PROLOGUE
Nicole
WHEN I WAS A GIRL, MY FATHER TOLD USSTORIES OF THE GODS.
I don’t know when he started. Perhaps when I was a flicker of life in my mother’s womb. Perhaps only after she’d been killed and he needed ways to soothe us in the long, mother-less hours of the night. But I remember the tales he told on endless drives as we fled from place to place, or lay down in unfamiliar beds to sleep.
I remember them most clearly after we’d settled in Estwood for long enough that he’d bought an armchair we could all sit in. Me on his left, Bells curled on his chest, and Dylan on his right. Always with the steady reassurance of his voice and a fire flickering cosily, all clad in fresh pyjamas with full bellies; the security and wards activated, and the scent of his forbidden herbal tea steaming gently on the side table.
There, he read us the myths and folklore from my mother’s books.
Some creatures we’d already encountered, like the Empyreal assassin my father had been too late to stop.
Or a Witch in a herbal shop who asked, with too much dark curiosity, ‘And what might you be?’ We left swiftly enough that I never saw her again.
But I did see blood spattered on my father’s boots.
So, when he told us that there had been two types of gods in the Irish pantheon, as glittering and powerful as the cosmos, I wondered if danger would follow.
‘There were the Old Gods and the Demon Gods,’ he explained,turning a large, gilded page. ‘The Demon Gods – the Fomóiri – ruled Ireland for a time, until the Old Gods arrived. Those were the Morrígan’s people – borne on a silver mist from another world. And for a while, the two lived in harmony, until a war began.’
The illustrations shimmered and moved. Their colours were bright as crushed gems or iridescent mother-of-pearl and each page was decorated with Celtic gold edges, as if to keep the beings drawn within contained. There, the gods of the Irish pantheon fought an epic mythological war that carved into the Emerald Isle, tore stars from the sundering blood-soaked sky, and wielded divine weapons that arced through the pages he turned with a razored echo.
I learned later how much he’d simplified the tales; how these weren’t the first of the beings that came to Ireland, nor the last. That the pagan religions of the supernatural world had been tucked into the shadows of time, quietly surviving while human society took over, their stories remaining in paintings and myths, now taught only in universities, galleries or old folk songs.
They were a hoard of divine gold, teaching me that, above and beyond, in realms I couldn’t see, there were beings more deadly and ancient than I could fathom. More powerful than the slumbering urges inside me, or the myriad of creatures my mother had warned me about and my father went to dangerous lengths to protect me from.
‘What did they want, Daddy?’ I’d asked quietly, holding onto Bells’ tiny foot, her cheeks flushed, her eyes moving behind her gold lashes as if witnessing frantic dreams.
He turned the radiant pages. ‘What would any god want? To be loved? Power? Who can say? But one thing is true: many beings – human and otherwise – crave power so complete that it consumes society itself. And if you control a society’s beliefs, you have the world in your hands.’
‘Who would want that?’ Dylan had asked, eyes concerned, a quiet seriousness to him that had lingered since the night of our mother’s murder.
Our father had sighed, chest rising and falling. ‘Who indeed?’
But I didn’t fear. I knew my father would protect us with his case of wicked weapons.
It wasn’t until much later that I realised I needed to question thelengths he would go to to do just that. That, while I knew of my mother’s immortal darkness, I did not yet understand my father’s.
But I would learn soon enough, as I would learn the truth in the words that Callum later told me, as we hunted for a stolen painting in a night-bathed museum.
‘There’s one thing that you will learn very quickly around immortals, Nicole.
‘And that’s that the past never stays dead.’
CHAPTER ONE
Callum
Two hours after the binding
CALLUM STOOD OUTSIDE THE EMPTY PALMERHOUSE.
Despite the daylight, the Hunter’s Moon lingered in the sky above, faded as a myth.
It was a sweet little abode, he supposed, as his eyes trailed over the human facade. But then, it was so like Freya to hide in plain sight. Not that Dylan and his sisters could do much to suppress their true essence. They were too striking, despite everything they did to counteract it.
The hint of a smile quirked on Callum’s mouth.
