for me.”
“Fine.” Jeremiah followed. The iron in the building resonated, singing its cold song as the breeze picked up.
The elevator heaved and shuddered its way down. Jeremiah trudged toward the office, the bite of almost-worry under his breastbone sharp and unwelcome. His right hand wormed its way into his jacket pocket, the calluses on his fingers scraping rough corduroy.
Daisy had picked this dun coat out for him. Heavy and graceless but sturdy as hell, leather patches at the elbows, found on sale. Thrift stores were her favorite places. The broken-down, the beggars and half-drowned kittens, the cheap and the castoff overwhelmed her gentle heart. Maybe that was why she’d settled for him.
The right-hand pocket held three iron nails. A little bird had warned him, and unwilling gratitude warmed the inside of his ribs.
If he hadn’t been touching inimical mortal metal, he might not have seen it. The office—a temporary trailer listing just a few degrees out of true, less well-built than Jeremiah’s own—hunched against the damp. Warm electric light shone from its windows… and up the wooden steps lifting toward the door were smears of phosphorescence, weak in the gray daylight. They glowed a sickly green, and his fingers spasmed against cold iron. The marks on his forearms twisted, writhing under the skin and dragging their tingling claws bone-deep.
Unseelie. Here, in the daylight. But why?
Robin. There was no other explanation. Had the rider been pure Unseelie? A highborn of Unwinter, be it the Hunt or the Hallow, simply wouldn’t fall apart at the mere touch of a dwarven-inked lance, even iron-bladed.
It took far more than that to kill them. Or the Sluagh.
If the ragged little Robin had been under the Hunt of Unwinter Himself, killing one rider wouldn’t have stopped the pursuit. There would have been more of them, and they would have followed her over Jeremiah’s doorstep, cold iron or no. Once the Hunt—or, God forbid, the Sluagh—was called, it took more than a single piece of cold iron to bar passage.
There had only been the one, though. No names exchanged, no bloodgilt to be asked. Why would Unseelie brave even cloud-filtered sunlight and ask about him? He hadn’t been Summer’s Armormaster for a long while, and any sidhe with a grudge against him would have found him before now—and found him willing enough to answer.
He kept moving, the same heavy mortal footfalls. Regret and chill forgotten, every sense alert, he made no attempt to alter his gait. They would have heard him long before now. Let them think him stupid or oblivious.
He eased his hands free of the corduroy pockets, letting go of the iron regretfully. Now that he was on guard, glamours wouldn’t be nearly as effective. His workboots thudded on the rickety steps. It was ironic—a construction site full of cold iron, and the Unseelie had been ushered to a tin can of a trailer that wouldn’t seriously hamper anything they wanted to do.
The doorknob was slick and ice-cold; he twisted it and stepped in.
Immediate darkness enfolded him, wet illusion clinging and cloying. He ducked, and the spat curse went over his head, its wingtips brushing past his hair and sending a rill of ice down his spine. Fullblood. Great. The marks on his arms gave a flare of cold heat as he drove forward, the lance resolving and striking lightning-quick.
Most flying curses were sight-line; he swept the lance, the blade striking home in something soft as dark-glamour fell away, spent. The inside of the office was a shambles, paper exploded everywhere; the lanceblade sinking in just under the ribs of a tall, black-clad noseless scarecrow of a sidhe, all the visible slices of its skin patterned with the violet tree-ring markings of lightshielding chantment.
They had planned and prepared for coming out by day, and asked for him by name. The intervening years fell away, and he was the Armormaster again, calculating as he moved, the lance part of his breath and bone.
Sylvia the secretary lay flung back over her desk, her throat cut and a bright jet of arterial spray painting the corkboard where project-resolution timetables and OSHA notices were tacked up. The stench of a mortal battlefield rose—copper blood, adrenaline sharp against his palate, the reek of loosed bowels.
Sylvia had two cockatiels waiting at home in her apartment. She kept the coffee hot and didn’t complain when the boys dirtied the bathroom in the office trailer. She walked around in a cloud of Loveswept perfume and chain-smoked in her office, a merry defiance of