The mist over the estate’s grounds swirled like her metamorphic dreams with each action, stealing away the air until she couldn’t breathe. It choked her with the ghost of acrid scents: smoke and charred flesh; linseed oil and pigments; sulphur so strong her eyes burned.
Fear clawed up her throat at the thought of losing control again, at the memories of her first transformation. The tear of skin. The spray of blood. The venom, liquid and sweet in her mouth. Losing that control had kept her alive. She had unleashed herself to survive and it had kept Kyan safe. Kept her family safe.
But it left them more unmoored than ever.
‘Focus, Nicole,’ her father ordered, bringing her back to the moment and the fightshe was in the middle of, grounding her in the morning.
The last remnants of the dream faded as she ducked beneath his wooden practice sword and it whipped over her head in a rush of air, neatly stopping before the elaborate metal and gold gate of the palatial house before them. She parried, forcing him backwards, the gravel of the great oval drive crunching beneath her trainers.
He needn’t have been concerned. Her reflexes were good, even if her focus was scattered. It was her urges she was worried about; the immortal predator that simmered in her veins like liquid gold and plagued her with a low, insistent desire tohunt.
One that had only grown more seductive in the six months since they’d left Estwood.
She forced her mind onto the training and the facade of Burghley House looming ahead. Despite seeing it every day as she jogged through the grounds – its newly leafed trees and lawns lush from pre-summer rains – it never failed to enchant her.
The silver-white of the limestone manor glowed in panels of sunlight, its wealth of windows and mix of towers and spires glittering. Built in the Renaissance with all the extravagant details of Elizabethan architecture, it was a moonstruck fairy tale in the English countryside.
Nicole danced forward, lighter in her body now. Faster, stronger. She drove her father backwards over a central oval of lawn and into the house with restrained ease.
Inside, it was Nicole’s dream home.
Each room was artfully decorated with artefacts, curios, and silk-clad furniture, many with frescoes that spilled from the ceilings and down the walls to the floors. Layer upon layer of exquisite art drenched the house in masterpieces. There were more than in Westmoore House. More than in any museum she’d been to.
Nicole swept over the gleaming wood floors, her dark workout gear offering no restriction. Her father’s matched hers, sun beams catching the silver in his stubble and his light brown, almost blond hair.
Nicole blocked as he struck to her right, the force of it strong enough to reverberate down her arms. He was using all of his strength, his movements swift and sharp, revealing the years of fighting he’d done with her mother. It perked awake that huntress side of her, but the newness of it – of using a weapon that wasn’t her own body – made her feel … unruly.
‘Keep your knees bent for ease of movement,’ he said. ‘Don’t lock up when your mind starts working. Flow.’
They’d started using weapons to purge some of her excess energy, since hunting wasn’t an option. She couldn’t risk running into one of the Wake’s Empyreals just to quench this need. A need that didn’t make sense, considering there were no homicidal creatures around, and therefore no real reason she’d been feeling so … dangerous.
Instead, weapons taught her new aspects of balance, drive, strength, and control, and practising through the house made her so paranoid about damaging a single piece of art that sweat, caused by actual, blessed strain and the low heat of spring, slid down her spine.
Evidently, the frustration was bleeding into her dreams.
As they backed into the library, Nicole’s reflection flashed in the glass-boxed shelves. She had pulled her longer hair back into a sleek ponytail, since she’d butchered every attempt to replicate the braid Kyan had woven the last night they were together. An echo of heat and yearning seared her chest, while the scarred dot on her arm – the binding mark that joined them together – seemed to hum in response.
The one she had to wait six more months to repeat.
She tried to control the feelings, the urge to use more strength. Tohoneit, as her body and face had been honed by this new, capable darkness.
So with each slash, she recited the items in her mother’s last message:
A painting.
An artefact.
Something of divine provenance.
They’d come to Burghley House on the trail of her mother’s clue: ‘my last lead hidden with my painter’, tracking the artist from a concoction of paint from her portrait, and one of her father’s visions. But instead of finding the immortal Italian artist Elisabetta Sirani, they’d discovered the palatial manor’s enigmatic owner instead.
‘Verin,’ Nicole greeted, as they moved further into the library.
The most powerful Vampire in England.
He watched from across the mahogany-carved space, his pale skin gilded by a lamp and as alabaster and faintly veined as marble. Though he was deathly still, the wink of partial light on the crystal glass of blood between his elegant fingers had given him away.
Turned in his fifties, Verin was over five hundred years old, but neither his delicate height nor slim frame muted the regal aspect of his dark, historic eyes, which were mildly amused as usual.
