Stone Song (11 page)

“But he
did
get to her tonight. At the Black Rose,” said Miach. “Did you really think that news wouldn’t reach me? You left a fiddler with a broken hand in the emergency room at Mass General telling anyone who would listen that the Good Neighbors are abroad tonight and the Prince of the Fae stole his woman.”

“No one except those who already know what we are will believe him. And his woman,” said Elada, though the words tasted wrong in his mouth—Sorcha was Elada’s woman, or would be soon if he had anything to say about it—“brained the Prince with a Dutch oven. I think you’d like her if you met her.”

Miach sighed into the phone. “You’re determined to keep this girl alive, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” said Elada.

“Then bring her here. I will see what can be done with her.”

Elada tried to imagine moving Sorcha Kavanaugh in her present state. “I can’t,” he told Miach. “Not right this second, anyway.”

“Why not?”

“She’s drunk.”

“Sober her,” said Miach. “Before Donal and Finn find you.”

“It’s not that easy. She’s drunk on Fae wine.”

“Ah,” said Miach.

Ah indeed. “What can I give her to counteract the effect?”

“Do you really need me to spell it out?” asked the sorcerer.

“Don’t be crude.” Elada found he was extraordinarily touchy when it came to Sorcha Kavanaugh.

“I’m not being crude. I’m being honest. Give her a long, slow—”

“That’s not an option.”

“Why not? She’s pretty enough. You’ve already announced your intention of binding yourself to her. You’re no celibate. And unless I very much mistook your reaction when I first showed you her photo, you find her attractive.”

“I do find her attractive, but an all-night sex marathon is not how I had hoped to woo her.”

“Then find someone else to do it,” said Miach, as though he were talking about a broken garage door and not a scared young woman.

“There aren’t any other promising candidates,” replied Elada acidly. “The Prince, of course, wanted to do the honors, but then, he’s the one who dosed her in the first place. Now she’s burning up with fever and twitching like a cat and she can barely stand up, let alone begin the bardic training she needs to keep her safe from the bastard. And if we stay here long enough, Donal and Finn are bound to scry us. The house is ironbound, but I see no evidence of wards on the windows and doors.”

“There is an elegant solution to the problem at hand,” said Miach. “Sleep with the girl tonight and bring her to me tomorrow. Acquit yourself well, and she’ll be likelier to align herself with us.”

Miach was his oldest friend and closest ally and he could be a total ass at times, like now. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“It’s not about what I’d like. It’s about what’s best for the people who depend on me, who depend on us.”

“How long before the effects wear off?”

“That is . . . unpredictable.”

“Make an educated guess,” said Elada.

“A week. Possibly. It’s like any other intoxicant in that sense. Much depends on the amount she drank, her body weight. Several days at least. During which you’ll have to force her to eat and drink. Dehydration is the real danger, and psychological damage is almost impossible to prevent if it goes on more than a few days.”

“I can’t move her like this and we can’t stay here a week. The Prince will almost certainly come back. There has to be something you can do,” said Elada.

“There is,” drawled the sorcerer. “I could see to the pretty bard’s needs myself, but Helene wouldn’t like it. So
you’ll
have to cure the black-haired bard tonight, and worry about how to woo her in the morning.”

Chapter 7

I
t was cold in Sorcha’s room. She knew that, but she couldn’t feel it, and that was a bad sign. She had to be burning up with fever to feel warm in a room as chilly as hers.

As a musician, she made enough to eat and pay the taxes on the house, which were as much as rent would have been in a studio apartment, only studio apartments didn’t generally come girded with iron to keep out the Fae. But musician’s wages, even with tips and private gigs, weddings and retirement parties, didn’t leave a lot of money left over for luxuries, like heat. She kept the thermostat on the ancient boiler dialed down to the minimum to prevent the pipes from freezing.

Of course, she could have made more money at her trade if she’d been willing to play gigs in the Irish strongholds, in South Boston and Charlestown. Tommy took those jobs sometimes, because a lanky bearded hipster had less to fear from the Fae than Sorcha did. The jobs tended to pay in cash and even modest affairs held in church basements usually came with generous tips. Tommy never pressed her to join him, but he did pay her rent for the bedroom he used at the house, and the money helped.

Sorcha had heard so many warnings about the Fae while growing up that she couldn’t remember them all. And at some point, when childhood had given way to adolescence, the message had changed and gotten mixed up with other dire admonitions. When she was a child, Gran had told her never to talk to the Beautiful People. Never accept gifts from the Fair Folk. Candy from strangers. Invitations from the Good Neighbors. Then it had become rides from boys. And flattery from the Gentry.

Maybe the warnings would have made an impression if she’d actually encountered one of the Fae as a child. Maybe not. But once Sorcha was old enough to date, Gran was full of warnings about boys in general and the Fae in particular, that somehow always put the blame for anything that might happen squarely on Sorcha’s shoulders.

Sorcha wasn’t to “court trouble” by “casting lures” or “tempting fate.” She wasn’t to “show too much skin” or “dress like a tart.” If Sorcha had been born thirty years earlier, no doubt she would have picked up an unhealthy attitude toward sex and all things male, but she’d been fortunate enough to be born in the era of mass communication and the Internet. So much of what Gran said sounded crazy that Sorcha had chalked Gran’s fear of the opposite sex up to general lunacy.

And once Sorcha started having sex, she was unable to fathom what all Gran’s fuss had been about. Sex was . . . nice. Sometimes pleasant, sometimes disappointing. But it had never been an all-consuming need.

Until tonight.

