Page 46 of The Pale Rider
Aeron took a long inhale and glared at me.
“If I was trying to hurt you, why would I bring you back here? I came back here after you went missing. I knew these paintings were on the wall, and I knew Mabel was still here. I was hoping she was still around when I managed to get you here. If I were trying to hide something from you, I would have killed her and destroyed these paintings if bringing you back here was this huge ruse.”
Well, fuck. He had some damned good points. And Miss Mabel liked him, or she wouldn’t be sharing her weed with him. She could sniff out an evil person like one of those truffle pigs. I remembered a guy I dated that I was totally into, and she hated. She kept telling me to dump him, and I didn’t listen. I found out epically and the hard way that when Miss Mabel said someone’s mother should have just swallowed, you should stay away from that person. And she wasn’t doing that with Aeron.
“Then why didn’t you want me to know I paint the future?”
“Ariel, you only woke up a few weeks ago. You found out corpses are eating people, humanity has gone to shit, they have bombed most of the world, and you are dealing with horrible nightmares of what your father did to you. I would tell you when you’d had time to come to terms with that. I was hoping to tell you when you stopped waking up screaming.”
Fair enough, but Aeron needed to stop deciding for me what I could and couldn’t handle. He’d passed part of my test, but there was still an enormous question that he would need to answer if I would go to Mexico with him or stay here with Miss Mabel.
“Why did I paint your horse as something out of the Book of Revelations, Aeron?”
I didn’t really believe the Book of Revelations was happening. I knew Miss Mabel’s theory. It made sense, but there was this part of me that just thought men wrote the bible to control people. It was a fairy tale. But something made me paint those horses and start reading it, and it was probably the shit happening now.
Aeron had that look on his face. I knew it quite well by now. He didn’t want to tell me, and he knew I would not take it well. I wasn’t near high enough to deal with another lie. If he didn’t answer my question, I was booting him out of my apartment and riding out the apocalypse with Miss Mabel.
“The answer is in your bedroom, Ariel,” Aeron said.
“Oh, that’s right!” Miss Mabel said. “I forgot about that one. I showed it to you when I stopped beating you with the broom and realized who you were.”
“You’re dangerous with a broom, Mabel. When you want to keep a painting from a series, you hang it in your bedroom. You kept one from these horse paintings, and you hung it right above your bed because it meant a lot to you.”
“You’d best take a toke off that joint before you go in there, Speedy,” Miss Mabel said.
If Miss Mabel thought I needed to be good and high to view some vision painting I decided to keep that would answer whether or not I should go to Mexico with Aeron, I’d smoke this entire joint because I already wasn’t high enough to hear that I could paint the future.
Aeron was jiggling his knee and looked like he wanted me to hurry the fuck up and go in my bedroom. Honestly, he was ruining what little high I had. I just wanted five minutes to process all this shit. What was I, anyway? Some sort of psychic? I wasn’t sure I believed in all that. No one could see the future.
Still, there was a lot of shit staring me in the face that I couldn’t deny. I was drawing those horses back then and now for a reason. Aeron was somehow right in the middle of it. I didn’twantAeron to be the bad guy. I didn’t want the reason that I kept drawing these horses because Aeron had been working for my father this entire time. I didn’t want to know I had bought his lies this whole time.
There was apparently some sort of proof in my bedroom, but I was stalling going in there. Because I might not remember a lot of things and I might not know if I could trust Aeron, but there was one thing I knew. Miss Mabel would never lie to me. If she were beating the shit out of Aeron with a broom, she only would have stopped for a principled reason. If he came at her, she would have snapped it in half and drove part of that broom through his neck.
I was pretty fucking high, but still not high enough to deal with my bedroom. This was the apocalypse. I was lucky even to have weed to deal with this shit. I also didn’t have the luxury of trying to get my shit together before I went in there.
I stood up and glared at Aeron.
“I’m going in there alone. You wait here.”
I hadn’t seen a single Rage Head behind the walls of California, and I already knew that doorman wouldn’t allow strangers in, but I grabbed Smurfette like she could protect me from whatever the fuck I had painted before I got kidnapped.
I flipped the light on and stepped inside. I didn’t need to find this mysterious painting among all the pictures hung on my bedroom wall. It was huge, and I’d hung it right above my bed. I stared at that thing, and I could only do one thing.
“What the fuck is this shit?” I shrieked.
Miss Mabel came ambling in and stood next to me and stared at it.
“It’s a lot kinkier than what you usually show me, but this is what made up your mind to meet Aeron and Leif.”
Aeron peered around the corner of the door.
“Is anyone feeling like they will hit me with something if I come in?”
“The jury is still out.”
The painting above my bed was hyper realistic and less stylized than the horses. It was also horrifyingly erotic. It was me standing in the middle of the Oval Office. Aeron was there with three other men. The Oval Office was totally trashed, and my shirt was half off. I was kissing one man on the mouth while the other men were kissing various parts of me. It looked like we were all about to fuck in the middle of a destroyed Oval Office.
“Thisis supposed to convince me? I painted some wet dream, and that is supposed to answer all my questions?”
