Chapter Six
Bells
EVER SINCE BELLS HAD ATTEMPTED A SMALL, RISKY RITUAL in Estwood to try to glimpse her family’s future, her visions had gotten … worse.
They didn’t just come when she was supposed to be dreaming in the deepest hours of the night, but their dark strangeness was beginning to encroach when she was trying to help Dylan remember the night their mother died.
She couldn’t help but be reminded that the goddess she’d called to, Badb, was one of the three Morrígan sisters. But she was not just a Death Goddess like her sisters, but the Goddess of Prophecy.
And Madness.
Bells tried to shake off the reminder by glancing up at the sprawling ceiling of Burghley House’s Heaven Room.
The gods of Mount Olympus gazed down, the walls painted with columns like an ancient temple.
Rainbows and lost seas could be glimpsed between and behind the many theatrical figures.
It was like a paradisical dream. Well, what Bells suspected other people dreamed of.
All her dreams were visions of death.
‘Are you sure you want to try again?’ their father asked Dylan.
Her brother sat on the floor before her, his back to her knees where she sat perched on the couch, her fingers hovering at his temples. It was the most comfortable way they’d found to do this, considering the process usually took an hour or more.
‘Let’s just get it over with,’ Dylan said tightly.
They’d gone about this memory mining process carefully so far, hesitant to harm Dylan in any way, but he was an unusual mix of reckless and wary about it each time.
Their father moved throughout the space, shutting the blinds against the bright day and the miles of sprawling emerald grounds outside, strewn with blossoms and grazed by deer.
They’d left Nicole to research. Bells knew her sister wished she could help, had even tried to do this once, but her heightened Empyrean powers kept distracting her.
Nicole could do the transforming; she could even tackle a fair amount of the research.
She always seemed to know what she was looking for with those quick, dark eyes.
Sometimes, Bells wondered if Nicole and their mother did have some uncanny connection that allowed her sister to seek out the lost details they needed.
But a tiny part of her was also glad. This was Bells’ predominant power and she was a little territorial over this mission Callum had given her.
‘If Dylan saw your mother’s killer but can’t remember,’ he’d told her, ‘it’s buried in his subconscious. You, as his sister and a full Seer, can help him unearth the memory.’
It would stop Kyan and Callum being caught unawares if their mother’s assassin worked among them, and could make sure they knew who they could and couldn’t trust.
Even though Dylan didn’t trust Callum, Bells … liked him. His charm and his friendship with Kyan. His quick belief that there was something else going on in the Wake.
But digging up memories was a nebulous, difficult thing that gave her a roaring headache – to such a degree too much light would burn her eyes and make her dizzy – so they had to take regular breaks.
Now, though, the room was dim and quiet. Verin had long since stopped tours during their stay, which meant nothing would interrupt them.
A sense of calm settled over Bells as she placed her fingers on her brother’s temples.
The warm skin flickered as his teeth ground together and she tried not to let her concern distract her, focusing instead on their father’s relaxed instructions, guiding them as if into a meditation.
Bells closed her eyes.
‘Think of the memory,’ their father said.
Then the darkness behind her eyes changed.
There were not so much rules to a Seer’s abilities as there were ranges.
Five, to be precise. Some Saw the past, some – like her father – Saw the future.
And some, the present. The fourth category were Death Seers, who only ever saw visions of death.
And the last, the rarest, was the Prophet or Prophetess, the one rare Seer capable of Seeing the past, present and future.
None could easily See the future of someone they loved. Not without a type of training that had been lost eons ago. Probably because the process could drive them mad.
But most, with the right training or connection, were able to See someone’s memories if they were replayed in the person’s mind while there was physical contact.
So, when Bells’ eyes opened, she was in their childhood nursery.
From what she’d been told of this place, it was one of the locations they’d settled in the longest as a family.
Sometimes, when they returned here in Dylan’s mind, the place was unlit, nothing but the gloom of an eerie twilight.
Other times, like now, it had a soft, cosy feel, its lamps casting the tiny blue flowers in the wallpaper in a warm glow.
Here, his memories gave details to a room Bells had been too young to recall: the cream carpet and cot, a rocking chair and dresser.
Bells appeared in the memory just as she was in the present, sixteen years old and dressed in pyjamas. It allowed her to walk it; take in the rest of the room.
The trio of her and her siblings would always materialise after the room itself.
She knew the sight of them now, huddled on the carpet of the walk-in wardrobe, the slatted door partially open.
The door of the nursery sat to its right.
Above, the room had a sloped ceiling, and there was one small window opposite them.
Nowhere near big enough for someone to have climbed in.
No, the Empyreal that was about to kill their mother would use the front door.
Bells scanned the room before she went to young Dylan, searching for something she might have missed previously, but nothing had changed, even if she felt more unease today.
He was only four years old here, Nicole only three. Bells was clutched by Nicole at barely a year old, one of Dylan’s little hands covering her. Her heart ached sharply. Even at that tender age, he’d tried to protect them.
It looked like a movie that had been paused, parts of it blurred out until he focused. But he always focused on this part last, reluctantly. And she knew why.
Across from them their mother appeared, as if in a simulation.
After the first few times doing this and telling her father what she’d seen, Bells had learned that the strange, wall-like shimmer that separated the young versions of them from their mother was their mother’s Influence, hiding him and the others from the intruder.
