Stone Song (12 page)

“By accident. I lost a year of my life in his house. I don’t think I ever went out in that time. I was starving. My clothes were rags. And I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was please him. Then one day he snapped his fingers and told me we were going to sing for someone else.”

His stomach turned. He was very afraid of what he was going to hear next.

“I’m not sure where we were going,” she said. “I never found out. It was winter, February, and it was snowing. I had no shoes, no coat. I didn’t care. I followed him out of the house, thinking how beautiful he looked in his fur coat, how I was lucky just to be near him. I didn’t feel the cold. Not until it happened.”

“I slipped on the ice. We were walking down a street full of brownstones. I wasn’t paying attention to the sidewalk or my footing; I was just following him blindly, like I always did, his hair streaming behind him like a pennant. Then my feet slipped and flew out from under me and I flailed. I reached out to grab something, anything, to stop my fall.

“The snow was piled so high that we were walking in a narrow channel between banks. My hands plowed through the drift. There was nothing to hold on to. Then my hand hit something solid under the snow. It was a railing. An iron railing. I grabbed hold of it to stop my fall.”

“It was like being hit by lightning. I could see him clearly for the first time. I could feel how hungry and cold I was. The whole year I had spent in his house flashed before my eyes. Even then I didn’t understand what he was. I couldn’t say the word even in my head.

“When he turned to beckon me on, I opened my mouth. I thought I was going to scream for help, but words didn’t come out. I sang at him. It was a single note. I don’t know how I did it. I haven’t been able to do it again. At least not on purpose. But the granite foundation on the house we were standing in front of cracked. And the Fae . . . Keiran . . . he . . . there was a lot of blood. I ran. And I didn’t look back.”

• • •

Sorcha finished her story and
looked Elada straight in the eye. He was silent.

She shouldn’t have told him. Gran had warned her. The Fae in Manhattan had only kept her alive because he didn’t know what she was. He had taken her because she sang the old music, because he liked her voice. He hadn’t known.

Now Elada did. And if Gran was right, as she had been about so much, he would kill her as one of them had killed her parents.

He didn’t reach for the sword on his back. Instead, he said, “Sorcha, you’re crying.”

“Oh.” She touched her face. It was wet. She hadn’t realized.

He surprised her again by turning to the door and searching the scarves hanging there until he found something. A handkerchief. He handed it to her.

Tommy, dear as he was, couldn’t tell one piece of clothing from another. She’d ask for her jeans and end up with a winter coat, or a T-shirt and be handed a cocktail dress. But Tommy was a musician with no fixed address except sometimes Sorcha’s house. And Elada seemed . . . domesticated.

“You’re different,” she said, wiping the tears from her face.

“I’ve lived among men for longer than I lived among the Fae.” He had stepped away from the bed, and once more, as in the Black Rose, she had the sense that he was restraining himself.

“I thought you served a Fae sorcerer.”

He nodded, and leaned his broad frame against Gran’s wooden dresser. “But Miach is more than the sorcerer I serve. He is my oldest friend. And in truth I am no longer bound to serve him, but I choose to. He has a family. Half-bloods. And a human lover. And he has offered the Irish in Southie protection for two hundred years. We have no unwilling followers.”

Unlike Keiran.

“After I got away from Keiran, I was too afraid to go back. I don’t know what happened to the others in his house. I knew he was dead, but I was afraid there would be others, more Fae, like the visitors he sometimes had. So I went straight to the Port Authority and begged bus money from strangers until I had enough to get out of New York. I had enough to get as far as New London as it turned out. That’s where I met Tommy.”

“The fiddler,” Elada said. “Are you in love with him?”

She considered the question. “No. I love him, as a friend. And sometimes because he rents a room here, we share a bed.”

“The Fae don’t share,” he said, taking a measured step toward the bed. Then he cocked his head. “At least, I don’t.”

He drew the sword off his back and placed it on the floor beside the bed. She’d seen things like it in Keiran’s house. Fae things. They liked silver. She knew that. They also liked organic shapes. Flowers, leaves. Sinuous forms. The hilt was molded in the shape of a lily, and the blade was chased with knotwork patterns.

“How do you walk down the street with that thing on your back without anyone noticing?”

“Another form of glamour,” he said. “Your Keiran probably used something similar to pass unnoticed among men when he chose.”

“He wasn’t
my
Keiran. And Gran never told me that the Fae could look just like us. She warned me about so many things, but not that.”

“And she slept in an iron bed in a house clad with iron windows and doors,” he said pointedly. “And she kept sacks of iron filings in her pantry, disguised as coffee.”

“So you found those. I’ve never understood what they’re for.”

“They’re a Druid weapon,” said Elada. “They can be exploded or sprayed into the air. If a Fae breathes in too much iron, he dies. If he survives the initial exposure, his hair and skin will still be coated with the particles and they will incapacitate him. If the iron filings aren’t washed off, they’ll poison him to death.”

“I didn’t know about the iron filings when I was growing up. I was more concerned with what she wouldn’t let me have in the house. There was no music. No instruments. I wasn’t even allowed to sing. Gran didn’t want the Fae to hear me and find me.”

“Is that why you hate the little girl’s bedroom across the hall? Because it was yours?”

“Because I had to live without music in it.”

“Then how did you learn?” he asked. He sounded genuinely curious.

“Gran hid my father’s fiddle in the attic. When she was out, I went upstairs and practiced. She wouldn’t let me bring sheet music into the house, so I would go to the library and copy the notes as words, longhand.”

“That was very determined of you.”

“I loved practicing, even up in the attic, where no one could hear me. I as so afraid, growing up, that no one ever would.”

