Northern Light

by E. J. Russell

  “Ricochet?”

  “Off my sweatpants? I don’t think so. I—”

  Stefan launched himself off the bed, holding one hand away from his body. He grabbed the flashlight off the floor and even in the weak light from the fading bulb, Luke could see Stefan’s palm glistened red.

  “You’re bleeding.” Stefan rolled him onto his stomach. “Above your right hip. I thought your injury had healed.”

  Luke touched his lower back and hissed at the bright spike of pain. “Shit. That was two years ago, and it was the other hip.”

  Stefan helped Luke off the bed with a steady hand under his elbow and led him down the hall. In the flickering light of the oil lantern on the vanity, Luke washed his own chest and belly while Stefan sponged his back, his hand resting on Luke’s hip to hold him still. Firm but gentle. Not frenzied like their lovemaking. Not furtive like the hidden touches in darkened parlors and empty hallways or the stolen moments under the servants’ stairs.

  What?

  Luke pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes until spots of light burst behind his eyelids. He opened them wide to clear the blurriness, but it didn’t work. His own eyes were black in the mirror and Stefan’s looked brown, not blue.

  Stefan glanced up and met Luke’s reflected gaze. “It looks like you got jabbed with something sharp but rough. Not a blade. More like a—”

  “Splintered tree stump,” he blurted.

  Stefan’s hand tightened on his hip. “You fell? When?”

  “No. The nightmare. It was…that night…” Luke braced his hands on the vanity, elbows locked. “God. Poor Edward. If only he’d spoken sooner. Before he…before I…”

  “Christ, Luke. Your eyes.”

  The grip on his hip tightened but couldn’t hold him. He drifted away. “Drove for hours. Forever. To a riverside. Piled my canvases on the bank.”

  “Luke, can you hear me?”

  His head pounded and he couldn’t catch his breath. “Lit a cigarette. Lit the paintings. What good were they without him? Too fast. Too hot. The trees in flames. My car wouldn’t start. I ran. Raced the fire.” He jerked and flung his arms out wide, but nothing could save him now. “The ravine. Falling. Suffocating. Fire rushing toward me, over me, until—”

  Luke jerked at the splash of icy water on his face. His throat ached as if he’d screamed it bloody and water dripped off his eyelashes and chin, trickling down his chest. He blinked at Stefan, who held an empty glass. “I’m wet.”

  “Sorry.” Stefan cupped his face and blotted the water off with a towel. He stared into Luke’s eyes, thumb stroking his jaw. “Do you remember what you said?”

  “I said something?”

  Stefan nodded, unsmiling, and helped Luke into a faded pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt.

  He sighed and his shoulders drooped as if he’d accepted some final defeat. “Will you come to the studio with me?” He held out his hand and Luke took it. “I need to show you something.”

  Chapter Eight

  “Surely you have some clue whether you painted or not,” Luke said, gimping through the matted weeds behind the cabin in Stefan’s wake.

  Stefan paused with his hand on the studio doorknob. “Nope. I just wake up the next day with a monster headache and a butt-load of hope and fear.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  Stefan tossed a glare over his shoulder. “Can you explain your nightmare?”

  Luke eased the waistband of his pants away from the bandaged laceration on his back. “Well, I figured I was drunk—”

  “Drunk.” Stefan’s tone held a ton of give-me-a-fucking-break. “Yeah. Let’s roll with that.” He opened the door and flipped a switch.

  The solar lights were dim in the cavernous studio, but they cast enough light to reveal the easel in the center of the room, its canvas facing away from the door. The window reflected the bold colors and aggressive style of a classic Arcoletti. Luke glanced at Stefan, who’d stalled inside the threshold, staring at the easel with wide, haunted eyes. He grabbed Luke’s bicep, his fingers like ice though Luke’s shirt.

  “You look. Please?”

  Luke laid his hand over Stefan’s long enough to share a little warmth. “Absolutely.”

  He circled the easel and faced the painting. Even in the dim light, the colors were vibrant, alive. Pretty fricking ironic considering the artist was dead. Luke glanced at Stefan, hovering near the door as if he was about to bolt.

  “You say you painted this last night?”

  Stefan nodded, arms wrapped across his stomach.

