Chapter Two
Nicole
Six months after the binding
WHEN NICOLE DIDN’T DREAM OF KYAN, SHE DREAMED OF THE Wild Hunt.
It wasn’t always like the folklore: with ghostly visions of riders astride black horses, near feral from nightly hunts; exhaustion steaming from their inky coats.
Most often, it painted itself like the Last Judgement: those epic chaos artworks where jewel tones became blood and fire, and cool tones became the last tear in a peaceful sky beyond the deluge of bodies.
Where creatures were clawing themselves free of a smouldering underworld and overwhelming the humans above.
So often those images adorned ceilings or great altarpieces.
But in the dreams, they swarmed over her and painted themselves beneath her feet.
They moved, swirled, and dragged her deep – both out of herself and into herself.
Down and down and down into that goddess-touched place that had pearled to life in Estwood.
Birthed of rage and ruin and the primal need to protect that had transformed her forever.
Beneath it, though, there was something pulling her. A spiral. A tug. So familiar it stirred a longing that turned her throat hot and set her soul seeking. That often woke her.
The memory of it chased her now as she moved through their new training routine.
Strike.
Parry.
Strike again.
The mist over the estate’s grounds swirled like her metamorphic dreams with each action, stealing away the air until she couldn’t breathe. It choked her with the ghost of acrid scents: smoke and charred flesh; linseed oil and pigments; sulphur so strong her eyes burned.
Fear clawed up her throat at the thought of losing control again, at the memories of her first transformation.
The tear of skin. The spray of blood. The venom, liquid and sweet in her mouth.
Losing that control had kept her alive. She had unleashed herself to survive and it had kept Kyan safe. Kept her family safe.
But it left them more unmoored than ever.
‘Focus, Nicole,’ her father ordered, bringing her back to the moment and the fight she was in the middle of, grounding her in the morning.
The last remnants of the dream faded as she ducked beneath his wooden practice sword and it whipped over her head in a rush of air, neatly stopping before the elaborate metal and gold gate of the palatial house before them.
She parried, forcing him backwards, the gravel of the great oval drive crunching beneath her trainers.
He needn’t have been concerned. Her reflexes were good, even if her focus was scattered. It was her urges she was worried about; the immortal predator that simmered in her veins like liquid gold and plagued her with a low, insistent desire to hunt.
One that had only grown more seductive in the six months since they’d left Estwood.
She forced her mind onto the training and the facade of Burghley House looming ahead. Despite seeing it every day as she jogged through the grounds – its newly leafed trees and lawns lush from pre-summer rains – it never failed to enchant her.
The silver-white of the limestone manor glowed in panels of sunlight, its wealth of windows and mix of towers and spires glittering. Built in the Renaissance with all the extravagant details of Elizabethan architecture, it was a moonstruck fairy tale in the English countryside.
Nicole danced forward, lighter in her body now. Faster, stronger. She drove her father backwards over a central oval of lawn and into the house with restrained ease.
Inside, it was Nicole’s dream home.
Each room was artfully decorated with artefacts, curios, and silk-clad furniture, many with frescoes that spilled from the ceilings and down the walls to the floors.
Layer upon layer of exquisite art drenched the house in masterpieces.
There were more than in Westmoore House. More than in any museum she’d been to.
Nicole swept over the gleaming wood floors, her dark workout gear offering no restriction. Her father’s matched hers, sun beams catching the silver in his stubble and his light brown, almost blond hair.
Nicole blocked as he struck to her right, the force of it strong enough to reverberate down her arms. He was using all of his strength, his movements swift and sharp, revealing the years of fighting he’d done with her mother.
It perked awake that huntress side of her, but the newness of it – of using a weapon that wasn’t her own body – made her feel … unruly.
‘Keep your knees bent for ease of movement,’ he said. ‘Don’t lock up when your mind starts working. Flow.’
They’d started using weapons to purge some of her excess energy, since hunting wasn’t an option.
She couldn’t risk running into one of the Wake’s Empyreals just to quench this need.
A need that didn’t make sense, considering there were no homicidal creatures around, and therefore no real reason she’d been feeling so … dangerous.
Instead, weapons taught her new aspects of balance, drive, strength, and control, and practising through the house made her so paranoid about damaging a single piece of art that sweat, caused by actual, blessed strain and the low heat of spring, slid down her spine.
Evidently, the frustration was bleeding into her dreams.
As they backed into the library, Nicole’s reflection flashed in the glass-boxed shelves.
She had pulled her longer hair back into a sleek ponytail, since she’d butchered every attempt to replicate the braid Kyan had woven the last night they were together.
An echo of heat and yearning seared her chest, while the scarred dot on her arm – the binding mark that joined them together – seemed to hum in response.
The one she had to wait six more months to repeat.
She tried to control the feelings, the urge to use more strength. To hone it, as her body and face had been honed by this new, capable darkness.
So with each slash, she recited the items in her mother’s last message:
A painting.
An artefact.
