7. The Tide Returns
THE TIDE RETURNS
LEV
H igh tide had only left shells and a wavy line of white polystyrene sprinkles behind.
“How many times must I tell you, you’re wasting your time ?” Silas sang, leaving no footsteps in the sand as he traipsed ahead. “The tide won’t return me to you.”
Lev had long ago stopped questioning whether Silas was a projection of his guilty conscience, something supernatural, or something far worse.
Before Silas died, he’d promised he would never leave Lev, or Lichenmoor again. Was that what made ghosts? A love so ardent not even death could part them?
“What’s tossed into the sea around Lichenmoor always comes back,” Lev repeated the local lore, the hypothesis of which he’d tested and proved time and time again, tossing from Lichenmoor’s cliff dozens of paintings, sculptures, moth-eaten rugs wrapped in twine and weighed down with bricks.
The ocean took them, but it always returned them like a possessed doll that wouldn’t stay dead.
“My bones are long gone, probably used for toothpicks by a giant squid.”
Silas bit a sliver of nail off his index finger and spat it toward a tide pool. Lev resisted the urge to drop to his knees and sift through the water.
“The next storm could dredge the ocean.”
There’d been hundreds of storms since Silas had died, but Lev clung to it year after year. There was always that chance, that flickering hope like the ghost of a lighthouse beam swinging through fog, that if he found Silas’s bones, he’d set him free.
“I don’t know why you bother. It makes no difference to me if you find my body. I’ll still hate you, regardless.”
Lev kicked a clump of sand snatched by the wind and stalked off toward the path.
“Oh, don’t be cross,” Silas called after him.
How could Lev not be upset? He may have killed Silas, but he’d still loved him. He’d still lost him.
As long as Silas haunted the moors, Lev would keep searching. He had to find Silas and lay him to rest before his memory died with him.
Asher joined the group at the front stairs six minutes after ten.
“Nice of you to show, Blakely.”
“Sorry. Jet lag,” the cheeky bastard teased.
“See that it doesn’t happen again.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good lad,” Lev said, delighted that they already had an inside joke.
Asher’s eyes narrowed. His lips pursed, not with loathing or distrust, but determination. Asher was plotting a retaliatory strike and Lev couldn’t wait. Nor could he hide his smirk .
Chuck and Lars chortled as if they were in on the joke. Loathsome twats. They’d already identified Asher as the outlier to beat, the art genius with inherent talent others could barely scrape at, even with years of practice.
Giftedness was a lonely existence. Jealousy masqueraded behind reverence.
“This way, please.” Lev led them away from his father’s studio. He didn’t want to share that sacred space. Only he and Asher would step foot inside it.
Lev hesitated on the threshold of the decaying ballroom Father had converted to an atelier for group instruction. Awe-laced gasps rippled through the group. The ballroom did possess a certain appeal.
Ivy crept through arched windows and climbed to the top of the stone cathedral ceiling, raining down scarlet leaves that swirled around their feet with the hushed rustle of whispers at a funeral.
Asher weaved past the art stations, silhouette blurred by trespassing fog and damp wood-smoke.
“Time to go,” Lev hissed to Silas, who’d stuck to his heel all morning, like a wad of gum he couldn’t scrape off.
“A little please and thank you goes a long way,” Silas said. “ Please fuck off so I can flirt without you cock-blocking, Silas. Thank you very much . See.”
“Go.”
“Fine.” Lifting both his middle fingers, he backed into the massive fireplace, and disappeared. Arsehole.
Lev exhaled the tightness from his chest. Every time he vanquished Silas was a victory, proof he hadn’t lost all control yet.
He shook out his shoulders, and stepped onto the stone subfloor spider-webbed with cracks, then followed Asher to one of the windows overlooking the ocean.
“We really are trapped here,” Asher said, gesturing to the soggy moor and rocky beach .
Cumulus clouds loomed on the horizon.
“It feels that way, but it’s an illusion. We do have boats, after all.” Boats rendered useless during a storm surge, but Asher didn’t need to know that.
“Why paint in your father’s studio when you could paint here?”
“What makes you think I don’t?”
Asher turned. “None of your things are here.”
“The moisture is bad for the canvases.”
“But good enough for ours?” Asher arched a brow. “The logic of your lie is flawed, sir .”
