The gentry and Talus started moving forward, and my teeth started to itch. The sensation was familiar, and I focused on it for a moment as I followed.
Cold iron! I could feel cold iron somewhere around. The others presumably sensed it too, but Talus and the three gentry seemed unbothered, starting to separate and move apart. It wasn’t a big chunk of cold iron, just little bits. Lot of little bits. Lots and lots...
“EVERYBODY DOWN,” I yelled, and dove forward, tackling Talus and slamming him down to the ground as the first claymore mine detonated.
Cold-iron ball bearings ripped through the room at waist height, and a second claymore detonated. I could feel the iron whizzing across my back, and then suddenly Talus and I were falling. The floor beneath us vanished in a burst of fae Power and we dropped.
Only moments later, another explosion rocked the floor above us as more explosives, these not the cold iron–filled claymores but more traditional charges, shattered structural beams and blew out windows.
We kept falling, wrapped in a glowing nimbus of force as Talus blasted his way through each floor in turn, more explosions echoing above us. We hit the main floor with a shock I felt reverberate through my bones and flesh, even with Talus cushioning us.
The fae noble was on his feet before I even processed that we’d stopped falling. He grabbed me by the collar of my jacket and dragged me across the floor as he pulled me out of the building.
He got us clear and turned back to look at the building. The top three floors of the office were just gone, the last support pillars collapsing inward as I watched the growing inferno consume the last clue I had to fulfilling my Queen’s mission.
Then I spotted motion out of the blaze, and a black figure leapt from the sixth or seventh floor; I couldn’t tell which with the smoke. They plummeted half the distance to the ground, and then Talus had his hand outstretched, slowing and stopping the fall, pulling the figure toward us.
He guided Laurie to a soft landing on the snow pile. All glamors lost to the flames, the hag bore every ounce of her true hideous face, and I doubt Robert had ever seen anything so beautiful. The young gentry lay broken in her arms, one of his legs sheared clean off, and I could feel the burn of the cold iron that had done it as Talus and I rushed to him.
“He’s dying,” Laurie coughed through the smoke. “I don’t know how much iron is in him. I think he missed the claymore blasts, thanks to your warning.”
“Enough,” Talus said shortly, then looked at me. “You can sense cold iron?” he demanded.
“I thought everyone could?”
“No,” he told me flatly. “It’s rare. I can’t.” He paused, looking down at the moaning boy, and then back at me. “And it can save him. Do you trust me?”
For three years, I had learned never to trust the noble fae. I had learned my kind were capricious and callous and often cruel. And even Robert was true fae, almost noble.
And it didn’t matter. A boy was dying on the snow in front of me, red blood staining the stark white beneath him.
I gave Talus my hand and, for the first time in my life, shared minds with a noble of the fae.
15
“I AM no more prepared to risk my son than the humans are,” a voice boomed. “The way the Germans keep going, there won’t be much left of London by spring!”
I peeked through a crack in the door, watching my father and mother argue. A bomb had fallen close to the house last night, and many of my schoolmates, fae and human, had been sent into the country. Few who could manage to be elsewhere were still in London.
“But to Canada?” my mother demanded. “It’s so far, and the sea isn’t safe.”
“Calebrant has offered to carry him Between with the Wild Hunt, with the other children of the Courts,” my father—no, Talus’s father; I was seeing his memories, ones the current circumstance brought to the forefront of his mind—said. “They will carry our future to safety. We can walk the paths ourselves to visit if time allows, but bombs pay no more dignity to our kind than to humans. I must know the heir to my clan is safe.” Talus’s father softened his voice, and his pain leaked in. “I must know Talus is safe, now that we’ve lost his brother.”
THAT WAS the last time Talus had seen his parents, at the age of twelve. He’d been taken aboard the personal mount of Lord Calebrant—the Wild Hunt’s master, a dark-haired twig of a fae, slightly built and short for a fae lord at less than six feet tall—and carried through the darkness to Canada.
Two weeks later, his father’s words had been proven true. A bomb had destroyed the ancestral home of his fae family. After the Blitz, Talus had never returned, raised in Calgary by his uncle Oberis.
Older and wiser now, Talus looked to the gentry of the city for the closest thing to equals, to their children for his hope for the future. He’d watched Robert grow up. Always from a distance. Never from close up.
Close up, someone might see the resemblance between the gentry boy and the fae noble who could never admit to being related to him for risk of censure to them both. Someone might realize what secret Robert’s gentry mother had taken with her when she’d died in childbirth, and never named the boy’s father.
I OPENED my eyes and looked into Talus’s, and saw the pain he could never reveal. The truth he could never admit about the young gentry whose life the cold iron stole away second by second.
I saw his pain, felt it through the link between us, and gave him my power. I felt our strengths merge, and for a moment, I could feel the world the way Talus felt it, see it as he saw it—in strings and lines and bars of power and energy, to be touched and changed at a moment’s whim.
We followed my sense for the cold iron and found the strands and pieces working their way into his son’s flesh. We wrapped tiny lines of force around each one and carefully, ever so carefully, for our power does not work well with cold iron, pulled each one out of Robert’s flesh.
An eternity passed in a moment, and then the last of the iron was gone, and Talus released my hand and the link, both of us panting feverishly.
“Sirens,” Laurie told us. “Can he be moved?”
“The iron is out,” Talus said quietly. “We have no choice; we can’t be found here. Dave and Elena?”
The hag simply shook her head.
Talus grunted and picked Robert up easily, leading the way quickly back to the SUV. Fire trucks and other emergency vehicles began to arrive as he slipped us away into the night. I held my breath for a moment, afraid that one of them would see us and stop us, but we eluded detection as we fled the scene.
We didn’t drive far before Talus pulled us off the road and put the SUV in park. Leaving the engine on for heat, he rejoined Laurie and me in the back, checking on Robert.
The hag had sat by him the whole way, a tiny trickle of power helping the wounded gentry to heal. “He’s going to be okay,” she told Talus.
“Hold up,” he told us both. “I need to check in.”
The noble stepped out of the SUV, taking his cellphone out into the cold with him. I turned back to trying to bandage up Robert’s still seeping but now slowly healing wounds. I could see Talus outside in the snow, talking on his cellphone and gesturing wildly with his free hand.
Finally, he turned the phone off and got back in the vehicle.
“We’re heading to meet my uncle at the doctor’s,” he told us. “He’s arranged for some of our people to make sure Dave and Elena’s bodies are quietly shuffled out of the mess. Poor bastards.”