Stone Song (5 page)

“Sorcha Kavanaugh’s?” asked Miach, raising one black brow in skepticism. “You don’t usually date women who crack your ribs as a form of foreplay.”

“I’m afraid she’s going to run,” said Elada. And he was afraid that if she did, and Miach heard about her talent without meeting her, he might order her killed.

He wasn’t going to let it come to that.

“Our friends in the police department,” said Miach, who had several of Boston’s finest on his payroll, “can track her for us. You don’t need to chase after her tonight. And after what I’ve got to do to your ribs, you’re not going to want to.”

The motion he used was a short, sharp jab, but it was the magic he channeled into Elada’s body that hurt like hell. Enough to make him black out for a few seconds. When he opened his eyes again, light flooded the narrow street from the headlamps of Miach’s Range Rover, and Helene Whitney was bending over him, her long blond hair brushing his shoulders.

Elada watched her slip her hand into Miach’s in a gesture of comfort. He must look very, very bad. He felt awful. “How bad is he?” she asked.

“A few ribs broken,” said Miach. “Some internal bleeding, though I think I’ve stopped that. And a concussion.”

Helene untied the scarf from around her neck and dabbed at the blood on his face. He’d known his ears had bled, but evidently his eyes and nose had as well. Elada recognized the colorful square of silk. Miach had sent him to the Hermès store in Back Bay to pick it up as a birthday gift for Helene. And Elada doubted that Helene, who loved fashion, would be using such a luxurious gift to sop up blood if there wasn’t an upsetting amount of it.

In the end Miach had to help him into the Range Rover. It hurt too much to sit up, so he lay across the backseat and allowed them to drive him home to South Boston.

From his vantage point in the back he saw Helene reach across the console and put her hand on Miach’s knee, then give him a reassuring squeeze.

He envied their intimacy. It was something he’d seldom known. Maire had always given him comfort and understanding, but she had never loved him. No one would ever take her dead husband’s place. She’d only accepted Elada into her life because he was Fae—not human, not a man—and on some deeply personal level, didn’t “count.”

“I’m fine,” Elada said again, as they rolled over the bridge across the Fort Point Channel.

“You will be fine, with some rest, after I’ve had another pass over those ribs,” said Miach.

“Then I’ll go after the girl,” said Elada.

Miach shook his head and found Elada’s eyes with his in the rearview mirror. “Liam and Nial can fetch Sorcha Kavanaugh. Her iron harp won’t have any effect on them.”

Miach was right. Sorcha’s iron harp couldn’t harm Liam and Nial. They were half-bloods, and their human heritage made them immune to the crippling power of iron. But Sorcha Kavanaugh was terrified of the Fae, and if her harp wouldn’t work, she might resort to something that would.
Stone song.

And Liam and Nial would die.

“You can’t send Liam and Nial,” said Elada.

“Why not?” asked his oldest friend, whom just a few minutes ago he had planned to deceive. But not at the cost of the boys’ lives.

“Because she’s frightened, and untrained, and if the harp doesn’t work on Liam and Nial, she may lash out in a different way.”

A beat. Then Miach asked, “How?”

“It’s only a guess on my part,” said Elada, hedging.

“But an educated guess, no doubt, old friend. What is it you suspect?”

“I’ll tell you when I’m certain.”

And not before. Because if he was right, it would be her death sentence. He suspected that she was the deadliest of Druids. He suspected Sorcha Kavanaugh was a stone singer.

• • •

She ran. She didn’t know
how long the Fae would stay down. And she didn’t want a repeat of the thing that had happened the last time one of them had attacked her. The thing she couldn’t control, the thing she still saw in nightmares. Especially since this Fae hadn’t seemed quite so alien, quite so inhuman.

He’d been civil, actually. Of course she had told him upfront that she was wearing cold iron, so perhaps he hadn’t bothered with the Fae mind games. But her attacker in New York had progressed quickly from ensnaring her to imprisoning her and using physical violence to keep her in line, and this Fae hadn’t.

Not even when she’d struck that first note in the alley. They moved fast. He probably could have snapped her neck before she’d completed that shattering chord, and he hadn’t.

