Page 20 of These Hallowed Bones (Bloody Desires #3)

Ezra

The click of the front door lock broke the silence. My hands stilled, scalpel suspended above the tissue sample I'd been transforming into pigment. I listened, savoring the anticipation like the pause before a symphony’s crescendo. Micah had returned, using the key I'd given him mere hours ago.

The hunger in him ran deeper than I'd thought. I set my instruments down and peeled off my gloves. My journal lay open, filled with notes about Micah's transformation.

He was evolving exactly as I'd designed, yet with unexpected flourishes of his own.

Where previous subjects had been passive canvases, Micah actively participated in his transformation.

Just as he had taken a blade to his paintings, slashing through the saint's face to reveal the void beneath, he now turned that same destructive creation toward himself.

What I hadn't anticipated was the strange warmth that bloomed in my chest when he appeared at my door.

I savored his smiles for their warmth, not just their form.

I closed the journal and locked it away with my collection of rare materials.

Then I washed my hands in the sink, watching pink water spiral down the drain like watercolor on wet paper.

Everything was ready. The cabrito had roasted for hours, its skull intact.

The wine had breathed. The bedroom awaited our arrival.

I left the workshop, closing the heavy wooden door behind me.

The house was dark, moonlight casting dramatic shadows across the marble floors.

Micah stood just inside the entrance, fingers still wrapped around the door handle as if poised between staying and fleeing.

A perfect moment of suspension, like a brushstroke caught between artist and canvas.

When he saw me, his body responded in a beautiful composition of release. His shoulders softened and breath deepened. The moth toy glowed against his chest, casting his face in gentle light from below. Chiaroscuro made flesh.

"I didn't know if you'd be home," he said, voice hushed in the vastness of the foyer. "I should have called first."

"Yet you came anyway," I replied, moving toward him across the marble floor. "Something drew you back."

Color flooded his cheeks, a blush like dawn breaking across alabaster. "I couldn't stay away. I tried, but..."

I touched his face, tracing the elegant architecture of his cheekbone. His skin burned beneath my fingers, fevered and alive. "You don't need to explain. I expected you."

The truth I didn't speak: I'd been listening for his return, waiting with an eagerness that surprised me. The space between us hummed with potential, like pigments awaiting the brush.

"Come," I said, taking his hand. His pulse fluttered against my thumb, a rhythm both fragile and insistent. "I was about to prepare dinner."

In the kitchen, I continued the meal I'd begun earlier. The roasted goat's head had blackened beautifully, its skin tightening over the skull beneath, eye sockets hollow but commanding. I moved through the familiar dance of cooking, each gesture flowing into the next.

Micah’s gaze kept returning to the hallway and the heavy wooden door I’d just come through. He hadn't noticed it during previous visits, but tonight his eyes tracked to it repeatedly.

"I tried to focus on coursework after I left," he admitted, fingers worrying the moth's velvet wings. "But everything seems hollow now. Meaningless."

"That's the curse of seeing deeper beauty," I told him, placing the platter between us. The goat's skull faced Micah. He stared at it, transfixed.

"Have you ever eaten goat?" I asked.

Micah shook his head.

"The head is considered a delicacy in certain cultures. It’s traditionally eaten with the fingers. The cheek contains the most delicate flesh," I explained, peeling off a perfect morsel and offering it to him. "What others discard often contains the greatest treasures."

His hand trembled slightly as he accepted my offering. He placed it on his tongue, hesitating at the threshold of taboo. Then his eyes fluttered closed, and he let out a pleasured sigh.

"In many cultures," I continued, gesturing toward the head's intact features, "different parts hold symbolic meaning. The eyes are said to grant visions. The horns and hooves restore virility. Some even believe that eating the brain imparts forbidden knowledge."

“People believe a lot of strange things,” Micah said before eating another bite. “That doesn’t make them true.”

I watched him chew, studying how his jaw worked against the tough meat. The skepticism in his voice didn't match the hunger in his eyes as he tore another piece from the skull. His fingers glistened with fat, smears of it marking his lips like ritual paint.

