Stone Song (15 page)

Sorcha experienced a new kind of terror. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a Fae outdoors in broad daylight. Usually she encountered them in bars, shadowy, liminal places, the spaces fairy tales existed in, between dawn and dusk. Out in the open, with the sun shining down on them, they were somehow more real and more frightening.

They weren’t idle Fae like Keiran. These two looked more like Elada. At least in terms of their physique. They both wore their hair long, but not so long that it reached their elbows, and not loose. They had swords on their backs, and their backs were broad. They looked much alike otherwise. It was possible they were brothers. They were both blue eyed and blond and had wide, cruel mouths.

“I knew your master had perverse tastes, Elada Brightsword,” said the one who edged out in front. “But I didn’t know you shared them.” The nod of his head indicated Sorcha.

“Don’t worry about them,” said Elada. “Just get in the car.” He was talking to Sorcha, but his eyes never left the Fae. Or, more accurately, his eyes never left the Fae who
wasn’t
talking.

But the talker had more to say. “So Miach spoke the truth. You bound yourself to a bantling Druid.”

“What does he mean?”

“Just get in the car.”

“We’re going to kill the Druid, Brightsword,” said the quiet one, finally. “But we’d prefer to kill you first. We’ll get no credit for killing you after. Everyone will say you were going to follow her into death anyway.”

“I don’t understand what’s going on here,” Sorcha said, feeling like she was watching a movie in a foreign language.

Elada ignored her and drew his sword from his back. “Can we do this quickly?” he asked. “I haven’t had my coffee yet.”

“With pleasure,” said the talkative Fae, who drew his own weapon. It wasn’t a sword. It was more like an ax, glimmering silver in the early morning sunlight, the blade chased with patterns of writhing animals, the handle set with flashing diamonds, and it would have been a pretty ax if Elada’s head hadn’t been its target.

She felt the music then. Just as she had when she was a girl, when the leaves had danced and swirled around her. And just as she had in the snow with Keiran. And in the alley with Elada. Her killing voice was climbing up out of her, like a squirrel scrabbling up a tree. Only this time it wasn’t trying to protect her, it was trying to protect Elada.

Stupid voice. It could definitely kill both the talkative and the quiet Fae, but she had to stop it, or it would kill Elada, too.

The quiet Fae drew two short knives and began to circle her Fae. When she had begun to think of him as
hers
, she wasn’t quite sure, but there it was.

Unfair. Two against one. The voice wanted out, but what Sorcha wanted was to help Elada.

She ripped the cover off her
cláirseach
just as the first clash of blades rang out: Elada’s sword meeting the talkative Fae’s ax. Collision and withdrawal. When Elada stepped back, the quiet Fae darted in and tried to stab him.

That’s when Sorcha struck. Not a full chord, but two deep notes. The Fae closest to her, the quiet one with two knives and no sense of fairness, dropped his blades and cried out. He clasped his hands over his ears and crumpled to his knees.

Elada was next in the line of her sonic fire, but he didn’t go down. His back was turned to her and she saw his powerful shoulders shudder, but instead of falling to his knees, he lunged and skewered the Fae armed with the ax through the stomach.

He wrenched his sword free and his victim wailed. “That,” Elada said to Sorcha through clenched teeth, “is the part that hurts.”

The talkative Fae stumbled back a pace, clutching at his wound. Then he backed purposefully toward the line of trees, keeping his eyes on Elada.

Elada paid him no mind and turned to Sorcha. Her heart stopped. His eyes were bleeding. Crimson ran from his nose and ears.

She placed her hand against the iron strings and took the vibration into herself, deadening it.

“I hurt you,” she said.

“It’s not as bad as it looks. Get in the car,” Elada rasped.

“I was trying to help,” she said.
And trying not to kill you,
she added silently to herself.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Just get in the car.”

“I’m sorry about the coffee,” she replied, completely irrational.

He smiled then. “Just get in.”

