Chapter Forty-Two
Nicole
REMI HAD STARTED ANOTHER SONG. XINYI HAD AGREED TO help them get their hands on the Brian Boru Harp.
But now it was time for the second half of tonight’s plan, the one that involved Kyan … Nicole just had to make an excuse to leave, and then their faux hunt would begin.
‘Hey.’ Dylan brushed her shoulder, leaning over Callum to do so. His concerned blue eyes met hers like a splash of fresh water. ‘You okay?’
Nicole made herself nod. She didn’t have to feign a slight wince. She was tired, and so overly aware of the room, that stepping out into the night would be a subtle relief, even if she wished she had longer to soak in the atmosphere. ‘I’m fine. I just have a headache. I’m going to get some air.’
As she slid out of the booth, Callum draped his arm around her brother’s shoulders to keep him there, giving Nicole a reassuring wink. Both knew about the plan and had their own roles to play, but Dylan’s eyes didn’t leave her as she wove through the other creatures.
Going through the door by the bar, Nicole bypassed the bathrooms and disappeared down a set of stairs to the back entrance and out into the night, the door locking behind her to prevent humans getting inside.
She took a moment in the ringing quiet to locate herself.
Smells rushed her: car exhaust, the sharp spill of alcohol, the salt of the marina.
She’d entered onto a warren of back alleys.
Ahead was a shadowed route to the next street.
Otherwise, the different alleys branched off from the tarmacked stretch outside the door, lit by moonlight and the neon-red glow of the exit sign buzzing quietly.
She was supposed to linger here for a few minutes, just long enough that Kyan could ‘track’ her. She focused her hearing, searching for him.
Instead, something shifted in the dark between two large bins.
A thrill of awareness prickled her skin as her eyes latched onto the spot, and the predatory focus of her Empyreal narrowed on the gloom.
Nicole gazed deeper, her defences on high. It wasn’t Kyan, so what—
The door behind her opened again with a blast of jazz and a rush of perfume.
‘You all right, love?’ a woman asked, sashaying out and lighting what looked to be a herbal cigarette, white smoke coiling up and turning momentarily red.
Nicole blinked. She’d never been approached by another supernatural before. She suddenly felt like an imposter, imploring her eyes not to skate over the woman’s neck, where her skin shimmered slightly.
‘Yeah, just a slight headache,’ she managed.
‘Ah, that rocca’s strong. Don’t have too much more.’ The woman winked, then headed down the left alley.
Nicole recalled Kyan’s instructions for their plan, and headed for the right-hand alley. She was a few steps down it, anticipation and a bite of nerves chasing her, her heels clicking on the glistening asphalt, when she heard the skitter of movement back across from the door.
Nicole stilled and turned as a smudge of a form headed after the woman with the cigarette.
The warm breeze drifted back towards her.
Hunt, her Empyreal ordered. Nicole’s ears muffled, her focus narrowing.
Now.
Something flashed over her eyes. A vision of someone screaming, a sear of intense pain. And a scent: dark and drugging that made her shudder as her vision cleared.
Some part of her brain was telling her to avoid the creature. Linger here for a little while, and then decide to head home, meeting the others at the rendezvous after the ‘hunt’.
But she couldn’t turn herself around if she wanted to.
This was what she was made for.
It’s practice, she tried to tell herself as she turned to follow and every predatory and confident thing inside her awakened.
Practice at transforming and still being able to walk around afterwards.
To move and run and fight. That would only be useful.
Only make her better at protecting the others.
She felt a quick tap of excitement, like she was dancing on a cliff’s edge of relief and was desperate for the free-fall.
Stalking through the night, she shifted her weight so her heels didn’t make as much noise.
Her prey seemed familiar with the dark.
They looked like a human man, with a dark jacket and dark hair, but they didn’t sense her following, and neither did the woman who was just about to break out into a busier street.
Nicole’s power strained beneath her skin. It wanted out, it felt almost annoyed and … sulky. But around her, the night shimmered in strange ways, like objects and barriers were suddenly more 3D, jumping into her vision in a way that made her jerk backwards, while her body pulled her forward.
