Iron (The Warding Book 1) (27 page)

What the hell could I say to that?

“Well, Jenni, there’s been a lot going on that I haven’t been telling you. On my birthday I was attacked by a troll because—surprise!—apparently I’m not 100% human. And because my great-great-grandma got frisky with a faun or something, I can see faeries. These faeries aren’t the cute, dress making Sleeping Beauty type either. Some of them are evil and nasty and just downright gross. They’ve been feeding off us in secret for years. Since their nut-job king went off his rocker and stopped paying attention to what they do over here on Earth, they’ve even been killing people.

“That’s why the good faeries need me. I’ve got to help them track down this Lynx person who no one but me can see, so they can get home and stop that wacko from ruining both our worlds. So I had to learn to fight like Xena: The Warrior Princess and start killing them off too. You know; for the safety of mankind. Don’t worry though, I’m actually pretty good at it. Freaky good, actually. The buff-and-handsome faery man I’ve been hunting with says I have more natural skill than he’s seen in a hundred years. How cool is that?”

Yeah, that sooooo wasn’t going to happen. The truth was so far from believable that I couldn’t spill the beans now, even if I wanted to. The skulking around museums and book stores and freaking coffee houses in search of a phantom stranger was bad enough. How would I ever look her in the eye again, once she knew I was a killer? Human, fae, hamster; it didn’t matter. I had taken lives, plain and simple. How would she ever
trust
me, once all that I had hidden from her over the past few months came to light?

I felt my eyes start to water. I looked away, gaze roaming the room to look at anything but the hurt, accusatory stare that was being leveled my way. Something inside me was trying to curl up and die. It hurt to take a breath. What a fool I was, for ever having thought that my life would be normal again, when all this passed. Had I really ever believed I could go back to being boring “sits at home drinking wine and watching Netflix on a Saturday night Caitlin” again?

Weird was my normal life now.

It was who
I
was now.

A deep, shuddering breath finally filled my lungs. I stared up at the ceiling, tracing the uneven stucco lines as I blinked hard to stop myself from crying. “I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry Jen, but… I can’t.”

“You can’t,” she repeated, deadpan. “You can’t what? I mean; Christ! We haven’t kept secrets from one another since we were kids! I just don’t understand what is going on with you. What is with all this running off and keeping secrets like you’re afraid to let anyone know where you are anymore? Were you recruited by the goddamn CIA or something?”

My lips twitched, trying to smile. I chuckled, but it sounded hollow. “Yeah, I wish. At least then I’d be making some bank.”

“I’m worried about you.”

I let out a low, long breath and tried to stop that horrible shaking feeling that was spreading from the inside out, all through me. There wasn’t even a watered down version I could conjure up now. “I know you are and I’m sorry. I hate that I’m worrying you. It’s not that I want to keep secrets from you, I swear. It’s just that things in my life have gotten really… Complicated.”

Her laugh was bitter. “When haven’t they been?”

Once upon a time, that would have been the opening for some banter. I would have tossed out a playful insult, maybe, or came up with something caustically witty to diffuse all the tension around us. Sadly, I was as low on wit as I was on lies. “These last few months have given that ‘complicated’ a run for its money. I swear, Jen, if I could tell you more I would.”

The look that earned me was one I would have saved for someone who had kicked my puppy. I hated myself for hurting her. She looked like she was going to chew through her lip, trying to keep all that anger in. She let me hang for a minute before asking, quietly, “Why can’t you?”

I felt trapped. This storm had taken me by surprise, though I should have seen it coming, and now I was caught in the downpour without an umbrella. I rubbed my hands over my knees, watching their clamminess dampen the denim. I wanted to bolt, to grab my things and run out the door, but I just couldn’t. My bestie deserved better than that, even if my heart was telling me we wouldn’t be besties for much longer. I leveled her with as apologetic of a look as I could muster. “Because you wouldn’t understand, even if I tried.”

Wrong answer.

