Stone Song by D. L. McDermott Read Free Book Online

indigo-dyed blue jeans, artfully frayed at the hem and no doubt ruinously expensive. His shirt was Indian, silk, and embroidered with jewels. Atop it he wore a rococo frock coat of gray velvet embellished with silver wire roses.
    For a second she felt a sense of relief. This was not the Fae she had attacked in the alley earlier, angry and intent on revenge. Then the sense of relief vanished and cold dread took its place when she remembered that Fae’s warnings about others who might be looking for her.
    “Who are you?” she asked. She realized she didn’t even know the name of the Fae she had spoken to earlier in the night, but she suspected she knew the name of this one.
    Her question appeared to amuse him. “I am,” he said, considering, “shortly to be the one fixed star in your dwindling universe.” And he smiled as though pleased by the thought.
    Suspicion turned to certainty. “You’re the Prince Consort,” she said, wishing she’d asked her earlier visitor more questions.
    “At your service,” he said, managing to bow—gracefully, the hem of his coat swirling around his knees—without removing the silver knife from Tommy’s throat.
    “Put the harp down there against the wall, gently,” he said, “lest it make some unpleasant sound and I flinch.” He turned the pale blade against Tommy’s neck to catch the light. “Your friend might not enjoy that.”
    Without the harp, she’d be defenseless against the Fae’s glamour. She hesitated. The Prince Consort flicked his blade again, and this time a red spot bloomed on Tommy’s throat.
    She set the harp down.
    “Come closer,” the Prince Consort said.
    She walked to the center of the room but kept a table between herself and the dangerous Fae. His assessment was as blatant as the one she had received from her unnamed visitor earlier that evening, but there was a coldness, a clinical quality to the Prince’s perusal. It was the opposite of the warm appraisal she had been treated to by her mysterious Fae, the one who had only sought to warn her, and she suddenly very much regretted felling him in the alley with her harp.
    “Let Tommy go,” she said.
    “I think not,” said the Prince Consort. “At least, not as long as you’re wearing cold iron.” His eyes slid over her neck, her wrists, and her ankles, searching for the metal.
    He wasn’t going to find it. And she wasn’t going to take it off. If she did, she’d be his puppet, powerless to resist his commands. Like she had been with Keiran. This Fae would be able to reach down into her soul and take her very identity from her, as Gran and the old men had warned when she’d been too young and too foolish to listen.
    “I won’t take it off,” she said.
    “Then I will kill him,” said the Prince.

Chapter 4

    S orcha tried not to focus on the knife at Tommy’s throat. She looked the Prince in the eye and said, “You won’t kill him.” She prayed she was right.
    “Why not?” he asked. It sounded like he was quizzing her.
    “Because you want something from me, and Tommy is your only way to get it.”
    He looked pleased, which was worrying. “You reason well,” he conceded. “Not all artists do. Some of you are skilled, and some of you play by pure instinct, and there are those who can bring both to their craft, but intelligence is the rarest component. We will deal well with each other, I think.”
    She had no plans to deal with him at all. “I won’t be your trained lap-Druid.”
    The Prince sighed. “I suppose that is what Elada told you, but then he is Miach MacCecht’s lapdog, so he would put it that way.”
    So his name was Elada. “Elada didn’t seem like anyone’s lapdog.”
    “Even Fae dogs are superior in all ways to human men.”
    She could see only one weakness in this glittering creature: his vanity. She had no other weapons to use against him, so she struck at it. “‘Superior’ isn’t the word I would use for your kind.” Cruel. Soulless. “But Elada at