Chapter 8

On my balcony, I inhale fresh mountain air. Too much emotion for one day. Too much stress.

It’s sunset, and the full but waning moon lurks like a wispy mirage. A swath of thin clouds sail across the sky’s pinkish-orange canvas. I lean my arms over the balcony railing and stare into the mountains.

I miss Mom.

I try to call, but she doesn’t pick up. It’s only 3 PM back home. Sunday night. She’d be at Taco Grande. They’re nice to her there. She needs that job. Maybe she needs her independence, too. Maybe Dad’s right, and my only hope is working for him at the gun range. I could try and make it work—draw on the side and save up for art classes.

I just have to somehow ignore the fact that citizens capable of a gamut of negative emotions are there practicing firearms.

Cringe-fest.

I text Mom to let her know I miss her, but I don’t send it without Wi-Fi.

Caw!

Swoop. Black feathers. In my face.

My pulse scurries up my neck.

A rook lands on the railing before me. Pearly eyes study me over an ebony beak.

Something’s between it, gleaming bluish-green in the twilight.

“Fate?” I step back.

A rush of adrenaline shoots over my chest. I laugh nervously. What’s the proper response when Fate lands at your fingertips?

It cocks its head to one side then sets the object down and stares at me. A bulbous blossom glows soft blue on the railing.

“For me?” I peer over the railing to the dark-veiled gravel drive. “Are you here all alone? Where’s Varujan?”

“Does he reply to you?” Varujan’s voice.

But where?

My pulse thumps harder. “Where are you?”

“Here, Morgan. Sit with me. The night is unparalleled.”

I lean over the railing. Varujan’s backward at the patio picnic table, feet bare, legs crossed at the ankles, elbows on the table, and staring out at the horizon.

“Hang on.” I grab the flower, quietly exit my room, and ease the door shut.

Dad’s bedroom door is closed. He’ll be sleeping like a log by now. Still, I creep downstairs, my heartbeat accelerating with each step. I can’t wait to see him again.

The first-floor lights are off. Incredibly, the flower between my fingers emits a gentle turquoise light. Its stem prickles my skin with fuzzy, shard-like hairs.

Barefoot, I slip outside to the front patio in my leopard-print PJ pants and camisole. A cicada symphony rings out in the edge of gray before the veil of night, between darkened shades of blue. Moonlight casts an ethereal light over Varujan’s complexion.

“There you are,” he says from the picnic table. “Did you like what Fate brought you?”

I hold up the flower. “Shadow thistle?”

“One can never have too many.” Varujan rises and meets me near the front door. Aside from his bare feet, he’s in an interesting get-up—like something from a steampunk festival—a gray vest over a white long-sleeve button-down, dark pants, and a gray fedora with black trim. He takes the thistle from my hand. “This one withers. Join me. We will fill our arms with fresh blooms.”

“Right now? I can’t. Anyway, I just showered. But I plan to come by day after tomorrow … if that’s okay.”

Varujan’s head cocks to one side, much like the rook’s had.

A brazen shiver races up and down my arms. I like this inconsistency, this effect he has on me that changes from moment to moment, like day changing into night, darkness into light, and all the shades of gray in between.

“Oh, Morgan,” he says faintly, stepping out into the yard. “You fret over getting your clean feet dirty, when there is no better feeling in the world. Let them feel the earth.”

“Is that why you’re not wearing shoes?” I join him in the yard, grass tickling my arches.

Varujan’s shoulders rise in an easy shrug. “Puzzling how a simple alteration to one’s feet can have such a philosophical outcome. Would you agree?”

“I guess. Till you step on a sandspur, snake, or broken glass …”

He tips his fedora with a slight bow. “My friend, unnecessary fretting wastes energy. It is possible to step on these things, yes, but you allow that one fear to keep you from all the surrounding joy as well. If you wish to free your creativity, your first step must be to free your mind.”

Feels a little like he’s scolding me over shoes.

Obviously, a subject change is needed.

“I’ve been working on a new piece,” I start. “Remember the pictures I took of you in the clock tower? I zoomed in on the one of you in the sunbeam beside the rook.”

He has no idea what the natural light does for his fair skin and chiseled features. Or maybe he does. Maybe that’s exactly what made the photography so striking—his indifference to his good looks.

“Anyway, the shot’s pretty great,” I add. “I’ve got the color scheme down, but …”

Damn, here I am, teetering on my artist inferiority again.

“It is missing something?” Varujan asks.

I nod, shrug.

“Perhaps you have not conveyed what the colors mean to you.”

“How so?”

“Easier if I show you.”

“Maybe I’ve got too much going on in my head.” I push back my hair. “It’s like, everything’s competing for center stage right now. I dunno. If I can finish this new piece in time, I can enter it into that contest I told you about. The potential’s there, I know it. Why can’t I find it?”

Varujan gives his head a slight shake of disagreement. He pulls his pocket watch from his vest pocket and flashes it in the moonlight. “Let the rest of the world obsess over time. Eliminate the element of time, and you are free to enter new dimensions. Wherever and whatever your heart desires.”

I love how his accented English sounds like he’s reading from a nineteenth-century novel, even though he’s out of touch with reality. Maybe that’s what makes him so attractive.

I bite my bottom lip. “Well, some of us have obligations and don’t get to live in abandoned buildings with no jobs or school or …”

Yikes, am I insulting him?

“Walk with me, let me learn.” Varujan holds up his arms as if embracing the atmosphere. “The night is breathtaking. Nothing but moon and stars to accompany us.”

For a few seconds, I anticipate. It is a gorgeous night, the air a perfect temperature.

