Céline tumbled backward into a pyramid of packing crates, pine slats grinding against stone. “Bastien!” He did not look up, dragging bristle across linen. Winter frost bit into the stones, numbing the cartilage of his nose and thickening the phlegm in his throat. The dark billow crushed through the fractured planks, knitting into shoulders, ribs, and a wreath of writhing profiles. At the center hung Léonie’s face—snarling, jaw unhinged, her retinas burning with kerosene glare directly at them. “It knows,” Céline murmured, knuckles white against the chalked slate pressed to her ribs. “It knows what you drew.” The entity slid across the damp flagstones, oily vapor licking the mortar lines. Céline’s charcoal wards along the baseboards flared dull amber, sizzling as the ice crept over them. Bastien let his wrist fall. He took one step back, ribs burning beneath his collar, his sight anchored to the wet oils. The board held an indictment. Léonie stared out from raw umber and zinc white: cheekbones pinched to needles, mouth a razor slit, eyes hollowed into sunken troughs. Not the fragile martyr of his sketches, but the parasite stripped of disguise. “Look at yourself,” he said. He thrust the easel forward, turning the wet wood outwards. The painted gaze met the creature’s smoldering stare. A high, metal screech tore not through the damp room, but between Bastien’s temples, shaking his inner ears with the violence of a church bell rung upside down. The fog wavered. The carmine streaks dulled to ash. The face inside the cloud withered, skin puckering around the jaw as it witnessed its borrowed marrow exposed. “No! You can’t!” Léonie’s voice, sharp and thin, echoed in Bastien’s head, filled with a frantic, desperate denial. “I am Léonie! I am everything!” “You are nothing,” Bastien said, stepping toward the cloud. “You were never Léonie. You were the scavenger, the purloined skin. And now the portrait is finished.” The pressure behind his skull cracked like dry slate. Léonie’s visage in the cloud twisted into a silent gape before the column of gloom unspooled, trailing into soot-colored ribbons. A chorus of pilfered memories shrieked as they dissolved into the rafters, the red sparks winking out. Within his mind, the jealous rasp snapped, dissolved, and left only silence. The damp air softened, smelling faintly of river moss and cellar clay. Céline’s uneven breaths grated against the silence. Near the broken threshold, the dust gathered light. A girl stood upon the flagstones, barefoot in faded wool. Her straw-colored hair fell limp across round, plain cheekbones, her pale hazel eyes tranquil above a sunken chin. Héloïse Allard, the daughter whose name had been devoured. She dipped her chin toward Bastien. A whisper reached his ear, dry as dry grass brushing stone: *“Thank you, Bastien Valois. You saw me.”* She turned to Céline, whose chin trembled against her collar. *“Thank you, little sister. For the salt, for the circles.”* The edges of her dress frayed into dust motes. She inclined her head, pale and fading into the lantern glow, until only the smell of fresh rainwater remained upon the flags. By June, salt air through the third-floor casements carried the sound of gulls instead of drafts. The studio plaster had dried to chalk white, bare of soot and brown seepage, and the cedar treads of the central staircase smelled of beeswax. Bastien worked the palette with steady, measured strokes, mixing Prussian blue with flake white to capture the breakwaters beyond Rue Ancolie. Céline sat on the low sill, turning the pages of an atlas and whistling off-key over the scrape of his palette knife. He wiped his palette with turpentine, setting the hog-bristle brushes into a stone crock. On the window ledge, a clay pot held five dark violet buds, damp from morning mist. He touched the edge of a leaf, letting the scent of sea salt wash the last chill from his fingers. He reached down, set aside the dry seascape, and stretched fresh linen over the cedar frame.

Where the Violets Bloom