Chapter Nine
Nicole
HER MOTHER WATCHED FROM ACROSS THE NOTE-STREWN coffee table.
Nicole had propped the portrait up against an ornate chair and sat opposite on the floor, a silken couch at her back.
Around her the otherworldly frescoes of the Bow Room watched, the figures blissfully quiet companions.
In the first few days here, she’d spent so long in the three most painted rooms that Verin had put more useable furniture in each so she could sit beneath the painted masterpieces and focus on anything other than the whispers of her body and dreams of swarming paintings.
She knew Dylan was baking away the fug of his blurred memories, and Bells was watching a movie in bed. Their father had been reading with her until he went to check on the plants he’d been nursing in one of the grand windows of his guest room.
Nicole picked up her mother’s portrait and laid it flat on the table. Its details were lambent: the Celtic Revival patterning on the circular gold frame; the way her mother’s face glowed against the dark background; the deep rose-burgundy gown that shimmered in the firelight.
And those eyes.
The brown of them so rich they almost looked flecked with red as well as the slightest hints of gold.
If Elisabetta wasn’t coming back, then Nicole would just have to take matters into her own hands. Her mother’s clue had said her last lead had been hidden with her painter.
But what if that meant there was something in the painting itself? That was how her mother had given them clues before; they’d just never had reason to believe there was something in this. The only likeness of her they owned.
If anything happened to it, that likeness would be destroyed.
But if Elisabetta didn’t come back for another six months, Nicole couldn’t sit by and do nothing. Not when Kyan had to stay in the Wake, playing a game of cat-and-mouse that could cost him his life.
Emboldened, Nicole hurried over to her father’s weapons case.
Thankfully, he’d left it by the armchair.
Opening it was like unlocking a dark treasure chest. Inside, the most wicked of his weapons and poisons were laid out, sitting in little shelves or sunk into a padded side pouch so they didn’t rattle.
Nicole ignored the guns, blades, and other curious devices and scanned the vials, plucking out the one she was looking for.
It was a tiny amount of the Finfolk blood Remi’s mother, Lawna, had collected back in Estwood. Just enough to make a thin supernatural varnish remover and discover if there was anything painted beneath her mother’s portrait.
Nicole pulled out some of the items she’d gathered from Elisabetta’s studio: a small dish, paintbrushes, and wads of cloth. Then carefully mixed the Finfolk blood with a carrier oil to help it spread further.
Without hesitating in case she changed her mind, Nicole tested a corner and, satisfied there wasn’t an adverse reaction, painted the remover over the piece.
There was—
Nothing.
Nothing but paint. No coded message. No reveal of a ghostly image beneath as there had been beneath the Dante painting.
Disappointment nearly choked her and a prowl of impatience began to stir beneath her skin.
It’s okay, she thought, pushing up to pace out some of the energy.
When they’d arrived, they’d asked Verin where Elisabetta had gone, but he didn’t know the details of her commission, only that she had been thrilled – as thrilled as the mysterious Italian painter could be.
How long will she be gone? It was a commission for an entire royal court; it would take months.
Perhaps she could get Elisabetta’s scent from her rooms and go out searching for her?
The only problem was, Nicole had never tracked anyone over long distances by scent, especially not any scent other than the kill one that allowed Empyreals to transform.
She wasn’t like Kyan, she didn’t have centuries of tracking under her belt.
She had nothing. Nothing but her mother’s books, mythological paintings swirling around her mind, her currently useless Seer powers, and an unruly sense of—
Smell.
Nicole breathed in, trying to isolate what had stolen her attention. Now the marine scent of the Finfolk blood was clearing, something else had become more noticeable.
Nicole turned back to the painting and, fighting her every art historian impulse, touched the place the strange perfume originated. Her mother’s lips.
The moment her fingers met the viscous concoction, the world tilted.
Nicole staggered into an attic at night.
A small, shadowed art studio. Distantly she heard the clip-clop of …
horse hooves on cobbles? The dusty floorboards beneath her felt loose, and the scent of paints and pigment singed her senses.
There were two other women in the room, both dressed in Victorian silk dresses.
One a deep burgundy that was so familiar Nicole’s throat dried out.
‘Mum,’ she breathed.
Her mother was sitting before a dark swathe of fabric, while Elisabetta stood opposite behind an easel, her brush moving over the canvas.
There was someone else in her periphery: a third woman in emerald green and white.
But Nicole was riveted by her mother.
‘She’ll figure it out,’ her mother said, with a wry curve of her lips.
It felt so real, emotion cleaved through the vision.
She was Seeing her mother with her own face, hearing her own voice.
Nicole hadn’t heard it in the vision she’d had in Lanhydrock, when her mother had approached Kyan to try to convince him not to take the Wake’s new oath.
Then, Freya had changed her face to look like his mother.
But this – this was her. It was the way Nicole had always imagined her: the wink of life and knowledge in her eyes; the low, captivating voice. The immortal confidence in her preternatural presence thanks to centuries spent honing her hunting power.
The vision tore away, returning Nicole to the Bow Room with a cosmic shove. She stumbled, realising what the scent was. What Elisabetta had been adding to the painting.
Blood.
Nicole darted from the room, warm air rushing over her cheeks as she raced through the midnight manor.
‘Verin,’ she gasped as she burst in to his library.
The sprawling mahogany-panelled room was full of books, but in a portion of each ‘book’ was a vial of blood. Every one of them housed writings on a type of creature or particular person: their histories, lifestyles, even the foods they preferred. And, of course, a vial of their blood.
The Vampire looked up from where he was examining a sample and scrawling a note.
‘Yes, my intrepid little cohabitator?’
She smiled, a weight lifting off her chest. ‘I know why Elisabetta chose to live with you.’
Twenty minutes later, Nicole had set up her mother’s portrait on an easel she had brought from the studio. Her father stood beside her, his eyes glued to the painting.
It was the most treasured thing they owned, so even though she’d done her own little risky experiment on it, when Verin brought over some implements, nerves prowled beneath her skin. He’d washed his hands and gathered a petri dish, but as the scalpel moved closer to the canvas, Nicole tensed.
‘I know what it’s like to only have paintings left,’ Verin said softly. Nicole looked over his shoulder to the portrait of his lost partner, a handsome nobleman the Wake had murdered to keep Verin in line.
‘I’ll take good care of her,’ Verin promised, with a delicacy and understanding that made tears prick her eyes. She nodded and her father rubbed her shoulder.
Verin scraped, the dried paint flaking into dust from the sharpness of the scalpel. He took only the barest amount so Nicole relaxed as it drifted into the petri dish.
She waited as he mixed it with some type of liquid, then inhaled. Nicole watched with a breathless hope as Verin’s eyes dilated. He blinked a few times as if startled, then shook himself and took the sample to a telescope for confirmation.
‘This, my dear, is definitely blood.’
Hearing him confirm it set a tap of intrigue at this art-based hunt into her pulse.
‘What kind?’ asked her father.
‘That’s the issue,’ Verin said, his face a portrait of confusion. ‘I’ve sampled blood from practically every creature in the world, and I …
‘I have no idea.’