Blade Dance

Ann knew that the chill she felt wasn’t the breeze coming off the water or the temperature dropping with the onset of night. It was pure fear. Her body accepted the truth of what Finn was saying even if her rational mind wanted to reject it as a fairy story. There was no denying what she had just experienced, their terrifying passage from the house to the Training Ground.

And Finn had no reason to lie. He was not luring her into an elaborate fantasy world. On the contrary: he was warning her off.

But she couldn’t walk away.

“I knew you were dangerous before I came here,” she said. “I thought you were just a criminal. Now I know that you’re a criminal and a . . . ” It struck her then that she didn’t really know what to call him.

“We have always thought of ourselves as the Tuatha Dé Danann. The people beloved of the goddess Dana. After we conquered the Druids, we were often called the Aes Sídhe, the people of the mounds, the Fae.”

“Okay. You’re a criminal and a Fae. That doesn’t change anything. I still need to talk to you about Davin McTeer.”

He swore. He did it in a language she didn’t recognize, but the tone made its meaning clear. “What the hell do you know about Davin McTeer?” he asked.

“He’s one of my second graders,” she said, looking him in the eye. She found it slightly unnerving, knowing he wasn’t human, but she persevered. “His father has had the child’s arms tattooed out of some mad belief that it will toughen him up. Davin’s skin is bloody and scabbed from shoulder to elbow.”

“All Fae have some ink,” Finn snapped back. She heard evasion in his voice.

“He’s a seven-year-old boy,” she said. “He loves to run and jump and shout on the playground, and both his arms are so swollen and inflamed he can barely move them.”

“I know about the tattoos,” he said.

“What?”

“His mother came to me.”

“You knew about this, and you did nothing?”

“Dial back the righteous indignation a hair. I didn’t know about the ink until earlier this evening. I will put a stop to it as soon as I can, Ann, but understand that Davin is half-Fae. He will heal. And until then he can probably take whatever his father dishes out. In a few years he’ll be able to give almost as good as he gets.”

“Just because someone is strong, doesn’t mean they should be allowed to be abused.”

“No, it doesn’t, but I’m not allowing the boy to suffer without a purpose. The tattoos were inscribed by a Druid. I can’t catch this Druid if I remove the boy from danger. He’s Fae. Or half-Fae. He was born into a dangerous race. His mother, on the other hand, is human. I saw her earlier tonight, Ann. And I saw the bruises on her face. I would prefer not to see them on yours.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“No. I’m warning you. Sean is dangerous. He won’t tolerate your interference with the boy, and I don’t want him to know that I’ve found out about the Druid. We need to catch this treacherous mage and discover what he is up to.”

Ann shook her head. “I can’t allow that. I’m going to call Child Services as soon as I get home.”

“Do you honestly believe, given what I’ve shown you tonight, that some gormless social worker can protect this boy, if his father and the Druid mean him harm?”

The real import of it hit her then. In the face of that kind of power—her mind still shied from the idea of magic—she and the teachers at her school and the social workers at Family Services were powerless. Terrifyingly, infuriatingly, powerless to help this child. It made her angry, the way she’d been angry as a child, and it made her wish that she could harness that long-ago rage and use it to help Davin, but she’d silenced that part of herself long ago.

A part of him had hoped that she would run away. A part of him wanted Ann Phillips to go back to her classroom and pretend she didn’t know anything about the Fae or Druids or the child who was now a pawn in an increasingly dangerous game. A part of him wanted her safe from his kind—even safe from him.

Her fierce determination could get her killed in his world. It also made him want her more than he’d wanted any woman in recent memory.

“Family Services could take him into protective custody,” she said.

“And Sean would take the child back,” said Finn, “and disappear with him, where no one would be able to gainsay his authority, not even me.”

“If I can’t help, and the school can’t help, and the police can’t help, then it’s up to you,” she said, looking him in the eye, as even few Fae dared to do.

“I have matters in hand,” he said. “I am aware of the situation. The boy will be as safe as any child of the Fianna.”

She narrowed her eyes and looked at him as though he was one of her second graders. “That sounds a smidge too carefully worded for the plain truth.”

“Fae undertakings are binding, so we parse our oaths carefully. Simple as that.”

“Not good enough,” she said. “I don’t want Davin as safe as any child in fairy gangland. I want him safe from the man who struck his mother and the weirdo who tattooed his arms. That means taking him away from his father.”

“I can’t do that, Ann. If I were to take the boy away from Sean, I would never be able to catch this Druid, and he will do to others what he has done to Davin. Worse, perhaps. Much worse. Druids can’t be trusted. I doubt very much that the marks are the simple geis that Davin’s father wanted.”

