Sea Haven 02 - Spirit Bound

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