“Why you think that would make a whit of difference to me, I have no idea.”
Affection and relief shuddered through me. I crossed my arms on the table and let my cheek rest on top of my sleeve. “The need to paint is getting worse,” I whispered.
“I know,” he murmured, and for a moment he almost looked pale again. “I can see the swirling in your eyes. The fever. The color seeping from you.” He looked at the specially made handkerchiefs filling the hazard container. “Literally.”
“Do you think…” I swallowed. “It was a week at first, then half, now three times a week… Do you think I might…?”
“Turn into paint? If so, try for a tasteful chromaticity.”
“You might get grayscale,” I said ruefully, thinking of the darkness and despair.
His eyes narrowed. Fingers touched my neck. “Show me what you’ve been painting.”
“No.” I quickly pushed all mental images away from his grasp.
“I’ve watched you paint countless times at school.” I could feel someone else mentally join with him, lightly pushing, asking permission. The complicated swirl of Constantine’s emotions told me who it was. The one person he couldn’t seem to get rid of.
“Not like this, you haven’t,” I whispered, denying the images to both boys.
“Why?” He watched me, seeking out weakness. “You’ve painted grim pieces before. But they were all beautiful.”
I swallowed with difficulty, keeping the images firmly out of reach. “Not these.”
His fingers stilled. “All of them?”
“Each and every one of them,” I murmured. “The images grow worse, and it takes more paint each time because I struggle to make something else.” Desperately trying to create anything else. “And still, the images form in the same suite of patterns.”
“When did this start?” His gaze took in the papers strewn around my desk on mind techniques, meditation, and garments that regulated magic flow.
“Soon after I left campus.”
“Let me see, Ren.” His cajoling tone switched to a softer one, and that of anything had me pushing up with reluctance.
I closed my eyes and let the images filter through, each growing successively darker and more disturbing.
When I finally opened my eyes, I could see the unease he was trying to hide. An impossible task, since I could still feel it through our connection.
He tipped his head. “You win. Have you tried creating new paints?”
My gaze automatically shifted to the supplies littering the counters. “Yes.”
He frowned, and I could feel his mind shifting through data. “But the result is always the same? You can’t control your own output?”
“No, and it takes more each time—more of everything, effort, paint, magic. It all just becomes...horrible. No matter what I do. What if...what if I turn into something horrible?”
Like my pictures. Like a portent. A heavy portent of doom that was increasingly trying to gain attention.
“Impossible.” He waved a hand, mind still on the problem.
“But you've been here when I clean my brushes.” He couldn't follow me if I wasn't there to take him. But he had arrived while I was off painting a few times, and he always waited until my return. Constantine Leandred was exceptional at waiting. “Think about what it took to create those things.”
Think of what kind of person made those things.
“Exquisite monsters and terrifying hybrids. A dark Fae Queen working her magic—all wormholes, monsters, missing limbs, and bloodstained teeth.”
“The last thing tried to eat three of the workers in the compound’s menagerie,” I said bluntly.
“I’m certain the menageríer was thrilled.”
“He...he asked if I could go back to fire breathing lizards instead of dark matter burping frogs.”
Justice Toad was still very much with me in spirit, even if he was in Will’s hands on campus now.
Constantine’s quick gaze looked around the room, furtively checking for dark matter frogs. “Where are the paintings now?”
I cleared my throat.
His eyes narrowed on me. “Ren?”
“Well...you’ve seen my brushes. I brought the first painting back here and...” I cleared my throat again. “Well, then I rebuilt the eastern wing.”
I felt him sigh. I could feel him adjusting his timeline to never-leave-Ren-alone-again status.
“Which means you can’t paint here.”
It was more a sorrowful statement than a question, but I shook my head all the same.
Heaviness settled over his thoughts. “Of course not, because fate hates me,” he murmured. “Where do you leave the paintings?”
“Er, I don’t exactly leave them...”
“Ren.”
“The, uh, Origin Book, um, eats them as soon as I finish.” It ate them while I sat frozen, staring at the horrors looking back at me.
He said nothing for a long minute before settling on, “Both healthy and wise.”
“Yeah.” I sighed. “Neither.”
The layers only shifted the tiniest bit each time the book ate one, though. Way better than the alternative.
“Why?” he asked bluntly.
“I don’t...” I closed my eyes. “I don’t want to be a destroyer, Con,” I whispered. “But I can’t paint anything else. I asked the book for advice. And it...it just dove down and ate the first two pieces, and I just...never looked back.”
It meant I never had to look at them.
“Have you asked the book to help before you paint?”
“It doesn't want me to control anything my magic wants to do. It knows I need to paint. That's why it's angry right now. It's a...free rein, might is right, every book for himself type of thinker.”
It buzzed my head again, angrily flipping pages as it tightly soared in a clear message to go and gather all my people.
I ducked. We had already had this argument.
He drummed his fingers on the table, then reached over and touched my skin with all ten tips.
His gaze went distant, though it stayed on me. “The magic—it bubbles up from within you. It feels like the whispers the people here utter when they think you can’t hear them—like the magic will destroy you. Like you won’t be able to—”
“Stop.” I swallowed. “Stop reading my mind.”
“A lock, a key, a tower,” he murmured. “I thought I had been pretty specific, Fate.” He leaned back, fingers tapping again, his gaze focused on the bend between the wall and ceiling. “But you need this,” he murmured to me, magic wrapping around me in an almost fearful way.
The moment was gone before it was fully realized, and his gaze focused back on me. “Well, where are we off to, then?”
I stared at him. “No. Absolutely not.”
His expression was unimpressed. “I’d prefer you stay here for the rest of your days, but seeing as that would mean your days were numbered, we will be making a quick trip. And you aren’t leaving this tower without me.”
He rose.
“I didn't realize you disliked living so much,” I said tightly.
“I like it very much, thank you.”
“I’m dangerous when I paint.”
“As am I when I’m kept waiting.” His smile was sharp.
“You were just advocating for me to stay away from danger. You were practically martial about it.”