Silver Skin (A Cold Iron Novel) (21 page)

She was covered in blood and soot, but Deirdre didn’t bat an eye. “What has happened?” she asked.

“They have Miach,” Helene said. “Nial has been shot. And Liam beaten. And Angus and Kermit are in the hospital and Conn and Elada and Beth are trapped in Clonmel.”

“Who has Miach?” asked Deirdre patiently.

“Druids,” said Helene.

Deirdre’s lovely face lost all color. “No,” she said.

Helene tried to sit up. “You have to help me. There are dozens of them. They have him in cold iron.”

“No,” Deirdre shook her head and backed away.

“Wait here,” said Kevin.

Helene watched him follow his lover into the hall. He could hear low voices, a terrified sob, then Deirdre running up the stairs, Kevin after her.

Helene got stiffly to her feet. She walked into the hall and looked into the dining room where just a few nights ago she had sat at the same table with Miach, Nieve, Beth, Conn, and Elada and wondered if she wanted to be part of their world, if she was willing to take the bad with the good.

On the floor in the corner of the room, beneath the mahogany sideboard, was little Garrett’s ball. She picked it up and made her decision.

Helene climbed the stairs. She heard Deirdre talking in a high, excited voice, and Kevin in a calm, low one, in the studio.

Helene stood in the doorway until they noticed her. “Miach cast the wards on your house, every year, even when there were no Druids. Please, help him.”

Deirdre looked stricken. “You don’t understand,” said Deirdre.

Helene looked down at the blood covering her arms, her legs, her clothes. “I’m afraid, too,” she said.

Deirdre shook her head. “You don’t know what they’re capable of.”

“I think I do. Even if I didn’t suffer as long or as badly as you did, I’m capable of empathy. Apparently the Fae aren’t.”

“That isn’t fair,” said Kevin.

“I can’t afford to be fair,” replied Helene. “Brian is half-Fae and his Druids are insane. I can’t rescue Miach without help.”

“Then go to Finn,” said Deirdre.

“I’ll go with you,” said Kevin, rising.

“No,” said Deirdre. “You won’t.”

He kissed the crown of her honey-gold hair. Despite their enthusiasm for novelties and “sharing,” Helene was more than ever certain these two loved each other deeply.

Deirdre tilted her head back and claimed Kevin’s lips with her own. Her hand slipped around the back of his neck. For a second they looked like a living sculpture, something out of Ovid chiseled by Bernini, two lovers caught in a fleeting embrace.

Then Deirdre’s hand flew back. Helene heard a cord snap. A braided leather thong dangled, broken, from her fingers. And a black iron ring struck the floor of the studio, bounced on the snowy-white paint tarp, and rolled to a stop at Helene’s feet.

Kevin’s face was a picture of stricken betrayal.

“Sit down, my love,” Deirdre ordered.

Kevin obeyed.

Deirdre turned to face Helene. “You would do the same, to protect the man you loved, if it was in your power,” she said.

“No,” said Helene. “I wouldn’t violate his will. I had the opportunity. Miach was chained in cold iron. I wanted to stay with him, even if that meant making him vulnerable to Brian. But that isn’t what he wanted.”

“And now he’s going to die for your weakness and stupidity.”

“No. I’m going to save him.”

“Go, then.”

“I need money. And clean clothes.”

Deirdre turned to Kevin. “Stay here.”

“Don’t let her go, Deirdre,” said Kevin.

The Fae ignored her lover and swept past Helene. “Come with me.”

Helene stooped to pick up Kevin’s ring as she went and followed Deirdre down the hall.

The Fae led Helene into her bedroom. It was a magnificent space, heaped with the artistic spoils of two millennia and a number of paintings that Helene had thought were in major museums.

“Copies,” said Deirdre as she noticed Helene’s questioning glance, although she did not say which were copies—the ones in her bedroom or the ones in museums.

Deirdre opened a drawer filled with currency and rooted through Spanish doubloons, British pounds, Revolutionary War scrip, stock certificates, and, finally, American dollars. She tossed a bundle of bills on the bed. Hundreds. Then more. Thousands.

“Some twenties would be nice,” said Helene. “For cab fare.”

The Fae ignored her. She opened the double doors of a wardrobe and turned to Helene.

“Finn will hurt you,” she said.

“I know,” said Helene.

