A sense of timelessness came over him as he killed and painted. Painted and killed. He lost himself in his work. Not thinking about anything, just letting his hands wield the brushes, mindless of the image he produced. When the blood in his paint container was nearly gone and an image had been born upon the wall, he came back to himself.
He stepped away from the wall, taking more and more of it in with each footstep until he stood on the other side of the room, taking in the full magnitude.
The color contrast of blood on white was as breathtaking and beautiful as a flock of cardinals against the brilliance of snow. Tears burned his eyes. His face stung, and a wild freedom he’d hadn’t experienced in years surged through him. He recognized the feeling. In this moment he was God. The author of destruction. And creation.
The image he’d painted was so… No words existed to convey the gloriousness. Words were small and meaningless compared to this wall.
On the wall—a man knelt, head bowed, hair falling forward, shielding his face from view. Even in that supplicant’s position, supremacy and authority radiated from him. He looked like the strongest of warriors after a great battle—exhausted, but not weak. No, never weak. There wasn’t an ounce of vulnerability in his sinew, muscle, and bone. Nor was there any delicacy to the lacework of scars marring the skin of his arms. And on his chest, directly over his heart, were two crisscrossed slashes that dripped blood down his torso.
Surrounding him was a magnificent pair of wings. Not the kind you’d see on a sparrow or even on a chubby cupid, but the kind of wings that conveyed power and strength and utter indestructibility.
He loved the picture as he loved himself.
An incandescent flash and Cain returned to reality, to the stench of decomposing blood smeared over his face.
His brain recategorized everything that he’d just seen and done into the it-wasn’t-really-me file. But that didn’t take the feelings away. The awe spreading through his chest at what he’d seen. The guilt sinking into his gut because he’d had no remorse.
A dull thumping started behind his eyes. Usually when he did his blood work, he was there for only a few seconds before skipping on to the next images and the next. Those flashes gave him a migraine every time, but seeing entire scenes like this… The migraine was gonna be a badass bitch today. He had maybe ten minutes before the pain ratcheted up to the level of ax-buried-in-his-brain.
Mac handed him a black towel—black disguised the blood better than any other color.
“You back?” Mac knelt next to him, his face full of concern, but Cain could see the concealed disgust in the way Mac’s mouth turned down at the corners, like he was fighting an outright grimace.
That look—especially when it was aimed at him—always took him back to the moment Mac had found him. Cain had been covered in snot and blood and shame. He had to give it to Mac. The guy had tried to hide his horror, tried to pretend Cain was just a kid, when he’d never been a kid. He’d been more monster than anything else.
Cain scrubbed the material over his face, his arms, wiped his hands. The blood on his body—so thick and dry it smeared into his skin—would only come off after a good scouring down in a scalding shower.
He turned his attention to the image on the wall. But…there was no image. Instead, the wall had been painted gold, perfectly coordinated with the rest of the room. Mac must’ve called him back from his vision before the killer covered up his work with the paint.
Holy.
Fucking.
Christ.
Cain’s legs wobbled when he stood. His hand shook like an alcoholic in need of his jolly juice, but he pointed at the wall. “He painted a picture.” His brain bashed against the backs of his eyeballs. He wanted to press his hands to his eyes to keep them from exploding out of their sockets, but his hands were smeared with the family’s blood. The pain was only beginning.
“I-I don’t know what you mean.” Mac’s tone was full of question.
“He painted the wall white—made a blank canvas. Then he created a portrait, using the family’s blood, of some guy…” Cain closed his eyes, seeing on the back of his lids the scars lined up and down the man’s arms, the slashes over his heart, just like the ones on his—
“Fuck!” His lids popped open. His gaze automatically sought the wall, hoping to see the actual image again, but gold paint pulsed in his vision from the thumping inside his head. He held his arms out in front of him. Underneath the thin coating of blood on his skin, a network of white slashes ran from his wrists to his shoulders.
The wounds had healed decades ago, but the scars still remained. He pulled his shirt up high and looked down at his chest stained with drying blood. A thick, white crisscrossed scar rested over his heart—cut into his flesh by his father. Every scar on his body, placed there by his father.
“What is it?” Mac’s tone was full of question, mixed with a bit of suspicion. “You’ve got to talk to me. I don’t know what’s going on.”
Cain’s heart galloped up and down his rib cage, but he forced himself to speak slowly and quietly—in deference to the ax beating against his skull. He told Mac everything he’d seen and everything he remembered about the artwork in blood. “It’s there. You can’t see it, but it’s there. I’m there. Underneath that gold paint.”
It took a lot to catch Mac off guard, but score one for Cain—he’d just done it.
Mac’s mouth was slightly open, lips twitching like they were trying to form words, until one finally spilled out. “Infrared.” The word came out soft and hesitant. “We might be able to see the image using infrared photography.” Things went quiet for a moment while Mac stared at the perfectly painted gold wall. “Why paint you? Why not paint Killion? I mean, people are obsessed with you both, but why choose you over him? And this guy made it clear it was you he painted. Without those scars, we would’ve thought it was Killion.”
Yes. Cain was cursed with looking too much like his father—like one of the world’s most horrendous killers. It usually took a double take and some head-scratching before people realized he wasn’t Killer Killion.