Being caught in a lie by a twenty-five-year-old shouldn’t be as hot as it was. “My reasons are too nebulous to explain, and they’re private.”
“Hm.”
“I wish you wouldn’t use my own Hm against me.”
Asher rolled his lips inward and returned his attention to the scenery. Long seconds passed, during which Lev mixed colors in his mind’s palette to match the faint purple shadows under his eyes, the—wait—was that inky black line a tattoo peeking out from his neckline?
Lev fought the urge to slip his fingers inside Asher’s collar and peer down his chest. What art had he loved enough to immortalize on his skin? How many tattoos did he have, and where? But a good mentor wouldn’t ask his protégé such questions.
“Come,” Lev said. “Let me show you to your station.”
Lev guided Asher to a spot with good light near the warmth of the fireplace. He’d already moved his painting to the easel.
“I brought your things here after breakfast.” Lev stroked the top corner of the canvas. “Unless you wish to abandon this?”
Regardless of the answer, Lev would see that Asher completed it .
The muscles in Asher’s jaw tightened.
“What’s wrong?” Lev asked.
“I don’t like people touching my art before it’s finished.”
“I see. More of a lone wolf, are you?” How sharp were his teeth?
“If anyone’s a lone wolf, it’s you.”
“You speak as if you have any idea whose company I keep.” Lev cleared his throat and traced the graphite trunk of a tree. “If you can’t bring gluttony into this piece, I’m happy to provide you with a fresh canvas…”
“No.”
“Splendid. Good luck, Blakely. May the best artist win.”
Before Asher could answer, Lev turned and walked away. Best not to piss the morning away flirting.
Over the next few hours, Lev roamed the room, stopping at each canvas.
Melody’s project was a hot pink nightmare.
A young girl with eyes too big for her face clutched a teddy in a wrecked bedroom.
Wardrobe tipped over, rainbow clothes spilling out.
Disemboweled stuffed animals bleeding fluff.
A monster drawn on the wall in black crayon.
“It’s the death of the inner child,” she explained with a smile that looked like she’d spent years practicing in a mirror.
An art critic with his head stuck up his arse might have said her work wasn’t all that inspired or different. How many artists over the centuries had editorialized the death of their inner child?
But Lev didn’t care about originality. He didn’t care about technique. She could have drawn a stick figure for all he cared. What made it art was the piece of herself she’d embedded in it.
An honest artist flayed open their veins and painted with their pain, and carved a piece of their soul out and put it on display.
Melody’s message was clear; her inner child hadn’t died from natural causes. It had died suddenly and under suspicious circumstances, had an entire autopsy performed before money disposed of it.
“This is fantastic. Well done.”
Melody beamed.
Lev felt Asher’s eyes on him like a spell chanting, look at me, look at me, look at me. But Lev didn’t need to. He’d already synchronized his peripheral vision with Asher’s paintbrush.
“Alright there, Lars?” While Lar’s work with ballpoint pens was novel and exquisite, the thrashing bodies of a gluttonous circle of hell a la Dante’s Inferno rang a touch too literal.
Julian was off somewhere snapping pictures, and Lev refused to look in Chuck’s direction after being the captive audience to what was, essentially, a self-masturbatory monologue.
“Daria.” Lev stopped at her canvas.
“Lev,” she answered in a husky voice without pausing her brush.
She’d been at it for hours, and Lev still hadn’t the foggiest notion of what she painted. Thus the peril of examining surrealist works in progress.
“May I ask what message you hope to convey with this piece?”
She tossed her head, shaking long, midnight curls from her face. “You’ll know when I’m finished.”
“I’ve no doubt.”
Daria’s self-taught and somewhat bastardized methods worked incredibly well for her. He didn’t impart any words of wisdom. She didn’t need them.
At each canvas, he heaped praise intermixed with the occasional suggestion, because Father said he always left his artists in a better place than before they’d met him. Lev would save his hard edge for the one he’d selected, exactly as Father had done to him.
Saving the best for last, quite intentionally, Lev made his way toward the dangerous and depressing rendition of the Bolton Strid brewing in Asher’s painting. Except, somebody else was already looking at it—Theo Laurenti.
Asher leaned toward Theo, his lips moving as he told him something Lev couldn’t hear. When Theo laughed, Lev’s eyes narrowed. He wanted all of Asher’s words, even the ones he spoke to someone else.
