17. The Paintings Are Listening #2
“That can be dangerous. I know from personal experience.”
“Yes.”
Outside, the woods do not feel less watched.
This seems unfair.
I had been promised fewer walls, not a forest full of judgmental trees and crows with undertaker energy.
Anneliese leads me down a narrow path behind the studio, past ferns heavy with rain and foxglove bells drooping beneath the mist. She stops beside a moss-covered stone bench overlooking a ravine. The creek below is mostly hidden by fog, but I can hear it rushing over rocks.
“There,” she says. “The studio cannot hear us from here.”
I look back at the cottage. Its windows glow pale gold through the trees.
“Can the trees?”
“Not in the same way.”
“That is not the no I was hoping for.”
“They’re fine. Really. They may listen, but they’re not part of the ear channel.”
“Better. Still eerie.”
I hug my coat around myself. “If the ears are in paintings, walls, mirrors, enchanted surfaces—then we remove them.”
Her gaze cuts to me. “No.”
“That was very fast.”
“Because it is a very bad idea.”
“You don’t know my idea yet.”
“You said remove them. That is enough.”
I fold my arms. “Fine. We infiltrate the enchantment. Trace the listening threads, identify the anchor points, cut the channels, salt the surface, burn the infected pigment, and maybe insult the walnut cabinet while we’re emotionally warmed up.”
Anneliese stares at me.
“What? I said maybe.”
“You are describing surgery on a living spell system you do not understand run my something or someone we can’t identify.”
“I understand enough.”
“No. You understand that the paintings listen. You do not understand what answers through them.”
A chill slides down my spine.
“That sounds like a distinction designed to ruin my day.”
“It should.”
“The ears are not merely listening devices,” she says. “Some are bait. Some are hooks. Some are hollow places made to feel like channels so anyone with enough power and desperation will reach inside.”
“Reach inside and what?”
“And be noticed.”
The creek rushes below us.
My mouth goes dry. “By the curse?”
“By whatever planted the ears. By whatever Saffron learned to court in prison. By whatever old hunger has found its way into art, architecture, rumor, grief.”
I hate this because I think she is right.
“And if we pull them out blindly—”
“We may wake the entire network.”
For one second, I see it: every painting at the gallery opening its eyes, every mirror in Everwilde darkening, every old wall leaning close. A whole town becoming a listening mouth at one time. Nowhere would be safe.
Still, fear is surrender.
“And if we don’t do anything, it keeps listening.”
“I did not say do nothing.”
“You didn’t say not to.”
“I said no to your heroic plan to perform magical root canal on an ancient curse-web with three facts, two theories, and the confidence of a fox in a henhouse.”
“Foxes are very effective in henhouses.”
“Not from the hen’s perspective.”
“I am not the hen.”
“That remains under review.”
I make a sound of pure frustration. “I’m tired of half answers.
My mother gave me half answers. Dorian and I are cutting each other open with half answers.
You are standing here with centuries of experience and an entire studio full of suspicious portraits, telling me not to touch the thing that is listening to us. ”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because you are angry.”
“I am allowed.”
“Yes. But you are also powerful, frightened, poorly informed, and in love.”
The word hits like a hand to the chest.
“I did not say—”
“You did not have to.”
The thread beneath my ribs gives a sharp, traitorous pulse.
Dorian.
I hate that his name can exist in me without being spoken.
Anneliese’s gaze softens slightly. “The ears feed on exactly this. Fear wearing devotion. Devotion wearing anger. The need to protect someone before they can choose how to stand beside you.”
“That is rich coming from the Olympic gold medalist of secret keepers.”
“Yes,” she says quietly. “It is.”
That stops me more effectively than an excuse.
Anneliese looks toward the ravine. “I've made terrible choices in the name of protection. So has Alistair. So have you. And so, I suspect, has Detective Wolfe.”
I say nothing. Because yes. Because no. Because my heart is a contrary disaster.
“The question,” she continues, “is whether we keep making old mistakes with better excuses.”
Mist curls between us.
For one dangerous second, I want to tell her everything. The séance. My mother’s loophole. The place where death wears many faces.
