Shadows of Darkness

6. The Portraits

David never explained how he worked. To him, painting wasn't a form of expression, it wasn't like he replicated what he saw in his mind, it wasn't as if he had the visions, and it wasn't something he understood entirely. Composing Darkness was the desperate impulse, the seepage of the no-way-out dusk, and the submission to his great love. He didn't dream, witness, or feel those reveries, but they came to him imperiously and incomprehensibly. His body, ego, spirit, subconscious, and soul together guided his muscles, and when it was done, which usually took days, breathlessly he would gape at a portrait and wondered how she took shape.

When David painted the white fuzzes around Cyan, he howled in tears, shuddering in fear of losing, mourning something he couldn't phantom. Three days without rest, he hallucinated, collapsed, and cried. When the entity released him, upon the sight of the great masterpiece, he wondered how she could die so beautifully. How could this gentleness, with her small face calm and peaceful, imply the apocalypse falling from the sky?

"We won't let anything happen to you," said Simon. His slow gaze on Cyan made her sank deeper in the couch.

"How could a gate destroy the other side?" Luke peered at the door. Asking the right question, he grasped the concept of the huldreke world better than the other Watts boys, quicker than David.

Aric nodded, pleased with the youngest Watts boy's intelligence. "When there's no room, there's no need of a door," he said instead of putting out another theory he arrogantly considered.

Angelica whispered something to John, and he reluctantly went up the stairs. Cyan watched him go, leaving her in an inescapable veracity. But John was human, and his reality couldn't be the same as the huldreke world's.

"Whatever it is, we'll stop it!" Will shouted, this tone of his was Bill Watts's. Heaving, he darted to the breakfast counter and gulped down two glasses of cold water.

"Are you okay?" Simon asked when all eyes went to Will.

"Yeah," Will responded between the third glass of water.

"What do we know about Gate?" Luke returned to the topic.

"Not it," David said. "Gate is a woman—a girl like her by the look of human. She's huldreke, so she aged slowly." He nodded at Angelica and then glanced at Cyan. "But Molly Wolf is older than us, stronger and more dangerous than us."

"How old is Cyan?" Luke narrowed his eyes.

"17," Aric answered confidently. "But Darkness is older than this world." He strutted to Luke and adamantly stared at the boy's face. If the circumstances were different, Luke wouldn't let anyone look at him like that for two seconds straight. "Molly needs to be on our side."

"Then I don't know why we can't meet her." David elevated his voice. He had been trying to get to the bottom of it, but there were many lines he wasn't allowed to cross. "If Cyan's dead..."

"Dead?" Will yelled and hurled the glass against the wall. "Why the hell does everyone want her dead?" he grunted. "She won't die, all right? Stop trying to kill her. Just frigging stop. Stop!"

"Will!" Simon stumbled to Will—a nuclear ready to go off. "What the hell is wrong with you?"

Right then, Will fell on his knees and fought for breaths. His eyes were red, his fingers curled into his skin, his entire body drenched in sweat.

"He's burning up." Angelica pressed Will's back to the floor. "David!"

David clutched Will's head. While Will's shivering body gradually relaxed, the heat had spread through all of his organs.

"What is happening to him?" said Luke as he locked Will in his arm.

"I don't know." David eased a little away from the defused obliteration. If he reached Will a second late, the later would have exploded into a pile of flesh.