Page 4 of These Hallowed Bones (Bloody Desires #3)

He went very still. The air between us seemed to crackle with a strange electricity, a recognition that transcended the boundaries of student and teacher.

"You see it," he said softly, the words more statement than question. "Most look at my work and see only technical prowess. Light and shadow. Composition." His lips curved into a smile that never reached his eyes. "But you perceive what lies beneath."

He moved with liquid smoothness to sit behind his desk, gesturing for me to take the chair opposite. "Your triptych," he continued, "the one that caused such controversy last semester. Tell me why you destroyed the face of Christ."

I sat, grateful for the solid wood beneath me as the memory resurfaced. The night I'd completed that piece had been dangerous. One of the bad ones where the shadow pressed so hard against my skin I feared it might split me open.

"It wasn't destruction," I said carefully. "It was honesty. The face I painted was too... contained. Too peaceful. It felt false."

"False how?" His voice was neutral, but his eyes never left mine.

"Divinity isn't serene. It's terrible." The words felt pulled from some deep place inside me. "When Moses asked to see God's face, he was told it would kill him. He was only allowed to see God's back as He passed by. The divine isn't meant to be looked at directly."

"So you created the void."

"Yes." I swallowed, struggling to articulate what had been instinct that night. "The absence felt more true than any face I could have painted. More sacred, somehow."

Professor Bishop leaned back slightly, his expression thoughtful.

"Your religious iconography is technically impressive, but it's the violence you do to your own work that interests me most. The way you create beauty specifically to corrupt it.

" He paused, studying me. "What drives that impulse, I wonder? "

Something long bound began to uncoil inside me. No one had ever asked me this directly. They'd psychoanalyzed, medicated, prayed over me, but never simply asked.

"There's something wrong with me," I said, the words emerging before I could filter them.

"Something that's been there since I was small.

People see the art, the quiet manners, the academic achievements, and they think that's me.

But underneath, there's something... hungry.

Something that wants to destroy beautiful things just to watch them break. "

I stopped, horrified at my confession. This wasn't the kind of truth you confessed to anyone still willing to look you in the eye.

But Professor Bishop didn't look shocked or disgusted. If anything, he looked pleased.

"Do you know why I chose you from all the applicants, Micah?" he asked, his voice dropping slightly in tone. "Not for your technical skill, though that's considerable. Not for your academic record or recommendations."

He opened the leather portfolio on his desk, revealing a series of photographs. My work from the past three years, including pieces I'd destroyed or hidden away. Pieces no one should have seen.

"I chose you because I recognize what's inside you," he continued. "That hunger you speak of isn't a flaw to be contained or cured. It's a gift few possess. The capacity to see beyond conventional beauty to something more profound."

My heart hammered against my ribs. This couldn't be happening. No one looked at the darkness and saw anything but pathology. No one.

"You've been taught to fear what lives in you," he said, his voice gentle now, intimate in a way that made my skin prickle. "To bind it with religion, with therapy, with artistic convention. They've convinced you that your darkness is pathology rather than potential."

He leaned forward, his eyes never leaving mine. "They've made you a chrysalis that never breaks, denying the emergence of what waits within."

"What are you suggesting?" My voice sounded strange, breathless, as if I'd been running.

"That you stop fighting yourself. That you consider not containment, but becoming. What if that darkness isn't a demon to be exorcised, but a god waiting to be born?"

The shadow inside me twisted violently at his words, clawing closer to the surface. "It would destroy me," I whispered.

His smile was slow, transforming his austere features into something almost predatory. "Or complete you, Micah. That is what I intend to show you, if you're brave enough to see."

A normal man would be afraid. Afraid of Ezra, of the possibility of confronting their inner demons, of failure at the very least. But a strange calm washed over me, as if my entire life had been leading to this moment, this choice.

"Yes," I said simply.

His smile deepened and he inclined his head. "Good. We'll begin tomorrow. I have a private studio where I conduct my most important work. Away from the academic environment with its limitations."

He wrote an address on a crisp white card and handed it to me. His fingers brushed mine in the exchange, a brief contact that sent a shock of awareness through my system.

"Tomorrow evening. Eight o'clock." His eyes held mine. "Bring nothing but yourself."

I nodded, unable to speak past the tightness in my throat. My fingers closed around the card, its edges sharp against my palm.

"Until then, I want you to consider something," he said, standing.

"The masters of the baroque understood that true beauty requires darkness.

Caravaggio didn't merely paint light. He cultivated shadow to make the light meaningful.

Remember that when you feel the urge to destroy your work.

Perhaps destruction isn't the goal, but merely the beginning of a deeper creation. "

I stood as well, feeling strangely unsteady, as if the floor beneath me had subtly shifted.

"Thank you, Professor," I managed.

