Chapter Forty-Eight
Kyan
KYAN HAD SEEN IRELAND CHANGE ON HIS RARE TRIPS HERE, but it all looked – felt – so different.
Two thousand years of landscape shifts would do that, he reminded himself. Still, an unnamed, pained tension in his chest had only worsened while renting a car and driving with Nicole an hour and a half north of Dublin and over the border into Northern Ireland, where his near mythic home lay.
The Druid site was on no map, as it had been hidden and forgotten from time.
With deforestation, farming and boundary changes, no one else would be able to find it unless they were led to the location.
Even Callum hadn’t outlined the boundaries of the invisible forest and how far it stretched, only given Kyan coordinates.
But Kyan’s mother had taught him how to feel her magic and the magic in the land.
The soulsblood.
When they finally came to the coordinates of Callum’s cabin, Kyan pulled over on the slightly sloped side of the road, where a hedge separated it from a field. The deep drag in his core increased as if drawn to the ground, as if even his Empyreal knew what slumbered here.
He wanted to reach for Nicole’s hand, but he kept his eyes trained through the window, watching for that tell-tale flicker of concealing magic that hid the ruins.
But there was no forest. No cabin. The whole place was countryside and lush green farmland, gently rolling this way and that. No ancient trees spired up as far as he could see. Just an overcast, silvering sky, the air warm and charged.
A storm was coming.
As he went to get out of the car, Nicole grabbed his arm.
‘Kyan,’ she breathed.
A lone white horse now stood in the centre of the road.
It had come out of nowhere and watched them with an omniscient gaze.
White animals were deemed creatures of the Otherworld.
Magical beings capable of traversing worlds, particularly between those of the gods and Ireland.
It reminded him of what Remi said about the harmony of the spheres.
If that was the case and the Otherworld was inaccessible now, it meant this horse had come from another magical location.
Cold fingers of intuition stroked over his skin, and he found his mouth had gone dry.
Nicole brushed her hand over his and he allowed himself to look at her. She smiled softly and, beyond the power in his veins, beyond the blood, he felt all those feelings for her warm him. Bolster him enough that he swallowed and restarted the car.
The horse turned to its right, and ran, disappearing into a ripple of air where it should have met a hedge.
‘I think we’ve found the spot,’ Nicole murmured.
Kyan put the car in drive and turned in the direction the horse had gone.
The world shimmered around them as they passed through the boundary and a forest replaced it. It rose up, the light suddenly a dappled, shadowed green. A simple dirt track wound deeper until Callum’s cabin came into view.
He must have Influenced anyone who came in here to build it to forget, because the sleek, mostly glass structure was too modern for him to have built alone. Despite its triangular shape, it blended so well it almost disappeared into the surroundings.
‘The Wake will have no eyes here, no power,’ he said.
They were hidden. But that didn’t mean they were safe, depending on who was inside.
Kyan parked the car and they got out, the soil rich beneath his dark, worn boots.
The horse bolted into the thicker trees, as if guiding them to the lost heart of the ruins.
The great, sylvan feel of the place near choked him with memory.
That charred, smothering hellscape from the days of the Táin was gone, replaced by new life, drenched in the fresh scent of a forest before it rains.
He imagined finding the Druid here, asleep in a grove. Defenceless. Then, the Druid using Nicole as leverage to stop Kyan taking them to the Wake.
‘Maybe this was a mistake.’
He couldn’t remember when he’d last said that word.
He’d always known what to do, led by that Empyreal urge.
But in this, his Empyreal was so quiet he felt mildly frantic.
He didn’t want to feel this way again. He didn’t want to make the decision.
To discover if the memories would tear through him, or he’d feel nothing.
Then the Wake would have well and truly sundered that connection to his origins.
‘We can go and sit somewhere and think about it first,’ Nicole said.
He looked down at her, chest warm with unspoken words.
‘No, I – we should go in. Just, be on your guard in case they’re here. We don’t know what they might do.’
Nicole nodded, eyes full of understanding and awareness.
