Midnight Enchantment (8 page)

ELIZABETH sat on the couch and toyed with the silver cuff around her ankle, all the while trying to kill Niall with her gaze alone.

He’d done something to the doors and windows, locked her in magickally somehow. She knew that because she’d tried to climb out the window in the bedroom. She’d been neither able to unlock it nor break the glass.

If she escaped, she still wouldn’t be able to get the cuff off, of course, but she could die trying. That was better than having Niall do the deed. She had no doubt he would. For all his charm and softening of charmed iron walls, there was a ruthlessness in his eyes that warned her to stay wary.

If she was going to make a break for it, she would have to do it soon. The iron sickness was leaching away her strength little by little. A nature fae’s resistance to charmed iron was lower than the other fae. Some suspected it was because the nature fae were more aligned with the elements than the rest. Soon she’d be too weak to run. She had a feeling he was waiting for that—waiting for her to weaken so he could press her for the pieces.

Poor, deluded fool.

“Where did you meet the Summer Queen when she handed over the pieces?” Niall walked over to stand near the edge of the couch, his dark eyes skating over her hungrily as they so often did.

Men were men. Place a halfway attractive woman near them and they all acted the same.

She turned her face away from him. She could tell him that much. The information meant nothing. “We met in the Boundary Lands, at a stream by New Orkney. She had two guards with her and was
not
dressed for traipsing through the underbrush. Why do you want to know?”

“She’s gone into hiding.” He sat down on a chair nearby.

“Well, don’t look at me. I don’t know where she went.” She paused, looking down at her ragged fingernails. “But I’m surprised she ran, doesn’t seem her style. I’m surprised she’s not still sitting in the Rose Tower, thumbing her nose at everyone and proving how powerful she is.”

“Caoilainn is interested in few things as much as her own neck. She knows how to survive. Most of the Seelie Tuatha Dé are upset with her for what she’s done, but she’s declawed them so much over the years that they can’t retaliate with much more than fluffy white magick. They could grow roses at her feet, or produce a nice spring rain, maybe.” He snorted. “That doesn’t go for the Unseelie, who are far more unforgiving and a hundred times more powerful. Caoilainn fled to save herself from the Shadow Queen’s eye. The Shadow Queen doesn’t want to release the sluagh on her ass, but that doesn’t mean she won’t.”

She raised her gaze to his. “The Summer Queen can’t only fear the Shadow Queen. I know she’s hard to kill, but I imagine losing her head wouldn’t do her much good. I figure that will happen sometime soon. She can’t take on all of Piefferburg and expect to live.”

He jerked his chin at her. “And what about you? You’re taking on Piefferburg, too. Do
you
expect to live?”

She snorted. “Of course not. My plan was to run for as long as possible and try my best to survive, but I always figured some Unseelie fae would eventually kill me trying to locate the pieces.”

“Then why do this?”

She looked away from him, curling her bare feet under her
on the couch. Obviously, she wasn’t going to answer. She changed the subject instead. “My vegetables are rotting in their plots, and the people I feed will starve.”

“Guess you should have thought about that before helping the Summer Queen.” When she didn’t answer, he stared at her for a long moment. Finally he stood, his hands fisted at his sides. “You mystify me.”

“I thought I annoyed and enraged you.”

“Yeah, you do that, too. You’re a woman of many talents. I’m going to get some wood.”

He left the cottage door open while he was outside. Knowing she had few chances left, she sprang up and ran for it. Some invisible barrier flashed tingling pain through her and tossed her backward. She slid on the floor of the kitchen until coming to a stop near the dining room table. Pushing up on her hands, she glowered at him as he stood in the doorway with an armful of wood.

He clucked his tongue and shook his head. “You should know better, Elizabeth.” He stepped over her and knelt by the cold hearth, building up a fire for the chilly evening to come.

“Are you just going to wait until I die of iron poisoning?”

He struck a match. “I hope not. I hope you’ll come to your senses before then.”

Disgruntled, she picked herself up off the floor and brushed herself off. “Why do you want out of Piefferburg so much? Do you really think humanity will welcome us with loving arms? Let us live where we want? Go where we want?”

He turned to her with a hard look in his eyes. “Do you really think I’ll
let
them tell me any of that? I lived in the world before Piefferburg. I know what it is to go where I please and do what I want. Once I’m out of here, no one is going to dictate the terms of my life to me. In the centuries I have been locked in here, they have erected the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty. I want to see them. I want to go back to my homeland, walk on Irish soil once again, and breathe Irish air.” His voice broke with emotion. “The world was meant to have fae in it, Elizabeth. It had fae in it long before the first human was a glint in some apelike creature’s eye.”

She grimaced at him. “I still don’t understand what’s so bad about life in here.”

Niall said nothing. He finished building up the fire at his leisure, then stood and walked over to her, coming very close, close enough that she could feel his warm breath on her face. She fought the urge to take a step backward, hating the soft, excited curl in her belly that seemed to always be present when he came near her.

He leaned in so close he was almost kissing her. “I have no life in here.” The words whispered against her lips. His eyes looked dark, haunted.

Her heart pounded out a crazy rhythm. Her body softened and her lips parted. For an awful, wonderful moment she thought his lips would touch hers. Then he was gone, across the room, and the chilly air closed around her like a lonely embrace. She hugged herself, rubbing her upper arms against the cold.

