by Ana Calin
A faint voice reaches us, “But not against Saphira’s. Paint him, Saph.”
Vivienne’s regained consciousness! I stroke the tendrils off her forehead enthusiastically. “Viva, thank God! How are you feeling?”
She squeezes my hand weakly and whispers, “Hurry, Saph, before it’s too late. Paint him.”
“Whom?”
“Zed.”
CHAPTER XXVIII
SUPERPOWERS
Vivienne is much too weak to move. But she’s back to herself, she’s cold, and dependant on me to cover her nakedness with thick duvets, and to arrange her pillow.
“How could that possibly help?” I inquire, still unsure of what I heard.
“Please, just trust me Saph,” she says weakly.
“But I—”
“Their voices,” she continues, her eyes wide and fixed on a spot on the ceiling as if reliving the horrors of her recent past, “their voices seemed to ooze from under their hoods when they spoke, like the scraping song of devils. They kept me in chains, hanging from a rod like an animal to be roasted, that’s how they transported me back here. They thought I was out, but I was aware. Aware, but so afraid, that I seemed feverish and unconscious. They talked about the portrait you made of the Marquis, and what it meant. You must do the same for Zed, Saphira, I beg of you, and you must do it fast.”
My eyes dart from her to Joyous, who slowly approached us again. I can see in his eyes that he understands more than I do.
“But of, course,” he whispers as he wraps his mind around whatever Vivienne means, then exclaims, “Of course!”
He clasps my shoulders and asks me what I need in order to paint, since my tools aren’t at the manor. I look around to gather my thoughts, but the only things I can think of on the spot are clay or anything pasty, even toothpaste and sauce. At Joyous’s signal the young butler flings the double doors open and speeds out into the corridor.
Joyous’s unsettling, honey eyes inspect me from head to toes like those of a man who’s just had a revelation that he can’t get enough of.
“I still don’t understand, Joyous,” I mutter. “Even if this whole undertaking is supposed to help Zed in some way, I doubt it’ll work if I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“You didn’t know what you were doing when you painted Kieran either,” he says.
“Yes, but with Kieran I—” It hits me. “Of course!”
In an instant all the sense in the world swirls and settles in my mind. I’d put what I felt for Kieran into the portrait I’d made of him, I’d used my bare hands on it, I tried so hard to feel him and understand him because, even though I wasn’t yet aware of it, I was in love with him.
I walk slowly to the window at the far end, the ragged rim of the asylum-patient gown I’m still wearing trailing after me on the floor, growing heavier with every step like a cumbersome cloak. The huge responsibility starts weighing on my shoulders. I feel their presence out there, the presence of the black monks who stand ready to cast their curses against us, spitting out their plague like snakes their venom, and the realization that I might be our small group’s last chance chill my bones.
Neither Vivienne nor Joyous say another word, but I can sense their eyes on my back. A wave of self-pity washes over me. They expect far too much. We’re all doomed, if all this depends on me. I crash on the floor, bracing myself and crying desperately. My eyeballs hurt, that’s how hard I press them against my knees.
“Saphira, there’s no time to lose,” Joyous says.
Indeed, no time to lose. I slowly gather myself off the floor, wiping my nose with my sleeve.
Joyous stands by the stove where a bed sheet now hangs from the mantelpiece, the sides of it spread and hooked around the side posts. It looks like a small cinema screen. This is the canvas I’m supposed to use, along with the sauce and toothpaste and crayons and other improvised tools that the young butler managed to find, and place at my disposal on a platter by the improvised canvas.
The young butler now also stares at me with hopeful eyes, while Joyous does the same in a more self-controlled way. As for Vivienne, she’s lying behind me on the divan, but I feel the pressure of her expecting gaze.
With a trembling hand I take one of the crayons—soft tip, thick black lead; really good quality. Focusing on such details helps me mentally leave the surroundings, and ignore the pressure.
