Iron (The Warding Book 1) Read online

  “Yup, it is.” I located my wayward cup of blueberry-on-the-bottom as I said it and snagged it out of the path of a particularly fuzzy looking container of… Well, it might have once been lasagna. I couldn’t quite suppress a shudder. Some of the people in the office were utter savages. I plastered on a fake smile as I closed the fridge and turned around, the “thank you” dying on my lips.

  Marc leaned in the kitchen door-frame, sipping a cup of coffee. As usual, he was dressed in khakis and a brightly coral polo. Unlike usual, he was sporting a pair of large, curling horns, one on each side of his furry face. That face was still human—sort of. His grin was far too toothy beneath a protruding nose that looked distinctly snout-like. His bare arms sported the same dark, wiry fur as his face and his stubby fingers grasped a steaming paper cup with surprising deftness. A wave of dizziness washed over me.

  Holy hot staggering fuck. One of them was in my office. In my office. My extremities all seemed to go numb while the moment of panic played out in my brain. I heard the clatter as my unopened yogurt dropped to the floor.

  His brows—now nearly indistinguishable from his wild mane and fur-covered forehead—rose. “Hey, you okay there?”

  A million responses ran through my head.

  Oh, great. Spectacular even. Just didn’t expect your wicked 5 o’clock shadow there.

  Well, I guess this explains why you’re such a horn-dog.

  Are you fucking kidding me? You’re a FAIRY!

  Obviously, none of those was appropriate.

  Instead I stooped to pick up my yogurt, trying hard to school my face into something resembling normal, and tried to sound glib. “Oh yeah. Fine, fine. Seeing your cup of, ah, coffee there just made me realize that I forgot to turn my coffeepot off this morning.” I flashed him a weak smile, eyes darting around as I tried so very hard not to take in all that fur and horns. I flung an arm out toward the hallway—thankfully not the one struggling to keep a grip on my yogurt—and stammered, “I better go call… somebody. You know, before my, ah, apartment burns down or something.”

  Thankfully, my high-pitched babble struck him dumb. He made no attempt to stop me as I shot past him through the open door. I was shaking from head to toe, my heart beating so fast I thought for sure it was going to burst out of my chest like an alien parasite. Somewhere deep down inside I had known there was no ignoring what had happened to me last night. I mean, you really just can’t deny it for very long once you’ve seen Little Miss Muffet turn into a cat on your recliner. Maybe there was even a tiny part of me that had already come to grips with the fact that if I had seen such crazy shit once, it would happen to me again—but good goddamn. I had not expected it to happen again so soon. The bar, my apartment, now at work too? Was no place safe?

  A nervous sweat bathed my forehead. A full-blown panic attack was seconds away from crashing down on me. I felt like I was going to fall to pieces but held on with an iron will as I scurried down the hall toward my cubicle, telling myself to keep breathing though my chest felt squeezed flat. I was afraid to look up from my feet; afraid of what I might see in the face of someone else I had trusted to be a normal, everyday member of the human race. I could have a nice, wheezy little fit and get a grip on things once I made it back to my desk. I could cower in the safety of those bland, gray walls for another four hours, trying to make as little contact with anyone as possible. Maybe then I could keep my tenuous grip on sanity for one more day…

  “Caitlin, are you okay?”

  Or the universe could bend me over one more time.

  I froze mid-step, teetering on one foot, in front of the boss’s office. I looked a mess, and I knew Marc would be gossiping about my odd behavior to anyone who would listen in no time. The chances at brushing this one off were pretty slim. I gave Allison my best smile and cleared my throat. “I’ve been better?”

  The look she fixed me back with was of the no nonsense variety. She jerked her chin in the direction of the chair in front of her desk. “Come in. And close the door.”

  How could I refuse such a gracious invitation? Mentally cursing, I did as she asked. I settled myself into the seat across from her and tried to take a deep breath. This was pretty much bound to suck, no matter how I played it.

