"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, expectingto 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.
Micah
The address on thecard led me to the outskirts of town, where houses grew sparse and forest pressed against winding roads. I'd driven past Ezra's property countless times without seeing the narrow gravel driveway. My hands trembled as I turned onto the path. The driveway curved through dense pines before opening to a clearing where a modernist house of glass, stone, and steel stood against the darkening sky. I checked the time: 7:52 PM. Not too early to seem eager, not late enough to seem disrespectful.
I sat and took deep breaths to calm my racing heart. Since leaving Ezra's office yesterday, I'd been agitated, thoughts alternating between exhilaration and terror. The dream had left me raw. The human disguise I'd worn for years was slipping, and I wasn't sure if I was more frightened of what lay beneath or of Ezra seeing it.
I exited the car and jogged up the stairs onto the porch. When I raised my hand to knock, the door swung open.
Ezra stood in the doorway, his tall frame silhouetted against warm light. "Exactly on time," he said. His nostrils flared as he breathed in, and something flickered across his features—satisfaction, perhaps. "Come in."
I stepped across the threshold, immediately enveloped by the rich aroma of roasting meat.
"You've been painting today," Ezra said, scanning me.
