The car pulled over to the curb in front of an abandoned tenement and Scara killed the engine. She turned in her seat and leaned her arms on the backrest, hunger glittering in her eyes.
“End of the line, sweetheart,” she said.
Isabelle shivered. I could still try to stand up for myself, she thought as Bitterweed pulled her from the car. I could still fight them. But what was the point?
She knew where she was now: in the Tombs. That vast sector in the middle of the city that consisted of derelict buildings, burnedout structures and empty, rubble-strewn lots. Streets that were often little more than weed-choked paths, most of them too clogged with buckled pavement and abandoned cars to drive through. Deserted brownstones and tenements that served as squats for Newford’s disenfranchised, those who couldn’t even cling to the bottom rung of the social ladder. The area stretched for a few square miles north of Gracie Street, a ruined cityscape that could as easily have been Belfast or the Bronx, East LA or Detroit.
She could fight her captors, Isabelle thought. And she could run. But to where? The streets of the Tombs were a dizzying maze to anyone unfamiliar with the rubble warren through which they cut their stuttering way. Many of its inhabitants were easily as dangerous as her present captors: wild-eyed homeless men, junkies, drunken bikers and the like. Desperate, almost feral creatures, some of them.
Sociopathic monsters.
So once again she surrendered. She let the two numena lead her into the building. They stepped over heaps of broken plaster and litter, squeezed by sections of torn-up floor. The walls were smeared with aerosoled graffiti and other scrawled marks made with less recognizable substances. The air was stale and close, and reeked of urine and rotting garbage. It was the antithesis of her home on Wren Island.
And the opposite of those worlds once brought to life by the paintbrush of the man into whose presence she was led.
She saw him in a corner of a room on the second floor, lying on a small pallet of newspapers and blankets, his bulk dissipated, his features sunken into themselves. No longer the stoop-backed, somewhat homely mentor now. Not even a troll. More like some exotic bug, dug up from under a rotted log and left to fend for itself in the harsh sunlight. An infirm, helpless thing, weakly lifting its head when Bitterweed and Scam led her into its room. But there was still a hot light banked in the kiln of his eyes, a fiery hunger that was even more intense than what burned in the gazes of his numena.
“It’s time to make good the debt you owe me,” Rushkin said. Even his voice was changed—the deep tones had become a thin, croaking rasp. “I don’t owe you anything.”
The wasted figure shook its head. “You owe me everything and I will have it from you now.”
Isabelle knew all too well what he wanted. She just hadn’t wanted to believe it.
“John was right,” she said. “All along, he was right. You really do feed on my numena.”
“Numena,” Rushkin repeated. “An interesting appellation. Effective, if not entirely apt. I never bothered to give them a name myself”
“I won’t do it.”
Rushkin indicated his own numena. “They will kill you if you don’t.”
“They’ll kill me if I do. I heard as much before they brought me here.”
Confronted with Rushkin, Isabelle’s fear was swallowed by the anger she felt toward her old mentor.
She looked at him and saw a hundred painful deaths, the fire that had licked away at canvas and flesh, consuming all in its path. Never again, she had promised herself, and then she’d stopped painting gateways that would allow numena to cross over from their before. Never again, she repeated to herself now. Any of her numena that still survived, any that she might bring across with her new work, she would protect with her life. Where she couldn’t be brave for herself, the courage was there for those who had died before, for those who would die if she gave in to him.
“You have my word that you’ll be safe,” Rushkin assured her. He hid the hungry fire in his eyes behind an earnestness that Isabelle didn’t accept for a moment.
“Until the next time you need my ... my magic.”
Rushkin shook his head. “Once I have ... recovered, I will find myself a new protege. You will never see me again.”
“A new protege?” Isabelle said, startled.
All she could think was, how could she allow him to continue to spread his evil? But Rushkin, intentionally or not, mistook her shock for something else.
“I doubt we could work that well together anymore,” he said. “And besides, I’ve taught you all I know.”
Isabelle gave him a look of distaste.
“Oh, I see,” he said. “You thought you were alone.” He shook his head. “Hardly. There were many before you, my dear, and one since. Her name was Giselle, a lovely French girl and very, very talented. I met her in Paris, and though the city has changed, discovering her and working with her rendered my relocating there worthwhile all the same.”
“What ... happened to her?”
“She died,” Rushkin replied. He ducked his head and gave a heavy sigh. “Killed herself, actually.
Burned down our studio with all of our work and herself in it.” He indicated the two numena who had brought Isabelle to him. “These two were the only survivors of the conflagration and lord knows how I managed to save them.”
A deep stillness settled inside Isabelle. She remembered sitting at her kitchen table one morning some two years ago with that week’s edition of
“Giselle Marchand,” Isabelle said softly as her memory called up the artist’s name.
“So you know her work. She could have given Rembrandt a run for his money with her use of light.
We lost a great talent that day.”
Isabelle stared at him in horror. “You killed her. You killed her just so you could feed on her numena.
You set the fire that burned down her studio.”
“I no more set that fire than I did the one that destroyed your studio.”
“At least have the courage to admit to your crimes.”
Rushkin shook his head. “You wrong me. And if my word is no longer of value with you, then look at me. Do you think I would have left myself in a position such as this? She had a death wish, Isabelle, and all that gorgeous art of ours fell victim to it. Without it, I am reduced to begging favors from an old student.”
“No,” Isabelle said. “You set that fire—just as you set the one in my studio.”
“I didn’t set that fire.”
“Then who did?”
Rushkin gave her a long considering look. “You really don’t remember?”
“Remember what?”
He sighed. “Isabelle, you set that fire.”
Those few simple words made her reel back from him. She would have fled the room, except Bitterweed caught her by the arm and returned her to Rushkin’s pallet.
“You always had a gift for restating the truth to yourself,” Rushkin said, “but I never realized how thoroughly you would come to believe your own lies.”
“No. I would never ...”
She closed her eyes, but then the burning figures reared up in her mind’s eyes. She could hear the roar of the flames, the crackle of flesh burning, the awful stink of smoke and sweet cloying smell of cooking meat. But it hadn’t been meat, not meat that any sane person would ingest.
“The only difference between yourself and Giselle,” Rushkin said, “is that she let the fire consume herself as well as her art.”
“No!” Isabelle cried. She shook off Bitterweed’s grip and knelt on the floor, her face now level with Rushkin’s. She glared at him. “I know what you’re trying to do, but it won’t work. You can’t make me believe your lies. I won’t believe them.”
“Fine,” Rushkin said. “Have it your way.”
It was plain from the tone of his voice that he was humoring her, but Isabelle refused to let him bait her any
