Blade Dance

Ann hesitated on the doorstep, remembering her last visit to Finn’s house. The day they had met, she and Finn had been talking in the second-floor parlor of his far grander residence across the square. He’d been trying—she was pretty sure—to charm her, or at least seduce and distract her. Then there had been a deafening noise and somehow they had been outside, across the street, on the grassy slope below the Bunker Hill Monument. Ann still couldn’t sort out exactly what had happened. She’d heard later that it had been a gas explosion, but something about it didn’t add up.

Common sense told her to turn around now and go home, but the thought of Davin’s ravaged arms strengthened her resolve and carried across the threshold. That, and she was parched for a beer and tired of walking the length and breadth of Charlestown in search of this intriguing, infuriating man.

She followed the crime lord inside. The interior wasn’t at all what she had been expecting. His brownstone had been grand, full of overstuffed furniture and swathed in velvet and silk draperies, like something out of a decorating magazine. It had felt more like a showplace than a home.

This house was different. It was immediately welcoming and comfortable. The wide pine floors were sanded to silk beneath her feet and dotted with colorful braided rugs. The paneling on the walls was painted in a soft palette of gray and blue. She glimpsed a comfortable-looking sectional covered in pewter twill through one door, a dining room with a maple table and Windsor chairs through another.

The home was like its owner: quietly seductive. Ann wished she wasn’t intrigued. Criminals were not supposed to be sexy. Bad boys were bad news. She had come to tell Finn that she was going to report Davin’s father to Child Services—and dare him to do his worst, now that all of Charlestown had seen her march up to his front door—but already something was off the rails; things weren’t going to plan.

Because she found something about him bewitching, his charm so difficult to resist.

It was more than his physical appeal, although that was impossible to ignore. She’d never encountered a man like him in the flesh. His body was the stuff of billboards and movie posters: broad shoulders and defined muscles and a neat, narrow waist over lean hips. His clothing moved with his body, a soft flannel shirt in forest green and rich indigo jeans that fit as though made for him. The piercing gray eyes and thick wavy hair didn’t hurt, either.

She had never felt this way about a man before. She had found her previous boyfriends cute, like puppies or kittens, but not the stuff of her deepest fantasies. And even then, while dating men she found only passably attractive, she’d been hungry for them to touch her. With Finn she felt more than hungry. She felt ravenous—and it frightened her.

“Hungry?” he asked her.

“Yes, actually.” For more than food, but she could hardly say that. She worried that it was obvious enough without putting it into words. And it was hardly a position of strength from which to bargain over the well-being of a child. Remember what you’re here for, Ann.

“Walking back and forth across town twice without dinner will do that to you,” she supplied, letting her eyes roam his athletic form again as he turned toward the kitchen.

The fridge was a stainless-steel behemoth, a restaurant model scaled down for a home kitchen. Finn opened it and handed her a beer, icy cold and dark. Next he produced an artfully arranged platter of meat and cheese decorated with pieces of cut fruit and vegetables carved into the shapes of flowers.

She raised an eyebrow when he placed the food on the counter. “Do you have Martha Stewart squirreled away in one of the cupboards?”

“I have a housekeeper,” he admitted. “Though she’s used to managing a larger residence. Until the foundation of the brownstone is stabilized and the gas can be turned back on, there’s nothing for her to do but cook and clean for this place, and since it’s just me here,” he said, taking a bite out of a carrot carved to look like a rose, “she’s got some extra time on her hands. Possibly a little too much.”

That explained the vegetable sculptures, but not the condition of the brownstone. “What cracked the foundation on your house?” she asked.

“Gas explosion,” he said.

She still didn’t buy it. “I was there that day. I don’t remember smelling gas. And I don’t remember seeing any flames.”

He grinned at her. It was a slow, sexy expression that went all the way to his eyes. He took another swig of his beer, then said, “All right, then. What do you think it was?”

Good question. “I think you were cooking meth, or something equally dangerous, in your basement, and it went wrong.” That was the rational explanation for what had happened.

“If I wanted to cook meth, I wouldn’t do it in a residential neighborhood where people could get hurt.”

“So you’re a civic-minded criminal,” she said.

“Let’s say I take care of my own.”

“That’s just a romantic way to describe a protection racket.”

“Or feudalism or government. Yours didn’t treat the Irish very well when they flocked here in the nineteenth century. My kind did.”

“Your kind are racketeers.”

That slow grin again. “Is that what the teachers at your little school call us?”