  Allison sat forward, hands folded neatly in the center of her desk blotter. She was a tall, thin woman in her middle forties; nondescript brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, wire-frame glasses perched on her nose. A real type A, with a submissive husband and two young kids. I was pretty sure there was a dog—and a maybe even a minivan—in that equation somewhere, just to round out her image as the All-American Suburban Power Mom. As I found myself pinned under her best concerned-boss/sympathetic-mom stare, I felt for her kids. It was going be hard for them to pull one over on her one day. She said, “I’ve noticed that you haven’t been yourself today, Caitlin. Are you okay? Is there something going on? Something that you would like to talk about?”

  Yup, just as I had feared: pop psychology from the boss-lady. Oh goodie. Just what one wants when they’re staving off a major meltdown. I bit my tongue and studied the sagging tiles of the ceiling above her desk intently. I tried to choose a good excuse from the chorus line running through my brain but they all sounded fake or downright crazy. All of a sudden, words started tumbling out of my mouth. Perhaps my traumatized psyche was so desperate to tell someone something about the night it had just been subjected to that even a grossly abbreviated version was better than holding it in one second longer. I spewed out words like “mugged” and “scared shitless”—hell, maybe even a dramatic “certain death” got thrown in there too. I felt myself grow more and more hysterical with each second. I’m pretty sure I let slip a “troll” or two, but I was so emotional that I was pretty sure it fit in context if I had.

  By the time I had finished with my miraculous rescue by a few strangers on the deserted street, I was on the verge of sobbing. I took a deep, shaky breath to choke back the tears and stared at my hands. They were clenched together in my lap, going numb from the force of my own grip. Part of me couldn’t believe I had just opened the emotional floodgates to my boss, of all people.

  The rest of me just didn’t give two shits. It felt so good to say something, finally. I had avoided Jenni’s calls all morning, finally staving her off with a non-committal “tell you later” text. Maybe it would be easier to talk to her if I considered this a dress rehearsal for my later lie. Close as we were, I couldn’t burden my bestie with my fucked up fairy tale. It was too damn weird, even for someone who had stuck by my side through my stinky incense and funny chanting hippie-pagan phase. Of course she would probably try to have herself committed right alongside me if I did tell her, just so I’d have company in the loony bin but, still. That was too much to ask for from a friend.

  When I finally had the courage to look up, Allison was regarding me with a look of co-mingled shock and pity. Something about that look made my throat tighten until I wanted to throw myself into her arms and bawl like a baby. She asked me the expected questions: are you okay? Did you file a report with the police? Did you go to the hospital? I gave all the expected let’s-not-make-waves answers. I belatedly wondered why I hadn’t done those things, upon waking this morning. Wouldn’t any sensible person have wanted to make sure they were healthy and sane? Had my subconscious already accepted that the boys in blue would be no help against gigantic monsters from another dimension? I had to swallow a hysterical giggle in a wet cough.

  Good god, my life was a mess.

  “…and you have the vacation time. Why don’t you take the rest of the week off and rest?”

  I blinked and stared at her for a moment, as if she had been speaking in Swahili. Allison, the attendance Nazi was telling me to take some time off? She had been known to argue the importance of silly little things like doctor’s appointments and kids’ graduations when they dared interfere with the well-oiled machine of her workplace. Her kindness in the face of my shaken state was uncharacteristically u
nderstanding. Granted, it wouldn’t do me a whole lot of good, considering all the details I had been forced to leave out of my “mugging” story, but; still. It was strangely comforting to get even a small dose of sympathy from someone generally considered to be slave-driving and heartless.

  Her suggestion had merit. I was less than useless in my current state and didn’t see it improving much in the next day or so. A little vacation from responsibility might be just the pick-me-up I needed whilst sorting out the pile of crazy that had just been dropped in my lap. I accepted her offered tissue, dabbing my eyes as I nodded slowly. “Yeah, maybe that is a good idea.”

