Cold Iron Read Online Free PDF Page B

trips, then,” he said, lifting Beth’s familiar blue duffel. “You’ve got four bags.”
    Beth scanned the packages lined up on the dock. There was her battered green suitcase, partner in crime to a dingy blue duffel. The other two bags were shiny, black, new, and definitely not hers. “Those aren’t mine,” she said.
    “You signed for them, Mrs. C. They gotta go somewhere.”
    Ten minutes later Beth was staring at the contents of the four cases, laid out on the table in her pokey little office. The door opened and Beth’s heart skipped a beat, until she saw who it was.
    “You look great. Very Madame X, very John Singer Sargent, that gown,” Helene said, resplendent in pale-blue chiffon. Then she stopped short when she saw the gold. “Oh no.”
    “Yup,” Beth said. Her clothes were all there, and the books she’d brought on the expedition, the maps and charts she’d used to find the mound at Clonmel. But she’d found that damned gold torc wrapped in one of her sweaters. The dagger down the leg of a pair of cargo pants. The drinking vessels muffled inside her socks. “He planned this. The whole thing. So he could get me out of the way, and implicate me at the same time.”
    “Is that what I think it is?” Helene reached out to touch the gleaming sword, silver chased with gold and, instinctively, Beth stopped her.
    “Don’t touch any of it,” she warned. Fingerprints. She was concerned about fingerprints, and the damage that the oils from her skin could cause. Not because the gold belonged to a Fae Lord she had barely escaped and could not, if he exerted his power, resist, without the defense of cold iron.
    And not because of the strange shimmering awareness that had flowed down her spine the moment she’d spied her suitcases on the loading dock. That was the autumn chill in the air, the bare arms and neck of her gown, she reassured herself. It was nothing like the sensation she’d felt in the window seat at Clonmel. Nothing.
    This was America. Boston and Cambridge. The home of Yankee common sense, not Irish fancy. The dangers here were mundane, but real. Frank had embroiled her in a crime that at best might end her career and at worst would send her to jail. Unless she played along with him. Or outsmarted him. “I signed for it,” she said. “All of it. The bags came through customs with my name attached. Frank planned all of this.”
    “What are you going to do?” Helene was biting her lip, a nervous habit Beth rarely saw her indulge.
    “I’m going to fight back.”
    “Beth,” Helene said.
    “Go on to the party without me. Frank is going to turn up looking up for this gold. And I’m going to be ready for him.”
    T aking the gold home with her was out of the question. Her apartment was the first place Frank would look. And if she refused to hand it over, he could always threaten her with the police, make it look like she was the thief. Her office wasn’t safe either. Frank was a renowned scholar with ties to the collection; he had the run of the museum.
    So she hid the torc, the drinking vessels, and the small ornaments in plain sight: in the overstuffed cases of the poorly lit Near Eastern Gallery. It was nineteenth-century exhibit space, quantity over quality, and the displays were such a jumble no curator in living memory had tried to sort them out. No one would notice a few extra pieces amongst the Scythian gold. She took care to reset the motion detectors when she was done so that even if Frank sussed out her hiding place, he wouldn’t be able to take the gold without alerting security.
    The sword presented different problems.
    For one thing, she was afraid to touch it. Even wrapped in her shawl, muffled by layers of cloth, it seemed to vibrate, to resonate through her body with the same strange tension she’d felt in the window seat at Clonmel. She needed to get it away from her. She could think of only one place to hide it where it wouldn’t stand out: the Arms and Armor