Stone Song (28 page)

Miach might not be able to glamour the girl with magic, but the suddenly puritanical sorcerer had probably not tried more direct tactics. She was human and female. Bending her to Fae will would be easy.

The teacher, when she appeared, was more than pretty. She was lovely and fresh faced and strawberry haired and he decided that he had just discovered an entirely agreeable way to pass his afternoon and deal with a vexing problem at the same time. She had freckles, which he liked, and slightly crooked front teeth, which made her pretty Cupid’s-bow lips all the more appealing. Her beauty wasn’t the kind that graced magazine covers today, but it was the sort he had regularly plucked from hedgerows in another era, and enjoying it today would make him feel young and alive instead of weighted with care.

“Mr. Finn?” she asked in a voice that was huskier than he expected.

“Just Finn,” he replied, taking the hand she offered and bringing it to his lips.

She looked more skeptical than flattered and retracted her hand without seeming to be affected by his presence. Unusual.

“I’m Ann Phillips,” she said. “And I teach at the school your son should be attending.”

Her gaze was steady and forthright. She was completely unintimidated by him.

And she thought Garrett was his son. Why wouldn’t she? In human terms he looked to be in his early thirties, though other Fae could sense or guess his true age easily. And his was a famous name, so few would fail to know his years or exploits. Normally he took pride in his longevity. Many Fae had tried to kill him over the years. Most of them were dead. But somehow he did not want this pretty young teacher to know that he was old enough to have grandchildren, even though he was old enough to have, quite literally, nations of descendants, if the Fae reproduced with the alacrity of humans.

“Garrett is being homeschooled,” he said.

“By you?” she asked, the note of astonishment in her tone vaguely insulting.

“You think me incapable of schooling a toddler?” he asked.

“You don’t seem the juice-boxes-and-nap-time type,” she said.

That was a promising opening. “May I offer you a drink, Miss Phillips?”

“In the middle of the day?”

“Are you teetotal during daylight? I’ve always found that to be a peculiar Americanism.”

“No,” she said flatly.

He reached for the decanter. “Then what will you have?”

“Whiskey,” she said without hesitation.

He liked her more and more. He offered her a seat, and she took it. That was getting closer to the position he wanted her in.

“What type
do
I seem, Miss Phillips?”

This was the moment she would warm up. “Call me Ann,” she would say, and matters would progress from there.

“You seem the criminal type. I realize that I’m new to the neighborhood and I could be trading in stereotypes, but the flashy cars and preponderance of tattooed young men does suggest that you aren’t an ordinary businessman.”

“And what would you know about ordinary business in Charlestown, Miss
Phillips
?”

“Would it make any difference if my name was Donohue? Or Kenny?”

“If it was, you would know better than to meddle in my business.”

“Is that meant to be a threat?”

“A warning. Charlestown is not Boston, Miss Phillips.”

“Then I’ll take it as a challenge. Social services might not be willing to cross you, Mr. Finn, but I am. That child belongs in school.”

“What is it you think you’re going to accomplish?” he asked, fascinated by her resilience. She was standing by one of the long windows and the sunlight turned her strawberry hair a warm golden hue. He found her lower lip, plump and red, deeply enticing.

“An intervention. I’ve seen the birth certificate. Garrett’s mother was barely more than a child herself when she had him. I’d like to break the cycle here and get her and her child out from under your thumb.”

“Garrett,” he said, coming clean, because he didn’t want this woman to think he seduced children, “isn’t my son. Nieve is in a relationship with . . . my nephew.”

“My mistake. I apologize.” She set her glass on the table. It was empty, but the whiskey hadn’t seemed to affect her. And she seemed genuinely to regret her assumptions. “There was no father named. The address the hospital had on file was this one. And there is a lot of that kind of thing to go around in neighborhoods like this—young girls being taken advantage of.”

“My nephew lives here as well. It was he who gave this address at the hospital. And he was only a few years older than Nieve at the time.” Not that it made what he did right, though Finn was never going to admit that to Miach.

The whiskey glass on the table began to shake. It triggered a memory vivid and hateful. Stone song. And he knew what would happen next.