Of course, refraining from physical violence didn’t make the Fae a nice guy. None of the Fae, as far as she knew, had anything like a human conscience. Not according to Gran and not according to the old men who had taught her to sing. And certainly not according to her experience with Keiran.

So as soon as he’d gone down, she’d run. There had been a second when she’d stopped, less than a block away, stricken with conscience. What if she’d killed him? What if he’d been telling the truth, and there were good Fae, or at least less-evil Fae, and they genuinely wanted to help her, could teach her how to control the voice?

Then reason and her survival instinct had reasserted themselves. It didn’t matter if there were good Fae or less-bad Fae. After Keiran, she wanted no Fae in her life at all.

She ran. She had her T pass and her keys in her pocket, along with some cash. She never carried much more. There was a case for her harp languishing back at the Black Rose, but she had another at the house.

Fortunately Faneuil Hall was crowded with tourists, the weather still warm enough for outside tables at the restaurants and couples strolling from shop to shop. She was able to disappear quickly into that press. Her modest height, for once, was an advantage. Even so, she couldn’t stop looking over her shoulder as the crowd thinned. Part of her hoped to see Elada following her. At least that way she could be sure he wasn’t dead.

And part of her dreaded seeing that gold-shot, dirty blond head above the crowd.

When she reached North Street, she paused. Congress Street was too open, too exposed for her liking, so she walked as quickly as she could without appearing to run past the Union Oyster House and into the T station at the Haymarket.

Once she was underground, she felt dangerously exposed on the platform as she waited for the train. There were a few dozen other passengers waiting as well, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that the Fae she had just fled from was going to emerge from behind one of the pillars, as he had in the alley.

Gran should have warned her about that. That they could
pass
. Whatever that meant. Some kind of superfast travel ability, no doubt. Sorcha now had the distinct impression that she didn’t know enough about the Fae to survive another encounter with one.

Finally the orange line arrived. Twelve stops to home. Two minutes between stops. Thirty seconds at each station, if she was lucky and the platforms weren’t too crowded.

At every stop she expected her Fae pursuer to appear when the doors opened, but she reached the cavernous concrete and glass station at Forest Hills without incident and began the long walk to her house.

Normally Tommy would walk with her at night, but she hadn’t wanted to wait for him. If she’d gone back into the Black Rose, if he’d come home with her, he would have stayed the night and made it more difficult to slip away in the morning. She would pack and prepare the house for her absence tonight and make her way back into Boston tomorrow with the commuters, safe in the rush-hour crowd.

When Sorcha had lived with Gran, she’d seen the old farmhouse with a child’s eyes. She’d liked the attics in the main structure and the service wing, the ell that projected at a right angle from the back, because they were secret and private. She’d loved the fireplace in her room, even though Gran had never used it, because it had seemed romantic and old-fashioned.

She’d never noticed all the iron. It had just seemed like part of the antique decor. She’d seen similar door latches on other old houses, similar gate hinges, hooks, and railings, but never, she realized when she’d returned as an adult, so much in one house.

The batten doors were banded with iron and studded with iron nails for good measure. The fireplaces all had iron dampers. Most of the ground-floor windows were covered with iron grilles that Sorcha had always assumed to be security bars, a precaution against the crime that flourished in Jamaica Plain when she was a child and had still not been banished by the community’s slow gentrification. The rest looked like leaded glass casements, but they were really panes of glass set in iron muntins.

It was only when she’d come back to claim her inheritance, after one of the lawyer’s dozens of letters had reached her at the home of a college friend, that she‘d seen the house for what it was: a fortress meant to keep out the Fae. But if she stayed here and let that Fae track her, it could just as easily become a prison.

As it had always been, Sorcha now understood, for Gran.

It was late by the time she had a bag packed and the water turned off where it entered the house in the basement. She would call to disconnect the power once she was on the road. She was exhausted and eager to climb into bed, trying not to think about how much she would miss the comfort of the thick down topper and the burnished wooden headboard, nearly buried behind feather pillows, when the phone rang.

Sorcha would have never bought a fancy phone with caller ID, but Gran must have done so some time before she’d died, because the cordless beside the bed had been there when Sorcha had come back.