Forcing a casual gait, he strode over and rested a hand on Asher’s shoulder like a toddler claiming a toy.
“Blakely, I see you’ve met our very own modern day impressionist.” Lev nodded toward the handsome French oil painter with warm brown skin and bright eyes. “Has he shown you his glass?”
“No?”
“Theo works with molten glass, takes these photos all sweaty, and covered in soot. He’s talented too.” Lev released Asher’s shoulder and extended his hand to shake Theo’s calloused one.
“Thank you, Lev,” Theo said, peppering a clean-shaven kiss to both of Lev’s bristly cheeks.
“It’s the truth.” Lev pulled his phone from his pocket and showed Asher the photo he’d saved of a pale glass hand sinking into a pool of murky black. “This one is my favorite.”
Rather than step closer as Lev had hoped, Asher took the phone from his hand. Theo’s arm grazed Asher’s as he sidled closer and hovered at his elbow.
“Theo, this is beautiful.” Asher’s voice took on a reverent hush as he traced the glass tendril fingers reaching through obsidian depths for the scattered stems of a wildflower bouquet drifting on the surface. “It reminds me of Millais’s Ophelia .”
“That was exactly my intention!” Theo smiled, lowering a lingering hand to Asher’s forearm.
Asher zoomed in on the petals. “I love the dichotomy. It’s so delicate, but if you don’t give it the respect it deserves, it cuts sharp, almost like the fledgling first days of the tragic love story that inspired it.”
A frisson of chills erupted all over Lev’s body. Watching Asher view fine art was even more beautiful than the art itself.
“Are you speaking from experience, Blakely?”
Asher shook his head and returned the phone without making eye contact.
“Lucky for you, then,” Lev said, pocketing it.
“Have you worked with glass before?” Theo shoved his way back into their conversation.
“No. I don’t have the finesse for it.”
“Nonsense,” Lev said. “There’s no finesse required. Theo all but fights with the glass, wrangling it into shape. Hell, he even blows a metal rod.”
“Oh, stop.” Theo swatted Lev’s arm.
Asher followed the motion. Was his pretty American as jealous of Theo as Lev was? Good. Best to keep things on an equal footing.
“Doesn’t Lichenmoor have a forge?” Asher asked.
“It does,” Lev said slowly.
“Maybe you can give me a private lesson?” Asher suggested to Theo, then trapped his bottom lip between his teeth.
Lev didn’t like that. Not one bit.
“Come now. Private lessons?” Lev clicked his tongue. “That wouldn’t be very fair. We’re far more into voyeurism at Lichenmoor.”
Theo’s lips curled into a seductive smile. “I brought my tools.”
“Did you now?” Lev asked.
“I was hoping to make art with that famous forge.”
Lev could lie. He could tell them he didn’t have any raw glass in stock or that the forge was out of order, but he wasn’t entirely sure if a forge could break.
“I look forward to seeing you in action,” Asher said.
This fucking walking sex on a lacrosse stick wanted to hook up with Theo?
Lev could acknowledge that Theo was offensively handsome, resembling a young Alain Delon, but how could Blakely reject Lev’s advances, given their chemistry, and then fall for Theo’s sophomoric attempt at getting into his pants?
“Careful, Blakely. At this rate, you’re going to have to buy Theo a drink before he demonstrates his lips wrapped ‘round the old blowpipe.” Lev placed a hand on Theo’s back. “Come, Theo. I’ll give you a tour of our forge.”
Asher rolled his lips inward, nearly suppressing his scowl.
“It was a pleasure to meet you.” Theo took Asher’s hand and squeezed, not a true handshake, more an intimate goodbye.
“You too,” Asher said.
“Happy painting, Blakely.” Lev guided Theo away and winked over his shoulder in time to catch Asher’s face fall.
Lev felt a bit shite, then. Silas materialized, matching Lev’s stride. Impeccable timing as always.
“Well, that was embarrassing,” Silas said over Theo’s droning monologue about medieval glass blowing.
Lev ignored him.
“Your little dormouse doesn’t know it yet, but he’s in the early days of a doomed love story like dear Ophelia.” Silas sighed melodramatically and lifted the back of his hand to his forehead. “If only I could warn him.”