I shook my head. “You don’t need to tell me. I was a fecking eejit. I was just soangry. They threatened you and I snapped.”
“You get this was your idea to stir up the villagers with your statue? Now they’re all stirred up you can’t go getting mad at them for the hysteriawecreated. And the fact they know about Aline is all the more reason why you shouldn’t have been inthere. This is dangerous, Flynn. They broke your arm. You could have gotten killed.”
“I don’t care what they do to me. I’ll scrap ‘em all if I have to. But if they hurt you, I’ll?—”
“You’ll what, Flynn? You’ll turn into Arthur? Don’t do that. I can only handle one warrior with a Lancelot complex. What’s going on with you?”
I shrugged. “Dunno.”
“You do know. Spill it. Do you remember what we agreed to only yesterday? No more secrets. No more keeping things hidden away.”
“You’re going to think it’s so dumb.”
“Try me.”
“Did I ever tell you when I first decided I wanted to be an artist?”
Maeve shook her head.
“I was living in Dublin with my uncle. He trafficked drugs around Ireland – the hard shite like horse, crack, yokes for the clubbers. This one day, he had a bigwig from the Irish mob coming over to negotiate a deal, and he kicked me out of the house because ‘your ugly mug’ll turn him right off’ or some shite. I didn’t have anywhere to go, and it was pissing down so I couldn’t just sit at the dog park and pretend all the dogs were mine. So I went to the Irish National Gallery.”
“I thought you hated art galleries.”
“Easy on, let me finish my story!” I took another sip of Rowan’s tea. It was weird, but the heat from the drink seemed to warm right through my body, especially my throbbing broken arm. Rowan was a right healing genius. “As I was walking around, gawping at Caravaggio’sTaking of Christand Morisot’sLe Corsage Noirand feeling absolutely nothing, I noticed this large class of art students sitting down in the main gallery for a lesson. I had a sketchbook in my bag, so I pulled it out andhovered at the back and tried to look like I’d paid a gazillion quid to be there like the rest of them.”
“The tutor lectured on about Caravaggio – how the artist pioneered the strong light contrasts and moved his figures close to the picture plane to really pull the viewer in and create dramatic tension. And even though I think Caravaggio is fecking shite, my hand moved across the page. I couldn’t help it. In minutes I had this sketch of the figures, only I’d given them all dog heads.”
“Of course,” Maeve said.
“This girl was standing beside me, watching me sketch. ‘You’re really good,’ she whispered. I kept my head down. I didn’t want to say anything. ‘You’re not supposed to be here, are you?’ I shook my head, hoping she wouldn’t rat me out. Instead, she grabbed my hand and dragged me out of the gallery.
“She took me to an abandoned shoe factory, where a bunch of artists had set up a workshop and gallery. It was wicked – just this big warehouse where people hung out and made art and swigged bottle-shop whiskey. I started going there every day, helping the girl – her name was Moira – finish a big mural on one of the warehouse walls. Most of the artists were like me – from the wrong side of the tracks, mixed up in gangs and street fighting. There were tensions, because some artists are territorial wankers, and no one trusted outsiders. Some of them were mad as a box of frogs at Moira for bringing me along. But they tolerated me because Moira liked me and I wasn’t some rich Trinners kid slumming it. In that warehouse, we were friends. We had hope.”
“So the day Corbin showed up asking about me, there was trouble. He looked like a rich Trinners kid. He got the shit kicked out of him and I wasn’t even there that day. They told me about it later. But he came back a week later, and the week after that,and finally he cornered me and told me who he was and what I was and that he wanted me to come back to England with him.”
“What’d you do?” Maeve leaned forward.
“What do you think I did? I laughed in his fecking face. I didn’t need no fairy godmother in a Blood Lust t-shirt dragging me back to some draughty castle. I’d found my people. I was going to be a street artist. I had Moira. I sent him packing.”
“A few days later, I showed up at the warehouse to work on another mural project with Moira, and she wasn’t there. I waited around for ages, but she never showed, didn’t answer her phone or nothing. She didn’t show the next day, or the next. The other artists told me they didn’t want me coming around no more. I asked about Moira, and they told me there’d been a fight downtown between two rival gangs, and she’d been down an alley working on a mural and got shot in the crossfire. The man who shot her? My uncle.”
“Shit, Flynn,” Maeve breathed.
I tried to wave my hand, to show her it wasn’t a big deal, but I forgot my arm was broken, so when I moved it I dissolved into pain-filled whimpers. “Ow, serves my right for acting the maggot. So yah, I packed my things and left with Corbin the next day. I threw myself into Briarwood and protecting you. I went to Arizona for that year and met you in person and made a right fecking mess of things. I haven’t thought about Moira in a long time, but last night during that ritual, these memories kept flashing in my head. I feel like she left me a legacy, and I’ve been failing her. And you.”
“You’re right,” Maeve leaned down and kissed my forehead. “That is dumb. Tell me about the memories. What did you see?”
I gave a one-armed shrug. “My uncle and his friends telling me to stop acting the maggot while they smoked crack in the kitchen. Having a paint fight with Moira while we were painting a mural out the back of the warehouse. Moira smiling, alwayssmiling. Moira’s gravestone – cold and grey, just the opposite of her. The way I turned my art into a joke, like I turn everything into a joke, so that I didn’t have to face my feelings about her or about leaving Dublin. But it never felt like a joke, especially not after I met Moira.”
“Your art’s not a joke. That statue of yours might save us all.”
“There’s a piece of me inside that statue. But it doesn’t say anything, you know? It just makes people afraid and angry. I always thought that’s kind of what I wanted, the way Banksy’s stencils piss off the authorities. But…” I shrugged. “I dunno.”
“You think maybe you want your art to say something else?”
“Maybe.”
“It can, Flynn.” Maeve grinned. “Just think, if the belief that statue collects actually ends up helping us defeat the Slaugh, you’ll be famous for something else entirely.”