She surged to her feet, a throw pillow sent tumbling to the floor. “Really?
I
wouldn’t understand? We’ve told each other everything, from the first day of pre-school. I understood when we were nine and you cut your own hair with those stupid plastic scissors and then freaked out, making
me
take the blame so your mom wouldn’t yell at you. I understood when you kissed Bobby Green and got mono, knowing full well I liked him. I even understood when you asked me not to tell anyone you were cutting yourself all through junior year of high school, even though it scared me to death every single day, thinking I was going to lose you. I have understood every stupid, fucked up thing you have ever done in your life. So, tell me, Cat. Tell me just what, exactly, is it that I wouldn’t understand now?”

I could feel the emotions coming off her: the anger, hurt, confusion. They whirled around me like a gale-force wind, yet I felt strangely untouched. It was like I was watching everything from a distance; like life had become a TV show and I couldn’t quite understand what the characters were making such a big fuss over. Maybe a part of me had been waiting for this, building up some sort of shield around my heart. Maybe part of me was relieved.

She stood there, trembling; staring at me with tears in her eyes. It was seeing them there that made me realize I was crying too. I probably had been for some time. My hands were gripping my knees so hard my knuckles were white. A sob threatened to burst from my chest. The realization slammed into me. This was it; this was her last, desperate grab to hold on to me. She wanted so badly for me to let her in, but I couldn’t. There was just no way. All this time I had felt like Jenni had been growing apart from me but, really, I had been the one slipping away.

“Me,” I said. “You wouldn’t understand me.”

In that moment, I knew nothing would ever be the same between us. Time might heal some wounds. Maybe one day we would be able to laugh again, to catch up over a random cup of coffee—but never again would I feel that sister-like bond we had shared for so many years. I had pushed her away until that bond had broken. My heart felt like I had dropped it into a pile of jagged glass, but this was what was right. This way was better for her. She would be safer without me.

I stood slowly, feeling like I would fall to pieces if I moved too quick. I felt robotic as I leaned forward and took my purse from the floor and pulled my coat off of the arm of the couch. Jenni was sobbing. I think she was saying something too, but I couldn’t hear it over the buzzing in my ears. She deserved a better goodbye but, well, maybe it was par for the course that I didn’t have one to give her, seeing how shitty of a friend I had become. I felt like I was strangling as I said, “Goodbye.”

I couldn’t tell if her voice shook more from anger or sadness. She waved her hands in the air, turning to watch me as I headed for the door. “That’s it? You’re just going to say that and leave? Cat, come on; what—”

I let the door close behind me, cutting off her words. I fell back against it, my whole body wracked by a sob so strong it wanted to pull me to the floor. I struggled to catch my breath, to force the strength back into my legs. I wanted to let the pain cripple me, but I couldn’t.

I still had a job to do.

~*~

“Skinny guy with the stupid hat and hipster glasses two tables over?”

Mairi’s eyes skittered to the left over the top of her second cappuccino. She was a pro at the not-looking glance. “Check. And I happen to think that hat is adorable, by the way.”

“Damn.” I pushed my mostly empty cup away from me. “I thought he kinda looked like the picture. If I squinted. Maybe.” I shot her a wary look. “And if you think mustard yellow plaid is cute, we need to get your eyes checked.”

She scrunched up her nose—which was sporting a new stud in the left nostril—and stuck out her tongue, making me chuckle. That was probably her intent, of course. She could always be counted on to perform as my one-woman cheering squad, warming my stone-cold heart. Only an hour ago I had pushed my oldest friend away for good, yet it already seemed like it had happened a lifetime ago. I was dry-eyed and hyper-focused, scanning the crowd around me with a strangely frenetic energy.

Of course, that could have been thanks to the two caramel macchiatos I had sucked down in that time frame but hey; I was going to take my focus any way I could get it.

“I’d really hoped he’d be here,” I said, ashamed of how dumb the words sounded as soon as they left my mouth.