Unfortunately, the Fae downstairs didn’t seem to find her very appealing. She knew she wasn’t sexy by contemporary standards. She had milk-pale skin that never tanned. A day in the sun resulted in a bright-red burn, a week of peeling, and a return to bone-white pallor. Her black hair only exacerbated the problem, throwing her complexion into stark contrast. If she’d been partial toward tattoos, piercings other than her cold iron ring, and goth style, she might have been attractive to men with those tastes, but evidently not to this Fae.

She heard him coming back up the stairs, and her body reacted to his proximity. Before she knew what she was doing, she’d crawled to the edge of the bed and was waiting for him, leaning toward the closed door in longing and anticipation.

He knocked before entering, and when he put his head in the door, he looked, astonishingly for a Fae, uncertain.

“What did your friend have to say?” she asked.

The Fae hesitated. “Miach said that the effects of Fae wine are unpredictable.”

“How?” she asked.

“They might last a few days . . . or possibly a week.”

“No.” She couldn’t stand feeling like this for a week.

“No,” he agreed. “Even if you could endure it without ill effects, the Prince is hunting you. It isn’t safe for you to be . . . distracted like this. And there is one obvious solution to hand.” He grimaced and sketched a bow. “I put myself at your disposal.”

She wanted, needed, him. Badly. But something inside her cringed at the idea of Elada Brightsword making love to her as a favor.

“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” she said, but her eyes were focused on the warm skin of his neck above his T-shirt, and if she saw much more of him, she doubted she would be able to control herself. “I mean if you don’t want
me
.”

Elada froze. “Why the hell wouldn’t I want you?”

“I’m not exactly the Fae type.”

“What is?”

“In my experience? Tanned, leggy, seventeen-year-old models with designer clothes and eating disorders. Not twenty-five-year-old musicians with split ends and a thrift shop wardrobe.” Although now that she said it, she found it difficult to picture Elada with the kind of girls Keiran had favored.

“You’re beautiful, Sorcha. You can’t possibly not know that.”

Little old men often called her beautiful. Sometimes they caller her a “looker” or a “peach.” They’d admired her complexion and her curves. But she didn’t have the physical qualities prized by her own generation, the sharp features that photographed well in a camera phone or the coloring that reflected how much time she spent outdoors. Or the boyish slenderness that looked good in jeans.

“I don’t dislike how I look, but I know it isn’t exactly in vogue right now.”

“Fashion is fairly meaningless to creatures who live as long as the Fae. Style, on the other hand, endures, and I like yours.”

“You don’t have to say all this just to make me feel better about the situation.”

“Sorcha,” he said. “I’ve . . . admired you for months, and I want you very much. I’ve fantasized about being with you—but not like this. Not because you need a man and I’m the only candidate available.”

“Oh.”

He took a step toward the bed, then stopped himself. “I have wanted to talk to you, to introduce myself to you, every time I walked into the Black Rose, but I was too worried about frightening you away. I used to come and listen to you between jobs for Miach. We locked eyes once across the crowd, and somehow I knew that if I approached you, there was a chance you would bolt. And now I see this,” he went on, gesturing at the iron latch and bands on the door, the bars on the windows, the cage-like structure of the cold iron bed.

“This was my gran’s house,” she said. “The iron was hers. She was terrified of the Fae.”

“And so are you, Sorcha. I saw it in your eyes earlier tonight at the Black Rose. I want you, but I can’t bear the thought of seeing that same terror in your eyes when I’m inside you.”

She had never seen a Fae so . . . vulnerable.

“You won’t,” she said, “because you’re different. You’re not like him.”

“No one is like the Prince Consort. He is singular in every way. The only Fae beautiful enough to please the Queen, the only Fae callous enough to endure her cruelty, and, unfortunately, the only Fae inventive enough to hold her attention. He is clever and nearly impossible to kill.”

“I didn’t mean the Prince,” she said.

“Who, then?”

She had never told anyone the whole story, not even Tommy.

“I was living in New York at the time. Most nights I slept in whatever bar I was playing. Until I met him. All my life Gran had told me how to recognize the Fae, but I couldn’t see Keiran for what he was.”

“We can pass as human,” said Elada, coming to stand beside the bed. “Cloak ourselves in a glamour that makes us seem more like you.”

She didn’t want excuses. “I should have known. It wasn’t just Gran who warned me. I studied
Sean nós
in the wildest places in Ireland. The men who taught me warned me, too. I just didn’t listen to them.”

“It’s nearly impossible to resist us without cold iron,” said Elada, generously.

“I learned that too late. I got a cold iron ring to wear where no one could see it, but I didn’t get it until after.”

“After?”

“After I killed the Fae in New York.”

• • •

He hadn’t expected that. The
Fae were very, very difficult to kill. Many, like Miach and the Prince, could draw on living things and heal themselves and others. Elada possessed no such gifts, but he’d lived a violent life, even for a Fae, and he was still alive after two thousand years of nearly constant fighting. Hard to kill indeed.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I almost lost myself to him. The night we met, Keiran bought me a drink after my show. He was handsome and funny and charming, and I went home with him, without a second thought. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going, or who I was with, and that didn’t even seem strange to me. I just wanted to be near him. I couldn’t help myself.

“He owned a town house in the village. That should have tipped me off. He was way too young to own a home like that. Especially one full of art and expensive furniture. He gave me my own room and told me to go to sleep. And I did. In the morning he told me to sing for him, and I did. Nothing even happened between us. And then his friends came, and I sang for them. There were parties some nights. I sang at those, too. Sometimes I felt hungry, and if I wasn’t singing, I’d eat, but days went by when all I did was sit where he told me to and entertain him.”

Elada was not surprised. The Fae often kept human pets. This Keiran of Manhattan must have possessed little sensitivity to magic, though, to fail to hear the danger in Sorcha’s voice.

“How did you get away from him?” Elada asked.