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I could feel dread still churning in my gut. Whatever I’d painted had unsettled both my angel and I; I could feel his restlessness. He didn’t want Aria out of his sight, and I shared that sentiment.
“Please,” I begged her.
“You’re…”
“He doesn’t care,” Johnny answered for me. I shot him a grateful look. “He might just want you here for his peace of mind.”
Johnny helped me into the shower and turned the water on cold. He helped strip me of my boxers only after the curtain was pulled, though a wave of panic had me pulling the curtain open enough to see Aria again.
“Do you want me to talk so you know I’m here?” she asked, eyes trained politely on my face.
I might’ve reminded her of what exactly we’d been doing before getting interrupted by my affliction, were I in better spirits. Instead, I nodded.
“Well, you’ve, um… you’ve been under for about eight hours, so it’s now a little around seven AM,” she informed me. This explained why I still couldn’t feel my legs, and why Johnny went immediately to showering me when I hadn’t even felt his hands on me. “I’ve been too anxious to sleep, but the others went back to bed or are off being assigned. I think Neo’s at the school and daycare center today, Marilyn’s at the training grounds, and Reese is in the kitchen.”
I zoned out as I focused on breathing and staying awake. The water turned off, a towel appeared in my line of sight, and Johnny patted me down at some point. I dozed off, and some part of my brain was very glad Johnny was able to carry me, because when I reopened my eyes, I heard him talking to Aria.
“You’re going to stay with him while he sleeps. I can explain your absence to the Director,” he said. “Just stay here. I’ll get you some food, and then I expect youbothto sleep, Aria.”
“And what about you?” she asked. I almost heard her suggest he do the same.
“I play video games in my spare time, sugar. I can draft a mansion running on two hours of sleep, a monster, and a granola bar. Don’t you worry about me.”
The door clicked shut, after which I became aware of the feeling of fingers being carded through my hair and a heartbeat beneath my ear.
I was asleep before I took my next breath.
When I woke, we weren’t alone. I could hear the nervous chattering of Johnny and Marilyn’s calm voice trying to soothe him.
“Why is no one else impressed by how incredible this is?” I heard Reese ask.
I shifted, lifting my head to squint in their direction, and Aria’s hand fell away from my head.
“You’re awake,” Johnny said. “Great. What in the fuck is this, Sariel?
He gestured wildly to the huge canvas still mounted on the easel in the middle of the room.
His panic had both Aria and I scrambling out of bed.
I wasn’t sure how long we’d slept, but I was now well-rested enough to recognize that the feeling in my gut wasn’t actually dread.
It wasterror.
I stopped before the painting, and my breath left me in a harsh whoosh. “Oh, fuck.”
My gut twisted. I wanted to turn and cover Aria’s eyes so that she couldn’t see this. I knew it would disturb her even more than it did me, and from how my gut was churning, I wasn’t sure that would be good for any of us.
“Oh my God,” she breathed out shakily.
I’d selected a seventy-five-inch canvas, and there wasn’t a single spot of it that had been left without paint. It depicted a wolf at the forefront, its eyes red and glowing, its paws and mouth dripping in blood, its lips pulled back in a snarl of milky-white teeth, and its eyes trained on the viewer. Its pelt was one that had been tattooed into the back of my eyes—black with white patches around the eyes, snout, and paws.
It was Aria’s wolf. And she sat atop a pile of bodies, ones that could be easily recognized as the people in the room with us, as well as Neo who wasn’t here to admire this horrid spectacle.
The bodies seemed to stretch beyond where Aria was poised atop her own mountain. In the background, an angel hovered over what looked to be a literal battlefield of corpses. One of its wings was black and gold, the other white and gold; it had no distinctive facial features, but the shock of orange hair gave me away to anyone that didn’t know about my wings.
Blood dripped from the bottom of each wing, and the angel’s arms were spread in a way that suggested that if it had a mouth, it would be laughing.
My skin felt like it was tightening around my bones.