“Geis?” she asked.

“A sort of spell contained in the ink, usually defining a prohibition or an obligation. These, apparently, were intended to shape the child into the kind of Fae his father wants him to be.”

“A fighter,” said Ann sadly. “Like his father. Like you.”

“It is not such a terrible thing to be—for a Fae to be,” replied Finn drily. “But I gather it is not Davin’s natural inclination.”

She shook her head. Her red hair, already disarranged by their passage and the breeze, settled like a mantle over her shoulders. “He’s a talker, not a fighter,” she said. “A natural-born storyteller. Devoted to books and television and comics and able to take a story he has heard once and recount it, with improvements, perfectly.”

As once the boy’s father had been able to spin enchanting tales, Finn well remembered, before the Druids had chained him beneath the earth and tortured him. As Sean might have been again, had he been given the opportunity or encouraged to rediscover his gifts. But Finn had seen the thirst for vengeance in him and had recruited him into the Fianna. What Sean was, he was in great part because of Finn. An unwelcome thought.

“The boy will be safe,” said Finn. He put all of the persuasion he could summon into his voice, enough to sway most humans.

“He can’t be safe under the roof of a man who hits women and scars children,” she said.

His voice, it seemed, did not work on her at all. He’d noticed that the last time they had met, but he’d put it down to the circumstances that day. He had been distracted. Not so tonight.

“He is under my protection, Ann,” Finn said, trying again, focusing charisma and will.

“Maybe Child Services can’t protect him from Fae magic, but at least they’ll get him out of that house,” she replied, entirely undeterred.

Some humans, he knew, were more resistant to Fae persuasion than others, of course, especially those with trained minds, such as scholars, musicians, and artists. Ann Phillips was none of these, which made her all the more intriguing, but her ability wasn’t a mystery he was likely to solve in the next few hours.

Which meant he had to use other tactics. He had to ask nicely. Unfortunately, he was woefully out of practice. “What Sean is doing to his son is wrong,” said Finn. “I know that. If you give me a chance, I can put it right. I will set another Fae to watch over him, to keep a lookout for the Druid.” Patrick wouldn’t be happy, but he would do it.

“I will give this Fae orders to spirit the boy away as soon as the Druid appears. I will keep the boy safe, if only you will put your trust in me for a few short days. Please.”

Her expression softened a little. Where Fae glamour had not swayed her, one word had the power to make her hesitate. “Why should I trust you?” she asked.

“Because I saved your life, the day of the blast. Nothing could stand in the path of that stone singer’s voice and live. I may be, as you say, a criminal, an extortionist, a racketeer, but I am not entirely without feeling.”

“Or,” she countered, “perhaps you saved me for your own selfish reasons. You’ve made it clear that you . . . have an interest in me.” The thought seemed to make her uncomfortable. She shifted her weight from one foot to another. She was too old, surely, to be a shy virgin, but she was clearly not at ease with their mutual attraction. Another delicious mystery to unravel as soon as this Druid was caught.

“If that’s the case, then you can be assured that I’ll do everything in my power to keep Davin safe, since you clearly set so much store by the boy. My Fae voice, which most humans and many Fae find irresistibly persuasive, has little or no effect on you, so if Davin were to be harmed, I wouldn’t have a ghost of a chance at all to bed you.”

Her eyes narrowed. She didn’t like being outmaneuvered. He wondered what kinds of things she did like. He wanted to find out.

“In fairy tales, the Beautiful People are always bound by their promises,” she said.

“As I said, Fae oaths are binding,” he agreed. “But it is dangerous to bargain with the Aes Sídhe,” he warned her.

“I’ll take the risk,” she replied sourly. “Promise me, with no hidden conditions, that Davin will be safe.”

“I’ll do better. As a token of my . . . esteem for you, I’ll make the promise you really want from me. I’ll allow neither his Fae father nor this unnamed Druid to harm the boy, and I will prevent them both from completing the geis they have worked upon the child. If I can, I’ll find a mage to reverse whatever burden of spells the child already bears. I’ll make it a generous bargain, too, by the standards of my people. I want only one thing in return.”

“What?”

“You, Ann. You, in my bed for a night.”

It was an outrageous demand, one she couldn’t possibly agree to.

“Yes,” she said, feeling the word leaving her lips. Hearing it hang, clear and telling, in the still air between them.

If he had demanded payment, in advance, tonight, she would have gone with him. Every time she came into this man’s orbit, her traitorous body responded. Her heart beat faster, and a weight settled low in her belly and traveled into the sweet place between her legs, making her slick with wanting.

