Chapter Fourteen
Kyan
SITTING AT A SLEEK BANK OF COMPUTERS INSIDE ONE OF the Wake’s monitoring rooms, Kyan stared at the circular logo on the screen.
Often, he’d sit with an extra-strong coffee and read up on his prey before embarking on a new mission.
Taking notes, strategising, even though his Empyrean urges would do the real work.
But a successful hunt hinged on more than just the kill: not being seen; disposing of the body; making sure there were limited to zero casualties.
This time he didn’t need a drink; the adrenaline pounding through his body was more than enough.
Kyan quelled the immediate urge to speak with Callum. That would have to wait. First, he laid down his mission notebook and searched for someone he hadn’t been able to before in case he alerted the Wake.
Nicole’s mother.
He wasn’t supposed to know her name until they’d mentioned it. He wasn’t supposed to know what she was, that she even existed. So it was the codename they’d given him that he typed in: préachán.
The Irish word for crow.
The bird of the Goddesses of Death.
Crows were said to be one of the Morrígan’s messengers or spies.
Other times, it was a form she, or indeed any of the three Morrígan sisters, could take.
It was a fitting word for Freya. But the fact it was Irish stalled him the most. Why, out of all languages, had they used that one?
Kyan was Irish, but he had not thought Freya was, and had not thought the Wake were.
The majority of their rise to power had happened in ancient Rome. So why not a Latin word?
His fingers moved cautiously across the keys, his mind whirring over how to tell Nicole every speck of information he found, even just to give her another thread of connection to her mother. If he managed to find her in a way that didn’t damn them both.
The page loaded.
There was only one image. A blurry street shot from behind that showed the curve of Freya’s cheek and her dark hair as she turned her head, as if to look over her shoulder.
But even that was enough to jar him.
She really did look like Nicole.
In an older way, a harder way. Danger breathed off her, even in this image. But the page had a glaring title written across it.
MISSION COMPLETED: TARGET EXTERMINATED.
NO BODY RETRIEVED – TOO DECIMATED BY FIRE.
Kyan forced himself to swallow, fighting the part of him that felt like he was looking at a file on Nicole and not her mother. That it was Nicole they had killed.
He shut his eyes for a moment, banishing the thought.
Never.
He’d never let that happen, not if it was the last goddamn thing he ever did.
Nicole had believed her mother to be dead, but Callum …
‘No body, no proof,’ he’d said to the Palmers back in Estwood. Would he believe this?
Kyan read the rest. It didn’t say which Empyreal had taken the mission.
That was highly classified information, which was unusual.
The rest was present though: the cottage location of her murder and the burned room where she was killed.
Her last known sightings before that. Even information dating back through centuries.
Otherwise, Freya’s skills were laid out:
DECEPTION
FACE-TRANSFORMATION
CAPABLE OF INFLUENCING OTHER EMPYREALS
ADEPT IN EVERY KNOWN STYLE OF FIGHTING
How much information had been left out? Surely the Wake knew more about her than this?
Kyan leaned closer and closer as he read on:
MAY HAVE A CHILD.
The sinking feeling worsened as he scoured for information on how they knew about Nicole … but as he scrolled down the page, he found the known associates, and the question-marked image of a silhouette, with one word:
DAUGHTER?
He schooled his features, kept his body from tensing as the bind between him and Nicole seared his solar plexus like a piece of the star they’d been made from.
I’ll find you, he promised.
Not to hunt her. To keep her as hidden as he could.
But one question remained: how could the Wake expect him to hunt someone by giving him so little information, unless they had discovered he knew her already?
‘I think they’re onto us,’ Kyan said as he stalked into Callum’s favourite tailor’s shop. Kyan had Influenced the employees not to hear a word while they were in the next room.
Callum grew dangerously still before the mirror.
‘Oh?’ It was light in tone, but contained a thousand questions.
‘They’ve given me a new mission.’ Kyan reached the bar cart and poured himself a quick snifter of strong whisky, before throwing it down. He’d never been much for a drink, but he needed one now.
It burned the whole way.
Callum turned. ‘What about that suggests—’
‘To hunt Nicole.’
After all this time, Kyan knew Callum’s different silences: this one was prolonged enough to be calculated.
‘They know about her?’
‘They know Freya had a daughter, and they want her.’
Callum stared, his mind working. He shook his head. ‘I don’t like the timing. How would they know that?’