Beyond, she knew someone else was hunting her. Felt him following, far enough away that if she turned she wouldn’t see him.
But he was there.
Another image seared her, her body still stalking even if her mind was elsewhere, like she was sleepwalking: her prey’s hand smothering someone’s mouth.
A woman’s wide eyes behind it.
The taste of sweat and fear and blood.
Confusion cut through the vision.
The hand he smothered people with wasn’t just a hand. It was draining them. And in the vision, Nicole was standing right over his shoulder, close enough to notice the other scent.
One that turned her blood into fire.
Nicole gasped in a ragged breath as the vision spat her back out into the street and she staggered against a bin. Lightning streaked across her vision as the loud noise smashed through her glaring senses.
But with the kill scent, came a transformation.
It drenched her in sudden relief, even as momentary panic at the sensation of losing control pierced it, her eternally tight grip on the reins of her body ripped from her hands so fast her skin smarted.
Her limbs prickled, air rushing into the slashed-open sides of her neck – gills, she realised, as the taste of the air changed. Her skin sparkled, covered in something hard and crumbling.
Salt.
It sparked in her mouth, and a rush began in her veins like the call of the sea.
She’d become a Naiad. Born from the rivers, this northern variation was more used to cold waters and perfectly tailored to kill whatever this creature was.
The figure stilled halfway down the alley.
It turned and Nicole realised what she faced.
A Wight.
As she dived, so did it.
It dodged, and slammed her into the wall, its surprise turning swiftly to anger.
Then its hand opened, revealing a leech-like spiral of teeth.
It was one thing reading about monstrous creatures. It was another seeing the moonlight glint off the fluid that strung up its arm. Its otherwise human face contorted, so its mouth could reveal the same thing: rows of teeth, spiralling back down its throat.
Nicole fought the panic ripping through her chest. The mythology of this creature and the theories on its origins were nothing to her right now.
She distantly recalled that they lived as long as they were able to eat.
That they developed a habit of draining those with alcohol in their blood, perhaps because they were easier and more clueless in the night-time.
But her mind was wiped clear with the transformation’s completion.
Her hand – now webbed with arching nails of clear, ice blue – secured around its throat and plunged straight through the jugular, only to meet those shredding teeth. Anywhere she touched its body, its own singed with the salt on her skin.
The creature screeched and tried to throw her off. But her grip was firm and tight, the new strength in her bones tailored for hauling struggling prey down to the riverbed, then back into the sea where she could pin it till it died.
She had the sudden, deep urge to drag the creature to the marina and do just that.
But she wasn’t close enough, so she tore its throat clean out instead.
There was a ripping moment, her face a snarl, the awful, liquid sound of flesh tearing.
Then the slump of the creature to the floor.
Her breath shuddered as she kept her grip on the spine of teeth. Disgust and horror began to filter in as the transformation drew back through her with an incredible amount of energy.
Nicole forced her logical mind to return, recalling the lidded skip she’d crashed into further down the alley.
Hauling the creature up over her shoulder, her legs nearly buckled with the transformation and weight, but she staggered closer, straining to throw it inside.
She dropped the spine in after it, the blood and salt on her hands burning white-hot as she tried to brush them off. They sparkled to the moonlit floor.
Free, she teetered sideways until her cheek crushed against the brick of the alley wall, and she was shuddering back to herself – that power inside pooling back to her core, like a dimming light. But instead of winking out, it glimmered in her veins, sated, so much more cohesive.
For a moment, she found it hard to breathe as the gills sealed and she had to relearn how to use her nose and mouth, gasping in a few deep breaths that made the shadowed alley swim.
And then he was behind her.
‘Now feel it settling,’ Kyan murmured. His voice was a full-body experience. His lips, so soft and warm against her ear. The stroke of his breath was a low reassurance as he talked her through it.
An immediate, almost painful shiver shot right down her sensitised form, pinching in certain places – her breasts, her fingertips.
‘How do you feel?’ he asked, his voice heaven.
I feel everything.
