•What would we do with them? Could they be used to bargain with the Wake? Or only destroy them?
•Is Kyan okay?
She scratched out the last one. Again.
‘If we don’t find something by the end of the week,’ Nicole said, ‘I’m going to press Verin for more information about Elisabetta so we can try and find her.’
Dylan sighed. ‘Nicole, she’s with an extremely private supernatural faction that sometimes kills people who attempt to enter uninvited.’
‘I know, but …’
I can’t do this any more.
She swallowed the words down.
It wasn’t that shecouldn’t. It was that the need to hunt felt like it was subsuming her identity. She didn’twantto resist. It was so convincing. So natural. And yet she was in a situation where she couldn’t freely use the part of her she’d unleashed and embraced in Estwood.
It had saved her that night, and learning to manage it would be invaluable. But training it was the issue.
So she didn’t say that she could keep waiting.
Instead, she ate her breakfast and thanked her brother, then headed back to one of the lavishly painted rooms for another day of combing through her mother’s bestiaries and copies of every painting Elisabetta had ever done.
She wanted to scream; she wanted tohunt.
All she could do was keep researching.
But tonight, she was going to get answers from their mother’s portrait one way or another. Because for once in her life, Nicole wasn’t sure how much longer she could look at art and ponder its secrets.
CHAPTER FIVE
Kyan
‘LOOK AT THIS,’ KYAN SAID BY WAY OF GREETING,SLIDINGthe 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’sThe 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.