Out the trembling window he saw a familiar figure exit the house and run across the street to the grass slopes of the monument.

The glass shattered. The windows blew out. The entire house began to tremble and without another thought Finn wrenched Ann Phillips into his arms and
passed
.

• • •

S
orcha had lain in the
darkness for hours. She’d sensed Elada’s distress with her hearing, known that someone had beaten him sometime during the night. She wished she could send more than her hearing, that she could send her thoughts to him as well. He was there because of her, and she loved him.

Garrett had left her unshackled and that was something, but she was locked in the cold damp closet and had no way to get out. She touched the thing circling her neck repeatedly, trying to figure out how to remove it, but it felt as though it were underneath her skin, had burrowed into her flesh.

She’d tried to quiz Garrett about it, about the kind of magic it was, because Miach had been teaching her defensive skills, how to counter the things Fae and Druid mages were likely to throw at her. She decided after some time that the lariat around her neck, the one that started to choke her every time she used her singing voice, was a
geis
of some kind. It was a simple command, a binary spell. It could prohibit one thing and one thing only. If she thought like a Fae, she should able to circumvent it.

So no singing. That much was clear. But there were other sounds she might able to make that had power. They’d spent so damned much time on humming, on using her voice without opening her mouth, because that was safer than unleashing her full power, that she was a master of that minor art.

She tried it now. Just a tentative little buzz in the back of her throat. She tensed, waiting for the lariat to move, to start closing around her neck. When nothing happened, she kept on. In the darkness she heard little eddies of dirt on the floor begin to dance. She stopped.

Moving dirt wasn’t going to get her out of here. And it wasn’t going to save Elada. And she was beginning to think that a house in Quincy and possibly even an armored minivan sounded nice. Wonderful, in fact. A home without iron beds or windows or door latches. Maybe with a few pots, though. She liked cooking in iron, wondered vaguely if it would poison the Fae the way lead in pewter had poisoned past generations.

Her mind was drifting. That was the cold and the dark and her body’s exhaustion and she couldn’t give in to it. She tried to think of how to use the hum. She could move things with the hum. Not large objects. Just small, light things. Leaves, when she had been a child. Pebbles with Miach. But leaves moved in storms; so did sand. Large collections of small objects moving could be powerful.

Garrett had said the spell around her neck was a
geis.
Miach had told her that most
gaesa
were tattooed on or cut into the skin. In a pinch, or for a more temporary spell, a sorcerer could just use a pen. She didn’t think that the design had been cut into her neck. There was no blood and the marks didn’t feel like scars. And she didn’t think Garrett had had time to tattoo her skin. Tattoos were painstaking. The needle deposited pinpoints of ink, not great swaths.

If he had used a pen, then the ink was on top of the surface of her skin. And she might be able to resonate it by humming, to break the lines up into dots and scatter the ink.

Or, in the dark, using a power that was admittedly not fine-tuned, she might flay her own throat open. Which was probably preferable to what Finn had in mind for her.

She hummed cautiously at first, trying to figure out what ink sounded like, and then found it, or at least the ghost of it, the sound of the felt tip squeaking across her skin, hours ago. And the resonance of the ink itself, the sound of it drying as it hit the air. She thought of it like leaves and pebbles and dancing swirls of dirt, and with a feeling a little like a razor skimming along her skin, she made the pinpoints of ink start to dance.

Then she could feel the ink circling her neck in a cloud, close but not touching, and the magic in it struggled. It wanted to wrap itself around her neck. She struck at it with a ferocious, closed-mouthed sound, and the cloud burst. She could feel the ink as moisture on the air, powerless and slightly chemical smelling, and she breathed in relief when it hit the floor like a spatter of paint.

Her voice was free. She could feel it in her throat. It wanted to shatter the lock on the door and splinter the wood, but she bade it rest a moment while she gathered herself. She was bruised and aching and something felt not quite right in her back—an injury, most likely, from her encounter with the pillar in the Commandant’s House. She needed to be ready when she broke out, because the house was full of Fae and she was going to get only one chance to free Elada.