“He has been at war, on and off, with Miach, for two thousand years. He thinks Miach double-crossed him over Nieve. You will not buy his help with coin. Only suffering.”

“I’d like to wash as well,” said Helene, ignoring the Fae’s warnings.

“There’s soap in the bathroom,” said Deirdre. She started pulling garments out of the wardrobe. It was like a curator’s costume collection. Sequined flapper frocks from the twenties hung alongside silk shantung go-go sheaths and a long velvet gown, with pointed sleeves and gold-wire embroidery that might have belonged to a Saxon princess, spilled out onto the floor.

“These should fit you,” she said, flinging an assortment of dresses on the bed. Then she looked Helene up and down with a cold, assessing eye. “Your chances of surviving the night are slim. Finn’s grievances run deep.”

“Thank you for the advice,” said Helene coldly.

Deirdre left her. Helene went into the Fae’s gleaming tiled bath and stood under the shower. She turned it on before she even removed her clothes, wanting the water to wash away all feeling. She shucked her skirt and tank top under the hot spray and let them lie in a wet heap beside the drain. The water ran red for a long time as she washed the blood out of her hair and off her arms and legs.

When she got out, she dressed quickly in a navy-blue gauze halter dress. It was probably mid-thigh on Deirdre but it fell to Helene’s knees and would blend in on Boston’s chic but conservative streets. She rummaged in Deirdre’s wardrobe for a handbag, selected a leather satchel, and put her cell phone and the money inside. Her own sandals would have to do; luckily she’d managed to scrub most of the blood out—with Deirdre’s toothbrush.

She left without saying good-bye, opening the gates to the driveway and making her way up Pinckney Street to Joy, then over the top of the hill at Mount Vernon Street, which Henry James had once called the most beautiful in America, though its beauty did not move Helene now. She descended Joy to Park, where the hill met the Common, and where she walked into the street and hailed a cab.

“Bunker Hill Monument, please.”

Nieve had told her where Finn lived, in one of the giant town houses on Monument Square. And Nieve had told her something of her father-in-law’s temperament. Finn was quick to anger, prickly in his honor, almost human in the violence of his emotions, but Fae in the coldness of his actions. His fame had been not as a champion like a Conn, but as a war leader, with the charisma and luck that drew fighting men to his banner.

When they were off the Hill and on their way through town, Helene pulled her phone out of her bag and called Beth.

“Thank god,” said Beth, when Helene told her she had escaped from Brian.

“I’m going to get Miach out,” said Helene.

“You should wait for us,” said Beth. “Two of the Druids tried to break in and Conn killed them, but the other two are still casting spells on the house, keeping us inside. They conjured some kind of beast, a dog with a snake’s head, inside the inn earlier, but I figured out how to dispel it. As soon as we’re able, we’ll come to you.”

“I can’t wait for you to come back,” said Helene. “I’m going to Finn’s.”

There was silence on the other side of the line. “Helene, please don’t. Miach wouldn’t want you to do this. He released Elada from their bond. He knew he was going to die when he went back for you.”

She hadn’t known. She didn’t know as much about the Fae as she ought to, but she could guess that self-sacrifice wasn’t a common Fae quality.

“I have to try to save him,” Helene said.

“This is bigger than Miach,” said Beth. “The Druids in Boston are only the vanguard. Brian and the Prince Consort found more. Ones like me. Ones who could be powerful. They have agents out looking for them now, recruiting them.”

“Then you’ll need Miach to fight them, when the time comes,” said Helene and hung up.

The cab sped through the nighttime streets of Boston, down Staniford to the Charlestown Bridge. Nieve had told her that the Fae couldn’t cross the old bridge—there was too much iron in it—and that Finn owned the old rotting warehouse on the Boston side of the channel, the one that everyone said was prime real estate and should be redeveloped, but never was. He used it to keep the cars he drove in Boston, and he crossed back and forth by boat when necessary. He had another fleet of cars for use in Charlestown itself.

The cab let her off at the base of the monument, and she decided that Finn’s house had to be the brownstone on the north side with the suspiciously large number of young chestnut-haired men loitering in front. Nieve’s stroller was also parked outside.

Climbing the steps was like running a gauntlet of Fae half-breeds, but the five outside let her pass, until she reached the double doors with their frosted glass panels. The half-blood at the top looked her up and down and said, “I think you’ve got the wrong house, sweetheart.”

