“What?”
He closed the book carefully, and then his eyes trained upon hers. “Do you remember when I told you I needed to mix blood with my pigments? This book says I was right.”
Lux’s mouth dropped wide, disgusted firstly and then confused. “That was a joke and blood is for curses. Are you saying your brilliance is…cursed?”
He cast her an exasperated look. “No, I’m not cursed. It doesn’t have to be blood, but it does have to be a part of me. It could be hair. Or a fingernail.” His expression turned pointed.
“And then?”
Lux sucked a sharp breath at Shaw pulling his knife free, slicing the tip vertically along his thumb.
“Shaw!”
“I have nothing else to paint with.” He pressed his seeping finger to the stone.
His hand moved quickly, and Lux couldn’t make out anything in the shadows. But once she stepped around to his opposite side, she held the torch out—lighting upon a quickly forming doorknob.
Flat and dripping. Formed entirely of blood.
Her stomach twisted.
When it was done, Shaw stepped away. She could tell his breaths, too, had shallowed.
“What did you do?” she asked. Streaks marred the stone where Shaw had wiped excess blood in the shape of a doorframe. Afterward, he twisted his wounded finger in the hem of his shirt. She stepped closer.
“It needs to dry. They always need to dry first.”
He sounded as if he were willing to wait, but Lux couldn’t stomach the feel of being robbed of air, and so she bent to the bloody work of art and blew.
She’d closed her eyes. She’d had to. But she could smell it still—the iron. She held herself back from heaving, though it was a near thing, and breathed out all that was left in her lungs. When she blinked open her eyes, a crimson knob sat directly in front of her face.
“Saints above,” she gasped.
“Devil below,” laughed Shaw. Then he grabbed the knob and twisted it.
The door swung outward into a flickering corridor.
They both stood in the stairwell; he didn’t move, and she didn’t either. Finally, Shaw peered around the newly formed doorway. “We’re on the fourth floor, same as before,” he murmured, low. “But Riselda’s portrait…”
Lux was never one to starve her curiosity. She ducked under Shaw’s arm to see what he saw.
Down the hall. The portrait. Melting. Riselda’s piercing green gaze folding and falling.
A peculiar quiet doused the manor. She waited to feel Death’s triumph. It didn’t come.
She could have missed it—Riselda’s long-awaited trip to the Beyond. Or Death was still lurking, and Riselda somehow still alive. Again.
The truest cockroach of them all,she thought.
The quiet was interrupted by a distant shuffling and muffled voices. Lux’s body seized. She whipped back to Shaw, only for him to shove her farther out into the corridor. To then see him muscling the thick stone of the door closed, reopening his finger with his teeth and swiping it over the red doorknob.
He copied her earlier methods. He blew upon the crimson paint.
When it dried, the knob was gone. All that remained was a bloodied handprint.
Howmuchtimehadpassed, Lux didn’t know. She blinked awake in the dark.
She couldn’t see at all, not even the outline of the room. Her hand stretched outward, and of that, at least, she could note the vaguest outline. She pushed the four-poster’s curtains aside.
