Chapter Five
Kyan
‘LOOK AT THIS,’ KYAN SAID BY WAY OF GREETING, SLIDING the fang across Callum’s dining room table, the bloody bone stark as a crescent moon against the shining black wood.
Callum’s London townhouse – one of his many secret abodes – was all dark shades and clean lines. It was an elegant knife of a building with antique details, a secret garage of cars, and priceless artefacts like a glass-boxed stone with lines of ogam carved into it.
Callum looked up with a grimace from where he was lounging at the head of the table.
The end of an espresso in priceless china sat beside him, his linen-clad legs crossed at the ankles.
As always, he was perfectly put together, today wearing a light tan collared jumper, his black hair short but somehow stylish, a groomed shadow of stubble framing his jaw.
‘First of all, that’s disgusting, get it off my table.’ Callum nodded towards a champagne bucket sitting on the low side dresser below a tastefully lit mythological painting, one Nicole would no doubt linger over.
Clearly, it had been based off Herbert James Draper’s The Lament for Icarus, but instead of the wing-strapped youth lying unconscious on a great boulder and attended to by worrying nude Nymphs, it was Callum lying in Icarus’ place, as if dozing on the sun-drenched rock.
Amid the Nymphs were Mermen, sweeping up from the dark waters to check on him, or drape themselves beside him beneath a spill of gold evening light.
Kyan arched a look at him.
‘What? It amused me.’
Kyan swiped up the bloody incisor and shoved it into the bucket, the melting ice rattling.
‘Secondly,’ Callum continued. ‘Hi, hello. Do tell me how happy you are to see my gorgeous face.’
‘I’m so happy to see your gorgeous face,’ Kyan said flatly. ‘But I have news.’
Callum slapped shut his newspaper with a laugh, pinning Kyan with an assessing look. ‘I take it time away from your Nicole has been … grating on you.’
Your Nicole.
He liked the sound of that a little too much.
‘More like grinding my patience into dust.’
Callum’s eyes glinted with amusement, but they floated to the covered new scar in the centre of Kyan’s Wake one. A dot within a circle. His and Nicole’s bind. He also noted, but didn’t comment on, the hair tie of hers that was still around Kyan’s wrist beside his ancient bracelet.
Kyan picked up the champagne bucket and thunked it onto the table.
‘Why, pray tell, have you brought me a … fang? And – ugh – why does it smell like that? Kyan, really.’
‘Just look at it.’
Callum looked aggrieved but got up anyway, and within a moment he was frowning. His chest expanded on another inhale. ‘What is this?’
‘I thought it was a Vampire’s fang, but the creature had two rows of teeth so I realised it could be another one of the little experiments the Wake have been doing. This one was wild as an animal, near feral. Do you think it’s enough proof?’
‘A fang in a bucket? No.’ Callum tapped the table, pensive. ‘We’d need the operation exposed or, at the very minimum, the body itself to prove the differences. But still, who would that convince? A Finfolk isn’t likely to care if a Vampire now has two rows of teeth.’
Lynch would have been enough evidence if they’d been able to keep him alive.
Maybe they’d have been able to understand what had happened to him if they’d managed to get his body to someone they could trust. There had only been slivers of the Spectre left when Nicole had finished with him, but she had been able to glean images from the Spectre’s memories, revealing the location where he’d been altered.
She’d shown Kyan before they headed to Lanhydrock and bound themselves together.
‘How many creatures do you think they’ve done this to?’ Kyan asked, hands clamped on the cool edge of the table.
‘I don’t know, but it’s safe to guess that this is a newer development. We’ve only been coming across more malignant creatures lately, no?’
Kyan nodded.
‘Well, while you’ve been doing mission after mission, I did some research.’
‘I wasn’t doing that many missions on purpose—’
Callum waved a hand, his eyes suspicious. ‘I’m not criticising. They’ve been keeping you busy.’
‘Yeah, well, this might throw another spanner in the works.’ Kyan pulled out his phone and showed Callum the photo he’d taken of the markings on the warehouse floor.
His friend’s expression smoothed free of any emotion.
‘Can you read it?’ Kyan asked.
‘Where was this?’
‘Where I killed the Vampire. I found it written in the blood of a human sacrifice.’
‘A sacrifice? What is this, the first millennium?’ Callum took the phone, giving him a reprehensive look. ‘You’ve forgotten your ogam?’
‘That’s really what you focus on here?’
