48. Passion to Doldrums
PASSION TO DOLDRUMS
ASHER
A sher woke in the dark, dazed, heart racing from a nightmare of being trapped by high tide, unable to move, waiting for the ocean to consume him.
It didn’t help that the sea had surged while he’d slept and sounded even closer than it usually did. At least the weight on his chest making each craven breath more difficult was Lev’s arm, rather than a sleep paralysis demon.
The slow, fluttering pulse of Lev’s heart pressed against Asher’s side felt like the wings of a butterfly in his palms, each beat washing away more of his nightmare and replacing it with blissful scenes from the night before.
Asher had spread himself flat on his back and begged Lev to reward his good lad with his cum until Lev braced his hands on the headboard, and fucked Asher’s mouth the way he fucked his hole.
Lev hadn’t let Asher swallow until Asher had come all over himself with only a few jerks and Lev’s filthy words.
Wind whistled down the chimney with a puff of ash scenting the air before it slipped between the gaps in the sheets, lifting them like a parachute. An unlatched gate screeched and slammed shut with a metallic clamor that rattled his teeth.
Asher rolled onto his side with his back to Lev, who even in sleep, pulled Asher into his arms, until they were skin against skin.
Lightning flashed. Asher tensed. He hated waiting for thunder to follow. Lev, on the other hand, regularly slept through soul reckoning thunderstorms that kept Asher up all night. The clap of thunder wasn’t very loud, but it took Asher by surprise and startled him all the same.
The next stab of lightning lit up the room. Asher’s skin prickled, not with electricity or cold, but fear because someone was standing in the corner by the door, eyes glinting obsidian in the dark. Asher’s heart leapt to his throat, but the next flash of lightning revealed an empty corner.
What the fuck?
A floorboard creaked in the hall outside their door. The thin gap of dim lamplight shuddered as if someone had walked by. No. It was much more likely that the electricity had flickered than an intruder was taking a midnight stroll down the hallway.
Unless it was Silas.
The doorknob rattled, but that could have been wind flitting through the keyhole. Right? Or it was someone trying to break in. Maybe Asher was hallucinating, scaring himself with his flight of fears.
But what if it was Silas?
Asher carefully inched out of Lev’s hold and pulled on a hoodie and sweatpants over his bare skin.
He carried his shoes to the door. If Asher had been sneaking out of his own room, he’d never have had a chance with how loud the hinges were, but Lev’s door was silent, or at least silent against the drumroll of raindrops as Asher slid through the door and closed it behind him .
The hall was empty.
Asher would have turned around and climbed back in bed were it not for the tapestry at the end of the hall flapping with the wind, lifting up just enough to reveal the secret door to the east wing was open.
Okay, maybe Lev had forgotten to lock the door. Maybe the wind had pushed through the centuries-old lock so fiercely the door unlatched. Or maybe, just fucking maybe, Lev wasn’t going to forget everything about himself and Silas was a ghost leading him to that forbidden hall.
Asher ducked his head under the tapestry, and tangled his fingers in spiderwebs until he found the lantern Lev had left on the hook. Asher’s love for Lev was the only thing that gave him the courage to close the secret door shut behind him and walk into the dark.
The east wing was dusty, but otherwise untouched, and the long, abandoned hallway was far less menacing than the passageway.
Asher flicked the light switch, illuminating stone walls lined with dull moth-eaten tapestries and ceilings held up by arched wooden beams, details he hadn’t noticed, or remembered before.
His footsteps were overloud as he followed the prints he and Lev had left, careful not to leave a single fresh print to betray him over what felt like hallowed ground toward the locked door at the end of the hall.
If Silas had led him there, he was hiding. The only footsteps he heard were his own. What if he’d chased nothing more than his imagination down that passageway?
The skeleton key fit easily into the lock, but the door was stuck. Was something blocking it? He shoved his shoulder against the door, and with a creak that sounded like a scream, the door opened.
Dust stung his eyes. He sneezed twice. When his vision cleared, he jumped back into the hallway like a startled cat. A man stood in the corner, nose pointed toward the wall. Asher’s heart hammered in his ears. The primitive part of his brain yelled it was time to run.
What. The. Fuck?
Wait, was Silas real? Had Lev locked him inside? Had Silas never died? Asher’s panic-addled brain suggested a dozen absurd outcomes before his brain turned off completely, and Nonna’s lessons about manners took over.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize this room was occu…” he trailed off.
The man was too still.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Asher strode into the room and flipped the light switch.
