Cold Iron by D. L. McDermott Page A

far less justification.”
    She was going to work it out eventually, the depth of her husband’s betrayal, but he hoped she would not need to learn it tonight.
    Her neighborhood was dark and quiet, mostly shingled triple-deckers with wide, open porches. Conn parked in front of the one she indicated and hurried around to her side to open the door and lift her from the car.
    “I can walk,” she said.
    “You need to save your strength,” he replied. And I like holding you. A strange thought, one to worry about later. For now he had to carry her up to the second floor as smoothly and painlessly as possible.
    Beth directed him to set her down in a chair at a well-worn desk, the lacquer in the center rubbed away from too much writing. She shivered and he brought her a blanket from the bed and wrapped it around her, though it was unlikely that it would help. The cold seeping into her was the void between stars.
    She rifled through drawers, searching for the right map. He took the opportunity to study her dwelling. Shabby, but comfortable. Everything of good quality, but well worn. And natural.
    So much he had encountered today, from the pots and pans used to make his meal in Harvard Square, to the chair he had sat upon to eat it, were spun from the muck of dead beasts under the earth. Dinosaurs was the word they used now. Dragons, krakens, behemoths, wyverns, is what his people had called them. And his people knew better than to make anything out of their rotting remains.
    Not so the people of Boston. Or Clonmel, for that matter. Plastics, polyesters, paints, even in food—the foul stuff was everywhere. But Beth’s apartment was mercifully almost free of it. The furnishings were wood and wool and cotton, all grown in the soil, and a heady note of beeswax polish.
    He liked the smell of her kitchen, the pantry a royal hoard of exotic spices. That was one of the things their technology did best, move things vast distances. All Fae could pass , but few could carry anything of much size with them. Before the great sailing ships, such spices were the province of kings and princes, imported overland at great cost and peril. Now even the simplest of meals could be seasoned like a banquet feast. He’d eaten a curry today in Central Square and liked it very much, and found himself wondering, as he ate, if Beth liked such things as well. Judging from the bags of fragrant mace and cardamom and cloves, he decided she did. There were a great many things he liked about Beth Carter.
    Then there were the books. The tiny stack beside her bed. The bigger stack at the foot. The stack beside the sofa. And the one on the coffee table. A precarious tower atop the refrigerator. A few more in the bathroom. And hundreds more on shelves lining the apartment.
    If she only knew there was more learning locked inside her than was contained in all of them.
    “This must be wrong,” she said.
    She had one hand clutching her stomach, the other splayed on the map before her.
    “Tell me.”
    “I can feel two centers. One here”—she pointed—“on the Charlestown peninsula. But it can’t be right.”
    “Why not?”
    “It’s in the projects. Giant government housing complex. Crime ridden. It’s better now than it was ten years ago, but still full of Irish gangsters. What would the Fae be doing there?”
    “What we always do. Making mischief.”
    “The Fae are your people. Why can’t you feel them?”
    “For the same reason you can’t feel other humans. They are what I am. For the Fae, magic is like the air. It’s everywhere, but invisible. You feel us because you aren’t a creature of the magic.”
    “But I have some of it inside me,” she said quietly.
    “You do,” he agreed, wondering how much he could tell her without terrifying her further. Very little, he concluded. “Where is the other location?”
    She pointed again. “South Boston. Another Irish enclave. But this makes even less sense. There are several distinct sites here.