Which was ludicrous, because she wasn’t exactly experienced. She quelled her impulse to laugh. If anyone had gotten the bad half of the bargain, it was Finn. Her high school boyfriend’s pronouncement echoed in her head even now. Like kissing a cow. Like trying to fuck a bull. It no longer had the power to wound or humiliate. Love, romance, and sex—until she had encountered Finn, at any rate—had faded to inconsequentials in her life.

“You look smug, Miss Phillips,” said Finn. “Could it be that I’m the one who has been entrapped?”

“Not likely,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“We’ll see.” He put out his hand. “Now let me take you home.”

For a second she thought he meant his home and that idea excited her far too much. Then she realized what he meant. “The way we came?”

“It’s the fastest route between two points, and you have demonstrated that you can pass with a Fae with no ill effects.”

She still felt like she might vomit. Or fall over. She wasn’t going to pass again if she could help it. “No. Thank you. I’ll walk.”

“Your home is a mile from here.”

“How do you know where I live?”

“Charlestown is mine,” he said. “I know about everything I take an interest in.”

“Then it’s a shame,” she said, turning her back on him and walking downhill toward the street, “that you didn’t take more of an interest in Davin McTeer.”

Finn watched her go. She was taking the long way home, he realized, so she wouldn’t have to go by his house or share the journey with him. If she continued to do things like that, crossing Sean would be the least of her worries. Finn knew the dangers that lurked around every corner in Charlestown at night, because the Fianna were behind most of them.

And so he followed her at a distance, keeping effortlessly to the shadows, alert for any signs that she had attracted the attention of predators, Fae or human. He would make it known tomorrow that the red-haired teacher with the temper was not to be touched. For tonight, he would see to it himself. The idea that other women not fortunate enough to have his protection might walk this same path every night did not sit well with him. He wondered, idly, why he had never considered that before.

She stopped to buy milk at the grungy little chain store on her way home, and Finn clenched his fists when she emerged and the teens who lurked outside made a mockery of opening the door for her and offering to carry her groceries. It was a penny-ante prelude to a mugging. If they could intimidate her into stopping, into handing over her groceries, they’d run off with the bags and probably her wallet as well. Fortunately, Ann ignored them, and when one tried to block her path, she sidestepped him and kept going. Smart girl.

When the thugs dropped back, Finn saw that two of them were half-bloods, members of the Fianna. Patrick’s boys, in fact.

Tomorrow he would definitely be speaking to them.

The thought brought him up short. He had never really done such a thing before. He’d always let the Fianna have the run of Charlestown. Occasionally, if the humans he did business with entreated him, if a girl was too young, if there was the risk that the authorities across the water in Boston would become interested in their business, he might intervene.

But he’d never stepped in like this before. Not over the treatment of a woman.

Ann was different. There it was. It was more than physical attraction. Her concern for Davin, her blind need to protect the boy, had touched a chord in him. Ann’s concern was more than a reflexive maternal instinct, though he would have found that alone admirable. Garrett’s mother hadn’t possessed one at all. It didn’t excuse Finn’s failures as a parent, he knew that. But he’d have made less of a mess of it if he’d had someone—anyone—to share the job with.

He had made mistakes with his son. He could admit that to himself. He hadn’t been prepared to be a parent, had never really been one before in any real way. Brigid had raised their Fae children, all of them long dead at the hands of the Druids. He had never tried to start another real family.

Finn had barely known Garrett’s mother. They’d spent a single night together, if you could even call it that. He’d met Aerin in New York, at a gathering convened by the Prince Consort, who claimed he had discovered a means, at last, to bring the wall between worlds down and free the exiled Fae Court.

The Prince had talked about computers, of all things. Of public records and searches. Of Druids. He thought he could find enough of their descendants, dispersed, latent, and tame, and turn them into instruments to open the gate and free the captive Fae.

As soon as Finn had arrived in New York, he had found himself wishing that he had refused the Prince’s invitation. It was foolish to dream of the return of their bitch Queen and her Court. The world of the Fae was gone, and Finn was done with tearing things down. He’d had enough of it. Enough death, enough killing. Enough to learn that there was no such thing as enough revenge. It was a hunger that fed on itself. All he had wanted after the Druids were routed was to build something.

Watching his half-bloods harassing Ann Phillips outside the convenience store made him wonder if he had built the right thing.

He thought back to that fateful visit to New York. To leave after the Prince’s meeting would have been to show weakness. The Fae could scent that kind of vulnerability, were jealous of one another’s territories, so he bided his time and accepted Donal’s invitation to spend the night at his town house on Washington Square.

