With a deft hand, he pulled out his phone and dialled a number he hadn’t called in a long time.
Having expected it to go to voicemail like usual, a flicker of surprise made his eyebrows rise as the recipient answered, but said nothing.
‘You’ll be pleased to know he’s ready,’ Callum drawled, glancing down the street to where Westmoore House was situated beside the dunes, obscured at this angle by other beach houses.
To think, so much had been hidden in this unassuming town, questions he’d been waiting millennia to answer.
There was a long pause.
Then, ‘How can you be sure?’
Callum looked down to his left forearm where the oath’s scar sat beneath his sleeve. A silvered moon. He felt it then: the sheersatisfaction, the sense of a reckoning. How long had he waited for this?
Too long.
And it was fuckingdelicious.
He laughed and his power throbbed in response. ‘Just trust me.’
Callum hung up and skimmed his gaze over the house, wondering which room had been Dylan’s; remembering the little note he’d slipped inside the Empyreal’s pocket as Dylan had stalked away from Lanhydrock’s woods like he could get away from his sister’s binding. From Callum. From the fate that tied them together.
Callum sighed, throwing a look up at the stars he knew to be watching.
It’d all come out soon enough.
Kyan would be pissed, but what was new?
And Dylan, well. There weren’t many people who shuttered out Callum’s charms quite so stubbornly. He’d have a lot of fun wearing Dylan down; learning him. Properly this time.
Until then, he had a few more things to put in order.
Callum sank into his silver sports car and it purred awake with a shudder. As he glided from the town and onto winding coastal roads, a satisfied grin graced his full lips.
What was this long,longlife without a few surprises anyway?
CHAPTER TWO
Nicole
Six months after the binding
WHEN NICOLE DIDN’T DREAM OF KYAN, SHEDREAMED OF THEWild Hunt.
It wasn’t always like the folklore: with ghostly visions of riders astride black horses, near feral from nightly hunts; exhaustion steaming from their inky coats.
Most often, it painted itself like the Last Judgement: those epic chaos artworks where jewel tones became blood and fire, and cool tones became the last tear in a peaceful sky beyond the deluge of bodies. Where creatures were clawing themselves free of a smouldering underworld and overwhelming the humans above.
So often those images adorned ceilings or great altarpieces. But in the dreams, they swarmed over her and painted themselves beneath her feet. They moved, swirled, and dragged her deep – both out of herself andintoherself. Down and down and down into that goddess-touched place that had pearled to life in Estwood. Birthed of rage and ruin and the primal need to protect that had transformed her forever.
Beneath it, though, there was something pulling her. A spiral. A tug. So familiar it stirred a longing that turned her throat hot and set her soul seeking. That often woke her.
The memory of it chased her now as she moved through their new training routine.
Strike.
Parry.
Strike again.
