Free Cold Iron by D. L. McDermott Page A

and fire me.”
    “I can glamour him into forgetting what happened tonight, compel him to allow you to keep your job.”
    “That won’t free me from Frank, won’t show the world what he is. Let me keep the Summoner for a day,” she said. “Just one day. It won’t leave the museum. It’s not like you can walk through the streets of Cambridge with a sword on your back, anyway.”
    “The sword is easily hidden by my glamour,” he explained patiently.
    “One day is all I am asking for.”
    “I’m sorry,” he said. The words tumbled out of him as though he was unfamiliar with the taste of an apology. She suspected the Fae did not apologize often, or maybe ever. But she couldn’t let that sway her.
    “I’m sorry, too.” She was. She wanted what he had to offer but was too broken to accept it. She hated him, too, in that moment for promising something she could not have.
    She gripped the iron key in her hand, then turned on her heel and ran. Her identity card was hanging at her hip. She reached for it, held it out so it would touch the scanner plate as she hurled herself against the thick glass door leading deeper into the ancient wing. Heard the click. Didn’t dare look behind her as she shoved the heavy door open and slid through. She ran, flat out, no looking back, for the iron gate that guarded the entrance to the Arms and Armor Room.
    It loomed up out of the darkness like a spiked black castle, gilt tipped and menacing. She unlocked the gate, flew through the opening, and slammed the door shut behind her with a mighty clang. The case lights, triggered by motion detectors, flickered on one by one until the entire nave, transported stone by stone from some long-destroyed English abbey, was bathed in ghost light.
    For a moment she was alone in the strange room, arrayed with daggers and pikes and halberds and blades of every kind, and she could only pray she had guessed right: that the iron would protect her, that he could not pass through the gate as he had her door in Clonmel.
    She didn’t hear him approach. Conn simply appeared out of the darkness, his skin seeming to drink in the ethereal light. He walked with preternatural silence, his booted feet impossibly quiet on the polished stone. He stopped short of the iron grille and drew back, then shocked her by laughing. “Very clever,” he said. “I take it you have the sword with you in your cold iron cage.” He prowled back and forth in front of the bars, but he didn’t come too close.
    She nodded. “I won’t let Frank have it. I promise you. He has no idea what it is anyway. Frank just likes shiny things he can sell,” she said.
    “But didn’t he take it for that reason, to sell? And who then, my clever Beth, do you think might be of a mind to buy?”
    A chill breeze wafted through the nave, and she shuddered in her bare-shouldered gown. The answer was obvious, but ludicrous at the same time. Another Fae, of course. One who wasn’t bound by the same covenant. One who might use the sword.
    But planning to find a buyer like that would mean Frank knew the Fae were real, had known, before he decided to steal the sword. And if that was the case, it suggested he had probably known Beth’s powers were real, for a very long time.
    It was a monstrous betrayal, and she had no time to dwell on it now. Even if it was all true, it would take more time and planning to find a Fae buyer for the sword than Frank had since Clonmel . . . unless he had a particular customer already in mind. He could have been selling Celtic relics for a while now, after all. As long as they had been digging together.
    It was a risk she had to take, an abstract danger, where the threat to her career was real and pressing. “Collectors,” she said. “Crooked dealers. That’s who Frank will go to.” Not that she knew anyone like that, but she could imagine them, cobbled together in her mind from movies and television, stage villains with pinky rings and fluffy white cats.
    Conn