There was a party in progress when Finn arrived. There was always some kind of party at Donal’s. This one was thoroughly Fae. Finn should have felt at home among so many of his people, but he’d moved through the rooms like a foreigner who didn’t speak the language or understand the customs, though they were familiar enough to him from his life with the old Court.

The entrance hall of the redbrick mansion was crowded, a line of statues running down one side of the tiled foyer. Only, they weren’t statues. They were beautiful young human men and women, pets, under the influence of Fae glamour and ordered to stand perfectly, utterly still, naked on their cold marble pedestals.

If Brigid had been alive, they would have negotiated the tricky political waters of the party together and then laughed about it in private later. Everything was harder without her, even two thousand years after her death. They had been true partners, supporting each other through the complex, dangerous game that was life among the Fae. That night, going it alone, it was all too easy to see why Miach declined to participate in what remained of their world, why Deirdre shut herself away with her lover in her town house on Beacon Hill.

He’d wanted a beer and nothing more. He’d found one in the kitchens and, beyond that, a television room refreshingly free of the gilded opulence of the rest of the house. It contained a half-dozen Fae watching a football game. There was an empty spot on the sofa, and he decided that there were worse ways to spend an evening.

Thinking back on it, the TV room had been the most human part of the house. Aerin had been sitting on the floor. He knew her vaguely as one of the Fae born in the first centuries after the fall. She was black haired and, of course, pretty—as a pureblood Fae, she could hardly be otherwise—but she possessed the kind of callow arrogance that had been tortured out of the oldest members of his race. When the game was over, she stretched like a cat and rolled over; then, as the room emptied out, she climbed onto the sofa and straddled him.

For just a second she had reminded him of Brigid, the way she had taken charge and taken what she wanted. For a few minutes afterward, sated, he’d been overcome with nostalgia for the way things had been. He’d tried to put his arms around her, but she’d snorted her disdain for his tenderness and rolled off of him.

That was the last he had seen of her until she’d turned up in Charlestown, heavily pregnant with Garrett and resentful as hell about the whole thing. And maybe, he realized now, a little frightened.

Fae pregnancies were dangerous, not just for mortal women, and often ended badly. He’d had no choice but to call Miach, and even at the time Finn had taken it to be a bad omen that his first son in centuries had been born under the sorcerer’s roof. Nothing, though, could overshadow the experience of holding his child for the first time. He’d been overwhelmed by it, forced to take the babe outside and down the street to the beach so no one would see Finn MacUmhaill crying over a newborn. But he had cried, for Brigid and everything he had lost.

By the time he got back to the house, Aerin was gone, completely uninterested in him or the babe. He had not seen her since. And Garrett . . . well, Garrett had been the best thing to happen to him since Brigid. He’d given the boy everything he could. Too much, maybe. And too little in other ways.

Ahead of him, in the dark, Ann Phillips rounded the corner to her street. He knew that she lived in a flat in a converted federal house, the ground floor of one of those boxy little clapboard structures.

From across the street he watched her lights go on. Hall, parlor, kitchen. There was something appealing about the yellow glow that made him want to follow her inside. He’d had lovers among the human population of Charlestown but couldn’t remember feeling like this before. He was even surprisingly curious about Ann’s apartment. He wondered what kind of furnishings she favored, if her home was cluttered or spare, frilly or modern, eclectic or uniform in style. From the street, all he could make out were the pale colors of the walls.

There was an alley running along the side of the house. The gate was unlocked.

He let himself in, followed a narrow cobbled driveway, and found a tiny patio and a small porch around the back. Terra-cotta pots dotted the bricks, overflowing with bright green herbs making a brave show despite the early frost. A light went on in the window directly overhead, and Finn slipped back into the shadows. Then the door opened.

Ann backed out, using her delicious taut bottom and lush hips to push open the screen door and shimmy onto the porch. She was still dressed in her work clothes, but her feet were bare and she padded gingerly over the cold bricks to the edge of the stairs. When she knelt, he got a glimpse of lacy panties beneath her skirt.

He almost stepped out of the shadows then. He wanted her, badly, and that enticing glimpse of embellished silk roused him powerfully. Their attraction was mutual, and if he revealed himself, she might even let him in. But he remained out of sight because he knew that would be a mistake. Some things were worth waiting for. Brigid had been. Somehow, he knew—certain and sure—that Ann Phillips was, too.

He watched her set two porcelain bowls on the bottom step and then scamper back inside.

Finn waited until the door closed behind her and the light went out in the kitchen before prowling forward. What he saw on the bottom step of the porch made him smile. Ann Phillips might feel ambivalent about her attraction to Finn, but she was at least convinced of the existence of the Fae, because inside the bowls were gifts to his kind: milk and honey.