‘They won’t tell me. Which means this is a test.’
‘A test of your loyalty. Do you think they know about you two?’
‘How else could they have discovered Nicole, now? Sixteen years after her mother’s assassination?’
‘Unless the Palmers have done something in these last six months to give them away.’
Kyan raked his hands through his hair. ‘I wondered that. I don’t know what to do.’
‘Well, there’s one option, but you won’t like it.’
‘Only one?’ Kyan asked bitterly.
Callum’s lips pulled into a flat line. ‘Never see her again.’
The thought was like an axe to his chest. Nicole had given him reason to hope again, after so long. Then to never see her again? She would be safe, though. She would be free from their clutches.
But that was a lie.
Kyan shook his head. ‘They’d only send others after her. People like Logan. No doubt that was another reason why they brought him in on this. If I fail, that fucking bastard will be hunting her next.’
‘Okay, option number two: warn her, and the clock starts. You delay discovering her for as long as possible so she has time to follow the last of Freya’s clues. Then hope she finds whatever it is that little madam hid on her art history conspiracy that can save them from the Wake.’
‘And, what? Stand aside and wait? We’ve found out the Wake are experimenting on creatures, that they may be trying to summon the Wild Hunt – they claim it’s a Druid, by the way. They’ve given Logan a mission to bring them in.’
Callum’s brows drew together, eyes ravenous. ‘A Druid?’
‘You think a Druid would summon the Hunt?’
Callum pursed his lips. ‘I think they could be interested in it. After all, the Druids believed in the transmigration of the soul …’
‘And soulmates,’ Kyan remembered, the embers of his mother’s voice drifting through his mind.
‘Each of us was made from a piece of a star,’ she had told him all those ages ago as her finger tapped his solar plexus. They’d been sat beside one another at a bonfire, her forest-green cloak pooling around them, the night sky above bright with galaxies you could barely see anymore.
‘Some of us just have more star than others, more power. But all of us have our réalta treorach.’
Your guiding star, it meant. Your soul-partner. The person you were always tugged towards, no matter where you were in the world, no matter what life you lived.
Some other supernaturals called it mate. Humans, soulmate.
And yet it was more cosmic than that, a concept that stemmed back to a time when gods had walked the earth.
‘However, do I think the Druid’s summoned the Hunt?’ Callum continued. ‘Unlikely. Freya’s clue said that’s what the Wake want, a Dark Age. And fucking with the Wild Hunt would be a sure way to achieve that goal.
‘Most likely, they’re setting the Druid up like they did with Lynch in Estwood.
Speaking of, is there any actual material to go on?
Proof? Have the sites been visited? Any evidence of blood magic?
’ He’d moved closer, close enough Kyan could see the concern in his friend’s eyes.
‘Because you’re the only Empyreal who would take this mission for personal reasons.
They never send us if there’s an emotional connection. ’
‘They said that’s exactly why they gave me the choice.
’ His words were razored, like he’d been screaming.
Perhaps it was just his body remembering that he had screamed enough over his mother’s body that he couldn’t speak for days.
Then spent the next few months in near silence, returned to the cold training keep in Scotland and the watch of his sharp-eyed trainer, Scáthach.
Back then, only a few things had dragged him out of his bleakness, Callum being one of them.
Purpose, being the other.
Kyan swallowed. ‘The Wake said I’d be the best at identifying Druid magic. That they’ve been killing people.’
‘Killing how?’ Callum took the two files Kyan had almost forgotten were in his hand and flipped through the pages. He’d got himself a copy of Logan’s mission file and information on the so-called ‘Druid killings’, so the other Empyreal couldn’t get too far ahead of him.
Callum shook his head. ‘Please. Mistletoe in the stomach? Garrotted? Bogs?’ He clucked his tongue in disgust and smacked the file against Kyan’s chest, then stalked around to the low couch set before mahogany shelves lined with expensive shirts.
‘This sounds like that ridiculous human archaeologist theory that those bog-people were Druid sacrifices.’
‘You know it might not be a mere theory. Those killings happened.’
‘Yes, but Druids don’t need to kill like that.’
No, the role of the Druids was communication with the gods through blood magic, divination, and their deep connection to the earth’s magic: soulsblood.
Magic that lived in all creatures and humans too, vaguely known by them as life-force, or merely ‘energy’.