But if the woods are not a no, only a different kind of maybe, then maybe words are still risky.
Maybe everything is.
I press my palms against my coat, grounding myself. “Teach me how to touch the network safely,” I say. “Not rip it out. Not wake it. Touch it. Map it. Find where it begins.”
Anneliese’s expression closes again, but not fully. There. A crack. She knows a way. Or part of one. “I may be able to test a canvas,” she says at last. “One canvas. Under controlled conditions.”
“Which canvas?”
Her eyes shift toward the studio.
The unfinished portrait with no eyes.
Of course.
My skin prickles. “That thing is bait.”
“Yes.”
“And you want to use it.”
“No,” Anneliese says. “I want to understand why it came to me unfinished.”
The creek roars below us. The forest waits.
And for the first time, I realize Anneliese is not refusing because she knows too little. She is refusing because she knows enough to be afraid.
I should keep the séance clue to myself. This would be the sensible choice.
Unfortunately, sensible choices and I have been in a trial separation since approximately the moment I inherited a matchmaking curse, fell inconveniently in love with a wolf-warlock detective, and began taking strategic advice from dead relatives.
“The red threads,” I say. “They transformed into black threads with knots in them. And they didn’t disappear when Mara and Caleb died.”
Anneliese goes completely silent. “That seems unusual.”
"Yes."
"And you don't know what it means."
"I didn't."
"But—"
She waits.
"Then I had a vision. And I saw the black knotted threads pulling the love from the red threads and collecting it. As if the curse is claiming that power for itself."
She flinches as if a lightning bolt ran through her. I see this has hit a nerve. And why wouldn’t it? She and Alistair are fated mates. Just another pair of my fated mates. None of us like the idea of our threads turning black and knotted.
Her gaze stays on the mist outline of the cottage. She waits. Then turns to me.
“There is something else. What is it you know that you are not saying?”
“I know many things.”
“Not the time to become a decorative fortune cookie. What have you learned?” she asks.
There it is. Not What do you suspect? What have you learned?
“If I tell you, can the woods carry it?”
“Not the way walls can.”
“That remains an extremely suspicious answer.”
“It is the most honest one I have.”
I study her face. Elegant. Still. Too controlled. But there is strain around her eyes now.
Fine.
“My mother came through in a séance.”
Anneliese goes very still. Not surprised. Alarmed.
“She said the curse has rules,” I continue. “That it listens where love is declared, where bonds are named, where fear teaches silence.”
The mist thickens between us.
Anneliese’s voice is barely audible. “What else?”
“She said to find the place where death wears many faces.” I watch her closely. “She said there, even the walls forget how to listen.”
The change in Anneliese is immediate. Tiny. Devastating.
“She said that?”
I nod.
Her lips part. Her fingers tighten around the palette knife she is still holding, though I do not remember her bringing it outside. For one second, she looks toward the studio as if something inside it might have heard the phrase anyway.
Then she hides it. Badly.
“Oh, no,” I say.
Her eyes return to mine. “Fate—”
“No. That is the face of someone who just recognized a clue and considered burying it like an old grimoire.”
“I need to think.”
“Thinking is allowed. Dodging is not.”
She turns and starts walking along the ravine path. Of course she does.
I follow because I am apparently incapable of letting hermit witches brood unsupervised.
“Death wears many faces,” Anneliese says, more to herself than to me. “Actual death. Symbolic death. Staged death. Magical death.”
“Sleeping death,” I add. “False death. Ritual death. Chosen death. My mother was very poetic while being wildly unhelpful.”
Anneliese stops walking. She turns and faces me head on. “She was not unhelpful.”
“You are saying that in a tone I do not like.”
“Theater.”
My pulse jumps.
“Harborlight?” I say.
“Not simply because Mara and Caleb died there.”
“No. Because lovers die there all the time.”
“Onstage,” she says.
“For an audience.”
“The walls are trained to witness and accept deaths that are not deaths.”
A shiver slides up my spine.
“Romeo and Juliet,” I say. “Poison that mimics death. Sleep draught. Public grief. A staged tomb. Lovers dying and not dying and actually dying, depending on the version.”