Was it a message to Judith? No, Judith would have told him had she known about the microchip. She’d been so hurt and angry, she would have flung the information in his face. So she didn’t know. Could La Roux have hidden the microchip in a particular painting? Over the last five years, Judith’s paintings had been sold in galleries all over the world. She’d earned a certain reputation and particularly in Japan, her name was growing.
La Roux could easily have slipped the microchip in between the stretcher bar and canvas of a painting. But why would Judith take a painting with her when she left him if she hadn’t known about the microchip? And if she had known, wouldn’t it have been easier to just take the chip? No, she hadn’t known about the chip. So if it was behind a canvas, what painting had it been and why had La Roux been so certain she’d keep it?
A ribbon of unease slipped into his mind and he glanced at the security system. The green light was off. Damn it all. The woman really hated that system. He should have known if she went down to her studio she’d open the doors—but she wasn’t painting. She was stretching the canvases over the bars and she sure as hell could keep the door closed. He actually took a couple of steps toward the hall leading to the stairs but stopped himself.
This was Judith’s house and her pain. She had the right to deal with it in any way she saw fit. Uneasiness was growing in leaps and bounds, tying his belly into knots but she had him so damned messed up he couldn’t think straight. Was his radar going off because Judith was making up her mind to reject him for good? Or was Jean-Claude prowling around?
They needed dogs. That was all there was to it. He went to the door and stepped outside, intending to circle the house, just do a slow search to assure himself the Frenchman hadn’t found his way to her home. He looked up at the night sky. The stars and moon were completely obliterated by the gray veil drawn so thick around them. The trees were vague outlines and all sound was muffled by the dense mist.
He was reluctant to leave, even for a moment. His left palm itched. Pulsed. He felt love brush across it—a soft caress he couldn’t mistake.
JEAN-CLAUDE
turned the key in the lock and pulled the door open. Judith held her breath as savage power rushed out, pulsing through the hallway in search of a target. The energy was so strong when it hit the Frenchman, he felt the impact like a physical blow, although she could tell by the look on his face that he had no idea what happened. He pressed his hand to his heart and stepped back, waving her inside.
“This room is dangerous, Jean-Claude,” she warned again, knowing he wouldn’t listen, but feeling as though she needed to at least give him that much.
He pushed her inside and stepped in after her. The inside of the studio was nearly pitch black, making it impossible to see anything. The light in the hallway was too dim to illuminate the interior of the room.
“Where’s the light switch?” he demanded, turning toward Judith.
Already she could feel the ominous pulsing of power surrounding them. She cleared her throat. “I don’t use light in here. Just candles.”
“Well light them. Open the curtains,” he snapped impatiently.
The door swung closed of its own accord, a hard, final sound that boomed like the thud of drums at a funeral. The room was instantly plunged into absolute darkness.
Judith felt the swirling emotions gathering strength and she hastily stepped forward, intending to light the candle closest to her. It was black, with a red center, and she knew the approximate position. The room groaned and creaked, and soft footsteps padded across the floor toward them.
Jean-Claude jerked her in front of him, fumbling for his gun. “What the hell? Judith, light the damn candle.”
Before she could do so, another surge of power ricocheted off the walls. Candles sprang to purple life all over the room, macabre pinpoints of light there in the sea of darkness. Smoke rose, blossoming out to slowly spread across the ceiling. The dancing light followed, slowly illuminating the twisted, gnarled branches and the weeping sorrowful splashes of purple on the walls and overhead. Crystalline tears dripped from the branches and ran down the walls.
The walls creaked and something dark moved in the shadows. A sound much like a branch cracking had both of them spinning toward the far side of the room where she’d painted a large dark trunk of a tree, twisted and misshapen, a grotesque apparition of a living, breathing tree. Even while they watched, the trunk seemed to split open and weep thick, black venom.
“What the hell is this?” Jean-Claude demanded.
“I told you this room is dangerous,” Judith answered. Her heart accelerated and she tasted real fear in her mouth.