“Me too.” She sighed deep enough to make me do a double-take. On one hand, it was nice to know she shared in my frustration, but it also bothered me to see my plucky little buddy downtrodden. When I said as much, I earned myself a wry twist of the lips and a shrug. “I don’t think this is any more fun than you do. I like hanging out with you, but—all the same—I’d much rather be doing it at a spa or something.”

“That sounds lovely. I can’t remember the last time I had a little ‘me time.’”

I was scanning the room again, without even realizing it. It had become second nature. My eyes roamed every nook and cranny; counted every head. The faces around us hadn’t changed much in the last ten minutes, but I was searching them again and again, hoping that something out of the ordinary would catch my eye—but, nope. Nothing. I leaned back in my chair and stretched until my spine popped. I was beyond tense. “It’s just so hard to keep doing this, night after night, never even catching a glimpse of him. I know Kaine said we have the word of some people he trusts but… How long are we going to keep this up?”

She shrugged again. “As long as it takes?”

I scowled. “Not a great answer. I didn’t sign on to be doing this until I was old and gray, chicky.”

“Just think: we were doing this for a few years before you came along, and that was when we didn’t really have any idea of how to tell if we did cross paths with him. Hell, we might have been in spitting distance of him a dozen times without ever having realized it. How’s that for depressing?”

“Touché.” I winced at the thought. Talk about perspective.

“I wish I knew where he was. I wish we could end this tomorrow, but no one has that golden ticket.” She looked chagrined. “Not even me.”

The bleak truth threatened to suck the last of my willpower right out of me. Suddenly, I felt another thirty years older and so damn bent I was all but broken. The words slipped out. “I don’t know how much longer I can keep doing this, Mai.”

I gazed down at the table, crestfallen. She reached over and placed her hand over mine. “You know, the myth about my kind being vulnerable to cold iron has some truth to it. It doesn’t make us turn tail and run screaming for the hill or anything, but it hurts us. Wounds made by it are slow to heal, if they heal at all. No one has ever been able to figure out why it affects us so badly, but it does. It’s one of the reasons Kaine was so insistent on you learning to fight with knives, instead of just pointing a gun at someone.”

I looked up into her old soul eyes, puzzled. What on earth had brought that on?

She continued, “The old legends used to say that the Warders earned their Gift by slowly immunizing themselves to magic. For centuries, they drank a potion imbued with iron, enduring incredible pain and sickness, until they had iron in their very blood. They passed that blood down to their children, and many say that was what made them immune to all other fae Gifts.” She squeezed my hand. “That might be a bunch of bull of course. But you?
You
are iron. You are stronger than you think and this will not break you. You can do this.”

For someone who swore she couldn’t read my mind, she certainly had the uncanny knack of always knowing what I needed to hear. Her unshakeable faith in me chased away some of the darkness. I smiled and squeezed her hand back. “Thank you.”

She picked up her cup to take a sip. Her gaze roved the shop. “So yeah; this sucks. But this is all we’ve got at the moment. And, really, is there anything worse than the alternative?”

Images flashed through my head. Goliath’s gaping, Rottweiler toothed maw. The Wax Man’s hollow eye pits. The barely identifiable remains that had been strewn about the lair of the Snake Man. While I had grown more comfortable in my hunter’s skin, I still couldn’t face the memory of that night; of that first hunt. Just the thought of it made me shudder. She was right. Stopping the High King was the only choice. If this was only the first stage of a feeding frenzy rebellion by the bestial fae, I didn’t even want to imagine the dark days that could lay ahead. Once they really started moving in on us in force, there wouldn’t be much chance that I—or anyone else that I loved—would make it to old and gray.

I hadn’t sacrificed my bestie’s trust for nothing.

I took a swig of my lukewarm coffee, grimaced, and let my eyes trace a path back to the farthest table from the door. “Moon-eyed blond with the ridiculously low-cut purple sweater?”

“Check.”