Which meant the person who had entered the house was a stranger.
All that new Empyrean focus she’d been quietly trying to hone zeroed in on the stranger’s clipped footsteps.
She heard her father leave his room and knew he’d be racing towards them, but the house was a maze and it would take him a minute. Nicole blew out a few of the candles, smoke coiling up in the sudden darkness.
She picked up her palette knife. The almost-blade was rounded but not sharp, used for scooping paint and blending colours, but she could make a weapon of it if the stranger was dangerous and didn’t have a kill scent.
Still, Nicole hoped her suspicions were correct.
But, surely Elisabetta would have let Verin know if she was coming back?
‘Bells,’ Nicole said, kneeling beside her sister. ‘Bells, wake up.’
She barely stirred.
Nicole stilled as a shadow shifted in the opposite hallway—
She would have dived on the figure if they weren’t coming from the bedrooms and she hadn’t caught a glimpse of the grey in their hair, like pure silver.
Her initial relaxation at the sight of her father was momentarily eclipsed by the brief colour of his eyes. They looked sodark.
He moved closer with the ease of a man who had hidden how capable and lethal he was his entire life. His now normal, storm-lashed eyes landed on hers and scanned her for panic, injury. She didn’t miss the gun in his hand, held low, and loaded.
‘I’m fine,’ she mouthed, not wanting to risk speaking in case the intruder could hear.
He held up a piece of Lawna’s tech, which blinked a warning red:SUPERNATURAL INTRUDER.
It must have alerted him.
‘You herd, I guard,’ he mouthed back.
He raised his gun.
Just in case, the action said.
Nicole nodded, slipping past him towards the footsteps coming their way.
Her Empyrean senses loomed up like a wave, noting the stranger’s breath, their gait. They had a steady pace, weighed down by something. It set warning bells ringing with the pulse in her ears.
Most of the lamps in the halls were low or unlit, given the late hour. With the threat of danger, moving in the dark made her feel even more inhuman, summoning the hunter beneath her skin.
She forced herself to breathe properly but couldn’t help the confidence that bloomed with each silent step around to the front of the house. She noticed something else as she stopped smothering herself: a pulse of awareness to Kyan and the bind that connected them like a gold, glowing wire coiling through the distance.
The intruder didn’t go to Verin’s library. Nor the bedrooms.
The studio was shadowed when the stranger’s silhouette stilled there. Bells’ chaise was unoccupied save for the crumpled sheets and smoky shadows. Their father must have carried Bells out to hide her.
The figure paused.
Nicole stopped silently about fifteen feet behind them.
Her father moved in from a right-hand room in the corridor, where she could hear Bells’ steady, still-sleeping breathing. Nicole held a warning hand out to him as she moved closer.
She smelled a subtle perfume – something floral – stone dust, and the scent of night air.
‘Turn around slowly, and tell me who you are,’ Nicole said, Influence pouring down her vocal cords like warm honey. God, it felt so good to use it. Usesomething.
The frozen figure turned.
