Silver Skin (A Cold Iron Novel) Read Free Page A

from the goods that arrived at the shipping terminal, the cars that rolled off the container ships. Like the milk and honey, which Beth had told her some Irish villagers still left outside their doors to placate the Good Neighbors, a little taste of everything profitable in South Boston was offered up to the Fae.
    Helene had taken the T as far as the Broadway station, and begun walking. The Back Bay, where she lived, was a neighborhood of cafés and boutiques and grand public buildings. South Boston was a neighborhood of barbershops and bakeries and light industry. Helene had chosen what she perceived to be the safest route, on a well-trafficked street with schools and businesses, but when two shirtless men covered in prison tattoos had started following her and calling out obscenities, she jumped into a passing cab and told the driver to take her to the big house at City Point.
    The driver knew exactly which house she meant.
    Her first thought was that the mansion was ugly. A jumble of spires and porches and dormers with no rhyme or reason to them. But there was an exuberance to the architecture, an undeniable joy in the variety and sheer excess of ornament, that seduced her as she drew closer. From the looks of the outside, she guessed that the individual rooms would be quite charming, the house taking its shape from the interior living spaces more than any architect’s plan.
    It had taken an act of will to come here. The night she had met Miach, she hadn’t known what he was. She’d felt an instant attraction to him, the effect, she now understood, of his Fae glamour. And perhaps, to be fair, of her unconscious desires.
    She was tired of dating men who were intimidated by her. Helene wasn’t petite and curvy like Beth. She was tall for a woman, but she didn’t fit the willowy feminine ideal. Helene was . . . athletic. Tanned. She worked out to stay strong, not slim. She had more than a few freckles across her nose. Her hair was long and blond, but it wasn’t the iron-straight curtain of perfection found in glossy magazines, more the windblown sort that hung in irregular waves.
    The scholars she met at the university, with the exception of a fling with a marine biologist who had turned out to be married, tended to be urban creatures, more at home on asphalt than on a forest trail. And few of them were comfortable dating a woman over five-foot-ten who might be able to bench press more than they could.
    Helene wanted to meet a man who was comfortable in his own skin, who wouldn’t feel emasculated by her height, her strength, or her focus on her career.
    Miach had introduced himself as a doctor. A confident professional with achievements, a breed apart from the introverted scholars and wealthy dilettantes she met at the museum. Their attraction had seemed promising—until she’d discovered what he really was.
    Helene had not believed it at first, but when she and Beth were kidnapped by a renegade band of half-blooded Fae, she’d been forced to learn the truth. The Fae had once ruled over men through their vassals, the Druids. But the Druids had grown weary of the abuses of the decadent, sensation-loving Fae, and turned on them, banishing most of the Aes Sídhe to an alternate plane, where they abided still, always looking for a way out.
    Save the few the Druids had kept prisoner aboveground, such as Miach.
    He had refused to take Beth, in the middle of a malaria attack, to a hospital. Helene had thought he was killing her best friend. She’d threatened to call the police. He’d tried to use his glamour then, to bend Helene to his will, and when that wasn’t expedient enough, he’d used his magic to close her windpipe and cut off her air until she’d blacked out.
    While she was unconscious, he’d inked a geis , a magical tattoo, on her inner thigh. It had allowed him to track her movements. While she admitted that the geis had probably saved her life and allowed Miach and Conn to find her when Miach’s