  And it did seem like a good idea. Right up until the moment I got in my car and realized the only place I could go was home. I wasn’t ready to face Jenni and being in the public eye felt far too vulnerable—yet, my apartment no longer struck me as the welcoming bastion of comfort either. Locks were well and good (and living on the second floor was even better) but a door wasn’t going to stop something like Goliath. Hell, if I had just seen a horny faun in the break room there was always the chance that some winged sprite would stop by at my bedroom window to ask for directions to Albuquerque.

  Fuck. I thumped my forehead against the steering wheel and cursed whatever cruel deity had taken control over my life. What the hell was I going to do?

  Chapter Six

  I would like to say I enjoyed my impromptu vacation. You know; that I indulged in a little Entering My Third Decade pampering. Perhaps that I got a much needed massage or had a fresh mani/pedi to brighten my mood. Given the gravity of the weirdness infiltrating my life, a day of drunken debauchery would have been just as fitting. Or, even if I had not had the gumption to go that far, that I had at least spent those days relaxing and recuperating, straightening out my head and making sense of the crazy train I had so recently boarded.

  Yeah… I wish.

  While I did get a lot of research done over those few days, it was done in the most bat-crap crazy fashion possible. I didn’t leave my apartment. I kept the doors locked and the shades drawn. Every light in every room blazed like the sun 24/7, electric bill be damned. I lived off of coffee and a stockpile of Chinese take-out while I scoured the Internet for every bit of information I could find on the fae. Trust me, when I say “everything” I mean, everything. I went far past Google’s top picks as I combed through every single little thing I could find: Wikipedia entries, Irish folklore, mythology essays, references in children’s books, long diatribes on pagan theology. I read it all, right on down to a few eye-searing websites that looked like the proprietor had gone GIF happy when they were created back in the mid-90’s. I even spent the better part of my Friday night reading some weird-ass PDF on Red Caps before I realized it was just some role-playing game guidebook.

  Three marathon-long days of searching for some sort of sense—some teeny tiny crumb for my wobbly sanity to cling to—and do you know where it got me?

  Nowhere.

  Even after sifting through all the chaff, I was left grasping at straws. Every site seemed to contradict the last. The dizzying variations to all the theories of the “truth” behind the fairytales made my brain ache. Not to mention that, in the end, I was just as lost as when I started. Sure, there were people out there who believed that the fae were real. Some of them even managed to not sound completely certifiable while stating their reasons. Hell, there were even some who claimed to have met them, in various places and fashions over the years. Yet, no one I could find had an experience quite like mine.

  It took me nearly an hour of figuring out that something that sounded like “es she” was nowhere close to how it should be spelled. Damn Irish, with their mouths full of marbles. Even after translating phonetics into dialect, it did me no good. I could find only the barest mention of the Aos Si and knowing that they were thought to be a supernatural—but equally mythical—race like the sidhe and the near-godlike Tuatha Dé Danann did me no good. Those gobblety-gook words meant nothing to me. I needed facts that just didn’t seem to exist.

  Furthermore, I couldn’t find a damn thing about the Warding I supposedly had. Not a single word. A lot of strange, supernatural abilities were attributed to faerie-kind, but that one? Not so much as a whisper. And don’t even get me started on what freaky shit I found when I dared to look up information on “shape shifters.”

  Saturday afternoon arrived in the blink of an eye and by that time, I was officially out of steam. My eyes burned from staring so long at the computer screen and the thought of looking at one more website made me physically nauseated. (Or maybe that was last of the pork lo mein that I had eaten for lunch. Cold.) My back ached. I had fallen asleep on the couch with my fireplace poker near at hand two nights running. I wasn’t sure if all the claims about cold iron being lethal to the fae were legit, but it gave me a little peace of mind to think I wasn’t totally defenseless if Goliath showed up on my doorstep.

  All in all, I was feeling grungy, cranky, and pretty damn stupid. I slammed my laptop shut and shoved it away from me, sending a cascade of empty soda cans and cardboard take-out containers off the other side of the coffee table.