She closed her eyes to try and rein in a shudder that nearly embarrassed her as her body returned to normal and flooded with the endorphins of a successful hunt.
She focused on the safe heat of his body at her back and waited a few long minutes in silence while he shielded her from the outside world.
When she finally opened her eyes again, the dark street morphed and resettled. Her hands had returned to normal, the skin healed and no longer burning, a rush of relief and awe following.
She relished the steady beat of Kyan’s heart at her back. His arm around her stomach, keeping her upright.
‘Nicole?’ he asked gently.
Her eyes fluttered shut.
To have him here, close and calming her … She couldn’t help that her body pressed back into the protective cave of his, her hips and backside meeting the solid muscle of his thigh. His chest was already bent close but with her hips against his, he grew deadly still.
She knew he wouldn’t pull away, knew he fought the same urges. Because it wasn’t just the physical, it was the comfort of knowing she was safe with him. That on this dark night, on a hunt that had stolen her body from her, he would be at her back.
She didn’t want to admit it – how much that meant.
Like he knew, his fingers on her hip squeezed gently and that strong thigh flexed against her as he straightened slightly so she could settle right between his legs instead.
Right. There.
She stifled a moan against the damn wall, hearing nothing but his rough breath.
‘Nicole,’ he warned, his lips brushing her temple. The word was pained, as if he said it through his teeth. As if the proximity with their constant interruptions was flaying his control as much as it was hers.
She managed a nod, the hormones of the hunt and Kyan’s nearness having turned the world warm and dark as the skies in a Falero painting.
She tried to reel it in. Tried to stuff all that feeling back into her core, tearing it through her limbs until she was tingling with cold and simmering with frustration.
Just suppress it.
‘Are you ready?’ he asked, voice rough. ‘We can change the plan if you need time.’
‘No,’ she ground out, hands fisting against the wall, forcing herself away from him.
The loss of the heat of his hands like two icy prints.
She moved a few feet away, focusing on the moonlight on the tarmac: the brick walls rising high either side of them.
On the plan. Not her body, and her desire to climb up into a hug with him, curl there, stay there.
They weren’t safe yet.
And safety was the priority.
So she turned, and the sight of him made the breath catch in her throat.
He was clad head-to-toe in tactical black. If she hadn’t felt his presence or heard his voice first, she might not have recognised him. But even standing in a moonlit alley, looking every inch the Wake’s immortal assassin, his eyes blazed dark with desire and something more.
‘Kyan,’ she whispered.
Kiss me when you catch me, she almost said. I need it. She needed something harder, something passionate, something with teeth that would match the loud urges and make her feel like this dark and aching desire wasn’t some kind of sinful thing.
His eyes glittered.
I’ll give you whatever you want, they told her.
That warm, gold feeling inside near burned her alive.
His words from Estwood returned to her. ‘I don’t want you to have to feel this need again, without me there to satisfy you.’
Then he dragged on the mask: a sleek balaclava to hide his features for the image they were going to have to paint.
Before he covered his mouth he stalked closer and bent, so all she saw were the lips that had talked her through the harried hours after her first transformation, and had vowed to her in an autumn wood that he’d keep her secrets.
Keep her safe.
This would help him keep that promise.
His lips brushed her sensitive ones, and a small gasp of need staggered at the back of her throat.
So he kissed her, hard.
His hand fisted into her hair as his tongue and teeth ravished her. Every iota of desire she’d smothered roared to life. She near choked on the pleasure, all those sensitive places newly desperate for his hands.
It was brief, too brief. And, panting, he released her.
Her legs barely kept her upright, her body trembling like live flame.
‘Run,’ Kyan snarled against her mouth, his lips moving her own.
He dragged the mask down to cover the rest of his face.
Gone was the lush mouth and familiar features.
Gone was her Kyan.
In his place: the Wake’s loyal hunter.
But she knew the truth. He would fight with everything he was, for her. Which meant she had to play along. Because if she didn’t, the Wake could figure out his deception.
‘Run, mo ghrá,’ Kyan said roughly. ‘Don’t let me catch you.’
Make it look real, was what he meant.
Because the Wake would be watching.