The Fair Folk. The Beautiful People. The Good Neighbors.

“No,” she said. “They call you dangerous.” Somehow they were now standing very close, Ann realized.

“That isn’t all they call us,” he said. “The Irish here have got half a dozen quaint euphemisms for me and mine. The Irish are afraid that if they say our true names, we’ll come at dusk and take their prettiest children away.”

She was only inches away from him now. His proximity had an undeniable effect on her. She could feel the pulse beating in her neck, hear her breath coming quicker.

He closed the distance between them and reached for her.

“Fairy tales are for children, Mr. MacUmhaill,” she said, trying for some composure.

“It’s Finn.” His hands had wandered. One was tracing the path of her freckles down her neck. She shouldn’t allow that.

But she didn’t want him to stop.

“You’re too smart to deny the evidence of your own eyes, Ann Phillips. You heard a voice before the house exploded that day. I’m sure you know that some opera singers can shatter glass with a perfect note. Now imagine such power amplified by a force that can draw on all the energy in living things. It’s called stone song, and it’s a kind of weapon. A lost art. One that should have remained so.”

He was right. She’d heard the note, felt it vibrate through the floor, the walls, the furniture, her body, and she’d been . . . electrified by the sound. She had felt like that note had struck a sounding board in her—and that, that had terrified her. Almost as much as what followed.

“And the way we . . . got out of the building that day?”

“That is a gift possessed only by my kind. The power to pass through solid matter.”

She shook her head, still reeling a bit from the memory, and more so from his proximity and touch. “No. That’s impossible.”

“You’re denying it because the human mind recoils from the experience. I would not have done it if I’d had any other choice. Passing often has an untoward effect on your race. It seemed an acceptable risk, however, when the only alternative was dying in the blast.”

“It was a trick of some kind,” she insisted.

All the playfulness went out of him. “Think back, Ann. First we were in my house, drinking whiskey.”

“You grabbed me. I remember that.”

“Like this,” he said. He placed a warm hand at the small of her back and drew her close. She didn’t push him away. “Do you remember what happened next?” he asked.

“And then we were outside,” she said, her breath short. “On the slope beneath the monument, but we must have walked.”

“Can you recall walking out of the house?” She could feel his breath on her face, warm and sweet.

“I was in shock. That’s why I don’t remember how we got out of the building.”

Somehow her hands had come to rest on his chest. She was such a fool.

“This is the second time you’ve come to me, Ann Phillips. If you mean to involve yourself in my business, then you need to understand who and what I am.”

“I know you’re a criminal.”

“That’s not all I am.”

She could feel all that he was: the warmth of his body, the solid muscles of his chest. “I’m not sure I want to know any more. I’m a schoolteacher. Getting involved with a man like you could ruin my career.”

“Oh, I’ll ruin you, Ann Phillips, I promise you that.”

Finn’s mouth covered hers. Warm and wet. Lips and tongue. Licking fire into her. Kindling heat low in her belly and between her legs, where she suddenly, alarmingly ached to be touched. She had not felt anything like this, anything so immediate or revelatory since her first heart-pounding fumblings as a teenager; and it was so transporting, so consuming, that it felt almost supernatural.

He broke away. She opened her eyes, thoroughly dazed, to look up at his face, and felt a frisson of sublime terror. Finn MacUmhaill was beautiful. The high cheekbones, the pale-gray eyes, the full lips and masculine jaw were in fact too perfect. Seen from this angle his beauty was inhuman and cruel.

The hand at the small of her back drifted up to her shoulder, then gripped her painfully tight. His other hand stroked her cheek, caressed her jaw, pain and pleasure in one embrace. Then he said, “Close your eyes.”

She did, because she wanted more.

She didn’t get it.

The ground shifted beneath her feet, and she cried out but the sound was swallowed by the earth. She was falling. And flying. And suffocating. She was part of the ancient wood of the house, of the soil beneath it, of running water deep underground. She was growing through tree roots and out of blades of grass and then she was in the open, shaking with terror and shivering in the cool evening breeze.

They were standing in the middle of a park on scrubby grass. Or Finn was standing; she was clinging to him for support.

She pushed him away and stepped back. Her knees wobbled, and she staggered up the dirt path. She could feel the breeze tickling her skin, but seconds ago she had been . . . buried alive. And yet moving through the earth. Her mind reeled. She felt for the cool silver of the whistle at her neck and tried to get her bearings.