The closer they got to where the horse had bolted, the more Kyan could feel the wards.
Leaves and twigs crackled as he approached the canopy of shushing leaves.
Despite passing the boundary, they still hadn’t breached the sacred forest’s protections.
It reassured him that even if someone stumbled across this place, this cabin, they would have been repelled by the force of the magic that pushed at them like a magnet.
‘It’s strong,’ Nicole said, pressing her hand against the invisible energy.
Kyan reached out. The magic warmed his palm, reminding him of his mother trying to explain her power. The burning trees.
He swallowed and, reaching for Nicole’s hand, stepped back onto Druid lands for the first time in two thousand years.
The wards stroked over him like water.
Then, the new mystic feel of a hidden world.
Nicole’s breath caught.
The forest sprawled around them, stretching further and taller than expected, with so much green it was as if every shade of it lived here in this semi-divine place.
The trees weren’t all ruined from that long-ago razing.
Many were twisted with age, their leaves lush and fresh, adorned in every shape of leaf and native flower buds.
Great ferns and not-yet-blooming yarrow and honeysuckle.
Wildflowers and protective trees had regrown, some towered hundreds of feet into the sky – a remnant of the fact this island, along with England, Wales and Scotland, had been lush with forests long ago.
There was a palpable energy in the warm air, drawn taut. Merely being here felt like dipping a bucket into a well, drawing up something he didn’t even know was inside.
Kyan touched a tree, felt the distant thrum of its power.
Calling, calling.
He removed his hand, flexing it.
‘Anything?’ Nicole asked.
He shook his head mutely, then cleared his throat.
They began to walk, the ground loamy and the distinct hum of natural magic warming his every step.
The forest had been restored by nature over the years, but there were marks in the land that couldn’t be erased, like the great magic-carved fissure leading deeper into the trees.
Kyan crouched near its edge. It was only a few metres deep, but whatever force had made the mark had also scalded the earth white. He scraped up some soil to find it cooler than the rest, with no pulse of life in it. It crumbled between his fingers curiously.
He couldn’t help but think of the strange being that had killed the Druids. Had it done this?
Above, the sky was shifting deeper into burnished silver and iron.
Looking around to find no one was the strangest, most eerie part.
This place had been his home. Now it was alone in time.
He felt the loss in the quiet: the lack of Druids collecting herbs or moving through the trees.
The lack of a population. There was deep magic in the place, but it lived in the ground and plants, pulsing with the earth in latent veins, no longer moving up and out of the earth to dance with the Druids as it once had.
As he looked around, he spotted something in the tree to his left, a momentary lustre. A crystal at the tip of a branch. No, not a branch—
A staff.
A Druid staff that had been swallowed up by a growing tree from where it had been dropped, or slashed from a Druid’s hand.
But in the glade-green and the sacred quiet, there was also … a surprising peace. Coming back to chaos or a barren world would have been worse. But to see that this place had flourished over the scar of such destruction choked him. It was gone. That time and his people were gone.
But there was new life.
He looked at Nicole, her hair gilded by the last few beams of light. She was a vision of hope through time, eyes full of soft affection and awe. It made him fall in love with her a little bit more.
Every time he was in her presence she taught him how much he could feel.
For a moment, he got such a startling sense of déjà vu he had to shake himself.
‘Lead the way?’ she asked, a smile on her lips.
Then he did something he’d never in a thousand years have expected. Not here.
He smiled.
Nicole
HER WHOLE LIFE NICOLE HAD SOUGHT THE SUPERNATURAL. She’d studied it, read about it, even been able to glimpse it from afar. In Estwood, she’d killed a piece of it, and unleashed another in herself.
But Nicole had never been in a place that felt so supernatural.
Kyan’s face had become a mask of wary concentration once they’d stepped over the boundary and he’d led her along the cracked ground.
Seeing him in the dense green foliage stripped away the modern ages.
Here, he was the Irish warrior of myth. Honed with lethal, supernatural power; regal as a lost prince. Tall and dark and with a palpable edge.