She had no idea how dangerous the studio really was until that moment. Jean-Claude’s presence had awakened the darkest of spirit weave. Here, where her every ugly thought, every dark emotion, had been about him. Revenge. Rage. Sorrow. Everything she had ever considered doing to him in the name of revenge had been conceived in this room. Spirit had bound those dark emotions together and now, Jean-Claude was present, a living key to unlock that very lethal, dark power.
He showed her the gun. “Don’t think I won’t use this if this is some kind of trick. Where’s the painting?”
She pointed to the middle of the room where she’d draped a cloth over the easel. “Under there.” There was little point in reiterating her warning. He wasn’t about to listen.
Judith looked around her warily. Dark bloodred wax bubbled from the centers of the candles and cascaded down in streams. She took a breath and the room pulsed, the walls breathing in and out.
Jean-Claude’s fingers closed over her upper arm in a vise-like grip, taking her with him to the center of the room. He reached out to grab the cloth. Vines stirred overhead like great snakes lifting their heads to watch. The air in the room seemed denser, harder to breathe. The Frenchman jerked the cloth from the painting and dropped it onto the floor. His hand slid across one of the jagged pieces of glass embedded in the canvas and came away bloody.
He swore and glared at her, lifting the side of his hand to his mouth. Drops of blood splashed onto the painting, and hit the floor. Beneath their feet shadows moved, stretching across the dark tiles reaching toward the liquid, greedily absorbing the fluid. Shapeless silhouettes emerged from the twisted trunks, amid creaks and groans. Power pulsed like a heartbeat.
Judith caught Jean-Claude’s arm. “We have to go. Let’s go now.”
“Not without the microchip. It’s behind the canvas.” Shaking her off, he reached for the painting before she could stop him.
He dragged the canvas from the easel, turning the shifting symbols and her brother’s name away from him, but she caught a glimpse of those dark shadows rising like wraiths from the layered painting of jagged, painful emotions. The rocking branches overhead picked up the pulsing drumbeat as if a heart had come to life, born there in those swirling darker spirits.
Judith pressed her fingers into her palm, her own heart following that ominous ghastly rhythm. Silhouettes began to take shape, rearing back as the candles leapt toward the center of the room—toward Jean-Claude. The man with no emotions was empty, and energy sought to fill that vacuum. She could see his skin change subtly under the play of purple light, turning his perfect color to a mottled ash.
She tried to project happiness, but fear radiated through the room and the apparitions expanded, coming out of the running black venomous sap and growing as her fear swelled. He didn’t notice the shadows running up his arms, his blackened fingers, or the subtle changes in his skin. Every time he turned the painting, trying to rip it from the stretcher bar, the jagged pieces of glass embedded in his skin. Blood fed the phantoms so that they took on monstrous shapes. She grabbed at the canvas, trying to get it out of his hands.
Jean-Claude growled, ripping the painting from her, nearly tossing her to the floor, cursing as he stumbled himself. Blood dripped steadily.
“It isn’t there,” Judith whispered. “Jean-Claude, please let’s go. It isn’t there. We have to go, right now.”
Jean-Claude tossed the painting against the wall. The crash reverberated through the room, his anger growing in direct proportion to the building violence of swirling emotions. The energy spun madly, like a terrible twister forming from the ceiling to the floor, shooting through the room seeking a target—seeking Jean-Claude.
He backhanded her, sent her flying, her body sprawling across the shadowed floor. Droplets of blood showered down around her. She tried to crawl toward the door, hoping he’d follow, hoping to lead him out. How could he be so oblivious? How could he not feel the swelling demons reaching for him as the purple lights of the candles stretched toward him? Everything in the room, above and below, the cracking branches, the venomous tree trunks, the crystalline tears, all of it extended toward him with greedy delight.
He kicked at her several times, following her just as she wanted. His face, in the purple light, revealed a vicious, building anger slowly boiling until rage erupted and he caught her legs just as she reached the door, dragging her back to the center of the room.
“Where is it?” he hissed, his lips drawing back in an ugly snarl. His teeth looked sharper, his lips thinner. The outer shell of the man, always handsome, seemed to be dissolving right before her eyes, and the inner man, dark and ugly emerged, as if those dark spirits were giving birth. “You treacherous bitch. You sold it!”