  “You sure?”

  “I’m never sure. But if it had been here yesterday, Thomas would have taken it.”

  Luke touched the lower corner of the picture over the signature. “It’s already dry.”

  “They always are.” Stefan stopped one pace beyond the easel, his gaze fixed on Luke’s face. “Is it his? Arcoletti’s?”

  Luke nodded. “It’s Last Chance Cafe. He described it in one of the Gordon letters. Here.” He pulled Stefan forward, draping an arm across his back and tucking him close. “Look.”

  The painting was a street scene. Night. Blues bleeding into reds and reds into greens and yellows, as if seen through a rain-drenched window. No cars. No people, except for a slender man in evening dress. He stood on the wet sidewalk, his reflection double-distorted in the wavy glass of a cafe window.

  Luke pointed at the man. “That’s…” Luke hunched against the sudden agony in his chest, the memory of a monumental loss. He pressed a hand against his sternum until the phantom pain eased. “That’s Edward. Edward Franklin.”

  Stefan jerked against Luke’s shoulder. “Franklin? Not Arcoletti?”

  “No. Arcoletti was a big, raw-boned guy. Shaggy brown hair. Leonine.”

  Stefan skimmed the canvas with one finger. “I’ve seen him,” Stefan whispered. “Edward.”

  “You painted him before?”

  “Not a picture. I’ve seen him.” Stefan swallowed. “He’s the man in the road. Last night. When I stopped the car.”

  “Shit. Two ghosts?” Luke muttered, running a hand through his hair. “I’m still not sure I believe in the first one.”

  “The first one?” Stefan didn’t sound happy. Who would?

  Luke shifted his arm from Stefan’s shoulder to his waist, wanting to give comfort as well as take it, because…shit. This stuff was freaky. “This was Arcoletti’s studio. William Franklin claims his ghost haunts the place. That he’s…ah…you know…possessing you. Using you as a means to re-create his lost collection.”

  “A ghost. Possession.” Stefan sagged against Luke’s side, his shoulders shaking. Luke realized the rusty sound coming out of the man was laughter. “Wonderful.”

  “Yeah, I know. Nuts, right?”

  Stefan pushed himself out of Luke’s embrace. “I have to show you something else.” He led Luke to a closet behind a circa 1970 brown plaid sofa. He fished a key out of an empty can on the floor and unlocked the door. “Thomas doesn’t know about these. I never showed him.”

  He pulled half a dozen two-by-three canvases out of the closet and propped the first five against the wall. Each one was the same. A tree with a wide, brown trunk and feathery branches that drooped under the weight of water pearled on the needles. On the left side, a gnarled root thrust up like a tortured knee, skin removed, muscles and sinews brown and mummified.

  Luke frowned. Something about the shape was familiar, but the sinister shadows didn’t match the tug on his memory. “I’ve seen this tree.” He snapped his fingers. “The painting in the gallery. Edward, Reading. Same tree.” He whistled long and low. “Way different mood.”

  Stefan held the last painting facing his chest and jerked his chin at the row of canvases. “These are the first blackout paintings. Scared the piss out of me. Night after night, another painting of the tree, always the same. Until this one.” His knuckles shone white where he clutched the edge of the frame. “After this one, I stopped checking the studio for
new paintings.”

  He flipped the picture around and held it against his chest. Same tree. Same branches. Same trunk. But a crimson splatter arced across the bark and a limp hand lay across the root, palm up, the just-visible white cuff and black sleeve smirched with mud.

  Images splashed behind Luke’s eyelids; stark, harshly lit, and disjointed. A bonfire on a rocky river bank. Fire rushing down the hill, Stefan’s face superimposed on Edward’s. Stefan’s head ringed with a halo of flame-like hair. Edward with blood blooming red on his white shirt.

  He caromed off the sofa, backpedaling until he slammed against the wall, gulping air like a goddamn beached mackerel. “Edward. That’s Edward. Arcoletti, he…the fire. He couldn’t get away.” He swiped one shaking hand over a forehead suddenly damp with sweat, the memory of that nightmare fire heating his skin once more, burning his lungs, threatening him with Arcoletti’s fate. He grabbed Stefan’s wrist and towed him toward the door. “We’re out of here. Now.”

