Aaron #2
I watch him stagger toward the dark of the hall, and I think about Seth, about what I did to him, and what Amir told me right after.
There’s a cruelty in giving a man exactly what he begs for.
A thing you covet hard enough stops being a want and becomes the bars of your own cell, if you let it.
Standing there in Eric’s restored study, I finally understand what I’m going to do with him.
“Hey, Dad.”
He turns on me, his ruined face twisting up. “Don’t you call me your father, boy. We just got done—“
I hold up a hand and look past him at the painting. “What if I told you I could make you beautiful again, give you back the youth and immortality you spent your whole life chasing?” I watch his face. “Say I could just hand you that. Would you think about coming around then?”
He weighs it a moment, then gives an ugly laugh. “What game are you running, boy?”
“No game.” I cross to the sofa and sit down on the arm of it, easy.
“You’re right about me. I’m never going to stop loving you.
That’s just a fact I have to carry. So I figure, if we’re going to be stuck in this realm together, the least we can do is find a little common ground.
” Some of what I’m telling him is true, and I make sure he feels the real part.
“I’m sorry. I guess I’m just a stupid man who never could figure out how to live without a father. ”
The caution doesn’t leave him. But underneath it, in the wreck of his eyes, something lights up—hope, the oldest hook there is.
“You know what the most exhausting part of being your father always was?” He shakes his head. “It’s how you keep crawling back, begging me for scraps of attention like a kicked dog. It’s pathetic—honestly the single most annoying thing about you.”
I grin at him, then look at the painting. “Here you go, Dad.”
His whole body lights from the inside, blue-gold pouring through him, and the damage runs backward.
The seams in his face smooth out, the broken cheekbone lifting and setting, the years bleeding off him until he’s standing there young and unbroken and flawless again.
He turns his hands over, touches his own face, and laughs.
“Well, all right.” He looks himself over. “Maybe you aren’t completely useless after all.” Then the cold comes back into him. “Don’t go expecting love out of this, though. I don’t have it in me—not for you. But I could stand to give you a friendship, and that’s the best you’ll ever get.”
“Nah, man, that’s all right.” I lean back. “Just being a dutiful son is enough for me.”
He rolls his eyes at me, and the last thread of love I have for him pulls at me before I cut it.
I walk to the painting. “You know the story of Dorian Gray, Dad?” He hears the “Dad,” and I watch him bite back the objection he made last time.
“Yeah.” He’s still admiring his hands. “What about it?”
I look away from the canvas and smile at him. “Funny thing—Josiah told me this painting reminded him of that story the first time he saw it. And he was right.”
Eric’s whole face curdles at the name. “Don’t you ever say that abomination’s name in front of me again.”
“Why not?” I tip my head. “Don’t tell me you’re still butt-hurt about your face. I did fix it for you, after all.”
“Are you finished?” He straightens his collar over the healed line of his neck. “Thank you for the favor. Now get out.”
“I read it, you know. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Spent a month with it while I figured out what to do with you.” The book drops into my hand out of nothing, fat with the notes I scrawled in every margin, and I hold it up. “It’s a good book. And it surely does sound a lot like you, Dad.”
I take my hand away, and the book doesn’t fall. It hangs there in the air, pages drifting, as I walk toward him.
“Killing you would’ve been fitting. I won’t lie, I turned it over more nights than I’m proud of.
” I shake my head. “But I can’t quite bring myself to kill my own father.
” The warmth leaves my smile. “What I can do is make sure you finally get the one thing you ever truly wanted—youth and beauty that never fade, not for one single day of forever.” I spread my hands at the whole world he turned his back on.
“And the best part, Dad? You’ll get to watch the future of this realm grow up right outside the frame. ”
His new face goes slack, and he bolts. He doesn’t make it two steps before the painting wakes.
The varnish over the canvas splits with a dry crack that races corner to corner.
The painted Eric peels up into the room, no longer paint at all.
His arms reach out of the frame—cracked oil and gold leaf on joints that bend the wrong way—and cross the study faster than the real Eric can run.
One hand spreads wide over his beautiful healed face.
The other punches through his chest, closes around something underneath the skin, and pulls.
What comes out of him isn’t blood. It’s light.
His soul tears free of the meat of him in one endless wet wrench, a screaming thread of it.
Eric’s mouth stretches around a sound I’ll never quite get out of my head.
The body left behind doesn’t fall—it crumbles.
His flawless face goes to ash first. What’s left of him follows it down onto the floor.
That ribbon of light reels back toward the canvas while his painted self drags it home.
He fights it the whole way, clawing at the painted arms, at nothing. His soul-face pulls longer and longer as the frame hauls him in. He turns the screaming on me.
“Aaron—Aaron, please—help me, help me—“
“Welcome to your new home,” I tell him. “It was here or limbo, and I really did go back and forth on it. I spoke to Carla about you. She told me hell doesn’t want you.” I watch the canvas swallow more of him. “And we both know Mother Fate’s got no use for you at all.”
The painted hands fold around his soul’s face and slam it flat into the canvas. The light dies, and the frame settles back against the wall, a painting again. The young flawless man inside it looks just as he always has, pleased and untouched. Nothing about him moves.
The annotated book drops out of the air and hits the floor with a slap.
I look at the little pile where Eric used to be.
“You’re not dead,” I tell the painting. “Death’s a mercy other men get, but not you.
You can’t move on—not until that canvas decides to release you.
That’s between you and him now. I won’t get in the middle of it.
He wants the same thing you always did—beauty that lasts forever.
” I crouch and run a finger through the ash.
“Now it’s got a little soul in it, to keep it company. ”
There’s a line of Josiah’s I never believed until tonight, one of his Healthy Habits verses he tried to put in my head a dozen times. I speak it to the painting.
“Give a man everything he ever craved, and you will have built him the finest cage he will ever know.”
I straighten my shirt and tip my head to the painting on my way out.
“I’ll be back later, Dad. I’ve got a throne to go claim. Then I’m coming home to make this house ready for my mate and cub.”
I close my eyes, and the study falls away.
When I open them I’m standing on the cold floor at the top of the high tower. Ellie’s there, a handful of witches and warlocks ranged behind her. Every last one of them drops to a knee the instant I appear.
“Oh, come on,” I groan.
A sound reaches me through the arched opening past the balcony—the sea-roar of the whole Glen gathered below, every voice lifted at once.
“Rise, all of you.” I start for the balcony. “Ellie, come with me.”