She'd been told more than once that, while her gaze was no danger to those of supernatural blood, it nevertheless elicited a strange physical reaction, something that shook at one's core for a moment before settling out, as if the body needed to convince itself it was still flesh, and not stone. Arkady, she'd found, had much the same effect on her, and she refrained from answering him until the jarring sensation--and the slam of her heart against her ribs which accompanied it, reminding her that, if nowhere else, here with him, she was prey--had passed.
"Come and see if you like." Her voice was low, almost too low for a woman, and there was a distinctly gravelly quality to it, as if she spent a lot of time shouting. It would have been difficult to hear over the music if anyone else had been at her door, but she knew she didn't need to raise her voice with the master of this madhouse. It was keeping him from hearing things that was more often the problem.
Stepping back out of the way, Lettie held the door open to permit Arkady inside, into a sea of candlelight and the overpowering smell of blood. There was a bucket of it--animal, by the smell--watered down, sitting on the floor, and spread across both palette and canvas--she appeared to have been using it like paint, to create the landscape piece propped up on the easel. It was a beautiful, foreboding image of the carnival, full of suggestive shadow and gleaming eyes, and the level of detail made it appear more like a painting, or an apparition, than a simple watercolor. By what technique it was hard to tell, but somehow she had managed to extract a range of colors from her medium, varying from dark red to bronze to brown and back again. There was even black in places, a thick, viscous black that looked more like ink than paint.
The trail of ebony fluid drying down her forearm gave away its origin as Lettie's own blood.
"It's not right yet," she said with a frown, a slight pinching at the bridge of her nose, "but I don't know why. Another few hours will fix it, maybe."