Delilah Dawson - Wicked After Midnight

“Something’s different.”

Lenoir appeared by my side again, not in his usual painting coat but in a high-necked white jacket that looked like something a doctor might wear. In his hand was a brass syringe, the sort I’d seen hanging on the wall at Monsieur Charmant’s shop, beside the dentist’s chair. This one was smaller and far cleaner, but the needle still reached past my Bludman’s bravado to the human deep within and terrified me.

“I won a great prize, mademoiselle .”

The goblet dropped from my trembling fingers, which had gone numb. I couldn’t close my mouth, couldn’t move my arms. As if from the bottom of a frozen pond, I saw Lenoir loom overhead as he pulled an artificer’s complicated goggles down over his eyes and settled the lens attachments with one hand, his other hand tense on the syringe. My eyes were open and tearing and cold, locked onto the small gold pin attached to his high collar.

Raven skull, bat wings, top hat.

“Are you ready, mademoiselle , to see the Malediction Club?”

No, no, no. I couldn’t shake my head, couldn’t speak. When the needle pierced my neck, right over my jugular, it was like cracking through a crust of ice. I had no choice but to watch in horror as he pulled back the plunger and sucked out my blud, my soul.

Forever and foreverwe were locked there, me frozen and him killing me. He was taking more than my blud, somehow, drawing some necessary life force from me, stealing all my warmth. And I could do nothing about it, could only choke silently on the freezing potion coating my throat. Lenoir didn’t speak, but he did smile for real for the first time, and it was the hangman’s cruel grin, a skeleton’s fangs that shone in the light.

When he was done, I was but an empty husk filled with panic and shadows. He held the syringe as if it was filled with liquid gold and carried it reverently to his canvas. With a flourish, he turned the uncovered painting toward me, letting me see his work for the first time.

Terrified, frozen, broken, drained, and dying, still I was awed by the perfection of it. It wasn’t me, not quite. But it was the most beautiful painting I’d ever seen.

“I can see from your eyes that you’re pleased. It’s a masterpiece. But it still needs one final touch.” His head swiveled around like a snake. “Your blud. Mixed properly with Charmant’s draught and a few of my own inventions. I’ll trap your very soul in the painting, lighting it from within. No one will be immune to its spell. It will hang in the Louvre, and they’ll line up to see it. They’ll weep. And no one will know that they are looking at your soul, and you are trapped within, looking back.” His smile curled. “And then I’ll switch it with a clever reproduction and hang the real you somewhere much, much darker.”

I couldn’t even cry. Couldn’t even whimper.

My blud oozed out of the syringe and onto a rainbow-splattered wooden palette. He selected a brush made of dainty silver-white hair, utterly pure and sparkling with a magical glow

“Unicorn-tail hair, they said.” He held it up to the light. “But I knew it for what it was. The virgin hair of a Blud Princess. Even more magical than a unicorn’s pelt, for my needs. Worth every silver.”

He licked his fangs as he mixed the deep red blud with his paints, adding a splash of some clear liquid, a pinch of something glittery, a sparkle of gold dust. Still I couldn’t move, could do nothing but look on in horror and hope that his words weren’t true. To be trapped in a painting? Even in Sang, it didn’t seem possible. And yet, thinking back to the malevolence surrounding Limone’s portrait at the Louvre, I finally understood why it had unsettled me so.

Her foul soul was trapped in the paint.

With tiny strokes that melted into the canvas, the brush caressed my hair, my lips, my fingertips. Each part he touched went dead, beyond numb. My heart cried out, straining against my chest, the only part of me that could protest.

“What’s that, ma chérie ? You wonder what will happen to your body? Do you feel it emptying, becoming merely a comely shell?”

He paused as if I could speak, as if he could hear me silently screaming. His smile was dark, dark as the hole in Monsieur Charmant’s floor.

“We have uses for pretty flesh at the Malediction Club.”

Inside, I howled and beat upon the cage of my own bones, the blud slowing in my veins. But there was nothing I could do. Nothing I could move. Nothing I could say. I couldn’t even cry, couldn’t even close my eyes.

“And you’ll be our second Bludman. Finally, a matched set.”

Lenoir’s eyes flicked to his palette, and he picked up the syringe to squeeze more blud into the puddle of glistening paint. And that’s why he didn’t notice the strangely glimmering object that flew across the room to lodge in his side.

But I recognizedit. The silver thing looked like Wolverine’s claws. As Lenoir spun, hands curling into talons, Vale hurtled out of the darkness and punched him square in the teeth. Even from where I lounged, immobile and terrified, it seemed a foolish move, busting his knuckles into a Bludman’s mouth, until I smelled something sharp.

Vale’s blood.

Lenoir reflexively licked his lips as he ripped the claws from his side, painting the floor with blud. “You idiot. Do you have any idea who you’re dealing with?”

Vale shook his hand out, sending splatters of his own blood everywhere. Red danced in my eyes, spots and streaks like the scattered stains left by the white-haired paintbrush Lenoir had dropped on the carpet.

“I did not know you were a Bludman, at first.” Vale straightened and walked over to the crouched and wounded artist as if inspecting the painting. “Rather lucky for me, don’t you agree?”

Lenoir had one arm over the three puncture wounds dribbling red through his jacket and one hand to his mouth, scrubbing at his pale lips as if he could erase the blood he’d already ingested. “Abyssinian,” he wheezed. His skin was going over pale, his nostrils wide and his eyes all black with widening pupils.

“Tell me how to save her, and I will give you a gift.” Reaching into his black waistcoat, Vale pulled out a tiny glass vial that glistened metallic gold. “An antidote.”

“No antidote.” Lenoir hissed. “For what you are.”

“But of course there is. We just keep it a secret so bloodsuckers like you will avoid us.” He held up the vial, just within snatching reach of Lenoir, who made a clumsy grab for it. Vale danced back. “Talk first.”

Lenoir’s legs buckled, and he fell to the floor, curled around like a dying centipede, legs twitching.

Vale kneeled over him, wiggling the little bottle back and forth.

Finally, Lenoir sucked in a long breath and exhaled two whispered words. “Burn it.”

He reached for the glass antidote bottle, but Vale ignored him completely and grabbed a paintbrush from Lenoir’s jar of spirits. An evil stench went up when he stuck it in the fire, and it got even worse when he held the flaming brush to the painting of me. Lenoir let out an unholy wail as bright blue flames licked over the canvas and caught, the entire thing suddenly alight and crackling.

“Antidote,” he hissed. “Antidote!”

But Vale was by my side, taking my cold hand, rubbing it between his own. “Still in there, bébé ?” he asked, his pinprick pupils telling the truth of his concern.

For all his jaunty swaggering, the boy was so scared I could smell the fear rolling off him in waves, although, strangely, I couldn’t smell him . I took a shuddering breath and felt my fangs dig into my lips. A few seconds more, and I was able to nod my head, just a bit. My eyes blinked and reopened on a vision of myself, a work of ultimate beauty, aflame and dripping paint and belching smoke. He must have turned the easel to face me so I could watch it burn. Vale touched my face, stroked my hair, flexed each of my hands, and ran thumbs down the soles of my feet until they feebly kicked. The ice that had run in my veins ebbed, leaving me warm, as if I’d been breathing in the cold and was finally indoors again.