But it also gave her glimpses of him in the past: as a boy racing through the ferns, echoes of laughter. Then older: the leather breastplate, the younger face being honed into what he would become.
There is more, something in her mind whispered.
It felt like she was looking at a painting and unable to articulate its details.
‘Why is the soil like this?’ she asked.
‘I think they did a powerful spell to try to defend themselves.’
She could See that, like some natural disaster, a great cleaving that followed. But there was—
A girl on a white horse, racing, racing away even though she didn’t want to.
Tears tearing at her eyes as she shrieked her grief with emotion that blasted the trees around her, forever marking them.
They were sending her away.
She was drowning in their magic. In the great unending task she’d been given.
But she didn’t want to leave. Not now, not when it had come—
Nicole sucked in a breath, finding Kyan had steadied her.
‘The creature that killed them,’ she managed, trying to tamp down the panic the vision seeded in her stomach. ‘You said it looked like a man.’
He nodded, concerned.
It was no man, and no beast he’d ever come across, he’d said when he’d first opened up to her about his past.
But the term creature prickled her mind with wrongness.
‘What did you See?’ Kyan asked.
‘I – I’m not sure.’
They continued, coming to a clearing, where Kyan slowed. Amid the colossal trees was a raised circular dais in pale stone, like the base of a long-lost temple.
Before it, the otherworldly white horse stood as if waiting for them.
As they approached, it moved again, leading them closer.
It revealed a white dolmen on the dais, small enough to act as an altar.
Its stone was moon bright in the gloom. Despite the great horrors that had happened in these woods, there was an incredible sense of calm here.
A deep quiet, even if a disquiet ran through it.
Around the stone were semi-shattered columns, carved like trees in serpentine-green stone.
Nicole ran her hand over the marble, polished as glass beneath her palm, an artistic form the world had never been able to see, hadn’t even known existed.
‘What is this?’ Nicole breathed.
‘It’s some of the Druid city,’ Kyan said quietly.
Millennia-old Irish patterns were inscribed into the columns, those swirls and weaves of an interconnected world – of supernaturals, gods, and humans.
Life and death and rebirth.
The land, the sea, the sky.
The past, the present, the future.
To think, there was so much of this history hidden or lost.
No, purposefully erased.
Kyan stepped up onto the dais, drawn to the stone, but as he did, they both heard the unleashing of an arrow.
Nicole didn’t have time to scream as it shot towards him.
She threw herself closer without thinking, a warning cry barely scraping her throat as the arrow jerked in mid-flight and speared into a tree trunk instead.
Nicole whirled back to see—
A … dog?
A huge silver-coated Irish wolfhound whose head reached her chest, its size nearly as otherworldly as the look in its intelligent amber eyes.
Nicole staggered closer to Kyan, grasping his arm, relief making her light-headed. It must have been some long-forgotten trap to deter thieves, or—
‘Don’t mind Failinis,’ said a low voice.
Kyan’s head snapped to the young woman across the temple ruin, her long white hair unbound. Flourishing in the wind, the ends were a dark emerald green. She was limned in subtle muscle under her brown clothes and had a beautiful, unearthly quality.
While she looked to be in her early-to-mid-twenties, there was an agelessness in her eyes, lined dark to turn the steel in them into an almost sensual cat-eye. Around her, or perhaps breathing off her, was the incredible feel of green, tinged with darkness.
This was the Druid the Wake had sent Logan to kill.
The Druid who might have answers to so many of their questions.
‘Apologies for the trap, I laid it so long ago I forgot it was there.’
She looked at Nicole for a half second, and then her green eyes slid to where Kyan had positioned himself beside her.
‘Túatha Dé leat, mo dheartháir,’ the stranger said.
Nicole didn’t know much Irish, but she’d been teaching herself a few simple phrases over the months she and Kyan had been apart. Evidently, that was all she needed.
Because if Nicole was right, that would mean the Druid girl, last of her kind, and possibly the key to this entire mystery, had just called Kyan …
Her brother.