She shook her head. “I didn’t. I found it and Paul had worked for a computer company. I thought he’d put it there when he stretched the canvas for me. I had no idea there was anything on it. I thought it was his good luck symbol for me. I put it in a cell for my kaleidoscope.”
His head whipped around, a hound on a dark scent. He stepped in the middle of the canvas, right on Paul’s name, those weeping Japanese letters, the only beautiful thing on the work of hatred and destruction. Glass crunched beneath his boot and the crimson letters layered over with blackened soot as if the burning candles had spread a filmy layer on the floor and it had collected on the sole of his boot.
Jean-Claude waded through the spinning energy as if he didn’t see it. The room hissed in triumph as he stepped up to the large kaleidoscope and jerked off the cover.
Judith used her heels to try to push herself to the wall, making herself as small as possible. “Don’t,” she whispered.
“How does this work?” he snapped, frustrated when the cell remained dark. He looked around the room, and then glared back at her, raising his gun menacingly.
Judith shook her head but pointed to the portable ultraviolet light sitting on the table just within his reach. He snatched up the light, shoved it into the space built into the cylinder and switched on the light. At once images burst toward him, dark and hungry and filled with powerful energy. He saw himself there, as he was inside, and he couldn’t look away, held by the whirling emotions, so tightly woven, so alive and strong, they gave birth to the true image, matching the outside shell to the inside substance.
Judith covered her face as the walls streamed black venom and overhead the weeping tears dripped blood. The door splintered. She hadn’t realized the shadows had locked it. Stefan shouted her name and his shoulder slammed into the door a second time. Then his boot. The door cracked and he reached inside and thrust it open, rushing into the room, taking in everything.
He bent over her, looking like the very devil—or an avenging angel. He scooped her up and she closed her arms around his neck, burying her face in his neck. “I’ve got you, Judith,” he murmured, raining kisses over her face as he raced out of the room. “
Ya tebyA lyublyU
. In case you didn’t understand me, I love you. I love you with all my heart.”
“I can’t believe you came for me.”
“Always, Judith. I wasn’t lying when I told you that you’re everything to me. I meant every word.” He turned his head to look into the dark room with the strange flickering purple lights, a little diminished now. “I have to get him out of there.”
She clutched his arm. “Don’t go back in there, Stefan. It’s too dangerous.”
“We can’t leave him in there. I’ll bring him out. My defenses are strong. I’ll get him, angel, and nothing will prevent me coming back to you.”
Judith reluctantly allowed him to step away from her. She slid down the wall, pressing trembling fingers to her mouth. She believed him. There was nothing evil inside of Stefan for those dark emotions to devour. His life had been shaped by the circumstances of his childhood, but he had not been born, nor had he developed, twisted.
He came running out of the room, carrying Jean-Claude over his shoulder. He deposited him gently on the floor beside Judith, removing his gun with that sleight of hand so familiar to her. Jean-Claude’s hair was streaked white, his eyes sunken and his skin wrinkled and mottled with dark spots. His eyes appeared vacant, staring straight ahead, pupils dilated in a kind of horror. Judith passed her hand in front of Jean-Claude’s face. He didn’t blink.
Stefan squeezed her hand and raced back into the studio to rip down the curtains and throw open the French doors.
“Don’t! What if . . .”
He shook his head. “The emotions have nearly completely spun themselves out. I’m going to air out the room. There’s nothing we can do for him right now. He’ll need a doctor and I’m not certain that will do much good.”
“The microchip is in the first cell I did for the kaleidoscope. Don’t look in there, just grab that first cell and we can open it. I thought my brother had put it there. It’s been floating in heavy mineral oil this entire time. I doubt you’ll be able to get much off of it after five years in oil.” She frowned. “But I suppose it might be possible, although not the best odds.”
She knelt up beside Jean-Claude and wiped at the saliva dribbling down his chin.
“I don’t have to get the information off it, just return it to Russia,” Stefan said. He pocketed the cell after he’d opened up the room. “As long as no other country can steal the information, I don’t care whether it’s destroyed or not.” He helped her all the way to her feet.