  The shrill, ringing chime of Jenni’s text tone knifed into my self-loathing and made me jump. The realization of how silent the world around me was—and had been for days—only further drove home the level to which I had sunk. I picked my phone up off the couch at my back and read, “You up yet sleeping ugly?”

  It felt foreign to smile. I replied, “Bitch. Been up since 7 thank you very much.”

  “Never know with you, old lady. You’ve really taken to this spinster-hermit thing. We still on for tonight?”

  I groaned. Saturday had been the date set in stone for our belated birthday bar hopping. I bit my lip and tried to think of a good excuse. How on earth could I go out drinking now, pretending everything was normal when it felt so…not? My thumb hovered over the digital keyboard as another text came in; “You’re thinking of ways to keep avoiding me aren’t you? L What happened at Gilroy’s was all my fault; I’m so sorry. I never should have let you go outside alone.”

  I hated that she blamed herself for my “mugging.” I had reassured her multiple times over the past few days that it wasn’t her fault, but the guilt remained. God damn it felt shitty to lie to her. I texted back quickly, “Stop that. It’s totally not your fault so please stop blaming yourself. I’m okay. That asshole didn’t hurt me. Scared me, yeah, but I’m tougher than that.”

  The eye-opening realization struck me like a bolt of lightning, giving me the shivers.

  I had just wasted a gift-horse of a vacay locked in my home, running up my electric bill while sucking down quarts of greasy carbs and fatty pork bits. Why? Because I was scared of fairies? I scowled. I was starting to hate the very word. The “me of a few weeks ago” would have laughed and called the “me of that moment” a pathetic loser. In fact, I muttered out loud, “Loser.”

  A few days space had started to leave me questioning what I had seen. Could that really have been a troll? I mean—come on. It was crazy enough that three strangers had slipped into my apartment and made me entertain their wacked out story; what were the chances that they had slipped me something that made me hallucinate the woman-turned-cat-turned-back-to-woman act? Maybe I was being a total ass, even trying to convince myself otherwise. How could I start believing in all this crazy magical crap thirty years into my life? Why on God’s green earth would I, of all people, have ever been chosen to have some crazy rare mystical power like this completely untraceable, no mention to be found anywhere in the whole wide world “Warding”?

  It all seemed like utter horseshit. Even Marc’s goat-faced leer seemed less and less real to me now after my crusade through the Internet.

  One look around at the mess of my living room and another down at myself to see the frumpy, stained sweatpants and faded tank top I was wearing—and had been wearing for days on end—and I made up my mind. Before Jenni could respond again, I texted, “I’m still
down. Just need to clean up and get pretty. Still meeting at your place at 8, right?”

  ~*~

  By 1 a.m. I was tipsy as hell and wondering why I had ever let myself become crippled by fear. Jenni and I had gone through one club, three bars, and enough liquor to make my liver weep. Though the night had started off with some jitters, I was glad I had forced myself out of my self-imposed fortress of solitude. The fresh air (and copious amounts of booze) had done me good. The world was looking brighter by the moment, my earlier fears becoming distant, crazy memories I was glad to leave behind.

  Luckily, I managed to talk Jenni out of our usual last stop at Gilroy’s. Discounted drinks or no, I just couldn’t handle that place—not yet. I might have overdone it on my impassioned speech about how she shouldn’t have to spend the end of her night off at her place of employment. I was half in the bag by that point so it’s entirely possible. I’m not even sure if she really bought it or not but, either way, she let it slide.

  Instead we wound up at Harbin’s, a low key hole-in-the-wall down the block from Jenni’s apartment. The bartender there had gone to ‘tending school with Jenni and had a bit of a crush on her. That was both convenient—hello free drinks!—and awkward, since she happened to be very much taken and he knew it. Worse still, I knew that he knew it, and hated that he continued to hit on her anyway. I had the feeling I’d spend the remainder of the night running interference if he got too handsy but; whatever. It was still better than having to walk back through Gilroy’s door. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to look at that place the same way again.