Cold Iron by D. L. McDermott Page B

them.”
    “Fairy bargains,” she said. “Rumpelstiltskin.”
    “Fairy bargains,” he agreed, “are never fair. And never to the benefit of mortals. Save the one the Druids made with me,” he added bitterly.
    “They gave you the sword,” she guessed. “To summon back your kin. What did they want in return?”
    “The Romans were hunting them down and destroying them with ruthless efficiency. The Druids were nothing if not wise. They knew their end was near. The sword could not be destroyed. They had invested it with too much power. But it had to be safeguarded after they were gone. Of course, they could have used the sword themselves, called upon the Fae to rise and repel the invaders, but they chose to accept their own destruction rather than have us return. That alone should tell you how dangerous we are.”
    “The Druids trusted you,” she said.
    “Don’t spin a fairy tale about me, Beth. They trusted only in my self-interest. I owed fealty to none. They chose me for my skill in battle, my talent for killing. They removed the wards from the mound, but they bound me to the blade. If the Summoner is ever used to free the Fae, I’ll be buried in the earth forever. I bought my freedom, at the price of my race’s. Altruism,” he added ruefully, “is not a Fae virtue. We value loyalty, beauty, our own pleasure, and nothing else.”
    “If that was true,” she said, “you wouldn’t have let me go in Clonmel.”
    S he was right, of course, and that gave him pause. He’d let her go in Clonmel. Most of his kind wouldn’t have. Most of his kind would have seen it as an opportunity to take revenge on one of them .
    He could have had her. He was certain of it. Could have driven her no-longer-husband from the room. The old woman would have clucked, but accepted it. And his seduction could have proceeded. Beth was starved for pleasure, and her fierce rejection of him, her instinctive use of her buried power, had only whetted his appetite for her.
    But her steady gaze, the way she had met his eyes and said she did not want him, had given him pause. He did not want this forthright woman by trickery or glamour. He could have squeezed the fine bones in her wrist until she released the headboard, could have flooded her mind with desire, and taken her.
    He hadn’t. He’d wanted something different. He’d wanted her to wrap her hand around that iron headboard, look at him, really look at him, and see him, stripped of his glamour, mute of his compelling voice. And say she wanted him still.
    A strange new perversity on his part, to want her to desire him like that. Humans did not care to look upon the true faces of the Fae.
    If he couldn’t have her like that, he didn’t want her at all. If she was only a way to satisfy his appetite, there were easier conquests to be had. The blond Amazon, for one. He pictured her long tan legs spread to welcome him, and felt nothing.
    It was disorienting, this lack of desire for any woman but Beth Carter. It went against his Fae nature and left him searching for some fixed point on the horizon.
    “Grasp the key,” he said on impulse.
    “What?”
    “The iron key. In your pocket. Wrap your hand around it.”
    She was suspicious, because she had a keen intelligence and had been hurt by men before. He knew that much from the brief contact with her mind. But she obeyed him. He could sense the moment her fingers wrapped around the cold iron, the moment the haze of desire cleared for her, and she saw him. She did not recoil.
    He stepped back.
    “Is this a trick?” she asked.
    “No trick. No glamour. No compulsion. Do you still want me to touch you?”
    She blushed and looked away. “In the gallery,” she said, without meeting his eyes, “you looked like an ordinary man. Not as beautiful as you look when you’re trying to compel me, but not fox-faced, like now.”
    “It’s another glamour,” he explained. “We can look like ordinary mortals when we choose. Pass undetected among