Wicked After Midnight(117)

“Not something. Someone.”

He turned the painting around to show me, and the breath caught in my throat.

It was Bea.

* * *

The painting had never been finished. The background was washed in red with hastily sketched-in details, and it was a more intimate portrait than I was familiar with, based on his work. His name in Sang was Lenoir, so close to Renoir. But most of his famous paintings were based on those by Toulouse Lautrec, bright and messy visions of cabarets and dancing girls and ballerinas. This one showed Bea dancing in a feathery ivory ballgown, her hair coiled up and one arm raised. The look on her face was more dreamy and relaxed than I’d ever seen her, not at all guarded and jumpy. In fact, now that I considered it, many of Lenoir’s paintings shared the same unfocused gaze.

It had to be the drink.

For me, it was blood and absinthe. For the daimons, perhaps he mixed his powders into one of their fiery brews. But I understood instantly that Bea had once stood before Lenoir, just as I had, and fallen under his spell. The only difference was that her painting had never been finished, while mine now smoldered on a stand. What I didn’t understand was why she’d never said more about him than her vague, general warnings. Her fear had been real, but she should have told me the truth. I glanced at my portrait; I’d totally forgotten that a fire burned across the room. It was merry and crackling, just about to reach his bottles of turps and tubes of paint lined up along the easel’s edge. The painter himself lay on the floor, huddled up like a smushed bug, his hair fallen to a pile on the floor around his head and his black lips drawn back over ivory fangs set in shriveled gums.

Vale rerolled Bea’s painting, stuffed it down the back of his collar, and reached down to collect me.

“Fire’s working fast. Time to go, bébé.”

I waved him away. “I know. Get his pin first. We might need it.”

Vale gave me a determined nod and snatched away the damning bit of gold from the painter’s jacket. I half expected Lenoir to bolt upright like Lestat and try to strangle the brigand to death, but there was nothing left in the shell of his body. When I held out my arms, Vale gently gathered me to his chest and hurried away from the growing fire. As he rushed down the stairs trailing my chocolate dress, I caught a last glimpse of the Siamese cats on the landing, curled together like parentheses, dead. Their downy white fur had fallen to the floor, their black lips twisted back over fangs, just like their master.

Instead of heading for the front door where I had always entered, Vale plunged into the darkness of a spare kitchen, nearly banging his head on hanging copper pots.

“Where are we going?”

“Into the alleys, the same way I came in. Trust a brigand, bébé, you don’t want to be seen stepping out a rich dead man’s front door.”

The courtyard out back was far less fancy than the sidewalk in front, and Vale neatly sidestepped rubbish bins that rankled of turpentine and neatsfoot oil. He navigated the back alleys like a streetwise cat, keeping us entirely away from gaslights and gendarmes and conveyances, carrying me as if I weighed nothing. I tried to speak once, but he quieted me with a quick peck on the lips and a wink.

“Brigand rule two: if you don’t wish to get caught, be silent,” he whispered against my ear.

I didn’t recognize the route he took to Paradis, not until we entered the elephant’s empty courtyard.

“Vale, I can’t go in. I ran away from the prince after he’d . . .”

“Paid for you?” He gave me a dark look as he scooted sideways down a narrow alley. “I know. I watched. You were magnificent.”

I drew back, which was hard, considering he was carrying me and I was still nearly numb. “You were eavesdropping?”

He shook his head. “I was coming to your room to visit, but then I saw you dressed in that . . . scrap, pacing around like a bludrat in an oven. When he arrived, I watched to make sure he didn’t hurt you.”

“But I went out the window and didn’t see you.”

“I can be rather quick when I need to be.”

Placing me gently to lean against the alley’s bricks, he tapped a broken edge, and to my great surprise, a knee-high door swung open on a crawlspace. I breathed in, always distrustful of small places, but all I caught was the scent of cold stone, old wood, and, oddly enough, hard liquor.

“Can you crawl?”

I flexed my arms and knees. “I think so. Blood would help.”

“Crawl to the end of the tunnel, and you can have all the blood you want.”

My mouth watered, and I dropped to my knees and wiggled into the hole with Vale’s face pressed against my bustle.