Callum smiled. ‘Good. Then you have a lick of sense. After you?’ He stood aside, eyes dancing with challenge.
Dylan let himself engage for a split second with the swell of Callum’s pupils, knowing damn well his own reacted the same way.
As if it wasn’t dangerous enough.
He wondered how to get Callum to answer his questions. If he could try and lessen the Empyreal’s impact on him with more exposure, to keep a clearer head and glean more information – all of that could start tonight.
‘Fine,’ he said.
But the word was drowned out by the sound of Bells’ scream.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Nicole
NICOLE BURST INTO BELLS’SHADOWEDBEDROOM TO FINDher father already there, checking her sister’s vitals. The curtains to the left were drawn, but a fire flickered gently.
Huge, mythological tapestries watched from the walls, their glade scenes in a palette of olive, blues, and warm woods, granting the space a peaceful, sewn softness. Evidently, it hadn’t helped tonight.
Nicole gripped the edge of the four-poster bed, its leafy carvings biting into her palm. ‘What happened?’ she panted, Kyan at her shoulder.
‘She’s asleep,’ their father answered. He leaned over Bells and opened one of her eyes to show the whites were crossed with bloody veins. ‘She’s having a vision.’
Dylan ran in, Callum behind him.
Nicole perched on the bed’s silk-embroidered sheets and took her sister’s cool fingers. ‘Bells,’ she said softly.
The moment she made contact, Bells’ eyes flashed open and the blood quickly returned to normal.
‘Bells, what happened?’ Nicole asked.
‘I’m fine,’ she said weakly, but the purple beneath her eyes said otherwise. ‘A vision. I – I think I saw the Wild Hunt.’
Kyan tensed, but it was Callum that asked, ‘What makes you say that?’
Bells explained the dying creature and the killer writing a bloody message. The swarming mist-like form of the Hunt, and the mysterious hunter within.
‘Then I saw another death that scared me.’ She looked suddenly embarrassed at realising it was her scream that had brought them all running. ‘But the Hunt looked just like the paintings you showed me,’ she said to Nicole.
Kyan filled them in about the inaccuracy of the Wake’s archives and how the Wake must be summoning the Hunt to trigger a Dark Age.
‘So, it’s like a dark cloud that people move in and out of?’ Dylan asked from the foot of the bed.
‘It seems to be a portable prison,’ Callum answered. ‘Its hunters might live within it, bound to the Hunt so they can collect the souls of dangerous supernaturals and make sure they don’t linger on this plain. Once, all souls went to the Otherworld to be reborn. Now, the dangerous ones need somewhere that can keep them contained.’
‘These hunters, they’re dead Empyreals?’ Nicole asked. Kyan had once told her that he believed when an Empyreal died they could be recruited by the Goddess of Death into the Hunt.
‘Possibly,’ Callum said. ‘But no one’s been able to confirm. It’s frustratingly secretive and invisible to humans and almost all creatures, except Death Seers, evidently.’
‘We – we don’t know if that’s what I am yet,’ Bells said. ‘There’s still time for my powers to settle.’
‘Of course,’ Callum said, more gently than Nicole would have expected.‘Legend says it’s had leaders from a range of mythos who are bound to rule it for a time, then pass on.’
‘Pass on where?’ their father asked.
‘Once, I would have said the Otherworld,’ Callum replied. ‘Now …’ He shrugged.
Nicole recalled the name from a distant mythological story and supernatural religions. ‘And, the Otherworld is the place the Irish gods came from?’