Callum sighed and looked at the picture. When he stilled, Kyan’s hackles rose. ‘It’s a call to the Hunt.’
‘The Wild Hunt?’ Kyan examined the bloody lines again. ‘How is that supposed to work?’
Callum stared at his painting for a moment, lost in calculation. ‘Creating more hostile creatures would bring the Hunt,’ he realised.
‘Wait, you think the Wake orchestrated this sacrifice and let loose the mutated Vampire on purpose?’ Kyan asked.
His friend turned to him, eyes dark and serious. ‘Where we deal with the physical forms of dangerous creatures, the Hunt cleans up their souls so their energy doesn’t linger and cause more … problems.’
Warnings and urges prowled through Kyan’s blood. ‘Problems like what?’
Callum shrugged. ‘Who knows. Negative influences on creatures? The risk of humans sighting the supernatural? The Hunt must do a good enough job that we never find out.’
‘Have you ever seen any proof of it?’
‘A long time ago,’ Callum said.
Kyan’s brow arched. ‘Care to share?’
Callum’s look meant Maybe, maybe not. ‘Apparently, it needs a new leader every few hundred years or more? Less? I’m not sure, I just know they supposedly swap out, but there always needs to be someone.
Hence why we have Germanic, Norse, English, and Welsh myths that all claim the leader is someone else: Odin, King Arthur, Gwyn ap Nudd, et cetera.
Once they go in, they’re bound to the Hunt until their time is up. ’
At first, Kyan had believed the Wild Hunt was something the Wake wanted to prevent from happening again. They’d written that very fact in their archives.
But now …
‘You’re making it sound like the Hunt has been working secretly all this time,’ Kyan said. ‘But the Wake claimed they wanted to stop a Dark Age and Wild Hunt.’
‘Well of course they said that,’ Callum said, ‘but evidently, it’s a lie. The Hunt is an important – albeit infamously mysterious and secretive – part of supernatural society that’s been doing its job a long time. Stopping it …’ He shook his head at the mere thought.
Kyan began to pace. ‘Freya claimed in her decoded Dante message that the Wake wanted to trigger a Dark Age, so what would Wild Hunt have to do with that?’
His friend’s eyes darkened. ‘My best guess? If the Wake can stop the Hunt collecting souls – or worse, find a way to unleash the hell trapped inside, otherwise known as all the world’s worst vanquished creatures, back again – there would be untold death and destruction.’
That would trigger a Dark Age.
The very thing they always claimed they were protecting people against and used to get Empyreals to swear their oaths.
Ice lashed down Kyan’s spine. ‘Is that possible?’
Callum looked deep in thought. ‘Anything’s possible, I suppose.
It’s a boundary. If things can go in, things can come out, but the Wake would have to get around some crucial issues.
The lore of the Hunt says you can’t come out without some kind of consequence.
But if they’re doing this, there must be a reason they believe they can use it. ’
‘What would any of this be for, other than chaos?’ Kyan demanded, running his hands through his hair. How the hell was he supposed to protect Nicole from that?
He’d do it. He’d do it if it killed him.
But he knew that anything happening to her family would kill her first – at least extinguish that light in her eyes.
Shadows passed through Callum’s steady gaze. ‘I suppose we better find out. Which brings me to these.’ He went to the side table and pulled out a set of blueprints.
‘How did you get these?’ Kyan asked as Callum unrolled the layouts of several of the Wake’s most well-known buildings across the UK.
His best friend gave him a look. ‘Do you really want to know?’
He huffed. ‘I suppose not.’
Kyan braced his hands on the side of the table as he took in the papers.
He’d been in Wake-owned buildings often enough to know how sprawling they usually were. They had ones for Empyreals, which housed everything they might need whilst on a hunt: gyms, bathrooms, bedrooms, kitchens, mission rooms, stashes of new identities, cash, and keys to new cars.
Sometimes there were even separate quarters for Seers who were able to transfer visions of future deaths to Empyreals and give them more insight into their prey.
This transfer of knowledge didn’t give Empyreals the same level of insight that Nicole had, though.
Thanks to her half-Seer heritage she could experience, through a vision of a past murder, the kill scent of a creature.
It made her an invaluable assassin. Even more so than Kyan and Callum.
The thought of the Wake getting their hands on her, using her as a weapon, turned that ice in his body to a mist of sweat down his spine.
‘Let’s say one of these locations is the right one. They’d have wards; cameras,’ Kyan said. Cameras that would record him entering, or Influencing people.
‘Not if we wipe them first.’