Bells took in the shocking clarity of her with a rush of fear and awe: the dark hair, the beauty, yes.
There was a sharpness to her features that was so similar to Nicole’s.
Bells couldn’t help but wonder what similarities she might have.
The child who had never even spoken her first words before their mother was taken.
Who had no obvious similarities. Who was soft and shy, where her mother was honed and confident.
Who echoed more of her father’s Seer abilities than those of her mother.
She was intimidated by a woman she’d never known. Felt like a cuckoo chick in a nest of Morrígan-blessed crows.
Their mother had just finished with the Influence when the intruder broke into the room and tried to take her out.
The killer’s form was a giant blur, their face obscured. The pair fought in an uncanny, partially blurred slow motion. Their mother managed to lead the fight out of the nursery and down the stairs to the living room.
But Dylan had moved, got up and scampered out of the wardrobe. He ran out to the small landing at the top of the stairs, and in her more adult form, Bells followed, rebelling at the idea that Dylan should see any of this, tempted every time to shield him. To change this.
But she couldn’t change a memory, only see it.
So she crouched behind him. So tiny. So real. And brought her hands up to lightly touch young Dylan’s temples and the downy gold hair.
‘Show me who it is,’ Bells said softly. ‘You can do it. Don’t be afraid. This is just a memory. It can’t hurt you—’
Her words were interrupted by a ripple of something else.
‘What is it?’ came their father’s distant voice.
For a moment she’d almost forgotten what was real and what wasn’t. But Bells couldn’t articulate what was wrong, and didn’t even know if she needed to. She was watching the death of her own mother through the spindles supporting the bannister, perhaps that was all this uneasy feeling was.
Yet something snarled to her left at the edge of the vision, down where the front door faced the stairs and was hanging open to the night. She forced her eyes back to their mother and strained to somehow bypass Dylan’s memory and see the face.
Then she felt something where her pinkie touched Dylan’s cheek, something wet.
Tears.
Their mother turned. This was the moment her eyes would widen as she spotted Dylan.
Instead—
Her gaze met Bells’.
It shocked her like falling in a dream, and the memory ripped away.
Bells reeled as the world lurched and split. The warmth of her brother’s temples at her fingertips disappeared.
‘Dylan, don’t pull away that fast!’ their father barked. ‘What happened, are you all right?’
‘I’m sorry, I can’t—’ came his choked reply.
Before Bells could blink the world back into focus, Dylan was disappearing out of the door.
She grasped for reality, but her ability to See had taken flight, drawing her up and away from her brother, away from the tangled memories, spiralling higher than the fairy-tale spires of the manor, away, away to—
‘Bells, are you with me?’ came her father’s voice.
Bells reached for him, still feeling in-between. ‘Dad?’
‘I’m here,’ he said, taking her outstretched hand, before coming to kneel before her. ‘Did you See anything?’
The urgent concern in his eyes came into focus.
There was more to the memory. Something about it was tangled, as coiled and complicated as the torcs Nicole had been sketching in her notes. But Bells was always so tired that she couldn’t figure it out, and sleep suddenly felt like a weighted blanket on her shoulders.
‘Why can’t you do this, Dad?’ she asked.
Regret creased his brow. ‘I’m sorry, love, it’s too murky for Seers like me.’
Right, because he was so used to Seeing the future that memories of the past were never clear. Not like they were for her, while her visions were still in flux and would be until she turned eighteen.
‘But Dylan’s angry that I can’t do it right and he has to keep going through this.’
Their father clasped her hands. ‘He’s not angry with you, Bells. He’s angry with the situation.’
‘I wish I could just see it clearly. But – I think there’s something’s wrong with the memory. Mum looked at me.’
His frown deepened. ‘Was she looking at Dylan, and you were seeing through his eyes?’
‘No. She looked over him. She looked at me.’
Her father shook his head. ‘That’s not possible.’
Bells put a hand on her neck, over the healed bite mark Lynch had given her.
Not a scar remained thanks to her father’s salves.
But she shivered to run her finger over where it had been, remembering the fangs and the gun going off as she shot him.
The hot drug of his venom. Fleeing to a moonlit safehouse by the lake.
Cleaning the blood off Nicole after her transformation.
Bells wished she’d Seen something, maybe then she could have stopped it. But seeing your family was always murky, shaded by your own fears and hopes for them, it was why their father hadn’t been able to See the events of Estwood before they happened.
What good was her power if she wasn’t able to use it to prepare for things like this? Prevent them? She wanted to be useful, but it seemed like her visions were settling into the ‘present’ category, not the past or future.
No, she was almost certain that if she wasn’t a ‘present’ Seer, she was a Death one.
She sighed, tipping her head back and squeezing her eyes shut to ease the burning dryness. But when they re-opened, they focused on one particular figure painted amid the divine revelry on the ceiling.
The Angel of Death.
It was the title given to the most powerful Death Seer on the Seers’ High Council.
On this ceiling, however, it was an older man whose colouring matched her father’s, down to the grey in his beard.
A great swathe of cobalt blue fabric draped behind him and his fanned-out tawny wings, the elegant scythe in his hand wicked silver and striking.
Bells blinked, refocusing as her father helped her up. This was her mission, and she was determined she wouldn’t let everyone down. Even if she couldn’t escape the feeling that something was wrong with these memories.
She just didn’t know what.