Lichenmoor was creepy enough already without Lev stashing a life-sized statue inside a locked room to jump-scare trespassers. He slipped around the steamer trunk beside the statue to confront Lev’s lost love head-on.
Who else would Lev have kept under lock and key, hidden away like he’d hidden the truth about why he’d invited Asher here?
Silas Morrigan looked exactly as Asher had expected him to. Even in stone, Asher’s stomach plummeted with jealousy. Milky marble matched Silas’s skin tone, and large eyes made him spritely.
Asher touched Silas’s cold lips, trailed his fingers down his neck, along the sharp collarbone like he had in Lucian’s studio.
His hands roamed over Silas’s shoulders, down slender arms to the dead man’s hands.
Each finger was highly detailed, from wrinkled knuckles to the prints etched onto the pads of his fingers.
Lev must have started the sculpture when Silas was alive. Or used photos. Fingerprints, maybe? Lev wouldn’t have forged them. Then they’d be meaningless. The lower half of the statue was still in progress, thank fuck. Asher had no interest in comparing dick lengths.
The scent of fresh oil paint dragged his attention to painted canvases on a rack. More were stacked against the longest wall, backs to the room, like the statue had been.
“Why doesn’t he want to see you?” Asher asked the statue.
Maybe because he saw Silas all the time against his will… But then why would he spend countless hours painting him?
Asher sidled out from behind the statue and flipped through the paintings on the rack. The first was a portrait that hurt to look at because Asher would never be able to paint something so beautiful.
Most of the paintings were unvarnished, some still tacky. All of them were of the man with an elven face and raven hair so black it was nearly blue. The twin to the statue, the rightful owner of the ouroboros encircling Asher’s navel.
Silas.
Loose plastic sheeting prevented the canvases against the wall from sticking together.
He tilted one away from its neighbor. Silas’s blue eyes glared from the painting, glossy and rimmed red, like he’d spent all night crying.
The longer Asher stared, the more convinced he was that Silas wasn’t sad. He was fuming.
“What happened to you?”
He wedged his fingers between the next pair of canvases.
Another of Silas, this time with a small smirk of pleasure.
The next was Silas too. On and on it went.
Lev had cataloged every manner of emotion, varying perspectives, positions, angles of light.
He’d studied Silas in shadow. In firelight.
From the throes of passion to the doldrums of depression.
The realization that Asher stood no chance against the object of such adoration and obsession hit him square in the chest and froze his marrow.
Lev was lost in the past, in love with a ghost. Meanwhile, Asher had a fanatical celebrity crush.
He swallowed back salty tears and blinked before they fell.
Thunder boomed. Asher scarcely noticed, too engrossed in Silas. He turned away from Lev’s art with dull resignation. Someday Lev would forget Asher, but never Silas.
A love like that transcended death.
Lightning slipped through the gaps in the curtains and caught on an open steamer trunk. Was it open when he’d first entered the room? Asher looked back at the statue. Of course it hadn’t moved.
Asher almost skipped the trunk. What was the point? Lev didn’t seem like the kind of person to stuff his ex’s body in a box, but Asher should at least check that Silas’s mummified body wasn’t inside.
He pushed the trunk open wider. Neatly folded clothes were stacked in a row like books on a shelf. He pulled a collared shirt out. A cross was embroidered on the left side of the shirt with HALLOWED SAINTS in script beneath it. The shirt was smaller than Silas’s statue suggested.
Asher had imagined Silas as a much less intimidating teenager just out of high school.
But maybe not. How long had Silas lived before he died?
Asher knew so little. He unfolded a knit sweater, and stopped just short of holding it up to the statue, afraid to embarrass himself in front of Lev’s dead ex in the off chance ghosts did exist.
Had Lev kept Silas’s clothes so he could hold them to his chest, knowing that was the closest he’d ever get to touching Silas again? Asher’s heart broke twofold, for Lev’s loss most, and for himself. Asher couldn’t compete with a ghost—metaphor, or not.
He carefully shifted the clothes to the side, and found stacks of paperbound notebooks.
Silas had been a writer. That made sense.
The faded black notebook on top stood out from the ones beneath.
The pages didn’t lay flat, but fluffed up, wrinkled, not from water damage, but like they’d been referred to again and again.
On the top right corner of the cover, someone had drawn a simplified ouroboros the size of a wedding band. Inside the circle was the letter ‘L’. He shouldn’t read it, especially if it was Lev’s diary. Then again, Lev had stolen Asher’s notebook without hesitation.
Asher peeled the cover back.