Chapter Fifty
Dylan
DYLAN STEELED HIMSELF AS THEY ARRIVED AT THE COTTAGE where their mother had been killed.
It was backed by dense woods. Once, it must have glowed with lamps and children’s laughter. The thought reached into his heart and squeezed, turned his palms clammy.
It didn’t have a wealth of flowers outside, nor much adornment. Just simple white stone – save for the black husk of a burned nursery on the upper right side that looked like some great hell beast had razed it with a flaming bite.
Even after all this time, the scent of burning was nearly overpowering.
Thanks to the information Kyan got from the Wake on their mother, they knew how the place was being watched, so Dylan’s father had taken out the supernatural watch bird with a tranquilliser gun and they’d scanned the woods with one of Lawna’s tools – a sonar-like device that cut off other tech or supernaturals.
It was finally safe to approach. But it was quiet as a grave, the trees rustling in a building wind, the soil and lush foliage beneath them damp from a warm rain which darkened the ankles of his jeans.
‘Are you sure about this?’ Bells asked, looking up at him with concern. She wore a waxed jacket with a tan trim at the neck, and had pulled her hair back in a ponytail with a red ribbon.
Even though she’d been his companion into these memories and knew they had to do it, she still stood beside him to witness the horror. She was so much stronger than him in that way.
His throat burned. ‘It’s all right, Bells. I’ll be okay.’
As they approached, Dylan reached for the handle of the door, finding it locked. He took a moment, then shouldered it open. The lock splintered and the door swung to reveal a shadowed interior.
‘Let me,’ their father said, putting a hand on his shoulder. He smiled for them, reassuring.
But Dylan could almost taste his sorrow.
He resisted, but his father pushed through, gun out, and so he and Bells followed.
It didn’t feel like stepping into a memory. Perhaps because in his memories, the place was still furnished.
It felt like stepping into a tomb.
It was quiet. Both dusty and damp, foliage attempting to reclaim the house. Whoever owned it mustn’t have had another tenant since that night. He was partially glad no one lived here now. He wasn’t sure how he’d feel if they did. Swallowing, Dylan moved deeper inside.
It was a simple layout. Stairs across from the door, with an open-plan sitting room on the left, a closed room on the right, and what he assumed was a kitchen in the back.
He felt so big. Too big, for this place that had haunted him. The room where his mother had been murdered.
Dylan climbed up a few of the stairs, before pausing.
It wasn’t so much the creak of the wood that made him feel uneasy, but the essence that breathed off their father.
He wasn’t sure what it was: rage, grief.
But it was strong enough it felt like a mist, capable of seeping through the building and slipping in between the stones and floorboards.
As if he’d promised himself the only time he’d return here would be to burn the place to the ground.
‘I’m sorry,’ Dylan said, ‘that you had to go through losing her alone.’
His father closed his eyes for a moment. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there to kill him myself. To help her. But if he’s still alive …’ An unholy darkness lit his eyes when he opened them. ‘I’ll make sure he goes through hell before he dies.’
‘Here?’ Bells asked softly from the base of the stairs.
At the top was the nursery room, but there was nothing but ruin there now. It was here that he’d come.
Here, that he’d seen it.
‘Yeah,’ Dylan said, trying to ignore the dresser she’d been thrown into that was now rotting wood.
No, he realised. You need to look. You have to finally see.
It didn’t stop the nervous uptick of his heart, though.
‘Let’s do it.’ He sank to sit on one of the upper steps, affording him that view through the bannister’s spindles.
Bells came to sit a step behind him and her fingers met his temples.
Their father stood at the bottom of the stairs in the shadows behind the door, so as not to impede the view.
The memory formed differently this time. Perhaps because they were where it had all begun.
So when their father began guiding them, Dylan’s eyes opened on to the scene.
He was sitting on the steps, watching his mother fight for her life. But instead of feeling so helpless, he grounded himself, allowed the pain and fear to wash over him, despite each grunt of pain and slam and crack.
He winced. Steeled. Let it unfold.
Then, he grew, as if ageing before the assassin. He grew to his current height. But his attention was on the blurred face.
‘Show me,’ he said out loud.
Some part of him called on his Empyrean power, that slumbering golden immortality inside. Help me see what happened, we need this to protect others, to protect the family.
Show me.
A headache began to echo through his mind, pulling slowly through his brain.
Show me, he ordered again as the image became clearer. As the mist of it shifted.
It replayed in slow motion. New things, clearer things.
His mother, fighting, her strikes harder and more ferocious. Even slowed down she was incredible. Somehow capable of both adapting to the assassin’s uncanny power, and keeping her Influence over Dylan when she realised that he’d left the nursery.
She turned, the Empyreal moving with her, and there was the face of the Empyreal that killed her. Remembered with the same surety as the stab of a blade.
Stark, vicious.
And strangely … familiar.
Dylan came out of the memory slowly enough, assured enough, despite the fear still thrumming through him with every beat of his heart.
When he blinked the world back into focus, something stilled and cleared in his mind for the first time in his life and he heard Bells say, ‘I know who it is.’
Her fingers disappeared from his temples as she bolted down the steps and straight out of the cottage.
He remained, though, chest heaving, and found his father at the foot of the stairs.
‘Are you all right, son?’
Dylan shook his head mutely, tried to swallow. He thought he would be, in a strange way. He thought seeing their face would finally eradicate the fear of a faceless thing that he couldn’t combat, couldn’t prepare for.
But the ruthlessness of it … the almost hollowed cheeks despite the extreme bulk; the dark red hair. It was almost worse. It made it real.
When they came outside, they realised Bells had run back to the car and jogged after her to discover her hauling something out of the boot.
‘Bells, what are you doing?’ Dylan asked, striding to help her.
She held the stained and charred piece of the Dante painting.
They’d gently removed it from its frame back in Estwood, having stored the cracked wood somewhere safe in case there were any more clues on it, and because Nicole had nearly had a fit when Dylan suggested they just bin it.
Apparently an old frame was just as important as the piece of canvas.
Now, though, he couldn’t figure out why Bells was hauling out the charred painting, until her wary, bloodshot eyes met his.
‘Prepare yourself, okay?’
Her words were honestly concerned, so Dylan did.
Then, she unrolled the piece with their father’s help.
And there, revived from his memories, was the face of the Empyreal that killed their mother.
‘His name is Alexander,’ Bells said. ‘And Kyan was supposed to have killed him over a hundred years ago.’