Bloody Painter X Puppeteer Novels & Stories

It's a drawing of a werewolf giving its heart to a human girl. It felt surreal yet real. I was certain the painter had some sort of inspiration and interpretation behind this painting. “Ahem,” I turned my head swiftly to see who had coughed. It was the driver—or I could identify him as the man I almost killed. His stubble is more visible and his curly black hair juxtaposes his tan skin tone. “Looking for something?” He asked firmly, his eyes darting from me to the painting. I strode a little further towards him.

I’ve found several stains of blood while seeing Papochka entering the home with a gun. There’s a rumour in the house that my Baboo used to paint with human blood. Even the sarcastic and fun-loving Papa Killian often loses his calm and beats the guards to pulp. Still, I’ve seen those people scroll past headlines soaked in blood and sip their coffee. Maybe we’ve all become too comfortable in our indifference, too fluent in detachment. Maybe monsters don’t hide under our beds anymore, they sit beside us, perfectly calm, chewing gum and asking what’s for dinner.

THIRD PERSON POINT OF VIEW Deep in the woods of the werewolf realm, the vampire couple lay in their own blood. The male vampire, his chest torn open, reached for his mate whose throat was being crushed beneath a strong foot, suffocating her. “P-please…spare my mate…don’t kill her…” They had tried to escape, but had fallen into the clutches of a beast. Above them, a half-shifted Ryker sharpened a wooden stake with his claws. His entire body was painted red with the blood of all the powerful people he killed but could not satisfy him. Instead it just made him dissatisfied and furious.

Xavier rubs himself along my ceremonial robe, then walks off to the darkest area within the dungeon so he could transform and cloth himself. Trex comes bounding in and if it were Jarek, I'm convinced he would have a triumphant smirk on his face. A tremendous feral hog, unlike any I have ever seen before, lies on his back. The wild boar falls to my feet, but he doesn’t rub himself against me like Xavier did. He promptly walks off so he can shift and change. I shrug my shoulders and my mom scrutinizes me. Not going to let that cat out of the bag yet. I may end up rejecting his dumb ass. DANTE

“They wrote the Blood Peace Treaty. Before the humans shattered it.” We kept walking. The deeper we went, the older the art became. Fire-dancers. Winged beings. Beast-men. Magic dripped from the walls, history bleeding like it was still alive. Then we reached it. The last painting. A man with obsidian eyes and raven-black hair. Beside him, a woman too stunning to look at. And between them, two boys. Twins. No older than seven. It’s Draven. I know him. Kelvin's dad.

One wrong whisper, one wrong rumor, and everything Sophie and Xavier were trying to build could shatter. I pushed it down. Focus. Protect them. Protect our children. Protect the future we’re fighting for. The first artist lived above a pottery guild. She answered the door with ink on her fingers and irritation in her eyes. “You think I’m sneaking around with protest paint?” she scoffed. “Half my work is murals. The red you saw on the walls? Wrong mix. That was cheap stuff. Mine’s imported. Cost me triple.” She shoved a crate of pigments at me, receipts clipped neatly to the side.

I remarked and Kyler chuckled. “The pictures you sent me through the mindlink were wow ! Are you an artist in painting bodies with blood ? The precision of the cuts and the streams of oozing blood were too accurately done !! I could swear you were sending me the images of a painting if I had not seen your victims walking and talking for real ! The artwork was beautiful but gory,” Kyler said with a shudder. “I know you paint red better, babe,” I snorted as I thought back about Kyler’s victims tonight. All of them had been left hanging on a tree and I swear, I would have loved to turn that tree into a Xmas one if he had used actual decorations instead of corpses.

I see the way the energy isn’t flowing evenly anymore. And I see the center. That concentrated signature. Not Arachne’s magic. Not stable. It spikes again. Wild. Then it slams down. I feel something close to excitement curl in my stomach. Not joy. Not happiness. Something sharper. “She doesn’t have control over it,” I murmur. “Over the child?” Carter asks. “Over what the child is becoming.” Abomination. The signature flickers like a bad lightbulb. Erratic. Emotional. I imagine the girl inside that house. Helena’s daughter. Unaware. Untrained. A loaded weapon with no safety on.

Patches of dirty snow lingered under the bushes, shade arbors, and benches. “Do you yield?” I asked. Xavier continued to struggle. I wasn’t going to let him up until I knew this was over. I had him, there was no doubt about that. His body went limp. With a sigh, he said, “I yield.” A sweep of my wand made the cobweb net vanish. Freed, the vampire leapt to his feet, and I steadied the piece of malachite on him, prepared for anything. Behind me a growl sounded. “What the fuck is going on? Why is she bleeding?”

“They selected four paintings this year. Yours was one of them.” Verity’s lips parted. She could not speak at first. Her eyes filled with tears before she could stop them. They slipped down her cheeks, warm and sudden. All the nights she had painted alone, all the times she felt invisible in her old life — it rushed back at her in this quiet room. Quentin turned her gently to face him. His thumb brushed her tears away with such care that more came. He wiped them slowly, his gray-blue eyes soft on hers. “Thank you,” she said, her voice shaking. “I don’t know how you did this… but thank you. No one has ever seen me like this. Not really. Not until you.”