Disappointment weaved a bitter thread through her before she forced sense into her mind. Her libido needed a smackdown. This was the worst man in the world to feel attraction toward. She chalked it up to too much alone time in the woods. Stupid. Silly.

Dangerous.

She needed to watch herself. Never let her defenses falter. And tamp down this irrational reaction to him at any cost.

Drawing a deep breath, she forced her heart rate to ratchet down and walked into the living room. “You’re wealthy, live in the Black Tower, have a brother here, friends. Doesn’t seem so bad to me.”

He looked at her. “How do you know about my brother?”

“The Quinn brothers? Everyone knows about you, even a reclusive nature fae like me has heard of you and Ronan.”

The Quinn brothers were known not only because they were siblings, which were rare enough in the fae world, but because they were mages. Through some trick of fate or by deliberate motion of the goddess Danu’s hand, the brothers had been born to a fae woman by a Phaendir father. That made them part-blood Phaendir and fae. It was completely unheard of. In all other known cases of Phaendir siring children with human or fae women, the offspring always turned out 100 percent Phaendir and always,
always
, male.

She took a step closer to him. “What was it like, living with them?”

“The Phaendir? We didn’t live with them for very long. By the time our magick began to manifest it was clear that we were fae, not Phaendir, at our cores.” His lips curled in a bitter smile. “We were called
abominations of nature
and were turned out by our father from the Phaendir enclave in Ireland.”

“I’m surprised they didn’t kill you.”

“Looking back on it, so am I. It was the final mercy of our father, I guess.”

Hugging herself against the chill in the cottage, she walked over and sat down on the edge of the couch. “So you went back to live with your mother in the fae community?”

He looked away from her. “She was dead by then, one of the very first of the fae to succumb to Watt Syndrome. No one even knew what it was back then. She just got sick and died. I don’t think she would have accepted us, anyway.”

“Why not?” She was so close to her mother, loved her so much and was loved in return; it was hard to imagine how any woman could reject her own child.

“She was Seelie, and the Phaendir magick in us made us Unseelie. Our magick was so versatile and could harm and kill in so many ways that we were considered to be dark fae.”

She frowned and shook her head. “Your mother couldn’t have been that pure and perfect. After all, she’d slept with a Phaendir.”

“The story goes that our father forced her into marriage with him. They lived together long enough to sire us, just ten months apart. Then our father took us from her and forced her back to the Seelie Court. Ronan and I don’t know the truth. In any case, she wasn’t there for us to run to, and, even if she had been, she probably would have turned us away. Too many bad memories. She hated our father.”

“Sweet Danu. You were just children. Where did you go?”

“The Shadow King had a stronghold near what is modern day Belfast. He welcomed us like long lost sons returning home.”

“I’m sure he valued you for your uniqueness.”

He stood and poked a stick into the fire to force a log to collapse into the flames. “Yes, and the Phaendir wanted to kill us. They castrated our father for siring us, to make sure he would never father another monster.”

She grunted. “That’s awful, but he did throw you to the wolves by turning you out.”

“He was never a warm man, but that was an act of kindness. He gave us a chance at life. If we’d stayed, we probably would have had our throats cut in our sleep.”

“Yes, the Phaendir are ever so merciful.” Her voice was laden with sarcasm.

“Yes, Phaendir mercy.” He looked up at her, eyes glittering and hard. “That’s exactly why the fae need their freedom.”

She shifted uncomfortably, looking away.

“How old are you?”

Great.
Here would come some lecture about how young she was and how he had so much more life experience than she did. Sighing, she answered, “You must know I’m only in my twenties.”

He walked to her and knelt beside her, taking her hands in his. “You are so young, Elizabeth. You can do anything, see anything, be anything. Do the right thing and I’ll let you walk out of here. You can enjoy the rest of your life, free, and in the world. You can travel to India. You can rent an apartment in New York City, or you can fade into the rain forests of Brazil. The possibilities are limitless.”

Yet all she wanted in the world was for her mother to survive. And here she was, likely to die a virgin.

Pulling her hands from his, she looked away from him, out the window.

“Don’t make me do this, Elizabeth. Don’t make me watch you fade away with that charmed iron on your skin.”

She held his gaze steadily. “I’m not
making
you do anything you don’t want to do, Niall. Stop acting like the wounded party here. I’m the one who is about to die.” She cocked her head to the side. “I wonder if the Wild Hunt will come for you when I finally go?”

His jaw locked. He stood and turned away from her. “The Wild Hunt won’t come for me because I’m under direct orders from the Shadow Queen to do whatever it takes to get the pieces from you.” He half turned toward her. “But I’ll regret it, Elizabeth. No matter how selfish a woman I think you are, I’ll still regret your death. I’ll regret what has to come next, too.”

She sighed in exhaustion. “What comes next, Niall?”

“You know all about me, yet you don’t know the nature of my magick? There’s a reason I was sent to do this job.” His voice held notes of tired resolution and steely resolve. “When I told you I intend to get the information out of you, I meant it. You won’t let it go the easy way, so it will have to be the hard way.”

He walked out of the room and left her shivering.