Chapter Eleven
Nicole
NICOLE’S PAINTbrUSH JERKED ACROSS THE CANVAS AT THE unexpected sound of one of the main doors to Burghley House opening at two a.m.
She stilled with predatory immediacy, her hearing zooming out like her ears were a lens’ focal point: in and out in the strangest yo-yo. Her senses veered out of the studio, past half-finished paintings and towering sculptures of supernaturals.
Verin had been studying the blood pigment all night and into the morning, feverishly reluctant to sleep. She’d checked on him a few times to find him pacing and talking to himself, glued to the microscope or checking the sample against his enormous collection.
But this wasn’t Verin.
She could hear him in the library. It wasn’t her father, either, he was settling down for bed for the evening. Dylan was already asleep in his room. Restless, but there. Even she was wearing her black pyjama set, planning to sleep as soon as she could exhaust herself with painting.
Nicole rose from the stool, gaze arrowing to where Bells dozed on the chaise. Her sister’s cheeks were flushed in sleep, one of their father’s old storybooks over her stomach. In the dim, warm candlelight, the gold foil glinted like Bells’ hair.
Which meant the person who had entered the house was a stranger.
All that new Empyrean focus she’d been quietly trying to hone zeroed in on the stranger’s clipped footsteps.
She heard her father leave his room and knew he’d be racing towards them, but the house was a maze and it would take him a minute. Nicole blew out a few of the candles, smoke coiling up in the sudden darkness.
She picked up her palette knife. The almost-blade was rounded but not sharp, used for scooping paint and blending colours, but she could make a weapon of it if the stranger was dangerous and didn’t have a kill scent.
Still, Nicole hoped her suspicions were correct.
But, surely Elisabetta would have let Verin know if she was coming back?
‘Bells,’ Nicole said, kneeling beside her sister. ‘Bells, wake up.’
She barely stirred.
Nicole stilled as a shadow shifted in the opposite hallway—
She would have dived on the figure if they weren’t coming from the bedrooms and she hadn’t caught a glimpse of the grey in their hair, like pure silver.
Her initial relaxation at the sight of her father was momentarily eclipsed by the brief colour of his eyes. They looked so dark.
He moved closer with the ease of a man who had hidden how capable and lethal he was his entire life. His now normal, storm-lashed eyes landed on hers and scanned her for panic, injury. She didn’t miss the gun in his hand, held low, and loaded.
‘I’m fine,’ she mouthed, not wanting to risk speaking in case the intruder could hear.
He held up a piece of Lawna’s tech, which blinked a warning red: SUPERNATURAL INTRUDER.
It must have alerted him.
‘You herd, I guard,’ he mouthed back.
He raised his gun.
Just in case, the action said.
Nicole nodded, slipping past him towards the footsteps coming their way.
Her Empyrean senses loomed up like a wave, noting the stranger’s breath, their gait. They had a steady pace, weighed down by something. It set warning bells ringing with the pulse in her ears.
Most of the lamps in the halls were low or unlit, given the late hour. With the threat of danger, moving in the dark made her feel even more inhuman, summoning the hunter beneath her skin.
She forced herself to breathe properly but couldn’t help the confidence that bloomed with each silent step around to the front of the house.
She noticed something else as she stopped smothering herself: a pulse of awareness to Kyan and the bind that connected them like a gold, glowing wire coiling through the distance.
The intruder didn’t go to Verin’s library. Nor the bedrooms.
The studio was shadowed when the stranger’s silhouette stilled there. Bells’ chaise was unoccupied save for the crumpled sheets and smoky shadows. Their father must have carried Bells out to hide her.
The figure paused.
Nicole stopped silently about fifteen feet behind them.
Her father moved in from a right-hand room in the corridor, where she could hear Bells’ steady, still-sleeping breathing. Nicole held a warning hand out to him as she moved closer.
She smelled a subtle perfume – something floral – stone dust, and the scent of night air.
‘Turn around slowly, and tell me who you are,’ Nicole said, Influence pouring down her vocal cords like warm honey. God, it felt so good to use it. Use something.
The frozen figure turned.
Nicole had studied Elisabetta’s self-portrait for six months, yet seeing her in modern dress, in the flesh, still made her brain trip over itself.
‘Freya?’ the woman asked in heavily accented Italian, her eyes widening in surprise.
‘Elisabetta?’
Before Nicole could relish the relief, before her hand could grasp the painter’s and tug her straight to the blood library and show her the portrait, to finally get the answers they’d been looking for, there was an ungodly shriek.
Every window in the studio shattered.
Nicole grabbed Elisabetta’s arm and threw her towards her father, shielding them both as thousands of shards tore clean through her pyjamas, over her back, her hair, her legs.
A few months ago, her skin would have torn clean open. Instead, it wasn’t the scratches she felt.
It was her power.
Liquid heat bathed her veins, and she barely stifled the gasp of adrenaline, of relief. Beneath it, something merged with her protective abilities, perhaps heightened by months of waiting.
Fury.
Nicole spun to see their attacker floating in the shattered arches, starlit glass shards knifing into the night beyond, a white gauzy dress swirling around her like a delicate mist.
Alarm morphed into confusion as Nicole gazed up at … a Banshee? Her eyes and ire zeroed in on Nicole with a soul-shredding blaze of vengeance.
Nicole thought of Estwood and the Baobhan Sìth Kyan had said was lurking around after her transformation, but as she did, a rush of warm night air brought exactly what she’d been subconsciously searching for for months.
The kill scent.
It unlocked her Empyreal like the crack of an immortal key.
In this awakened state, without the blocking tonics Dylan was still taking, the scent was electric on her tongue. It flooded her veins, her solar plexus going momentarily hot before the change bled through her, turning her incandescent with purpose.
All of it had lasted a fraction of a second.
Immediately, Nicole realised this was a Ban-Sìth, a form of Banshee with an acute awareness of death and a deadly scream. One so powerful it had cracked a sculpture at its weaker base, and Elisabetta was in its path.
Her father went to haul the painter away, but the marble centaur began to topple.
Nicole reached up to stop it, a slice of stone cutting right through her arm.
She hissed in shock at the sudden arc of blood and pain, realising too late that her Empyrean strength and healing abilities were draining away as her body transformed her into something else.
Into the Ban-Sìth’s natural predator. Nicole’s arms buckled, her core suddenly cramping with pain.
Before her panic could form, Verin was there, hands up to stop the sculpture crushing the others.
‘Nicole!’ her father shouted. He’d drawn his gun and fired twice at the Ban-Sìth which only shrieked in outrage. ‘Go!’
She nearly didn’t: the protective urges were so loud she would have done anything to stop him getting hurt. But when the Ban-Sìth lunged, her Empyreal’s need to hunt took over.
She couldn’t have stopped it if she wanted.
So as it unfurled inside her, Nicole embraced it and ran in the opposite direction into the manor’s maze of supernatural artwork, knowing the Ban-Sìth, intent on killing her, would follow.