Michael was as lost as a nun in a honeymoon until there; but honeymoon wasn't enough to describe his state of confusion after Raffaello, the Grim Painter, said those things to the girl in the shadows. But she shivered considerably, and got mortally pale; then, she started laughing sickly to disguise what even Michael knew that was anger. Pure hatred. And it pleased the red-haired villain, because his sharp teeth were gleaming again as he looked at her and at Michael and designed a picture around them. "It's over, then. It's... over. Of course, it'd end one day. I was fool, thinking that I could make you love as the others" she sighed sadly, as a girl-in-love, and walked slowly from behind the shop counter, towards the ginger smuggler, that smiled to her.
Michael only looked, but as she said those last words, ignoring his existence as a heart that was hers, he started to feel as desperately blind as she, and moved a step to separate them, when she became very close to that painter. But with a gesture of patience, this one stopped Michael; as if a hand came from under the ground held his ankle suddenly, keeping him where he was.
"There are so many things I wanted to say, Raffaello" said Cindy in that sad voice from before. Michael ached, when she pronounced the other's name. What had happened to her? If her heart wasn't free, and if it was so passionate, why didn't she tell him before it was too late? Why, didn't those kisses mean a thing for a lip-virgin like her? (as if it had ever meant something for him before) Did anything mean something? Or was he learning how the girls he had tricked with his charms had felt when the other day they saw him flirting with another one and ignoring them completely?
Ah, if felt like this.
How bitter. Empty. Feelingless.
Yet so painful and memorable.
"But I have no more time, dearest" she continued softly, pointing a little cute finger to the lad's forehead, to what he grinned even more carelessly. How could he... be so heartless? Heartless with Cindy, the girl of the shadows who stole the hearts of men that didn't even suspect they had one, like Michael Stormfield? Who was that Raffaello, Grim Painter, to stay inflexible in front of those purple sparkling seductive eyes?
But no... Michael suddenly realized, looking at the pretty teeth, no-freckles face, cold gray feelingless eyes: Raffaello did not have a heart. He was dead it had been more than four hundred years.
He died of high fever, caused by lovesickness.
"If I was to read my mind out loud, you'd get so bored it'd hurt me deeply; and I'm tired of being hurt, so let's skip this part. We both know that the moment you paint me as a fairy in my true form, I'm going to die. But if you don't paint me, what is your reason for living? So, as you can see, our wishes collide. One of us will have to step back for the other's sake"
"You love me" replied smoothly the painter "Isn't it a proof of your love dying for my sake? I would make you happy in your last minutes, covering you of kisses, if you wish so"
She shook her head melancholically.
"No, you're lying. After you painted me, you wouldn't care about anything else, you'd only stare at it like Poe's Oval Portrait's painter, I know... and you'd die just after me, as a fool, without me to take you out of your trance. Because who is better to take a lover out of his passion crisis than his loved one? If you need to paint me, you need me, and without me you die. So you love me"
"If loving means finding somebody useful, I love you very much. But after I have your painting, I won't need nor want you anymore. You're mistaken about the lover; if he's really in love, his love is an enchant bigger than the loved one, because what is she compared to what he feels she is? She is unperfect, stupid, human. His imagination is romantic and full of cliches that excite him; what he loves is the feeling and the touch, not the one who propitiates it – the object may change. He's in an eternal seek of love as a feeling; darn the causer! After the feeling is gone, she is worthless. When beauty fades, so does the affection. Because it's beauty... eternal beauty... that I'm in seek of"
Michael shivered, and so did Cindy, but in different ways; he was an ignorant boy, feeling scared of an atmosphere built over oppressing abstract ideas, that were too much for his sensitive will of spoiled brat. Cindy, though, was breathing of those red curls that fell over the cold eyes, the teeth that gleamed in the dark when he talked, as if her living depended on it. Her purple eyes shone, fascinated and fascinating, and Michael got lost on them as she got lost in Raffaello; Raffaello was lost in the ideas he had created, like many geniuses before him had did. Many air castles that flew around him. Imagination, powerful and bewitching.
The three of them were like that for some minutes, then the painter said, "I have made my decision, fairy. I'm going to paint you. I have already seen the sketch and I know and I feel what I'm going to do"
Cindy sighed darkly, and a gloomy pain passed through her spirit. She smiled... and cried.
Tears of amethyst that felt blankly on the ground and turned into red, winey tears, puddling the floor. Michael ran to her; the painter looked at the falling amethysts with a ray of inspiration – and then it was all in a flash, an eyeblink, before anyone would realize.
Michael stopped his hand before reaching Cindy, and looked at her, petrified. She looked at him, her glasses slipped down her little nose. They were close, but a cliff separated them: because when she rose her hand to fix the glasses, she accidentally brushed a finger in the cheek, and it got dirty with blood, too.