Varujan steps beside me and lifts my hand, cupping it between his cool skin, his bright manga-blue gaze hypnotic. “It is a night for the Moon to rival the Sun and claim her equality …” His words become rhythmic, “She offers solace it cannot. Imperfections become hidden, colors transcend, from vivid blue, into foreign shades, that exist in no other natural phase. Secrets of the heart will be revealed and witnessed only by those who dare.”

“Did you write that?” I ask, unable to peel my gaze from his. At this range I can’t help but breathe him in. He smells of herbal bliss—palo santo mixed with burning sage.

Varujan grins, and his cheekbones accentuate his face, his eyes dance. “Never have I written those words on paper. Never have they come to me until just now, in your presence.”

My cheeks flush with heat. I pull my hand from his. “I think you’re full of it.”

He laughs out. “You resist me. But I must say, strong will suits you. It is doubt that will bring you down.” He glances toward the moon. “I must go, or I will miss the best blooms. Accept my invitation. It will only be a short while. I must return to the band soon.”

I recall Varujan’s previous explanation for the shadow thistles. They are intriguing, almost as intruguing as he is. “So they only last a short while after dusk?”

“The trick is to catch them in their glory. Once they curl up in slumber, they never bloom again with quite the same vivacity.”

I glance down at my PJs. “What about bears? There was one at my Dad’s property today.”

“You do not have to worry about bears, not this close to town.”

“My allergies could flair up,” I explain, more to myself than to him. “I could have a migraine all day tomorrow. My dad’ll kill me if he finds out I left.”

Varujan folds his arms over his chest. “And at what point will you decide for yourself what you can and cannot do?” His casual tone contradicts the challenge in his words.

I snort. “Is that a dare?”

He backs away with a bit of snicker and twirls his pocketwatch. “It is merely a question.”

For a split second, Varujan’s face holds both moonlight and shadow. His bright eyes dull into ashen-gray. A flash of his skull pronounces the shape of his jaw, cheeks, and forehead below his fedora.

The hairs on the back of my neck bristle. I know it’s a trick of the light—fatigue, imagination, all the usual suspects of the doom and gloom that haunts me. My pulse accelerates, and I like it.

Dad would call him a gypsy. He’d be so pissed if he knew he was here.

Maybe that’s what entices me most. Defying dad. Varujan calls his own shots and lives outside of society’s norm, in full command of his mood palette.

The stuff artists’ reveries are made of.

Varujan points to the foothills. Their tree-lined slopes appear as black streaks beneath the taller Carpathian peaks. “Morgan, are you coming, or are you stalling? Shadow thistles will not wait forever.”

Right. When in Transylvania …

“Just let me grab some shoes.”

“What for?” Varujan asks. “It matters not what you wear, only that you are present in this very moment. Come as you are, as you were. I thought you wanted to be free?”

I bite my thumbnail.

“Or will you live by your father’s rules forever?” Varujan’s voice is silken, the features of his face now cloaked in night.

My jaw tightens. What does he know of me or my father? I make my own choices. My art will push new boundaries.

I meet Varujan on the gravel drive, my chin high. “Lead the way.”

Fate swoops down from the balcony and darts into the sky over our heads. There is so much I want to ignore in favor of Varujan’s presence, but the instinctive alarm that bird evokes in me lingers. If I were to guess, however, I’d say flaming curiosity will keep it in check … for now.

In swift, sure strides, Varujan leads me past the picket fence to the end of the dirt road. The beaten path becomes open wilderness, and like Fate, Varujan knows where he’s going.

I shiver in the cool night air. “You’re really not afraid of bears?”

“They are more afraid of me.” He smiles at the moon. “It is their instinct to fear mankind.”

“That’s what my dad says, but it’s a pretty big assumption. They’ve also been known to kill people.”

“Ha,” Varujan says. “So have vehicles. Do you fear their presence also?”

“That’s a flawed kind of logic,” I say softly. “So, did you grow up here?”

The grass is soft and feathery beneath my feet, the soil cold and moist. It does feel good, and risque.

Varujan’s nimble step suggests he’s been out this way thousands of times. His quirky but vintage-chic appearance makes me think of a ringmaster on the way to his circus tent, without a care in the world for what time his show starts.

How can a person seem so out of place yet belong so well at the same time? His comfort with nature and his surroundings, undeniably confident and aware.

I’d trade my right hand for an ounce of it.

“My father was Romani,” Varujan says. “My mother fled Russia to come here, where she met my father. Both died when I was young.”

My heart squeezes. No wonder he’s a drifter. As much as Dad and I don’t get along, imagining him gone forever, with so much distance between us, gives me palpitations. How would I swallow down the disappointment I’d brought him? And Mom, well, I can’t even bear the thought. She deserves so much better—everything I could give her.

“My father and mother never married,” Varujan continued. “My father moved on from our village and died from infection. It broke my mother’s heart. They said that is how she died—of a broken heart. I have been on my own since age thirteen. I never returned to school. There was no place for me there, as an orphan. I was ridiculed.”

“Because your dad was a drifter?”

“Because my mother renounced her faith. When we received word my father had died, my mother’s broken heart led her to think cruel thoughts and unsavory things. Everyone in my village knew she had cursed God. They marked me a villain. So I left my village, traveled far, and along the way, I happened upon the members of my band. Each of them had also lost someone or something. When we returned to Romania and discovered Veseud and the church no one attended, I knew we had found our home. What more perfect abode for a villain than a place of worship forgotten by its people?”

Religious hypocrites with their damnation and doctrine. Ugh, I could spit. They make me so mad. They have no right …

I pause just before the panorama of foothills and my heart races.

The forest breathes. Deep, dark spaces pulsate with shadows between towering, canopied trees. Foreboding and endless. But grimly beautiful all the same.

I’m no stranger to the colors of fear. Dark, grating greens; cold sooty blacks. Ghostly silvers and ethereal whites …

And it hits me. The mood palette for my painting.