“What about those guys?” she asked. The quiet Fae was lying on the grass, not moving. Sorcha couldn’t tell if he was dead or alive. The other had disappeared into the trees.

“Donal can clean up his own mess,” said Elada.

“So these aren’t the Prince’s men.”

“No. These are Donal’s followers. He’s the Fae who controls Manhattan. And you are racking up a lot of enemies, Sorcha Kavanaugh.”

“How did they find me?”

“They probably followed Liam and Nial from Miach’s house, which means we definitely can’t go there. And that’s inconvenient, as I’m iron poisoned and can’t heal myself.”

He reached stiffly for the driver’s-side door. “Let me,” she said, taking the keys.

She watched him climb gingerly into the passenger side. “Mass General,” she said decisively as she started the car. “We can get Tommy and they can look at your . . .”

Elada shook his head. “Human doctors can’t do anything for iron poisoning, or iron injuries.”

“What does the harp do?” she asked. “I’ve never been sure. It doesn’t seem to have any effect on humans.”

“You should ask Miach these questions,” said Elada, sounding hoarse and exhausted. “He’s the sorcerer. He understands how your power works. And until you do, please don’t try to help again.”

“That was two against one,” she said. “I thought they were going to kill you.”

He shook his head, sending drops of blood spattering over the dashboard and onto Sorcha’s hands on the wheel. “I had it handled. It’s what I’m trained to do. What I’ve done for two thousand years. I can fight multiple opponents and keep someone else safe while I do it.”

“That isn’t why I used the harp,” she said.

She took a deep breath. Her life was in his hands. There was no running from these creatures. She understood that now. She had to learn to defend herself, and until she could, she would be at the mercy of Elada and his sorcerer. It was time for the truth.

“I used the harp,” she said, “because I was pretty sure it wouldn’t kill you, and I know that my voice will. I can’t control it. The day I killed Keiran, it just happened without any warning. And I think it tried to come out once when I was a child, and Gran stopped it. Today I felt it clawing its way out of me. It happened when that Fae drew his ax on you. But I couldn’t make it come when the Prince had Tommy. It won’t answer to me.”

She took her eyes off the road—and the Jamaica Plain traffic—to look at Elada and see how he had taken that.

He was pale, but the bleeding had stopped, and he was looking at her intently.

And a creeping suspicion dawned on her. “You know something about my power that I don’t know,” she said. “Do you know how to control it?” she asked.

“No,” he replied. “And I was young, just with Miach a few decades before the revolt. I’ve only seen a handful of Druids trained, and never a stone singer. I assume that it’s a lot of the same things that other kinds of Druids do. They learn about patterns and how to channel energy through their bodies, how to control the flow instead of being washed along with it.”

A beat later he added, “Or they die.”

• • •

She had tried to save
his life. His frightened little Druid had survived an evening of torment from the Prince Consort, weathered a night of Fae-wine-fueled lovemaking, and tried to fight two of Donal’s company. She was reckless, stupid, and brave, and he couldn’t think of any finer qualities in a woman.

Admittedly, she’d almost killed him. She would certainly have killed him if she’d used stone song, and a little iron poisoning was preferable to being flayed alive by her voice.

She needed to learn to control it. She’d come into her power accidentally, unknowingly, the day she had killed Keiran. Elada knew from observing Helene and Miach that keeping secrets damaged relationships, but telling Sorcha was too great a risk until they were someplace safe. She’d been through too much in the last twenty-four hours. Even if Elada did tell her, she would have questions he couldn’t answer.

His nose had stopped bleeding by the time they reached Mass General. They stopped, to Sorcha’s amazement, at a Starbucks along the way, but it was going to take more than coffee to patch him up. For now, though, he would do what he had to do to keep her safe.

• • •

“What now?” Sorcha asked as
they pulled up to the emergency room.

“Park up there,” said Elada.

“That’s the fire lane.”

“The building’s not on fire. Pull up there.”

“Do you always break the law so casually?” she asked.

“Human laws don’t apply to the Fae.”

