28
Forever and forever we 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.