Page 49 of Cardinal House
“Put you here?” I ask, pushing thoughts of the dead rabbit out of my mind for now.
“On this table,” she blinks hard, her face blank, “when I was dead.”
The way she throws the word out, dead, I bristle at the casualness of it.
“Yes, I laid you there,” I tell her, wondering where the fuck this is going, but I’m trying to let her walk through things, talk out thoughts, memories, coax her into finishing half sentences.
I want her memory back.
I’m going to bring you heads, severed, bloody, heads, Little Moon.
She glances down at the pristine table, her taped fingers gliding back and forth across the square tiles.
“Lift me up,” she tells me, an instruction, one that has the hair on the back of my neck shifting to stand on end, but I don’t hesitate.
Cold and sterile, I move fully into the room, stopping in front of her, I grasp her hips in my hands, lifting her up to sit her on the long edge of the slab. She shivers as her bare thighs touch the cold tiles, and then I release her, take a step back.
She kicks her dangling feet gently, her fingers curling loosely over the edge. Her pale eyes look white in the darkness of the room, like she’s not in there anymore, drifting around the space in a non-corporeal form, as though her soul uses those blue glass orbs as doors to drift in and out of.
Her gaze comes to mine, a shiver rocking through my body like I’ve just been electrocuted. She looks at me like she’s looking through me. Then she swings her legs up, slides her body down the length of the slab and lies there. All delicate and quiet, calm. Staring up at the ceiling, unblinking, she has her hands over either edge of the table, fingers curled gently over the lip of the slab. Then with a soft flutter of her inky lashes, she closes her eyes and she looks like a fucking corpse.
Something wrong rushes through me, a fire in my veins like lava rushing down the side of a volcano, racing towards the little sleeping village below. She looks like a fucking corpse and my cock kicks to life like it’s the only place on my entire body that requires blood. Heart thrashing around inside my chest, I go to stalk forward, to tear her off of the fucking slab.
“Did you take off my clothes here or was I not wearing any?” she suddenly asks, her voice a ghostly whisper.
It stops me from completing my step towards her so suddenly that I have to grab onto the metal counter at my back to stop myself from stumbling forwards.
“What?” I reply sharply, my head snapping up so it’s straight on my shoulders.
“My clothes,” she says, staring up at the ceiling. “Did you take them off of me or was I already without them when you found me?”
I swallow down bile as I start to taste that acrid flavour on the back of my tongue, at the same time my cock weeps in the tight confines of my slacks.
“I cut them off of you.” The inside of my mouth is like sand as I say it.
“How?”
“What?” I repeat, staring at her blankly, seemingly so comfortable and relaxed on a table I regularly dismember bodies on.
“My clothes,” she says whimsically, like she’s smiling on the inside. “How did you cut them off of me?”
“Scissors.”
I can’t give her much more than blank answers, I’m equally terrified and morbidly excited to see where the fuck this is going. And I shouldn’t be, should I. Like, this is beyond fucked up, and yet…
“Get them,” Luna instructs, and my dick pounds against the inside of the zipper it’s imprisoned by.
Without hesitating, I turn towards the shiny metal table of tools, and retrieve the black handled scissors.
“Now what?” I find myself asking, a shiver tearing up my spine as I hover at her side, my shadow, even in the dark, darker than the rest of the room, looms over her like a cold blanket of death.
“Cut my clothes off, Wolf.”
Detachment.
That’s what she sounds like, that’s what it feels like, as I step closer until I’m flush with the edge of the table.
Still, I reach over her, the scissors sliding down the valley between her breasts, cutting easily through the elastic material of her spaghetti-strap, vest top until it’s falling open in two pieces.