It was why modern humans thought the Druids performed sacrifices, as historians and contemporary Roman sources knew so little of the Druids other than their bloodstained altars.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Kyan said. ‘They’re happening and they’re being linked to a Druid. Who knows why they might be doing it. If they were trying to contact the gods after all these years, maybe they found something else.’
Callum’s jaw flickered. ‘You’d better hope not.’
Without gods to contact, what would a Druid have been doing all this time? Hiding? Or had they been in contact with the divine?
Kyan had been raised to believe in the deities of his people; had known the Irish gods were real. Had even been certain he’d met one after he’d transformed and his mother took him to get his torc fashioned in the divine mountains that still stood proud as immortals today.
Now, Goibniu’s hidden volcanic forge was long dormant.
But, there had been other times. Times when Kyan had come across beings so powerful and enigmatic that he’d known they were more.
Whether they were forgotten gods, he didn’t know.
The tales claim that divinities left the world to humans and creatures long ago.
There were many stories to explain what might have happened.
One claimed they’d left the world protected by Empyreals.
But … was he to believe gods were still here? That they would do something like let an organisation like the Wake rise to power?
No, he was certain no gods still walked this earth.
But that didn’t mean this Druid thought the same. Not when the other thread of Freya’s last clue returned to Kyan’s mind.
‘If there’s a chance,’ Kyan said, ‘even the slightest, that this Druid is still able to contact the gods, then perhaps they could contact the God of Oaths.’
Perhaps they could be the key to bringing down the Wake.
Perhaps that was the reason the Wake wanted them dead in the first place.
Callum shook his head softly. His eyes, usually glittering with mirth or scheming intelligence, were filled instead with the strangest look of – grief?
It was gone in an instant, replaced by charm.
‘So what’s it going to be? The Druid or Nicole?’ Callum asked.
The answer rang through Kyan’s entire body. ‘Both. I can’t let Logan kill the last Druid, just as I can’t let the Wake take Nicole.’
‘And if you find the Druid, will you kill them?’
Could he?
Obviously, he could. If the Druid was in the middle of killing someone, his body would have no choice. But he wasn’t sure he could bear it, not if they were the last of their people.
‘Maybe they’re actually dangerous,’ Kyan said.
‘Is that what you believe?’
Anger and confusion whipped through him. ‘I don’t know what to believe! I’d hoped maybe—’ Heat burned his throat. Grief, regret.
He should have been faster. He should have had his mind on his family. Should have acted on the intuition that whispered about the wrongness brewing in the background of the battle that distracted him from their plight.
‘If the Wake knew it was us who’d broken into the lab, why wouldn’t they just bring me in and kill me?’
Callum’s eyes glinted. ‘Why indeed? But first things first: we get the blood of the “Huntbringer” to a Vampire, then find the Palmers.’
‘We?’
His friend’s brow rose. ‘You didn’t think I’d let you rediscover my favourite new troublemakers without me, did you?’
‘You just want to piss off Dylan.’
Callum’s grin burned away the darkness in his eyes like a celestial echo. ‘What can I say? You know me well.’
‘All right, Vampires first. Do you know someone?’ Kyan started to pace. He knew a few creatures that dabbled in supernatural medicine, but they needed someone who could read the secrets of the blood and not tell another soul.
Callum shook his head. ‘I don’t like our options. Any one of them could be bought.’
A name surfaced in Kyan’s mind and the realisation on his face must have been clear.
‘I don’t like him,’ Callum said immediately.
‘You just don’t like that he can see through your bullshit, and your charm never works on him.’
‘My charm works on everyone. But he won’t let us in willingly,’ Callum said. ‘He hates the Wake.’
‘Good. That means he’ll be more likely to help us.’
‘He’s the first place the Wake might look.’
‘Which is exactly why we should get there quickly.’
The clock was ticking now. Logan was already off after the Druid, which meant Kyan needed to get to Nicole as fast as possible. To warn her, to see her. Then beat Logan to the last remaining link to his people and their magic.
And then what?
Then, he had no fucking idea.
Then, you expose yourself to the Wake if you don’t hunt your mate.
Or you bring her in, and try to bargain for your lives.
‘One thing’s for sure,’ Callum said. ‘The Wake want Nicole. But the question is, are you going to get her for them?’
‘I suppose we’ll find out,’ Kyan said. ‘Cause I’ve taken the mission.’