They were in the old training ground. The little park was crisscrossed by dirt paths and bordered on all sides by homes. Light shone from the windows of the grand brick mansions on the high slope and peeked around the shades in the tiny, two-story row houses on the other side.

Everything about the scene was oddly peaceful. Somehow their arrival, which had felt like a cataclysm to Ann, hadn’t even disturbed the birds in the trees.

Or Finn.

“What—What did you just do?” she demanded.

“The same thing I did the day of the explosion. I passed. It is one of the gifts of the Fae.”

“Gifts? That’s not a gift. It’s . . . ” She didn’t know what it was. “Horror. Pure horror.”

Finn shrugged. There was a coldness about him she had not perceived before, an alien quality that marked him as a member of a race apart. “Mankind does not generally find it pleasant, but you have uncommonly high tolerance for the experience. It drives some humans mad.”

“Being buried alive would drive anyone mad.” Then the real horror of it struck her. “What would have happened if you’d let go of me?”

The thought made Finn feel as queasy as Ann looked. It had been a favorite trick of the Queen’s, passing with some mortal who had disappointed her, or amused her, or simply happened to be in the wrong place at the time when the whim was upon her. Finn had always found the idea repugnant, but he’d raised no objections to her casual cruelty, or that of the Court she led. In fact, she’d done it to him once—when he was a boy, before he had fully mastered that art—left him buried alive in a hillside for a terrified instant before retrieving him and depositing him in the center of a circle of snickering sycophants.

The experience had left him terrified of passing, but he’d conquered his fear with his then-friend Miach’s help and decided in that moment that he was never going to be the object of anyone’s jest again.

“If I let go of you, you would be buried alive. I would never do such a thing, but there are those of my kind who might, if you give them cause, or even for sport. This is the second time you’ve come to me intent on involving yourself in Fae business, but you don’t have the least notion what you’re meddling with. Before you tell me why you’re here, you need to understand the danger.”

“You mean there’s more than this passing thing?”

She looked wary, as well she ought.

“The Fae are varied in their talents,” he explained. “We have mages who cultivate the sorcerous arts. My son is one. There are others who paint living canvases. And warriors with unparalleled skills with blade and bow.”

“And what is it you do?” she asked. “Besides extortion?”

“I am but a humble leader of a fighting band.”

She snorted. “There is nothing humble about you, Finn MacUmhaill.”

He laughed. “You’re right. Humility is not one of the gifts given the Fae. Once we were so cruel and arrogant, we brought about our own destruction. Not all of us have learned from the experience, but as a race, we have been humbled. That is what you need to understand. If you meddle in Fae business, you are walking into the middle of a war.”

“You mean like some kind of gang war.”

“If it were only that. This is secret, centuried. The Fae fighting the Fae are dangerous enough for the humans caught in the middle, but the Fae fighting their ancient enemy, the Druids, is far, far worse. You see, Druids aren’t the nature worshippers your modern historians paint them. They’re closer to the bloodthirsty practitioners of human sacrifice that the Romans described. They began as our acolytes, vassals, ordinary men and women of extraordinary intelligence. We invested them with magic—just a little, because we were not fools—so they could run our domains. We entrusted to them the tilling of fields and the collecting of rents and all the mundane activities we did not deign to do for ourselves—and we set them to herd the human population like sheep.”

“That sounds like hell on earth for ordinary people,” said Ann.

“For the Fae, it was paradise. For the Druids it was . . . unsatisfactory. They began as mortal men, but Fae magic and their own experimentation turned them into something else. They studied our power, learned how to harness it for their own purposes. They discovered our weaknesses, and when the moment was right, they overthrew us. They hurled our Queen and her Court into the Otherworld, a plane that exists alongside and askew from this one, and they built a wall to keep them there. Other Fae remained in this world, imprisoned by the Druids in their mounds to experiment on.”

“Including you?”

“Including me. And every Fae you will encounter in the world today. We have all been prisoners, all been tortured. It went on for years, until one Fae managed to escape, and free others. Then we made common cause with new mortal allies—an alliance with the Romans, who were intent on conquering our part of the world—to wipe the Druids out. But some eluded us, and their descendants are fast rediscovering their powers. Worse still, the Queen’s former lover, the Prince Consort, has been seeking out latent Druids and training them to help him bring down the wall between worlds.”

He watched the emotions play across her face, the horror, the unlooked-for sympathy, and, finally, the understanding. Another woman would have walked away from him then, but not Ann Phillips, and that was when he knew he could not, even for her own good, let this woman go.