It was Tommy calling from his cell phone. She considered letting it go to voice mail, but decided against it. Tommy had known about the Fae in the crowd, seen Sorcha talking to him. She hadn’t told him she was leaving. He would have good reason to worry, and knowing Tommy, if he couldn’t get her on the phone now, he’d come to the house, and she didn’t want that.

She picked up.

Tommy’s voice on the other end sounded high and hoarse. “You need to come, Sorcha,” he said. Then he began sobbing.

“Come where, Tommy?”

“Back to the Black Rose, now.”

She looked at the clock beside the bed. It was one in the morning. The bar would be closing. “I’m all the way home, Tommy. The T stopped running an hour ago.”

“
He
doesn’t care, Sorcha.”

Her stomach lurched.

“You need to come back,” he said. “Or he’s going to kill me.”

There was a click on the other end.

Sick fear washed over Sorcha. She was safe here in her citadel against the Fae. The creatures couldn’t enter unless she allowed them, unless she lifted the latches and held open the ironbound doors. She could stay here and the bastard wouldn’t be able to touch her. She could run now, while he was expecting her at the Black Rose, and it would be hours before he realized she wasn’t coming. A head start, enough to disappear into the backwoods of New England. A haircut and a dime-store bottle of bleach would change her appearance enough that no one would recognize Sorcha Kavanaugh.

She could disappear, and be safe.

She couldn’t do that to Tommy. She had seen how the Fae behaved when they were thwarted. They were like children. When their toys disappointed them, they smashed them to bits. Tommy would be hurt. Maimed or killed. If this Fae was particularly cunning, he might only cripple Tommy and hang on to him to use against Sorcha when he caught up with her. Or if he was particularly fickle and cruel, he might just keep Tommy to torment, for petty vengeance against Sorcha for defying him.

She had misread that Fae completely. Or perhaps he had really intended to help her, had really been, at that moment, as . . .
gentle
 . . . as he seemed. And Sorcha had pushed him too far. Using the harp had been a desperate act. She didn’t understand exactly what it did to them, but she could tell that it hurt like hell. And it would hardly help if he knew that she’d only used the harp to avoid using the voice. . . .

Because of her, the Fae might snap Tommy’s neck tonight.

She thought of herself as tough and resourceful, but she’d never been called upon to perform heroics, only to persevere in the face of discouragement and discomfort, to play another set, walk another mile, when she was tired and footsore.

She’d never really understood people who put themselves in harm’s way when they had an easy out, but Sorcha considered how she would feel about herself tomorrow, sitting on a Peter Pan bus, speeding north into New Hampshire, the autumn leaves turning red and gold, if she left Tommy in the hands of this Fae. She knew she would never be able to enjoy the riot of color in the trees, woodsmoke in the air, or the taste of beer, ever again.

She wouldn’t be able to live with herself.

Sorcha left her suitcase where she had placed it beside the door. She called for a taxi and then found the spare cover for her harp and slung the carrying strap over her shoulder. She locked Gran’s house and went outside to wait for the cab.

There was no traffic at this time of night, and the trip was shockingly fast. She reached the Black Rose and paid the cabbie with no real plan for what to do once she got inside. But she had her
cláirseach
, and she knew it worked on this Fae.

She wasn’t surprised to find the back door unlocked and a light on in the hall. She followed the corridor, heart in her throat, to the taproom, and stopped dead when she saw Tommy sitting in a chair at the center of the space.

Behind him, holding a knife to Tommy’s throat, stood a Fae she had never seen before. He was dressed like the one she’d killed in New York, in the finery of half a dozen centuries and several continents, but his beauty outshone Keiran’s in every way. His hair was long, black, and swept all the way to the floor, threaded with silver leaves. Long legs were cased in indigo-dyed blue jeans, artfully frayed at the hem and no doubt ruinously expensive. His shirt was Indian, silk, and embroidered with jewels. Atop it he wore a rococo frock coat of gray velvet embellished with silver wire roses.

For a second she felt a sense of relief. This was not the Fae she had attacked in the alley earlier, angry and intent on revenge. Then the sense of relief vanished and cold dread took its place when she remembered
that
Fae’s warnings about others who might be looking for her.