"Ezra," he corrected, coming around the desk to stand before me. "When we're working together, I'd prefer you use my given name."

He was close enough now that I could detect his scent, something woody and complex that made my mouth water instinctively.

"Ezra," I repeated, the name feeling like a covenant in my mouth.

He reached out slowly, deliberately, his fingers ghosting along my jaw in the briefest of touches. The contact was electric, sending a current of awareness through me that was neither entirely pleasure nor pain, but some exquisite territory between.

My knees nearly buckled, an instinct to bow, to kneel before him, nearly overwhelming. I leaned into his touch, starved for contact that didn't ask me to pretend.

"Do you know what I see when I look at you, Micah?

" His voice had dropped to nearly a whisper.

"Not the wounded boy everyone else pities.

Not the brilliant student they seek to mold.

" His eyes held mine, merciless in their clarity.

"I see the monster they fear is hiding beneath your skin. And it's beautiful."

I couldn't breathe, couldn't move. I’d been called a lot of things, but never beautiful.

After what seemed an eternity, he stepped back, releasing me from the gravity of his presence.

"Until tomorrow," he said simply.

I left his office with the card clutched in my hand, feeling as though I'd survived something dangerous yet essential. Whatever path I'd been on before, careful, contained, safe, had just been abandoned for something infinitely more perilous.

And yet, as I walked across campus, I felt strangely lighter, almost giddy.

The exhausting pretense of normalcy I'd maintained since childhood suddenly seemed not just unnecessary but obscene in the face of Ezra's recognition.

He had seen me, truly seen me, and had not turned away in disgust, but leaned closer in fascination.

That night, I dreamed.

I stood in a cathedral made of bone and canvas, its vaulted ceiling dripping with black paint that never reached the floor.

My mother hung suspended in the central nave, but she wasn't my mother anymore.

She was art. Her skin was a perfect alabaster canvas, her veins filled with indigo pigment that pulsed beneath the surface.

Where her face should have been, a bouquet of St. Sebastian's arrows bloomed, their shafts extending outward like the petals of some terrible flower.

I moved toward her, my footsteps echoing on floors made of stretched canvas. With each step, my feet sank slightly, leaving dark impressions behind. Not footprints but perfect miniature renderings of faces I'd destroyed, mouths open in silent screams.

Ezra's presence manifested beside me, not arriving but simply there, as though he'd always been. In his hands, not a palette knife but a scalpel that glinted in light that had no source. As he extended it toward me, handle first, I understood without words what he wanted. What I wanted.

I took the scalpel. As I approached my mother's suspended form, her chest cavity opened, revealing not organs but a gallery of miniature paintings. Each one a moment from my childhood, each one both beautiful and terrible in its precision.

I reached inside, the scalpel forgotten, my bare hands sinking into the warm interior. Something moved against my fingers. Something alive and hungry that recognized me as kin. It wasn't trying to escape; it was trying to climb into me, to return home.

I should have recoiled. Instead, I welcomed it, opened myself to receive whatever dark baptism this was. As it entered me, climbing through my veins toward my heart, my own face began to dissolve, paint and flesh melting away to reveal the void beneath.

When I turned to Ezra, he had changed. His form remained human, but his eyes had become black voids that matched my own, and from his back sprouted not wings but canvases stretched on wooden frames, each one bearing a portrait of me in various stages of unmaking.

His extended hand was alternately flesh and paint, never quite settling on either.

The knowledge passed between us without sound: we were beginning.

The cathedral around us began to fold inward, its architecture collapsing not into rubble but into a perfect studio space.

My mother's form dissolved into pigments that swirled through the air before settling into glass jars on a workbench.

The arrows that had been her face arranged themselves in a perfect line of brushes.

I looked down at my hands to find them stained with colors I had no names for, colors that seemed to move with a life of their own. When I raised my eyes again, Ezra stood before an enormous canvas that bore my face, not as it was, but as it could be.

He began to cut into it with a surgeon's care, and with each slice, my actual flesh opened in corresponding patterns. There was no pain, only release. The sensation of something long constrained finally breaking free.

The truth vibrated between us: this was who I was. This was who we were together.

I woke violently, sheets twisted around my limbs, my heart hammering against my ribs. My hands flew to my face, expecting to find open wounds or liquid flesh, but there was only sweat-slicked skin, intact and unchanged.

Yet something had shifted. The shadow inside me was no longer contained, no longer separate. It coursed through my veins, saturated my tissues, vibrated in my bones. A hunger so profound it felt like devotion.

For the first time in my life, I didn't try to force it back into its cage. Instead, I lay in the darkness, allowing it to consume me from within, understanding at last that Ezra had recognized what no one else ever had: I wasn't fighting my demons.

I was denying my nature.