A dreamy beam of sunlight transformed her red hair into a gleaming copper flame. It cascaded in Botticelli-like curls over her shoulders to her waist. Nicole wanted to describe her desperately, to save her forever in her mind. To sketch her – no, paint. To try and capture the colours. The pale cream of her skin and the exact shade of her hair. My god, if she didn’t get it right she might go crazy—
She wanted to stare for the rest of her life. To understand every otherworldly detail. How the Muse’s features were so strange but together so world-altering in their beauty. The longer nose. The deeply undulating lips, full and voluptuous, as if someone had taken a paintbrush and languidly, lovingly, crafted them. And her large eyes. There was no guile there, no sharpness, only a world to fall into …
She felt a touch on her arm. Warm, soft, but firm. Then the gentle dig of nails.
Remi.
Nicole startled and blinked, realising she’d been staring and spiralling.
The Muse’s face didn’t change, and yet she couldfeelthe woman smiling at her.
‘I – we’d—’ Nicole began, but her mouth felt stuffed with cotton.
‘Lures don’t work quite the same on other lure-creatures,’ Remi said, aiming a warning look at the beauty. She didn’t seem as fazed by the supernatural who saturated the very air in the room.
A warm flush of embarrassment spread up Nicole’s neck, and she took a moment to recalibrate as the Muse’s eyes floated to Remi.
‘You must forgive me, I won’t play so much.’
As if a tidepool slowly stilled and stopped its drugging tug, the Muse dampened herself somehow. Nicole felt herself restabilise. Part of her was grateful, the other part deeply sad.
‘So,’ the Muse said, in an almost haunting monotone that hummed through Nicole’s bones. ‘Kyan has sent me two artists. How wonderful. Will you sing while she paints?’
Nicole cleared her throat. ‘No. We’re not here to paint, we’re here because my mother left a message with you and we need your help. Her name was—’
‘Freya,’ the Muse answered. She examined Nicole for a searing moment before slowly sinking into a Louis XIV armchair, its fabric lambent as gold leaf. She gestured with the merest waft of her pale fingers for them to take seats on the ornate couch opposite.
Nicole sidestepped closer and sank down as Remi joined her.
‘Yes,’ Nicole said. ‘You knew her?’
‘Oh, Freya was instrumental in helping underground women’s painting societies until they were able to announce themselves to the fragile male minds of the time. Heaven forbid a woman puts paint to canvas … Yet it was the men who were so feverish in their expressions, their passions, that many of the poor human girls could not survive their mad affections: like dearest Elizabeth.’
She looked away for a long moment. Her glorious features were almost unmoving, but a sort of eternal bleakness entered her eyes.
‘Did you know that was her name?’ she continued. ‘Elizabeth Siddal. Millais kept her in a bathtub to serve as his drowning Ophelia until she got pneumonia. I could survive their single-minded quests for beauty, she did not. I made sure the other girls did.’ She raised her delicate chin to a painting on the mantel Remi had lingered over.
A Black woman, nude and depicted as a Siren on a seashore, her skin radiant, her textured hair strung with pearls, a spill of shells and treasure making up the glinting beach beneath her.
‘Who was she?’ Remi asked.
‘One of the lesser-known human muses of the Pre-Raphaelites, Fanny Eaton. She escaped their clutches, thankfully. Last I heard, she’d lived a long life, far away from here.’
‘That’s why you drove the artists mad,’ Remi realised, understanding shading her tone. Nicole thought of the terrible and tragic lives of many of those painters and the women who had been their lovers, wives, muses.
The Muse’s eyes slid to her best friend. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
A lie. That must have been why Kyan was sent to hunt her all those years ago.
‘I was their Lamia; their poisoner. Their Circe who turned men to pigs and Aphrodite who bent the will of men so they could no longer be held responsible for that curse calledlust. Their Helen and Lilith and Eve, capable of damning civilisations with nothing more than beauty and temptation. Or their Nymphs, those dreamy secret-keepers. But my powers did notmakethem doanything; their own hunger and greed did. What happened to them was their own artifice.’
She looked over the city.
‘But what is history, if not the long script of blame placed on a woman’s body? What is beauty, but the revealer of the viewer’s evil? How it draws out jealousy. Unwanted desire. Obsession. Madness. Beauty is a powerful unmasker, and yet the one who reacts to the beauty is never damned … So now I am here. Trapped … as if in a house of water.’
Like she was slowly drowning.
‘I’m sorry,’ Nicole said, her chest tight, a hot pool of anger rippling in her gut. She saw the same pain reflected in Remi’s eyes. ‘If there’s anything we can do—’
