Sage smiled. “You don’t think it suits me?”
“Oh, I think it suits you perfectly. How many aliases do you have?”
“I’m a bit of a collector.”
I placed a hand on his wrist, stopping him as he transferred something into his wallet. “Does Larry Steczynski carry a black AmEx?”
“He might.”
“My mom doesn’t even carry a black AmEx.”
“Apparently your mom doesn’t move in the same circles as Larry Steczynski.”
“Sage,” Ben called from across the room. He had knelt down to gaze closely at a sculpted figurine that sat on an end table, and his voice broke with awe. “This … this is a real Michelangelo, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, yeah it is.”
“But it’s a Michelangelo!”
“Yep.”
“And that painting,” Ben said, nodding to a piece on the wall featuring a sketch of what looked like a somewhat cherubic version of Sage himself. “That’s a real Rubens?”
“It is.”
“It looks like you.”
“Strong genetics in the family line,” Sage explained.
This seemed like a good time to slip out. “Bathroom?” I asked.
Sage pointed across the room to a tiny hall that branched off. The bathroom was there … and so was a closed door, just a little farther down the hall. Sage’s bedroom—it had to be.
I tiptoed down the hall and eased open the door, taking great pains to pull it gently closed behind me.
If Sage did sleep here, it was a tight squeeze. The room was packed full of art and supplies: canvases, easels, paints, charcoals … some were works in progress, others were on display, and every inch of wall space held a framed image. Scanning them, my heart started to race. Almost every image featured one of four women.
Women I knew.
Women I had been in dreams.
They didn’t look like me the way they did when I dreamed about them, but I was absolutely certain who they were.
One woman laughed as she held on to the sides of a rowboat floating on the Tiber—Olivia.
One woman’s long red hair flowed wildly behind her as she raced on her horse—Catherine.
One woman studied her face in the mirror, expertly applying stage makeup—Anneline.
One woman leaned against a piano, singing in the middle of a packed audience—Delia.
There was more. A canvas mounted on the wall—a watercolor of two young men in Renaissance clothing, holding absurd stances. I knew this painting. I’d painted it.
The men were Sage and Giovanni, and I remembered the dream where I’d tried to get them to keep still and pose.
I looked at the bottom right-hand corner of the piece: signed with a single O. Her signature. My signature?
Was it possible? Were my dreams actually … memories? Memories of past lives? I didn’t believe in reincarnation … but what else made sense?
And what about Sage? He looked the same in Olivia’s picture as he did now. It seemed strange that he would be reincarnated looking exactly the same and I wouldn’t be.
I was grateful when laughter from the other room stopped my wild thoughts. Sage and Ben laughing together? Apparently a lot of strange things happened in this house. I had to get back before they realized how long I’d been gone, but I didn’t want to leave. What did all this mean? Could there still be some kind of rational explanation?
Should I ask Sage? He might not like that I’d snooped, but he couldn’t get that angry. He was still basically a stranger—I had every right to try and find out more about him.
I had my hand on the doorknob and was about to leave when a canvas in the corner caught my eye.
It wasn’t framed, and it wasn’t on display. It was on its side, the top canvas in a stack of them, all leaned against the wall. A sheet covered the pile most of the way, but the image of an eye grabbed my attention.
The eye was huge on the page, rendered in a stunning, clear blue. It was beautiful … but hauntingly blank. I couldn’t tear myself away from the image. I didn’t even realize I was walking toward it until I was there, pulling off the sheet.
It was all I could do to stifle a bloodcurdling scream.
Of course the eye was blank. It belonged to Olivia, and she was dead. She was lying on her side, the back of her skull crushed in, and her mouth fixed open in a final scream of terror. Blood pooled all around her; the iris charm she wore was fixed to the floor in a cake of red. The whole canvas drowned in a sea of blood, and while Olivia’s body was the focus, it was only the centerpiece of an abattoir of carnage. Other bodies lay behind Olivia’s, men and women twisted in poses of horror, swords and daggers impaling them to the floor.
Images from my nightmares flashed through my mind, and I winced away from them. I’d lived this scene.
Oh my God, was I looking at a painting of my own death?
Trembling, I reached out to flip to the next painting. Even touching the canvas made my skin crawl.
The next painting was of Anneline … or what had once been Anneline. She was sprawled out in a white bedroom: white curtains billowing in from the open window, white bed linens, white furniture. She was dressed in a flowing white gown. The only color came from her red lips, the long black spread of her hair, the silver of her iris-charm necklace, her unseeing brown eyes … and blood. It poured out of her from countless gashes in her torso, and splashed tiny polka dots over the rest of the snowy white landscape.
There was one more horrible piece of red in the picture.
A single long-stemmed rose, pushed deep into her chest, over her heart.
I felt my gorge rise.
I couldn’t look anymore.
I had to.
I heard voices from the other room—how long had I been in here? Was Sage coming in? What would he do if he saw me with these?
Quickly I flipped through the other canvases: more of the same. Delia’s death pose was pristinely clean, with only a single gaping bullet hole between her eyes.