‘You’ll find all information required for this mission with the codename reference.’ The Messenger handed Kyan an expensive card with one word looped on it in an elegant scrawl.
Choose Nicole, or the last remaining connection to his people.
Logan slapped Kyan on the back, hard.
Don’t break his wrist, he ordered himself.
Logan laughed, satisfaction winking coldly in his eyes. ‘Well, pup, I suppose it’s time to see who gets to their prey first. Hungry?’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Nicole
NICOLE CUT THROUGH THE SHADOWED MANORWITH A SPEEDshe hadn’t expected. Hundreds of mythological creatures and paintings swirled through her mind with theories on why the Banshee was here, and what she was becoming in response.
But right now, she didn’t need to know, she just needed to let her bodytakeher.
Nicole reached up and back as she skidded into a grand living space to tear her shredded satin pyjama shirt, allowing her body what it needed: the freedom to release the new wings peeling from her skin.
They were paper-thin and delicate, despite the new architecture of muscle and bone swiftly developing around her chest and ribs to support them.
Then she felt the magic, like a midnight whisper beneath her skin.
She was a Darksprite, she realised, as darkness leached from her in an inky sparkle and she shimmered in and out of visibility. Despite the name, they were often the same height as the average human – if a bit smaller.
Abilities: flying, night-vision, invisibility, mischief-magic.
One of the perfect predators for a type of screaming Banshee – the Ban-Sìth.
Nicole shuddered with invisibility, but the sound waves of the Ban-Sìth’s scream slammed into her anyway. The ground lifted away as she was thrown forward, bone near splintering at the force thatblasted her into the decorated wall. She staggered back, her teeth singing, her body feeling so much smaller and more breakable even with the fizz of new magic in her blood.
She needed a logical location to dispatch the Ban-Sìth, and out in the manor’s sprawling grounds wouldn’t be it.
So Nicole tore through the rooms in this strange new body, her feet barely skimming the floors, and headed for the most wickedly exquisite room in the whole manor.
The Hell Staircase.
The rectangular room was built over three storeys and consisted of two large staircases that descended to a lower level where another set of stairs went down again. But the steep and sudden drop wasn’t the only thing that would give her an advantage. The artwork was.
Because the painted ceiling would stop anything in its tracks.
Nicole sped right through the Heaven Room’s gods and creatures and into the Hell Staircase.
She let her body disappear as she skidded to a stop before the right-hand stairs. She shuddered with the unfamiliar sensation, but it allowed her to dart to the side as the Ban-Sìth burst in after her and looked up at the flame-licked anarchy of the fresco, spilling from the ceiling and down the walls.
When Nicole had first seen it, it had reminded her so vividly of the lawless legends of the Dark Ages and apocalypse paintings.
The great beast at the centre of the ceiling was swallowing, or perhaps discharging, chaos. It looked more like something out ofHowl’s Moving Castlethan other depictions she’d seen. The creatures streaming around it weren’t the twiggy, nefarious beings of Hieronymus Bosch or the animalistic creatures of Italian altarpieces. She hadn’t been initially unnerved by its gaping, fiery mouth and dopey eyes, so much as fascinated by all the other details and the sheerscaleof the double-height frescoes that blazed throughout.
Now, the strangeness of the creatures streamed into her mind: serpent-tailed men with silver hair, a Gorgon grasping her own snaky tresses, a flying woman that looked half kangaroo, and various creatures of the classical Underworld clawing at the walls.
The Ban-Sìth scanned the staircase, confused by the sudden array of creatures.
With her new power, Nicole’s vision had morphed, so the floating Ban-Sìth stood out like a glaring beacon against the infernal display above them.
Muscle shifted in her back and torso as Nicole willed her body to fly upwards. Her bare feet left the floor and the room dropped away as her clear, slightly iridescent wings took her up into the ceiling. Invisible, she let herself blend into the many painted creatures, her feet skidding softly against the cool fresco, her fingers stroking over monster and myth as she scanned the room for something she could use.
‘Come out, Empyreal,’ the Ban-Sìth rasped.
