Spirit Bound - Christine Feehan [93]
This was what she no longer allowed into her paintings. She kept her emotions compartmentalized. This was a room housing all destructive emotions. She didn’t realize one couldn’t possibly live the way she was trying. Darker emotions often got one through the most difficult circumstances. There was a balance to life and Judith had tried to get away from that balance fearing the darker side of her mind.
Even here, in this studio of rage, he could see the artist in her. Above his head the ceiling was painted in deep purples and swirling darker, nearly bloodred black slashes. The effect was astonishing. The ceiling looked as if it was weeping dark tears. Looking at it, he felt sorrow creeping into his heart, an insidious tendril of emotion winding its way into his mind. He pulled his gaze away from the fascinating montage of color and inspected the walls.
The colors were more mottled on the walls, great ropes, twisted into vines of hatred and anger. Sorrow dripped through the black forest of rage. The blood drops were more vivid, the knife slashing through the paint in quick bursts of anger, while that deep purple wept over all of it. Candles were on the tables and shelves, many burned down to nothing, the wax pooled around the bottoms of the candles, becoming part of the macabre atmosphere. A creepy oily smell permeated the room adding to the morbid, almost gruesome feeling emanating from the walls.
He was surrounded by her once again, her darkest moments, her most intimate, chilling thoughts. As joyful and bright as her kaleidoscope studio was, as beautiful and soothing as her painting studio, this was the complete and utter opposite, although, he found there was still a kind of beauty in the unrelenting darkness, mostly because no matter what her emotion, the artist that was Judith always came through.
“Oh, moi padshii angel, you’re so lost,” he murmured aloud.
Stefan knew he was a phantom, belonging to the shadows, but at least he knew exactly who he was and how he had gotten there. Judith didn’t trust herself—didn’t realize that by creating this place, she only reinforced her own belief that she was twisted. Five years of rage and sorrow were held suspended in one space. No one could stay in this room for any length of time without the unrelenting destructive emotions affecting them.
He stepped close to the painting she was working on, slowly removing the cover and shining his light over it. His breath stopped in his lungs. Something hard blocked his throat. This was Judith’s nightmare. The torture and death of her beloved brother. Jagged glass, tipped with dark blood, slashed angry lines through the canvas. Bold angry strokes with a broad brush, none of the fine little brushstrokes for this painting that he’d observed in all of her other works. The only real color was a bright, bold Japanese character. He knew it was her brother’s name painted over the rivers of blood and the broken, tormented body.
He peered closer and Judith’s eyes eerily stared back at him filled with a mixture of grief and anger. His own eyes burned and his gut churned. Shame and guilt descended over him, a heavy blanket weighing him down, nearly crushing his chest in the vicinity of his heart. Intellectually he knew he was feeling her emotions, the intensity she felt each time she gave into the concentrated, unrelenting sorrow and came into this room where she felt it was safe to allow her emotions free rein, to rework the painting.
She hadn’t signed the graphically detailed depiction of her brother’s death, but she’d brought it to life. He could almost see the figures moving in that room of blood and pain. The men turning on one another as her brother lay in agony, gasping for his