The Terms

You don't scream. You'll be proud of that later.

You look at the mirror. You look at Vesna. You look at the mirror again, where the fire is burning and the portrait is sitting on its easel and you are standing completely, impossibly alone.

"There's a trick," you say. "An angle. The glass is—"

"Three hundred years old and very good glass." Vesna steps away from you, toward the hearth. In the mirror, nothing moves except the flames. "You can walk out, Ava. Barnaby will drive you home. You'll keep the five thousand and tell your friend it was an eccentric old woman with a mediocre painting."

"You're not old."

"I'm three hundred and thirty-one." She says it the way someone else might say I'm a Scorpio. "I was thirty when that was painted. I stayed thirty. That part, at least, I've never minded."

Your phone buzzes again. You realize you never answered Hattie. You type fine, all good, client is just eccentric with fingers that don't feel like yours, and hit send, and that is a lie, and you've just told it to protect a woman who doesn't show up in mirrors.

"Sit down," Vesna says, more gently. "Before you fall down. Barnaby will bring you something with sugar in it."

Barnaby, who has apparently been in the doorway the whole time, says, "Already on it, madam," and vanishes.

You sit in a leather armchair that's older than your country's interstate system. Vesna doesn't sit. She stands by the portrait with her hands clasped behind her back.

"What are you?" you ask.

"My kind calls itself the Still." A faint, dry curve of her mouth. "You'll understand the name the first time you see me at dawn. From sunrise to sunset I sleep, and nothing on earth can wake me. I don't burn in the sun, whatever the films say. I simply can't stay awake in it. I drink blood. I have no reflection, because my reflection lives there." She nods at the canvas. "That is my likeness. It was begun the night I was turned, and it was never finished."

"And you want me to finish it."

"I want you to save it, first. You've seen the condition."

You have. Your eyes go to the lifting paint at the lower edge, the islands of color hanging by a breath. Professionally, it's a nightmare. It's also the most extraordinary thing you've ever been in a room with, and you include the woman.

Barnaby comes back with a cup of hot chocolate so thick the spoon stands up. You drink half of it in one go. It helps.

"Why me?" you ask. "There are conservators at the Getty. At the Uffizi."

"There are." She finally sits, across from you, crossing one long leg over the other. "Three years ago a small museum in Charleston sent a chalk sketch to New York for treatment. An anonymous Venetian study of a woman's hands. Everyone called it a minor workshop piece. You were the junior conservator assigned to it. You wrote in your report that the hand that drew it was a woman's, trained, and very much in love with the sitter."

You stare at her. "Nobody read that report."

"I did." Her gray eyes hold yours. "You were right. You were the only person in three hundred years who looked at that drawing and saw her."

"Saw who?"

But Vesna only says, "Here are my terms."

She lays them out like a contract she's recited before.

You work at night, here, in her house, in the studio on the third floor. You never take the canvas off the premises. You take no photographs of it, ever, for any reason. You don't touch it unless she's in the room. You finish by Halloween.

"Why Halloween?"

"Because after midnight on All Hallows' Eve, under the laws my kind lives by, an unfinished likeness reverts to the one who made me." Her voice doesn't change. Her hands do. They tighten on her knee. "He would like that very much. There are people who would prefer it remain unfinished until then. They may be unpleasant to you."

"Unpleasant how?"

"Barnaby will drive you to and from. You'll be safe." She says it like a promise she intends to keep with her teeth. "The fee is two hundred thousand dollars. Half now."

You choke on the hot chocolate.

When you can breathe again, she's watching you with what might, on anyone else, be amusement.

"That's too much," you manage.

"It isn't nearly enough." She leans forward. "I've waited a long time for the right hands. I'm not going to insult them."

You look at the portrait. At the blank, unpainted eyes. At the woman across from you, whose eyes are very much painted, and who is looking at you like you're the last door at the end of a long hallway.

Every sensible part of you is packing a bag.

"Okay," you hear yourself say. "Tomorrow night. I'll need to bring my kit."

Something moves in Vesna's face, so quickly you'd miss it if you weren't trained to see the tiniest changes in a surface. Relief. Raw and enormous, there and gone.

"Tomorrow night," she says. "Thank you, Ava."

You tell Barnaby you'll walk. It's six blocks, and you need the air, and you need to be somewhere with streetlights and drunk tourists and a world that makes sense.

He looks at you like a butler in a film looks at a heroine about to go into the cellar. "Madam won't like it."

"Madam can text me a complaint."

"Madam," Barnaby says, with deep sorrow, "does not text."

You walk. The night is warm and wet, the air heavy with jasmine and river. You pass a bar spilling music onto the sidewalk, a couple kissing against a lamppost, a ghost tour group posing for selfies at a cemetery gate.

On Bull Street, you realize the footsteps behind you have been behind you for three blocks.

You stop at a crosswalk. They stop too.

You glance back. A man, half a block away, in a dark jacket, standing under an oak where the streetlight doesn't reach. You can't see his face. You can see that he isn't pretending to look at his phone.

The light changes. You walk faster. So does he.

You cut through a square, past a statue and a sleeping pigeon, and break into a run on the last block, your bag banging your hip, and when you reach the lane off Waldburg Street and the carriage house that holds every single thing you own, you have your keys out and shaking.

You don't need them.

The studio door is standing open.

Inside, the lights are on. Your worktables are overturned. Solvent bottles lie in a spreading, stinking puddle. And on your easel, the nineteenth-century seascape you've spent six weeks cleaning for a retired dentist on Tybee Island has been cut open from corner to corner.

Across the torn canvas, in thick black paint still wet enough to drip, someone has written three words.

DON'T FINISH IT.