"Truth and belief occupy the same territory in art," I replied, using my knife to separate a morsel near the eye socket. "What matters isn't objective reality but the power of conviction."

I offered the piece to him directly. After a moment's hesitation, he leaned forward and took it from my fingers with his mouth. His lips brushed against my skin, tongue darting out to catch the juices.

"Many great artists sacrificed for their work," I said as we continued our meal. "Van Gogh surrendered his ear to capture the ecstasy of starlight. Michelangelo's hands twisted into permanent claws from coaxing divinity from marble. True creation demands a blood tribute."

His eyes caught the light, their darkness pooling like rich oil paint on canvas. "Do you think suffering is necessary for true art?"

"Not suffering," I corrected, leaning toward him. "Sacrifice. The willingness to give parts of oneself, literally, to creation. That separates visionaries from mere craftsmen."

"What have you sacrificed?" Micah asked, his question direct, unavoidable. "What parts of yourself have you given?"

The question caught me unprepared. Not because I had no answer, but because so few had ever thought to ask. I set down my knife and studied him, considering what to reveal.

"My first artwork using human material," I said finally, "contained a part of me."

His eyes widened. "What do you mean?"

"When I was nineteen, doctors removed a dermoid cyst from my lower back," I explained, my voice measured. "A growth containing teeth, hair, even partially formed bone. Most people would have been disgusted, but I was fascinated. I convinced the surgeon to let me keep it."

Micah leaned forward, captivated. "And you used it in your art?"

"It became my first true masterpiece. I preserved it, incorporating it into a triptych exploring the boundaries between self and other. That was when I understood the profound truth. Conventional materials could never capture what organic matter contains. The memory of life itself."

"You started with yourself," he said softly.

"I would never ask of others what I haven't first demanded of myself.

" I touched the small of my back briefly.

"There are other sacrifices too, less visible but no less significant.

My place in conventional society. Connection with those who cannot understand our vision. The comfort of moral simplicity."

"I never thought about it that way," he said, licking his fingers clean. "But it makes sense. Nothing beautiful comes without cost."

"Exactly." The word hung between us, a bridge.

"The most profound art demands the artist surrender something irreplaceable.

The Renaissance masters understood this when creating pigments that contained their very breath, ground into the paint as they labored.

Just as Christ gave his body so others might transcend, the greatest artists follow this sacred tradition.

The body becomes the site of transformation, the chrysalis from which beauty emerges. "

My mind drifted to a vision of Micah and me together in my workshop, bent over a living canvas.

Not merely creating art but becoming it ourselves, our hands stained with the same pigments.

The image brought unexpected pleasure—a composition I hadn't initially sketched but now seemed essential to the final work.

After our meal, I extended my hand to him. "There's something I want to show you."

His breathing quickened as I led him toward the locked door that had captured his imagination all evening. I retrieved its key, watching his eyes widen as the metal slid into the lock.

"Few people ever see this space," I told him as the door swung open. "This is where my true work begins."

The stairway descended into darkness until light flooded my private workshop. Unlike the teaching studio upstairs, this space revealed my actual methods without artifice.

Tools hung on the walls in perfect arrangements, their forms as carefully composed as a still life.

A refrigeration unit hummed softly, its glass door revealing specimens organized by color and opacity rather than clinical categories.

Steel tables gleamed under lighting designed to reveal true colors and textures.

No false warmth or flattering shadows, just honest illumination.

I watched Micah's reaction as he absorbed the room. His breathing quickened, his eyes darkening as though shadowed by an unseen brush, a fine sheen of sweat appearing at his temples.

"What are these?" he asked, approaching a series of glass containers, his voice hushed as if we'd entered a cathedral.

"Materials," I explained, watching his reflection in the glass. "From those who contributed to artistic transformation."

He turned to me, eyes wide, lips parted. "People volunteered their bodies for your art?"

"In a sense." I opened a cabinet containing finished pigments, each labeled with date and source. "Commercial pigments lack the luminosity you've noticed in my work. Only organic materials carry the memory of life."

"That's why they seem to glow from within," he murmured, leaning closer to a jar of pearlescent powder rendered from bone. "Like they remember being alive."