She was still gathering her strength when she heard someone approach. The tread was familiar but she couldn’t place it. She tried to send her hearing out in the direction of the sound but now she discovered what Miach had warned her about when he was training her to hear. Seeing with your hearing was an imperfect science, because you had to recognize sounds of objects when you heard them. If she had never heard a bicycle, she might not know what one sounded like and she’d never be able to guess what it was.

The basement beyond her door was a jumble of unfamiliar objects. The materials were identifiable, wood and plastic and metal and cardboard, and there were washers, dryers, and in a corner a small pile of inert porcelain on cast iron—old bathtubs, perhaps. Not a Fae-friendly material, that.

But much of what was out there was unknowable, and there was someone moving around in the maze. No, two someones. One of them Fae. The heartbeat was too slow to be human. And he was hiding, darting around the obstacles she couldn’t quite make out.

The rustling outside went on a long time, then stopped. Suddenly feet were approaching with purpose, and then the lock sprang open and the door swung wide.

The light, weak as it was, was blinding. “Who’s there?” asked Sorcha.

“It’s me, Nieve. I’ve come to help you escape.”

She knelt in front of Sorcha, and that’s when Sorcha heard him approach, a Fae she had glimpsed the night before, but whose sound she had not caught in the chaos.

He was tattooed and muscular and obviously no courtier, but he had the same brittle brilliance about him as the Prince and in the dark his eyes were luminous with interest.

“What, I wonder, will Finn and Garrett say about this?”

“Nothing,” said Sorcha, pulling Nieve to the floor behind her.

She struck the note she had used to shatter Deirdre’s illusions and added something with more focused intent to it. The Fae snarled and turned, but then his knees buckled and he clutched his head. A second later he slumped wordlessly to the ground.

“Did you kill him?” asked Nieve, who appeared to be unhurt. Evidently all that practice had paid off.

“I can’t tell,” admitted Sorcha. “It’s too dark, but usually there’s a lot of blood.

“Mother of Dana,” said a voice in the darkness behind them. Sorcha cursed. She hadn’t heard Garrett approach. “What the hell did you do?”

Garrett stepped over the body of the Fae to enter the room, then cursed again. “Get away from my wife, Druid.”

“Shut up, Garrett, and take us to Elada, or I’m going home with my son and never coming back.”

Until now, Sorcha had only seen the physical resemblance between Miach and his granddaughter, but now she saw their similarity of character as well.

“You would have me disowned by my father, forever?” asked Garrett.

“Either his heart will soften, as Miach’s has, or it will not, but, yes,” said Nieve. “I am asking you to choose between your father and me and what you know is right. Sorcha isn’t anyone’s enemy, except perhaps the Prince Consort’s. And Elada is like a second father to me. And he was there for our son when you were not.”

Finn’s son sighed. “We have to get Garrett out of the house first. If we free Elada, my father will likely hold our son hostage.”

Nieve’s expression became unexpectedly tender. She kissed her husband on the cheek. “I love you,” she said. “And your father will unbend. Eventually.”

Garrett didn’t look so sure, but he said, “Find our son and get out. I’ll lead the Druid to Elada.”

“I can find him myself,” Sorcha said. She didn’t like the idea of the little boy being in danger, and she wasn’t sure she could use her voice if he was in the house. It was still too difficult to control.

“What about him?” Nieve asked, looking at the Fae on the floor.

Garrett rolled the Fae over. “He’ll live.”

“Should we lock him in?” asked Sorcha.

Garrett shook his head. “He’s Fae. He’d be able to break out of anything we could lock him in and I don’t have time to ensorcel the door or the lock.”

“Then get your son,” said Sorcha.

Garrett looked at her quizzically. “How do you know where Elada is?”

“I can hear him. And everyone in between me and him.”

Garrett took Nieve’s hand and tugged her back. “Let’s go,” he said.

Sorcha wondered if all the Fae she met in future would look at her like that, with fear. Elada never had, but then he’d never seen her splitting rocks. He’d only seen Deirdre with a mild headache and felt the bite of Sorcha’s
cláirseach
.