  Stefan hunched in the wobbly ladder-back chair at the dining table, his head in his hands, while Luke stormed around the living room, demanding a reason for the impossible, an explanation for the inexplicable. A cold weight settled in Stefan’s belly, the numbness seeping out along his veins, growing each time Luke tossed out another theory. Another why. Stefan had given up on why long ago. Because why didn’t matter. Only what.

  The what Stefan had to face now? He wasn’t painting. Not really. He was still as blocked as he’d been since Marius’s plane plowed into that hill.

  Luke stopped pacing and propped his hands on his hips. “What did you do last night? Before the studio?”

  “I was pissed at you, so I had a drink. More than one.”

  “A drink. Of what?”

  “Scotch. Beer wasn’t going to cut it.”

  Luke paled. “Shit. The Scotch.” He grabbed the bottle off the sideboard. “Fifteen-year-old Glenlivet. This is the only thing Arcoletti drank. What if this is the…the conduit that allows him to break through from wherever the hell ghosts reside? The thing that lets him into your head?”

  Great. Luke had segued to how. How didn’t matter, either. “None of those paintings were mine.” It wasn’t a question. He knew the answer.

  “No. Damn. I thought Franklin was loony with his haunted studio talk, but he was spot-on. Pack your shit. We’re leaving.”

  “Why?” Christ, now he was the one asking that stupid, useless question.

  Luke stared at him as if he were insane. “Because this shit is off-the-charts repulsive. To have that guy in your head—”

  “I never remember it.”

  “Jesus, I do.” Luke closed his eyes and swiped a hand across his forehead. “He rode my brain as if it were a broken-down nag. Nothing’s worth a repeat of that.”

  The numbness invaded Stefan’s lungs and he struggled to force in a breath. “When you…in the bedroom…when we…was that you? Or was that…him?” God, sometimes who mattered, too.

  “No.” Luke stumbled on the rug in his rush to get to the table. “That was me. You. Us. Swear to God.”

  “How can you be sure? Maybe it was Arcoletti getting his spectral rocks off.”

  Luke sat in the other chair and pulled it close, his knees bracketing Stefan’s. He gripped the back of Stefan’s neck with one hand, thigh with the other, thumb stroking the inseam of Stefan’s jeans. “I’m sure because it’s been building since the day I was a fucking idiot and left you. That was us.” Luke pulled him forward and kissed him, a brush of lips, a hint of tongue. Nothing too hot, but warm enough to chase the ice from Stefan’s chest. “Definitely us.”

  Stefan leaned his forehead against Luke’s. “Thank God.”

  “No shit.” Luke brushed a thumb across Stefan’s jaw, rasping against Stefan’s three-day stubble. “So how about it? You ready to get the hell out of Dead Man’s Dodge?”

  Stefan tensed and pulled back far enough to look in Luke’s eyes. “It’s not that simple.”

  “What do you mean?” Luke scowled and dropped his hands to his knees.

  “I have debts, Luke. More than you can imagine.”

  “Try me.”

  Stefan clenched his hands between his knees. “The day Marius died, he called me from Vegas. He’d landed a huge commercial commission for me. Six paintings for a new hotel. He knew I hated that kind of job so he’d already cashed the check to force my hand. I told him I was leaving. Right before he took off. He was so angry.” The lump in his throat reduced Stefan’s voice to a croak.

  Luke took his hands, gently pried them apart, and laced his own fingers with Stefan’s. “You think he crashed his plane on purpose?”

  “Marius loved the grand gesture, and that was pretty freaking enormous.” Stefan tried to pull away from Luke. He didn’t deserve comfort. He needed to take responsibility.

  “Stef. You didn’t kill him. Okay? He was the pilot. Not you.”

  Stefan tucked his chin toward his chest and managed to nod. “I know. But I owe the Vegas hotelier. I never painted those pictures and all the cash burned along with the plane. If I leave here, I’ll be back on their radar and I’m not ready. Not until I have the means to pay them back.” Stefan ran a shaking hand through his hair. “And then there’s Thomas. I have an obligation to him, too.”

  Luke sat up, anger chasing the concern from his face. “Bullshit.”