Elada leaned over the bed, stroked her cheek with his hand. “I heard you,” he said. “Your voice drew me into the Black Rose like a spell.”

His touch set her body on fire. They were both still fully clothed. He was standing beside the bed, and she was kneeling at the edge, but they leaned toward each another, attracted like magnets, and he took her face in his hands and said, “I’m going to protect you, Sorcha Kavanaugh, from the Prince and his allies, and tonight, in this bed, from yourself.”

She didn’t understand what he meant until his lips covered hers and something exploded inside her. It was as though a part of herself, the part that was wild and uninhibited and sexual, had been caged all her life and was finally set free.

His tongue made a slick, insistent entry between her lips, a deep, exploratory thrust. She opened her mouth wide to accept him. She opened her legs as well, and her center felt as empty as her mouth felt full. She groaned and gripped his lean narrow hips, the muscles hard beneath her hands, and tried to drag him down onto the bed on top of her.

He disentangled himself and she fell back on the comforter.

“Slow down, Sorcha,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I want . . .” she said, “ . . . everything.”

He smiled. “I’m at your disposal, my black-haired bard.” He quickly unbuttoned his flannel shirt, then whipped off his tee.

She’d never seen a man like Elada Brightsword in the flesh. He was more beautiful than any marble statue, more ripped than any magazine or billboard. Every muscle in his chest, in his abdomen, in his arms, was defined by the moonlight streaming in her window.

He was beautiful, every inch of him, even the tattooed bands circling his wrists, normally not something she’d find appealing. They were shaped like bracers, reaching from the narrowest part of his arm almost to his elbows, and they were as elaborate as an illuminated manuscript, combining flowers and animals and symbols she had never seen before. They weren’t a perfectly matched set. She could see, when he unbuttoned his jeans and his wrists drew close together, that the design on his right arm continued onto the left.

“What do your tattoos mean?” she asked.

“These?” he asked, turning his wrists over and holding them out to her.

She nodded. There were other markings covering his shoulders, but they didn’t appear to be ink. They looked like scars.

“These,” said Elada reaching for her hands and placing them over the swirling black designs, “are my contract with Miach. This one,” he traced her fingers over his right arm, “is my pledge to defend him against all enemies. And this one,” he moved her fingers to his left arm and traced the whorls there, “is his promise to do the same for me. Each of us to the best of our abilities.”

“But you’re not bound to him anymore,” she said.

“No. I’m free to pledge my sword to another. To you. Until such a time as you can defend yourself.”

He had both her hands in his now, and he was waiting for something.

That’s when she felt it. There was a heaviness to the air, a ringing quality to his words that was more than the Fae resonance of his voice.

“If I accept, it’s binding, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Only on me,” said Elada. “I’m the one making the vow. Freely. To protect you from the Prince, and anyone else who tries to hurt or use you. I’m not even asking you to share my bed beyond tonight, to give up your other lovers, yet, but I hope you’ll want to.”

She hesitated. She’d never been in anything like what he was describing. It was . . . a relationship. And so far she’d had only hookups and friends with benefits.

“I don’t know . . .”

“You don’t?” he asked, dropping her hands and pushing her blouse off her shoulders. “Then allow me to persuade you.”

Chapter 8

F
or a second Sorcha remembered the Prince’s hands on her, and she froze. Then she looked up into Elada’s eyes, intent on her, not with avid lust but with fascination and vulnerability.

His hands were the explorers, tracing the line of her jaw, her neck, her collarbone, and down. His lips followed, kissing, exactingly, along the paths his fingers had led. He hadn’t touched her intimately yet, but there was something more deeply exciting about his touch than the Prince’s, than any mortal man’s she had ever known.

It was, she realized as he knelt on the bed and began kissing the back of her neck and the blades of her shoulders, the sense of being cherished. She wasn’t, for Elada, a conquest, a castle to be stormed, or an object of desire, she was a foreign land to be mapped, a place to linger.

Sorcha had been aching for contact for so many hours that his slow, determined, pace should have frustrated her. Instead, it satisfied. It printed every milestone in his progress in her mind and replaced the decadent fantasies that had danced through her head earlier with something more dangerous still: sex that meant something.

She’d misinterpreted his earlier reluctance. She understood that now. It hadn’t been that she wasn’t pretty enough for him. It was that he wanted to know her first. They had no time for that if she was to burn off the Fae wine’s painful arousal tonight, but Elada’s example was showing her that they could learn some part of each other here in bed.

She took her cue from him and explored his body as well. She started with the bracer tattoos that had so much meaning for him, and discovered that the skin there was smooth and hairless, and ever so slightly raised, the ink embossed in his flesh.

There was the faintest scattering of golden hair over his biceps, but when she reached his shoulders, the texture changed. She had not been able to fully see the pattern in the moonlight, but her fingers discovered it now. He had more than a few scars over his chest and back. Elada wore a mantle of precisely cut whorls and dots, interrupted by slashes and crosses that felt like Braille or some kind of code. When her fingers lingered there, his lips paused in their progress down her throat and he became utterly still.

“What are these?” she asked.

“Just scars,” he lied. She didn’t know how she could tell. She wasn’t wearing cold iron, but she could hear it in his voice, something about the timbre, an off note in the symphony that she thought of as his.

“They’re more than scars,” she said. “There’s a pattern here, a code.” It teased her with hidden meaning, the whorls and dots beneath her fingers, like being able to describe a concept but not remember the word she was looking for. “Like old computer punch cards or Braille,” she said.

He took both her hands in his and pulled them away from his chest, then rolled onto his back and pulled Sorcha on top to straddle him.