The crayon’s black lead tip touches the sheet, leaving a dusty trail behind as it slides downwards in what represents the first line of Zed’s stony cheek. It began, and it must be finished.
The next line is more confident, and the ones that follow slide from a softer hand, one that loses span and allows reflex and flowing moves to take over. There’s more tension in one side of Zed’s face—the one I drew with more controlled, reason-guided strokes in the beginning—but the other half loses the stony aspect, and reveals some of the softness of character I sensed behind it during his talk with Yvette. I immerse myself in his confession about how he met Kieran, feeling his loyalty, but also his vulnerability.
The scar Kieran had left on his face the night Zed attacked me was already only a fading white trail the last time I saw him, but I draw it nonetheless, making the portrait more human. I mix the materials the butler prepared, and use the pasty composition to build Zed’s features and the shades of a real-life face using my bare hands, just like I had with the picture of Kieran Slate.
And just like with that picture, I’m now fully drenched with the thick liquid of Zed’s vital energy. It seems to flow from my fingertips, smearing the face now looking at me from the white sheet.
With the last touch to his eyes he seems to come to life. I take a few steps back, marvelling at a mere sketch expressing the essence of the man so strongly. But soon a bubonic blister appears on the side of his forehead, looking as if someone is burning the sheet with a cigarette at first, and then spreading down his nose like a trail of popping black warts that take over all of the picture within moments. I climb up from the trance-like state I’ve been in, and can’t believe my own eyes.
“This is extraordinary,” Joyous whispers as he walks to my side, looking at the picture with a stricken expression of his ever-present grin. “The portrait absorbs the curse from the flesh. Everything that harmed Zed now passes over to the picture.”
“It worked!” Vivienne manages with as much enthusiasm as she can muster, while the young butler inspects the blackening picture closely with an open mouth and trembling fingers seeking to touch it, but not quite daring to.
“It’s amazing, Saphira,” Joyous says. “You have the power to make . . . Oh my God . . ..”
“Voodoo portraits,” the young butler finishes the sentence for him.
“Voodoo what?” I inquire, bewildered.
“You’re a soul trapper, Saph,” Vivienne whispers from behind me.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE PICTURE OF KIERAN SLATE
“All weakness of the flesh passes on to the voodoo picture,” the young butler mutters to himself, staring in awe at the portrait of Zed that blackens and crumples with the pestilence that ate at his body.
The meaning of all this sends my neurons spinning, making me barge out of the room and run down the grand stairs towards Kieran’s study, my bare feet slapping the granite floor. The double doors open as I haste toward them, and Kieran appears between them, my heart surging at the sight of him.
Those pitch black eyes that I love beyond all reason and common sense meet mine. I lose the last bit of control over myself and jump in his arms, practically assailing him. He says my name with the reverence of a priest invoking a saint as he lifts me, and claims my lips like a starved animal.
I savour the feel of his hot, silky kiss with every fibre of my body, and I hold him so tightly that my muscles hurt.
“Dear Good, this feels so good,” he says in his intoxicating, low voice. We kiss desperately again and again, only pausing to drink in the sight of each other’s faces, touching each other a
s if we both want to make sure this is real.
Remembering I must look much like the loser of a boxing match, I search for my own reflection in the black lustre of his irises—I’m indeed dishevelled and I seem a ghost, but I can’t see the bruises. I speak my mind before I think it.
“Medicine man’s talents extend to face-lifts?”
Kieran doesn’t find it amusing, and pain distorts his youthful features.
“I’d be just as crazy about you if you were a goblin,” he says. “But Jeremy Simmons and Lauren Morris will pay with their lives for what they did to you.”
“Please, Kieran, whatever happens, don’t hurt Lauren.”
A frown curls his otherwise marble-smooth brow. “Why do you defend her?”
“Long story. But fact is, she was punishing me because my father abused her when she was a child.”
“That’s no excuse for trying to beat you to death.”
