“I haven’t shown this to anyone but Basil. Not even Lloyd has seen it.”
The admission makes my stomach dip with mingled delight and horror.
Dorian’s shoulders slump forward, and his fingers curl into the velvet cloth. But he still doesn’t pull it back.
I sink to my knees at his side. “I may as well see it now. I’d have to anyway, if I—”If I decide to break my vow and paint you. “I’d need it in the room with us.”
He drags in a harrowed breath. “You’ll hate me after you’ve seen it.”
“Do you care if I hate you?” As soon as I’ve said it, I realize what a silly question it is. “Of course you care. Because if I hate you, I won’t do what you want.”
His face whips toward mine, anguish in his eyes. “That’s not why I care. Now that you’re here, I—the guilt of it, what I’ve done—I’m ashamed, Baz.” He looks back into the case with a sound that’s half scoff, half sob. “I don’t do shame. Not for anyone. I don’t do fear, and I don’t fuckingcry—” He snarls the last word, defiance against everything he’s feeling.
His aura, his emotion—I feel it like a searing arrow in my own heart.
“Dorian.” I take his jaw, pull his face back to me. “I won’t hate you. I might be shocked, overwhelmed. Sad, maybe. But I could never hate you.”
A shadow slithers through his eyes. Something furtive and dark and frightening. A corner of himself he hasn’t revealed yet, one that has nothing to do with the portrait.
“Just wait, Baz,” he says softly. “The man capable of this monstrosity”—his fingers tighten on the cloth—“is capable of making you hate him with every beat of your beautiful heart.”
And he drags the cloth out of the way.
The Dorian in the painting is naked, bloated—skin stretched tight, bursting open in places to dislodge copious floods of yellow bile, dotted with writhing maggots and lumps of shit. Swollen pink sores have erupted on the thing’s drooping ball sack and inner thighs, and the dick is shriveled, leaking pus and urine. All over the creature’s body, from its distended torso to its bony appendages, the wrinkled skin is purpled and blackened with bruises. The tips of broken bones slice through in a couple of places, and several wounds are bleeding openly, heavily, glistening as if someone just painted them. Theblood pools in the foreground of the painting, mingling with the bile and becoming a stream that snakes away into the background, into a never-ending river of putrid gore.
The neck and face are shrunken, skeletal, spotted skin stretched over bone, a handful of yellowed teeth still clinging to the gums, a broken grimace. Blisters and lumps crowd around that rictus grin. The lips rotted away long ago.
It’s all painted in horrific detail, all static—and yet, as I watch, I think I can see the worms writhing in the bilious spew from the figure’s belly.
The physical decay is shocking, but the thing that makes bile crawl up my throat is its expression. The look in those puffy, bloodshot eyes is lewd, murderous, ravenous. It’s strange that the eyes are even intact or visible, what with the grotesque decay of it all.
I see the hole, too—about the size of a nickel, blackened at the edges. Irrefutable evidence that this portrait’s existence is finite. That hole will expand until it swallows him, bit by bit, rot and all.
I want to look away. But for Dorian’s sake, I keep staring.
ThisisDorian. This lecherous, fiendish, voracious thing is his soul. His soul, trapped in this mess, nailed to this canvas by Basil Hallward’s brush.
Dorian didn’t choose this, not at first. His soul was sucked out of him and trapped without his knowledge or understanding. But he made a million terrible choices after it was already done.
I peer into the eyes of the portrait, searching for anything I recognize. Without thinking, I reach out, my hand hovering above the bulletproof acrylic.
A faint hum of energy tantalizes the skin of my palm. It reminds me of the energy I felt when I touched the door of the abandoned building. Except that energy felt enormous and alien, and this energyfeels smaller, more condensed. It flutters, quivering at my presence, responding to something inside me—the power I inherited.
As I stare at the portrait, something changes.
The eyes blink.
For a half second, that hideous, devouring gaze shifts to something desperate—something weary, wretched, agonized by guilt, lacerated with sorrow.
I could swear I hear Dorian’s soul screaming, faint and faraway, in the back of my mind.
A tear splashes onto the acrylic, and I startle out of the moment, brushing away the dot of liquid with my hand.
“I’m sorry,” I gasp. But more tears are welling from my eyes; I can’t stop them.
To clear the blur, I blink, and then I see Dorian—beautiful Dorian, with his hollow blue eyes.
“Why are you crying?” His voice is tight as skin over bone.