“Well, I’m human, and I have a human driver’s license that I don’t want to lose.”

“You won’t,” said Elada. “I promise. Stay here and don’t move the car for anyone except a fire truck. I’ll be right out.”

“I don’t like this.”

“You don’t have to like it. But sometimes you have to do what’s necessary for the people you care about. I’ll be back with Tommy in a few minutes.”

Sorcha watched Elada cross to the emergency room entrance. He stopped along the way to speak to the policeman who stood outside, pointed at the minivan, and received a nod and a handshake in reply. Then he disappeared inside the glass doors.

She rarely drove and when she did, she wasn’t a rule breaker. She stopped behind school buses, she slowed down in residential neighborhoods, and she never double-parked. Sitting here like this, in a strange car, made her nervous. Given the Fae attitude toward private property, which could be called casual at best, it was possible that this was a stolen car. Or that it had stolen plates. Every time the policeman directing traffic at the entrance turned her way, Sorcha tensed.

Then there was a ripple in the stream of people flowing out of the emergency room doors, and Elada emerged from the crowd, pushing Tommy in a wheelchair. The fiddler wore a slack-jawed, heavy-lidded expression that made Sorcha cringe. When Elada reached the Range Rover, she jumped out.

“You used glamour on him,” she said. It came out an accusation. She couldn’t help it.

“It was necessary,” said Elada.

“Why?”

“Because the last time I spoke with your fiddler,” he said, lifting Tommy into the car, “I needed your address and he was reluctant to give it to me.”

She needed to keep reminding herself that he wasn’t just a criminal, he was Fae. His sly humor, his love of coffee, his reluctance to take advantage of her while she was drunk on Fae wine, had lulled her into thinking that he was an ordinary man.

“I’ll drive now,” he said, holding out his hand for the keys.

She kept them in her grasp. “What did you do to him?”

“I reasoned with him.”

“With your Fae voice. The one that lets you order people around, the one that people can’t resist.”

“It was expedient,” Elada said with no trace of remorse whatsoever. “You wanted him removed from the hospital where the Prince might get access to him. You wanted him safe. Now he will be.”

“You should have sent me inside to talk to him. Not brought him out like this.” Tommy was still staring into space and smiling vaguely.

“He’ll come out of it in an hour or two. I told him he was lost in his thoughts, listening, in his head, to his favorite music, and that he wouldn’t be distracted by anything around him. It allowed me to wheel him out of the hospital unchallenged. It will do him no permanent harm.”

“And the policeman? The one who let me sit in the fire lane of a hospital for fifteen minutes without saying a word?”

“No doubt he wants us to move on now.” Elada held out his hand for the keys once more.

“Did you glamour him?”

“As it happens, no. He’s on Miach’s payroll. Many of Boston’s finest are.”

Of course he was. And Elada knew all-night welders who worked for cash. “Are all the Fae criminals?”

“We aren’t breaking our own laws.”

“Do you have any?”

He didn’t answer right away. “We have customs. Traditions. And
gaesa
.”

“What are
gaesa
?”

“A
geis
is a magical prohibition or vow. If Miach placed a
geis
on me not to drink coffee, I would be weakened every time I broke it.”

“You’d probably be dead in a week. And if you took a vow?”

“That would depend on the vow. I took one to protect Miach. It was binding until he dissolved it.”

“Why did he do that?”

“He thought he was going to die, and Fae who are bound together, or Fae bound to mortals, drag their partners into death with them.”

“But he didn’t die.”

“No, but he has a human partner, a wife of sorts now, and a sorcerer can’t have a right hand if he has a partner like that, because the death of one would mean the death of all three.”

“Oh.” She shouldn’t say anything. It was clingy. It was too soon. They’d only spent one night together. She wasn’t even sure she wanted anything to do with his world. And his offer to protect her wasn’t necessarily a lifetime commitment. “Does that mean you’ve never been . . .
bound
to anyone?”

He smiled. “No. Never. No one but Miach. But I’ve a mind to be.”

Chapter 10