Then he did something he’d never in a thousand years have expected. Not here.
He smiled.
Nicole
HER WHOLE LIFE NICOLE HAD SOUGHT THESUPERNATURAL.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 aplacethat 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 whenithad 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 termcreatureprickled 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.
