7Beneath his hands, she is still. She is beautiful before him with her sunshine eyes and her mouth, lips read and open like a wound, but he sees only the way the line of her jaw is not quite smooth and how her hips bend away from the shadow.
He feels the harshness of her skin as it slides warm and flawed against his own and he wants to flinch away to somewhere that sickens him less. Disaffection sticks like tears in his throat and he doesn't shudder, even while his hands ghost over her and leave nothing behind.
It's as if he never touched her at all.
Her body is quietly unrelenting – he strokes and shapes and moulds and it returns to its rigid imperfection. She is desert-dry and hot; at every point of contact he cannot bear the friction. Breathing in, he chokes on a flowery, fictitious sort of scent as she flexes her shoulders and his fingers curve around solid angel wings of bone – delicately and unbearably incorrect. She is an aesthetic mistake and a literal beauty.
In his embrace, she is indistinct.
As she moves to kiss him, her breath is soft and welcoming against his lips and he cannot stay.
The air outside is so cold that it crawls in his lungs and stings his teeth as he presses his hands to her ripe damp cheeks. Their last moments together, her skin is icy and wet like clay beneath his fingers and she feels like home.
His studio is porcelain white and filled with figures that stand as he needs them to stand. They are as he needs them to be. They are beautiful and he can adore them. He can be with her for now, but only while he veils her with visions of how she will be – how he will sculpt her. His gifts render him divine; he is godly among the monstrous crowds.
Nobody can do what he can with beauty.
Laura will be the eighth girl. She is in love with him – he can see it in the dull devoted sheen to her blue eyes, the way her rotted-silk hands ply at his skin. They have all been in love with him, his eight girls, but in the end they beg and they plead, why are you doing this, don't let me die, I love you, I love you, save me. His girls, they don't understand he is saving them. They are special: he sees the possibility of perfection in their broken movements and half-empty expressions. All he wants is to make them into what they are almost – to give them the help they are unaware they need.
When she returns, bloodshot blonde and impossibly unworthy of the word immaculate, he smears the colour from her lips over her skin to stain it further and she laughs, smitten – terrible shards of sound in the near-silence. She wanders through his collection, her fingertips brushing the girls she has yet to join and she says, they're beautiful.
I know, he says, but he does not say, so are you.
He lines her up in a space beside the last girl, the girl whose perfect clay hair surrounds her perfect clay face and who is present still in the thick sweetness of the air. Pose for me, he says, and Laura's face glows like the sun where it bleeds into the horizon behind her. She alters her stance, pushes useless hair over her shoulder as giggles pour in torrents from her pale throat.
He seizes her against a locked door, six floors up in a city of dolls. Blood falls in ribbons, painting veins on the outside of her tasteless skin so that for a moment it is as if it has dissolved and her screams consume the room, an eerie inverted echo of her laughter. He kisses her even as she's sobbing, allowing the knife – all perfect angles and pure glinting silver – to split the tender flesh of her thighs at the same time.
As always, he waits until her eyes have rolled back in her distorted face before he stands her against a model – a wire shadow with claws that cling mercilessly to the tainted skin and force her to stand like the deity he will make her. In the lolling angle of her head, the greying flushes in her cheeks he sees his other girls and their faces flutter over the girl in his arms until he cannot be sure it is Laura he holds – his hands are on Christine's throat, slitting Jessica's wrists, tearing furiously at Alice's precious uneven lips.
The clay soothes him, cooling his skin and slowing his heartbeat and he covers her body with it even as she bleeds. She is still alive: he will keep her that way until she is perfect enough that heaven will accept her as an angel.
He is frenzied now, gripped with the terror that the girls will wake and ruin his work. With eyes only for faces, you never see the sky and he has no idea how long any of his girls have been here, only that the timing of his art is intricate and a misplaced minute could destroy him.
She must not die imperfect.