bloodline, this thirst for knowledge.

Miach had deduced that Sorcha was a likely Druid because she studied music with single-minded focus, but he had not guessed that perhaps she had been drawn to music because she had it in her. Druid music. The kind that could fracture physical as well as magical foundations, like those that supported the wall between worlds.

Elada could hear her, one small girl, above all the other voices in the teeming room.

Sorcha Kavanaugh, Elada suspected, was not tame. There was a resonance in her beguiling voice, one that he knew—and feared. If Miach heard it, if Miach believed she could not be converted to their cause, he would kill her. And Elada was the only being on earth who could stop that from happening.

• • •

T
he Fae in the front
row was not amused. Sorcha could see that by the way he tossed off his whiskey and scowled. Good. Maybe if he didn’t like the music, he would leave.

But he didn’t leave. Not after the first set, and not after the second, even when they sang an encore of “Danny Boy” and Tommy joined in with his ragged tenor.

That’s when she started to get nervous.

Then she saw the Fae signal the waitress. He caught her attention with a nod of his head and held it with a spectacular smile. Sorcha was wearing cold iron and still that expression kindled something deep inside her. Jealousy. Even though she knew that nothing good could come of being the focus of such a creature’s attention. She still wanted that attention for herself. Such was the power of the Fae.

The waitress—Becky—didn’t know what he was. She was human and unawake to the danger he presented. She perked up and made a beeline through the crowd, ignoring the other patrons who were trying to signal her.

Sorcha watched, her stomach churning at the thought of such abject obedience. The Fae who had tried to enslave her in Manhattan had beckoned her with similar ease.

And she had gone. She had followed him blindly that night, caught in the web of his seductive beauty, beguiled by a voice as musical as her own.

Sorcha felt sick watching Becky bend over the Fae’s shoulder and smile with pleasure as he spoke in her ear. Becky nodded at something he said, then turned and headed back toward the bar with single-minded purpose. She ignored the other patrons who put their hands in the air and waved, trying once more to attract her attention. At the bar she ordered and picked up a single drink.

For her.

Careful what you wish for.

It was a half pint of bitter. Her favorite. A local from north of Boston. The color was rich and red, and Sorcha knew even before the waitress began threading her way back through the crowd where it was headed.

“From tall, dark, and gorgeous over there,” Becky said, placing a coaster on the little table beside Sorcha and following it with the half pint.

She shouldn’t be so gratified. “Don’t talk to him again,” warned Sorcha. She knew how to handle the Fae. Becky didn’t.

“Jealous, are we?” Becky said with a twinkle in her eye.

“No.”
Yes.
It was disturbing to be both so powerfully repelled by and so irresistibly attracted to the Fae.

“Relax,” said Becky. “He isn’t buying
me
beers. Or asking me to have a drink with him after the set.” She winked and scampered back toward the bar.

“I’ll have a chat with him after this number, shall I?” asked Tommy.

It would be tempting to let Tommy be her champion, to avoid a confrontation with this Fae, but she couldn’t. Tommy had never looked one in the eye, never had to face one down, and he didn’t have cold iron that no one could take from him.

Sorcha did. “I’ll deal with him,” Sorcha said.

• • •

E
lada watched her turn off
her microphone at the end of the set. She had left the beer untouched. She picked up her harp. The strings glittered in the spotlights. Her instrument was small and appeared to have been built to suit her petite frame. She tucked it under her arm and approached his table.

It struck him—not for the first time—that this was a bad idea. He’d told Miach as much when the sorcerer had first handed him Sorcha Kavanaugh’s file.

“If you want to train her, then why don’t you approach her?” Elada had asked, sitting in Miach’s book-filled study looking out over Boston Harbor.

“I want to train as many of these potential Druids as I can, and I want to get to them before the Prince Consort and his followers do,” Miach had said. “I can’t contact them all.”

“No,” Elada had said, “but you’ve given me an unusually pretty one.”

Miach had laughed. “Fine. Do you want me to admit it? Helene wouldn’t like it. She won’t like me training Sorcha Kavanaugh in any case. I won’t add fuel to the fire by trying to convert the girl to our cause. The idea smacks too much of seduction.”

So Elada had agreed to do it. Miach was right; trying to recruit the girl was a form of seduction. Unfortunately it wasn’t the kind of seduction Elada had intended for Sorcha Kavanaugh. Put plainly, he would be asking her to side with the race that had tried to exterminate her own, in a war between diametrically opposed factions of the Fae that would most likely result in her death, and possibly that of her loved ones.

Sorcha Kavanaugh stopped short of his table and stood there with her harp perched against her hip. “Thank you for the beer,” she said, “but I don’t accept gifts from your kind.”

She knew what he was. That was unusual but not unheard of, especially among those with ties to the Boston Irish. And she was intelligent enough to be wary of him. He could tell by the way she clutched the harp, knuckles white against the pale wood. But she had come to speak with him anyway, which meant she had nerve and a measure of confidence. He supposed that was necessary in a performer.

“How do you know what I am?” he asked. It seemed as good an opening as any.

“Your kind come for the music.” She shrugged. “And you tip well,” she added, as though the existence of the Fae was no matter to her. The way she gripped her harp said otherwise.

“And sometimes, perhaps, we get out of hand,” he suggested.

“College boys with a varsity letter and a sense of entitlement ‘get out of hand,’” she said. “Your kind is in another league entirely.”

“The Fae are not always the gentlest patrons of the arts,” said Elada. “But we’re sensitive to music, and your voice moves even the dullest mortals.”

She bristled at that, and he wasn’t sure which part had so upset her. Just that she was upset, and done with him.

“Thank you for the offer, but I don’t drink with patrons of any kind.”

He reached across the table and pushed out a chair for her. “If you won’t accept a drink, then maybe you’ll accept a warning. The Fae know what you are, and they’re coming for you, Sorcha.”

Don't miss the other titles in the Cold Iron Series!

In Book One in the Cold Iron Series, archaeologist Beth Carter is confronted with a man whose allure is so powerful it defies logic, a mythic god-king, a Fae whose seductive eye is fixed on Beth.

Cold Iron

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