  “I’ve been living on his dime for four months. I can’t afford a single paintbrush myself, let alone everything I’d need to set up my own studio. Thomas’s generosity is the only thing giving me the least bit of hope I’ll be able to paint again. I owe him for that chance, not to mention four months’ worth of rent, food, and supplies.”

  “You don’t owe him your life.”

  “My life.” Stefan pushed away and stood up, tipping his chair backward against the corner of the island with a thud. “You want to know about my life? I hadn’t painted anything for two years. I was living in my fucking fifty-dollar car. Nothing,” he said, staring Luke down, deliberately mimicking his earlier tone, “is worth a repeat of that.”

  Luke met his stare, eyes narrowing. “He sold two of the forgeries. Boardman. He mention that?”

  Stefan’s breath stalled and his stomach plummeted. “No. He said—”

  “One point two million for the set. Do you suppose that’s enough to offset the cost of these princely accommodations? And the Scotch. Let’s not forget that. You definitely want to reimburse him for the fucking Glenlivet and the joy rides on the supernatural super-highway.”

  Stefan sank onto the sofa in a crackle of ancient leather, his knees unable to hold him. “It’s all over then. I’m officially a forger. When will you turn me in?”

  Luke cracked a laugh. “Are you nuts? I’m not turning you in.”

  “But the sale—”

  “I’ve skated along the razor’s edge of my professional ethics before. I can do it again.”

  “You’d do that? Compromise another dream?”

  “It’s been more like a bad trip the last couple of years. Don’t worry about it. Stef.” Luke’s voice was low, its hard edge softened. “Come away with me.”

  “And what?” His fingers twisted together as if his hands belonged to two different people, each desperately seeking comfort. “You’ll take care of me? Like Marius? What if I don’t want to be taken care of? What if I never did?”

  “So what’s your plan?” Luke spread his arms, encompassing the dreary cabin, his voice sharp again. “Stay here and play Arcoletti’s bitch? As the one plastered on his drug of choice last night, I can tell you it will not end well.”

  Stefan stared at his hands, touching the place where a spot of cobalt once taunted him. “He wants to paint, Luke. I can understand that. He wants to make it right. To put everything back the way it was. This studio. The missing canvases. He just wants us to paint.”

  “He didn’t want me to paint, Stefan. He wanted me to die.”

  Luke’s voice broke on the last word. He sway
ed in the middle of the room, his hazel eyes wide and fingers twitching, obviously three heartbeats from a total freak-out at the idea of the uncanny. Shit. Of course. For Luke, it had always been realism or nothing. Hell, the guy didn’t even read fiction.

  Stefan, on the other hand, believed absolutely in fate. Destiny. Karma. Whatever the hell you called it. Weird shit happened all the time, like his worthless beater car breaking down with just enough momentum to roll into the Krab Korner parking lot. Karla giving him the dishwashing job when he was on his last package of ramen. Thomas walking into the restaurant and recognizing him from one brief meeting Stefan barely remembered.

  Or dread squirming in his belly like a colony of maggots until he refused to get in Marius’s plane on that last fateful trip.

  And as he watched Luke’s gaze dart from shadow to shadow in the shabby room, it hit him like a punch to the heart—Luke was sacrificing his reputation, the career he’d found to replace the first one Stefan had stolen from him, for Stefan’s sake. A professional suicide—maybe not as final as Marius’s death, but devastating and irrevocable nonetheless.

  Sweat broke out on his forehead and between his shoulders. Marius had laughed at his warning and gotten into the cockpit anyway, confident of his own invincibility. Luke wasn’t as arrogant, but he was ten times as protective and fifty times as stubborn. He’d never leave Stefan behind, never believe that Stefan didn’t want the sacrifice. And Stefan absolutely refused to cause the death of anyone—or anything—ever again.

  That meant he had to force Luke to leave. Drive him away. Destroy the connection they’d just barely rebuilt. Unfortunately, he knew exactly how to do it.

  He shot off the sofa and grabbed Luke’s coat from the peg by the door, hugging it to his chest. It smelled of damp wool, wood smoke, and Luke. Stefan clutched it tighter, inhaling the scent one more time because it would have to last for the rest of his so-called life.

  “If you can’t take the heat, go.” He thrust the coat at Luke. “I’m staying.”