‘How do you plan to do that?’
Callum grinned. ‘Oh, Kyan, when will you realise I have someone for everything? But there is one real issue: just because we don’t know what the Wake are up to, doesn’t mean other Empyreals don’t.’
Kyan crossed his arms. ‘You think others might be in on this? Guarding the doors and kidnapping creatures?’
‘How else are the Wake supposed to run this operation? They’d need muscle to keep this quiet. Someone sees something? They’d need to be taken out.’
He was right. There was nothing stopping the Wake from sending Empyreals, or its other new, twisted creatures, to hunt people or beings they wanted dead.
Just as they’d sent him to Estwood to take out Lynch after the Spectre failed to kill Professor Westmoore and steal her supernatural art collection.
‘Even if Empyreals don’t know,’ Callum said, ‘the Wake’s donors might.’
Kyan pressed his lips into a tight line. He rarely met the donors, except during very high-profile missions or rare, awkward events where he was used as a staid example of one of their finest killers. Those things reminded him too much of his early days as their gladiator.
How many of those wealthy supernaturals were in on this mutation process?
The idea made him sick to his stomach.
Likely the Wake had encouraged them with the same propaganda they’d imbued in him: that without the protection of the Wake, supernaturals would be vulnerable; that there might be another Dark Age in which creatures would run rampant through the world, massacring everything in their path.
‘What’s your bet the Old Bailey is just an administrative building?’
Callum gave him a look that said Zero.
‘You want to break in,’ Kyan realised.
‘How else are we going to be sure? All you know is they took the bodies there. That could’ve been for reasons that have nothing to do with this.’
‘Like what? Feeding them to some of the prisoners awaiting trials?’
Callum’s lip curled in distaste. ‘Possibly. But you know as well as I do there aren’t that many creatures that feed on dead bodies.’
Kyan resumed pacing. ‘I’ve been thinking about the other part of Freya’s message: “A cure to the oath must be found … Perhaps only the God of Oaths himself will know.” Do you think it means who I imagine it might?’
If there was a way, a real way, to be freed from the Wake and their oath, he’d sever that connection however he could, even if he had to cut out his infernal scar himself. But he had a suspicion that wouldn’t sever the bind. He knew the deep power of it was more like an ancient geis.
Like a spell, or a curse. It was unbreakable and often destructive. If you didn’t follow its order it could kill you. Irish myth was full of gods and heroes who were bested by them.
Callum slid him a look. ‘And if it is?’
‘Well, it’s impossible. The gods are gone, and even if they weren’t, the Druids—’
The Druids are dead.
He didn’t need to say it for Callum to understand, but his friend made a thoughtful noise.
Kyan frowned. ‘Don’t you think so?’
He had felt the gods long ago, felt them like he felt the air and his Empyrean power. But after the battle that killed his Druid family and sent him from Ireland, that changed.
The Druids had been the main beings capable of communicating with the gods, though many tales told of how the Irish pantheon appeared to humans or heroes, and came or went or intervened at their pleasure. Now, their only answer might lie in the mythology and research.
One more reason to find Nicole.
Kyan shut down the thought.
Callum was quiet for a long moment. ‘I think there’s a lot we don’t know.’
‘I have one more problem: my medical is this afternoon.’
‘Ah.’
‘The second they check me they’ll ask about the binding scar. I thought it might have been flagged when I scanned in to the buildings or accessed mission files, but the ID scanners only seem to pick up the Wake’s mark.’
‘Makes sense,’ Callum mused. ‘Empyreals are often covered with blood, mud or any assorted gore. If it picked up every mark we wouldn’t get in the buildings.’
‘But I’ll have a bunch of techs and the doctor checking me over. They’ll see it, and I don’t know how to explain it away. Empyreals don’t just acquire new scars. I can’t say I got it in a fight, it’s too perfect. I can’t say Lynch did something to me, they’ll try and investigate—’
‘So, cause a distraction. It’s the perfect opportunity to scope out the labs that we do know about.’
‘You think they’re doing experiments in the normal medical facilities?’
‘They’ve governed the supernatural world for nearly two thousand years, unchallenged. I think they’re cocky enough to do it, yes.’
He didn’t like it. It added more discomfort to what already sloshed in his stomach like acid.
‘It’s a dangerous risk, but I can’t put it off any longer or they’ll get suspicious.’
A pause, then one of Callum’s famous smiles. ‘Then I suppose it’s time you learned the art of distraction.’