“Oh, isn’t it?” I snap. “Didn’t you want to make a sacrificial lamb of me for my father’s wrongdoings?”
His eyes become slits, his pain all too obvious as he beats his own chest with his fist.
“I wish you were inside this for one minute to feel how remorse tortures me. It sears to look at you, and yet I can’t look away. From the moment I laid eyes on you, you were like a drug, and the more I saw you, the more I wanted you until I desired you so much that it hurt, Saphira. I fell in love with you, and the deeper I fell, the more I despaired. Every time I did something to hurt you was like driving a dagger into my own flesh.” He drops his voice, a dangerous glint crossing his eyes. “I love you so much that I’d let myself be killed for you.”
He kisses me again like a madman, taking my breath away in the most literal sense. I push him gently so I can inhale and stop my head from spinning in the wake of his love declaration that got me melting in all the right ways, and I catch a glimpse of the gathering behind him. I lean to the side to see clearer past Kieran, and my mouth opens as I make sense of it.
Kieran peels himself from my field of vision to clear the sight of his desk, which now serves as a stretcher for Zed. I approach slowly, eyes glued to him. Surrounded by his peers, the Head of Security lies still as a corpse. Except that he’s very much alive, not to mention plague-free. His stony features are once again recognizable, his dark-blond hair clean, and the black skeletal fingers that Kieran had almost surgically extracted from Vivienne’s flesh have skin on them again. His peers had cut the black suit off him, exposing the nakedness of his sturdy body that’s covered with tattoos.
“It’s a miracle. You are a miracle,” Kieran says, turning me around and looking at me like I’m the Holy Grail.
“You know what happened with the picture I made of Zed?”
“The butler boy searched the place like crazy while we were trying to save Zed, and explained he was looking for things you could use to paint. As the bubonic blackness started retreating from Zed’s skin it all became crystal clear to me.”
He cups my face with his hands. “I knew there was something very special about these golden eyes of yours, I knew it all along. You see people in a way the fewest can. In the portrait you made of me you focused all humanity and vulnerability that I’d thought forever lost. It was the first thing that scared me in a very, very long time, Saphira. And now it turns out you can do so much more.”
“But how . . . How is that even possible? The whole voodoo thing, I mean.”
“It’s your born potential activated by close contact with—well, with me. When I first influenced your mind with my own powers, your potential unlocked. You became subconsciously aware that the impossible is possible. Your subconscious mind pulled out that unique something that you were born with, since we are all born with one special particularity that only we can excel at, and sharpened it into a weapon. Back when you painted me you could have used that picture to hurt me; your probably did, in a way, by baring my soul, trapping it, and therefore making me love you. All people have unique talents that they can develop to more-than-human extents, but most cannot unlock their true potential naturally, like you did. Most people need psychological guidance and maybe—” he gestures at himself and his men, “—tampering a bit with their genes. That’s why I say you’re a miracle.”
This blows my mind, and I fear I might faint. I grip tighter to Kieran’s supporting arms.
“Is it . . . magic?” I breathe.
Kieran smiles. “Let’s say it’s a kind of magic that can be explained.”
“Will this magic be enough to defeat Ivan Basarab’s black monks?”
A shadow falls over Kieran’s face as he understands what I’m getting at. “It could be, but it would take an enormous toll on you. Every portrait you paint using your newly discovered power draws vital energy from you, and during battle you would have to repair portraits again and again before they are consumed with plague or wounds. You can’t possibly do that for all of us, we’re two dozen people.”
“And Basarab’s black monks are at least a hundred. You’re greatly outnumbered, Kieran.”
“Then give me Basarab’s true name, and I will take him on, one on one.”
Joyous enters the room. “It’s too late, Kieran. Black monks surrounded the manor, and the catacombs are blocked halfway to the asylum. If you leave this place, they’ll cast their curses on you a hundred at a time. You may be the most powerful serpent ever engineered, but with that kind of viciousness you’d be dead within the first couple of yards.”