Something of divine provenance.
They’d come to Burghley House on the trail of her mother’s clue: ‘my last lead hidden with my painter’, tracking the artist from a concoction of paint from her portrait, and one of her father’s visions.
But instead of finding the immortal Italian artist Elisabetta Sirani, they’d discovered the palatial manor’s enigmatic owner instead.
‘Verin,’ Nicole greeted, as they moved further into the library.
The most powerful Vampire in England.
He watched from across the mahogany-carved space, his pale skin gilded by a lamp and as alabaster and faintly veined as marble. Though he was deathly still, the wink of partial light on the crystal glass of blood between his elegant fingers had given him away.
Turned in his fifties, Verin was over five hundred years old, but neither his delicate height nor slim frame muted the regal aspect of his dark, historic eyes, which were mildly amused as usual.
He’d been their host for these last six months. A supernatural art patron, like a mysterious Medici, Verin harboured a hatred for the Wake that ran as deep as her family’s, which made him the perfect person to hide the painter all this time.
There was only one problem.
Elisabetta wasn’t here.
‘Any news?’ Nicole asked him, between the sharp clacks of the swords.
‘Afraid not, my dear,’ the Vampire replied. ‘We might be waiting a few more weeks.’
She swept the sword, air whipping over her as it spun, bringing the Vampire’s subtle scent of cold water and iron.
Her Empyreal played with it like a cat with a string before discarding it as it had every other she’d encountered recently.
There was no kill scent. Therefore, no excuse for her to hunt.
Frustration veered up her spine and had her teeth clamping down as her sword locked with her father’s.
Clack.
She hadn’t got to grips with the new bounds of her Empyrean power.
Clack.
She hadn’t found the painter, or taken the next step in this centuries-crafted conspiracy.
Clack.
She hadn’t found anything that would give her a feasible reason to risk contacting Kyan early. They weren’t supposed to even try, unless there was an emergency. And even then, who knew if the Wake had already caught on to Kyan’s deception?
Why couldn’t she just—
She brought down the sword again, a little too hard, testing that eager power that crooned and crooned and she ignored. Her father lashed back, warm air brushing her cheek as she bent backwards, body smooth and raring.
But she misjudged the distance between her sword and the side table, where a priceless-looking vase sat.
Her faux blade caught it with a heart-stopping crack, sending porcelain shrapnel flying through the library.
Nicole threw her hand out in time to stop a larger shard.
It didn’t break her skin, not now she was an awakened Empyreal.
But her father’s hiss of pain lanced through the chaos.
He’d brought his arm up in time to shield his face so most of the shards cut his arm instead, but her chest cinched in panic at the sight of his blood and the momentary colour of his eyes.
So many red veins, they almost looked black.
They seemed darker than they’d ever been, reminding her of the markedly strange Seer abilities she’d first glimpsed the night of her transformation: when he’d used some of them to unnerve Lynch.
Nicole dropped the sword in alarm. ‘I’m sorry!’
‘It’s all right,’ he said, holding up a hand. But all she saw was the blood smeared over the old scar bisecting his palm.
Her eyes snapped to Verin, her protective instincts glaring so loudly she grabbed her father’s arm to pull him behind her.
Shame immediately followed. Frustration. Verin made no move, nor did he show any blood hunger.
‘I’m sorry …’ she managed, backing up.
Verin had never once made them feel unsafe. He was around blood constantly, not just in his reference library but as the house was often open for public tours.
He’d told her early on: ‘Think of humans: if they’re faced with food, do they kill for it in a frenzy? No, they eat it calmly. It is the same for a Vampire. No established Vampire gluts on blood unless they want to make themselves sick. It’s all much more civilised.’
‘Don’t worry, my dear.’ Verin smiled softly, but it barely eased her. ‘That one was a replica.’
She met her father’s gaze, his eyes silver-blue again.
She’d have to ask about the night of her transformation eventually.
Her mother’s bestiary notes on Death Seers and their scythes arced through her mind.
But right now she needed some other piece of the puzzle of her life to slot into place before trying to address something as world-changing as why her father might have lied about what type of Seer he was her whole life.
‘I’ll just – I’m going for a jog.’
He stepped closer. ‘Nicole, I’m all right.’
‘Let her go,’ Verin said softly.
She was out of the room before much more could be said, but a few moments later – long enough for a human to miss maybe, but not her – she heard Verin say, ‘She needs to hunt, Ronan …’
And yet the words brought a different blood-soaked memory.
‘You were made by the Goddess of Death. And She does not sup once,’ Lynch had told Nicole back in Estwood. No, taunted.
Right before she had ripped off his head.
It had been a warning: that once she transformed, the Goddess of Death’s touch and her divinely given Empyrean powers wouldn’t let Nicole kill just once. That it would be her life, from that point on.
She’d thought it a blessing at the time, in the euphoria of a successful hunt.
Now, she just hoped she could get a handle on it in case someone else got hurt.
Or worse, she tripped up and exposed them all.