I felt a smile touch my lips and grow and grow. My finger brushed by Azrael’s. Fascinating. I could see the tar dripping around his irises. Thick and black.
His brows furrowed, the muscles in his face twitching until he finally looked away with a huff, irritation filling his features. “Fine.”
My smile fell for pursed lips as he unclipped the rope and stepped to the side.
Azrael gestured for me to go forward.
I stepped to the other side of the rope only for him to pass me and reach for the door. I found his eyes the moment I passed him.
He rejoined me just inside. “He saw the power inside of you and cowered,” he hummed softly. “Most don’t like it when they don’t know why you’re smiling. It makes them uncomfortable, you knowing something about them they didn’t want you to see. It takes them off-guard, and they no longer know how to react.”
Then I shall do it more often, just as he does. I’d rather them be uncomfortable when looking at me than covet what they would never have. If they were uncomfortable, they would never think they had a right to touch me.
I turned to the room we had stepped into, the hall short with only a single door at the end.
The lights were dim, lit with blue rather than yellow or white. The walls were stone, and, after a moment of studying, I realized that this wasn’t a place to linger. They wanted people to enter and immediately head for the door. It wasn’t an exit either, at least not a good one. The hall was too narrow to pass by each other.
“Come, little sinner,” Azrael hummed, “we mustn’t be late for this date. Remember,” he went on as we walked down the hall, “the people of this church have never been your true subjects.Whatever we see, it is only fuel for the fire burning under your skin.”
I was learning to like that burning. It felt good when it grew. Powerful. Comforting in this world of lenience.
Azrael opened the door at the end of the hall and soft music and the smell of copper laced in lavender accosted me.
I felt my expression turn to stone as I stepped into the room, taking in everything all at once.
The room was broken up into smaller sections lined in large panels that were completely made of white light while the rest of the room was bathed in blue. There were people everywhere. Couples, singles. I didn’t recognize anyone’s shoes, and I couldn’t tell who was a Favorite and who wasn’t. Everyone looked the same.
I breathed in slowly. Why was I smelling so much blood?
“It’s under the music,” Azrael whispered, guiding me to one side of the door.
Under the music?
I focused on the sounds, my eyes adjusting to the darkness. It gave me a headache, the dark blue lights with splashes of bright white. Everywhere those bright white panels were, the people congregated, so I knew there was something here, we just couldn’t see anything yet.
I sifted through the talking of the people, the soft music, the shuffling feet before I finally heard it.
The moaning.
My brows furrowed for half a second before my expression smoothed out again. Moaning and blood. This was—
“A museum of flesh,” Azrael purred before stepping towards the closest panel, following the light flow of the crowd.
My eyes were trained on the bright light as we walked. Closer and closer it came, my heart thudding.
A museum of flesh? What has Thomas done?
We stepped around the edge of the panel, and I felt the world sway under me when I saw the truth of what Azrael had said.
There was a man hanging from the ceiling by barbed wire that wrapped around his wrists, his left knee, and his right ankle, holding him feet above the ground much like a puppeteer would hold his puppet.
He was stripped completely naked except for the two metal clamps tightened around his nipples, and some sort of contraption wrapped around his cock. Blood dripped from all three clamps and everywhere that barbed wire dug in.
He was covered in sweat, his fingers blue, a small pool of blood under him, telling me that he had been there a while already.
We slowed to a stop, finding a sign posted just to the right of us.“Gluttony”.
Gluttony? Why? I could see his bones. He couldn’t have been older than 22 and I could see his bones. He was so thin. Smaller than me.