“Plus,” I put in with a shudder, “Basarab’s identity provides more reason for worry than for hope.”
Kieran squares his shoulders and takes a powerful attitude. “Give me his name, and I’ll find a way to reach and eliminate him.”
“You can’t.” I look around at the men’s confused faces. “Basarab has a special power of his own, and I’m afraid it’s a nasty one.”
CHAPTER XXX
EROS AND THANATOS
The dark tower provides a large view over the fields. Kieran’s serpent eyes penetrate the night, while I stand in the alcove opposite from him, looking up at the painting I made a felt century ago.
The painfully handsome Marquis de Vandenesse looks down at me from the wall, his marble features as ruthless as a young devil’s, but the black eyes that used to scare the life out of me have a creamy softness to them. Indeed, like Kieran pointed out on the Night of Venice, the portrait seems a confession. It allows a glimpse of the boy Kieran Slate behind the powerful Marquis. It mirrors his soul.
I feel him approach, which compels me more than his portrait. A gush of wind from the open window inflates my gown as I turn to look at the serpent Marquis who’s chained my heart to his. Tall and beautiful just like the young man in the picture, he takes my breath away. His shirt is open, revealing the marble sinews of his body, and I can’t help a surge of lust.
“The air carries the scent of death,” he murmurs.
I have a flashback of the moment we first met—that fated night at the Royale by the sea, when he’d first used his hypnotic powers on me.
“You promised you’d never influence my senses again,” I whisper.
“And you think I’m doing it now?”
“It feels like you are. It’s that opiate effect, numbing the pain I want to feel.”
“I assure you, it’s not intentional, but maybe automatic. I want to keep pain away from you so much, I might do it instinctively.”
He looks down at his hands, and I follow his gaze. My heart skips a beat at the sight of his long fine fingers twisting a diamond ring between them. A spike of emotion bolts up from my heart, gagging me. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to realize what he’s doing.
“A while ago I crossed Gunnar Lothar’s threshold,” he says, “asking for your hand in marriage. I asked the man I hated for what I thought would be the deadliest weapon against him. Things have taken many unexpected turns since then, and soon there was nothing left of my initial plans, but one thing never changed—my w
anting to marry you, Saphira. I desire you as my wife more than I ever desired anything, even revenge. I won’t lie to you, there’s a chance that I’ll find my end tomorrow, and there’s no priest to forge our bond before that happens. All we have is tonight and the deadly breath of the black monks out there. Let it be our minister and seal our vows, and be sure that I’ll love you forever even from the Underworld.”
My breath catches at his words, which he speaks taking my hand in his and sliding the ring gently on my finger. It’s a bit of a loose fit, but the intensity in his dark gaze fits mine perfectly.
I stroke his cheek, taking full delight in the feel of him, and I can’t hold back a longing sigh. That sets him on fire, and he takes over my mouth in a hot-blooded kiss, lifting me in his arms. I wind my legs around him, welcoming him between my thighs, rubbing and slithering onto him as he takes me to the bed. I’ve lost my head for Kieran Slate long ago, but now I let go completely. Death is just around the corner for both of us, so I might as well relish our love like there’s no tomorrow.
I peel the shirt off him with feverish hands, thirsty for him as I savour his silky lips, his jaw, his neck, and lower my mouth down his smooth chest, my hands seeking the hardness in his pants. He doesn’t have much patience either, breathing hard with lust, soon taking over and kissing me into submission.
Looming over me, he guides me on my back on the satin sheets, his fiery mouth pleasuring my skin all over. Before I know it I’m lying completely naked under him, while he stands on his knees over my chest, a beautifully shaped marble devil. He’s big and hard for me. His hand sinks in my hair, twisting and tugging as he brings himself to my lips. Making sure I want it as much as he does, he glides down my mouth.
