Free Blade Dance (A Cold Iron Novel Book 4) by D.L. McDermott Page B

parent, Lizzy, and there’s no one left here at school and I don’t feel comfortable walking by myself.”
    “Oh. That’s not good,” said Lizzy. In the background, Ann could hear children yelling and whooping. She wished she could travel through the phone from the silent halls of the school, where shadows were gathering in the afternoon gloom, to the bright open spaces of Lizzy’s museum.
    “Could you maybe pick me up after work?”
    There was a pause at the other end. “I would. In a heartbeat. But I’ve got back-to-back groups until six thirty and then there’s a board meeting. I can’t get out of here until at least nine.”
    Ann knew she wouldn’t last five hours in the darkened school. It already felt decidedly creepy, and she doubted she would be much safer in the cavernous empty building than out on the street. She promised Lizzy she would call when she got home, shouldered her bag, and headed for the door.
    “It’s only a few blocks,” she said to herself. A few largely derelict blocks of shuttered warehouses and suspect garages, admittedly, with no friendly businesses or cheery homes along the way. “Five blocks,” she said. “Four and half, really,” she added, to reassure herself.
    By the time she reached the end of the first, the van was already following her. As a teenager, she hadn’t been afraid of anything. She’d had her anger to keep her safe, to defend her against kids who wanted to steal her lunch money or boys who thought that because she was an outcast, she would be an easy target for a quick grope.
    She didn’t have that now. All she had was the good sense to start running.
    The van sped up. She heard it screech to a halt but she didn’t look back, didn’t want to slow down. She heard a door whine open, then cruel hands were grasping her, yanking her hair and covering her mouth and dragging her back over the broken sidewalk and into the van.

Chapter 6

    F inn didn’t like waiting, but there was nothing he could do about little Davin until the Druid made his next move. And there was nothing to distract Finn from his waxing, unsatisfied hunger for Ann Phillips, who would remain unattainable until he had fulfilled his promise about the boy.
    He considered slaking his desire with one of the accommodating women of Charlestown. There was never any shortage of local beauties angling to get into his bed. The problem was that Ann also lived in Charlestown and might hear of it, and bargain or no bargain, he doubted she would like the idea very much. Nor, truth be told, did he. Somehow—and slightly to his surprise—using another woman as a substitute for Ann felt like a betrayal.
    He was beginning to sound like Iobáth.
    Scratching his itch with another Fae, however, might be a different matter. Or so he told himself, without any great conviction, on the way to Deirdre’s house.
    The reclusive painter was an undeniably carnal Fae. She lived with her human lover on Beacon Hill, in Boston, about a two-mile walk from Finn’s place in Charlestown, and she often welcomed others into her bed. Once, the possibility of finding Miach there ahead of him had kept Finn away, but the sorcerer was besotted with his current human lover and had, according to reliable sources, forsaken all others.
    Deirdre’s house was an eighteenth-century gem hidden behind later, grander brick buildings, reached by way of a narrow drive at the end of Pinckney Street. Today the cobbled courtyard was covered with a blanket of sweet-smelling autumn leaves, and there was woodsmoke drifting from the chimneys.
    And a tantalizing aroma of pizza. Deirdre’s lover, Kevin, was an excellent cook, and he had used the house’s antique bake ovens to crisp sizzling platters of dough. They ate, all three of them, companionably in her muted dining room with its pale-green walls and polished mahogany table, and then it was natural that they should go up to Deirdre’s light-filled studio and tumble onto the generous window seat