“I’m here to see Finn,” she said. “With a message from Miach MacCecht.”

The half-blood tried to hide the surprise in his eyes, but he had too much of his patriarch in him, and Helene could read the uncertainty on his face.

“If it’s about Nieve—” he started.

“It’s not about Nieve,” she said. “It’s about Miach and Finn. Now tell him I’m here.”

“Wait here,” he said.

He disappeared inside the house. Helene willed herself not to turn around and look at the half-bloods behind her. She knew that here, in Finn’s domain, if she wanted to get what she had come for and survive whole, she couldn’t show fear.

The door opened. The half-blood beckoned her inside.

Finn’s town house was Victorian like Miach’s, but Monument Square was a world away from Southie. Miach’s mansion had been a lone outpost of wealth and ostentation in an otherwise steadfastly working-class neighborhood, built, she had learned, by an Irish whiskey magnate in the nineteenth century who had been determined to make the old neighborhood fashionable. He had only partially succeeded. Wealthy sons of Erin, boys from Southie who had made good, had built their homes on the peninsula, but Boston’s Protestant elite did not. They dispersed from Beacon Hill to the filled in Back Bay and later flocked to the streets around the Bunker Hill Monument in a patriotic fervor. And their wealth, long established from privateering and the China trade, dwarfed that of the rising Boston Irish.

It showed in Finn’s house. The cladding was stone, the ground-floor ceilings were sixteen feet high. The parlors on the ground floor were dark, but she could see their grandeur even in the green gaslight filtering through the sheer curtains from the street.

The half-blood led her up the stairs to a parlor with a view of the monument, all cream and gold and polished mahogany. It was not lined with books like Miach’s library, nor paintings like Deirdre’s house, but there was a profusion of gilding and ormolu fixtures that gave the room richness and warmth.

Finn stood in front of one of the windows, looking at the monument. The casements were open to the night air and the silk panels fluttered in the breeze. He didn’t turn around when she entered, and she bit her tongue to keep from speaking, because she didn’t yet know the rules of this engagement, and she was determined to come out ahead in any Fae bargain they struck.

Finn turned, wordlessly, from the window when the door behind her shut. She had the opportunity to study him closely for the first time. She had been too terrified at the Commandant’s House, and then in too much pain, to observe him in any detail.

He was brawnier than Miach, though not as muscular as Conn. She could see how he had become a great leader of men—Fae men, that is. There was a stillness in him that suggested that he was perfectly focused, ready, at a moment’s notice, to spring into action and lead an advance. His Fae beauty was almost feminine, his chestnut waves falling to his shoulders: his leonine mane made him look like a young Alexander the Great.

He looked her up and down and smiled. “So you decided to take me up on my offer.”

“No,” she said. “I’m here to beg for your help.”

“Charity is not in the nature of the Fae,” he said. “If you’ve been sharing Miach’s bed, you should know that.”

He prowled to one of the lolling chairs flanking the fire, black lacquer with gilded swan’s head arms, and sat, crossing his legs. His pose, the classical style of the chair, and the details of the room all conspired to make him look like a victorious Roman general. When he steepled his hands, he looked as though he were deciding how to dispose of the spoils of war.

“Come here,” he beckoned, and now he had gone from general to emperor.

She paced to the center of the room, but declined to stand in front of his chair for inspection.

“Miach’s son Brian has brought a band of Druids to Boston. They kidnapped Nieve and me, and now they have Miach.”

“But you and Nieve are free,” said Finn pleasantly. “And my old enemy is reaping what he has sown. His own son leads these Druids.”

“They aren’t ordinary Druids. There’s something wrong with them. Miach said they were made wrong, that the Prince Consort broke their minds when he created them. They’re rabid.”

“But not, I think, strong enough to come after me and mine.”

“Not yet,” said Helene. “But they have a list of names. More Druids. Hundreds.”

“If the Druids have come back, the Fae will all flock to my banner.”

“But you will have no sorcerer to fight with you.”

“Only because Miach MacCecht will not train my son.”

“Your son seduced his daughter.”

“His daughter was old enough to know her mind,” replied Finn smoothly.

“Garrett and Nieve can be forgiven their bad decision-making. They were children. You and Miach are not.”