Free Silver Skin (A Cold Iron Novel) by D.L. McDermott Page A

to stop you. I knew you wouldn’t like it, but there was no other way. Our enemy means to kill you, Helene. If you try to leave my house now, Elada will prevent it, by any means necessary.”
    His voice was definitely different. Ragged, almost. The music in it, the timber that always caused her, until she caught herself, to lean toward him when he spoke, was absent. It was what she said she wanted, to be able to hear him without that hypnotic resonance, but it disturbed her now and made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end.
    She approached his chair and thought she saw him shiver, but that couldn’t be right, because the Fae didn’t get sick. Did they? She stepped between the sorcerer and the window.
    The Sídhe were always pale, their skin a porcelain, otherworldly hue, but Miach’s complexion was ashen. There were dark circles beneath his deep brown eyes, and his lips were blue.
    “What happened to you?” she asked.
    “Iron poisoning. The stairs to your roof. Solid iron. And they were blanketed in iron filings.”
    Miach had described what iron could do to a Fae. Helene hadn’t imagined it would look like this. “You need a doctor,” she said. “A real one,” she added, remembering how he had first introduced himself.
    “A human doctor won’t be able to help me.”
    “A Fae doctor, then,” she said.
    “I am the only Fae on this side of the wall between worlds with any skill in the healing arts.”
    “Beth has some healing abilities,” Helene said. She didn’t understand exactly how they worked. “Could she help you?”
    “Druids are more talented at vivisection than healing,” he said. The bitterness was plain in his voice.
    If he weren’t an ancient immortal being, she would say he was cranky. He might be suffering from an entirely Fae weakness, but it was the most human she had seen him.
    “There must be something we can do,” Helene said.
    “I’ve done what I can.”
    “He’s gone and killed all my tomato plants is what he’s done,” said a woman’s voice from the door.
    Helene turned to find Nieve carrying a tea tray loaded with delicate bone china painted with pale-pink roses and rimmed with gold. Poppy-seed cakes fragrant with lemon were heaped on one of the plates, and Helene could smell the pot of warm honey, musky sweet. A sticky-fingered toddler followed in Nieve’s wake.
    “The oak’s lost every single leaf,” Nieve went on. “And he didn’t spare my rosebushes, either.” She set the tea tray down on the desk with an audible clink, then began offloading cups and plates, placing each one on the polished surface with a thunk . Evidently Miach was not the only cranky MacCecht in the house.
    “We’ll have to replant the whole garden now. He should have gone and pulled from the trees in the park, but I suppose he’s afraid Finn would hear of it.”
    “The Fae from Charlestown?” asked Helene, as the toddler climbed into her lap and ran his honey-coated fingers through her hair. He smelled like baby powder and green grass, and Helene found the warm burden comforting, a hint of normalcy in an otherwise disturbingly strange day. “Why would Finn care about the trees in the park?”
    “Because,” said Miach, “if he hears that I’ve drained the trees in my own garden and the ones in the park, he’ll know I’m weak, vulnerable. We can’t afford for him to know that, particularly if he’s mixed up in this business with the solstice gate at the museum, and your blackouts.”
    “He isn’t,” Nieve said darkly. “Listening to you tell it, a person might imagine Finn was responsible for everything bad in this world. But he wasn’t mixed up in the Beth Carter affair, was he?”
    “No,” Miach said pointedly, “but his sons were.”
    Helene had the impression she had stumbled into the middle of a family argument.
    “So were some of yours . And anyways, not Garrett,” said Nieve gravely.
    “You can’t be sure of that,” replied Miach. “Just because I