Chapter Thirty-One
Ash
This was going fucking nowhere, so I grabbed Blaze as soon as he reappeared from yet another empty room, dragging him close.
“Why don’t you do what you do, and we’ll smoke the fucker out?”
He grinned widely, almost fucking lighting up as he stared back at me.
Fire did that to him, and my dad Gray. They were fucking obsessed with it, I mean, look at us all with our fucking stupid names.
Why I got named after the dead thing left behind after fire, I had no idea, but way to make a kid feel like fucking wastage, right?
I’d moved past it, but it bothered me for a long time when I was younger.
Blaze had a cool fucking name. Cole and Nix?
They were blessed with good ones, but me? Dust. Yeah, I was mostly over it.
“Brother, you have the best ideas, sometimes. I’ll go grab my kit from the car.” Of course he had his firestarting kit with him, it went fucking everywhere with him. If he ever got stopped by the police while out doing the shopping, he’d have no excuse for it.
“FUCK! You guys need to see this!” Ethan yelled, cutting off the desperate urge in my brother to burn the world to the ground. We both ran down the hall to find him, and he was right, it needed to be seen. Fuck me.
The room had a podium that the fucker must have stood behind to preach at the people in the pews lined up across from it, but it wasn’t those things that freaked us out, or the stacks of bibles that’d make great fire fodder. No. It was the wall of ‘The Saved’ that made us fall silent.
‘The Saved’ were pretty obviously his victims. Kids like Cal, like me, only I wasn’t up on this wall, but my fucking boyfriend was. Young and innocent looking in his picture, with his name and the date he was ‘saved’ below it.
“This fucker catalogued all of this sick shit, and since that wasn’t twisted enough, he fucking paraded it in front of everyone like this.
Did these kids have to look at their fucking faces up here while he preached his bullshit at them?
” Ethan, I’m right there with you, man. What the actual fuck was wrong with this guy.
This here was what real evil looked like.
Call me sick or whatever, or any member of my family, even Ethan, but this?
This was deliberately forcing women on gay kids, and then fucking shouting out about it like it was a public service.
“I need to find this cunt, before I fucking explode and destroy everything in sight,” I hissed, clenching my fists as I forcibly held myself back from trashing things, and then I realised, why the fuck should I, so I turned and grabbed the nearest pew, lifting it and tossing it across the others.
It was heavy, but not impossible with my roaring anger fuelling me.
“Wait!” Blaze grabbed my shoulder, and I turned to deck him for stopping me, but he was pointing into the corner of the room.
“What?”
He grinned, and nudged Ethan. “Go get him, tiger.” Ethan followed the finger that pointed at what looked like a large cupboard, and hesitated, but then he heard what Blaze must have picked up on in the deathly silence that fell after I tossed the pew.
Someone moved. Something knocked against something.
Ethan barked out a laugh as he strode over to the cupboard and crouched down, grinning at us as he lifted a finger to his lips. Fucking idiot. Like we’re making a sound.
He wrenched that door open, and a leg flew at him, like Cal’s uncle thought he could fight his way out of his little fucking cupboard of shame.
“Not so fast, you perverted shit!” Ethan dragged him out of the cupboard, and tossed him on the floor by the pews, slamming a kick against his ribs before we could stop him. Or did we have time to try, but didn’t even bother? Pain would be good for him to experience.
“You call them ‘The Saved’, like you think these are your fucking achievements, like you did something impressive. You fucking tortured and raped these poor boys!” I kicked him next, because I liked the idea of symmetry.
Both sides of his chest should hurt, right?
At least there wasn’t a heart in there anywhere, just a filthy black hole where his evil resided.
“They needed… to be… saved. I saved… them!”
“That boy out there, he’s just a fucking child. Cal was just a fucking child. All these poor bastards on your wall were JUST. Fucking. Children!”
Ethan suddenly barked out a harsh laugh, and Blaze and I lifted our heads to look at him.
“What?”
“Maybe he needs to learn how it feels to be gay.”
Cal
Ren wasn’t letting go of me, so I struggled up from the floor and carried him across the room, following the sounds of yelling, hoping that meant they’d found uncle. What I found, in the room their voices came from, was more horrific than I could have ever imagined.
There was a wall behind a toppled over podium, and on it were pictures, so many framed fucking pictures, like a hall of fame, only it was a wall of shame.
But I was finally realising that we weren’t the ones to be ashamed.
It was him. That fucker who’d called himself a man of god, and my uncle, and had forced so many of us into this hell.
“Jesus fuck!”
“Blasphemer!”
He grunted a second later as someone kicked him, but I didn’t look to see who.
“So why can’t we? I’m just saying, he needs to feel as abused and fucked up as they did,” Ethan demanded, and I had no idea what he was talking about, but I turned to see what the hell was going on.
“I’m not fucking him!” Ash hissed back, shaking his head at Ethan, while Blaze seemed to be silently assessing the situation.
“What if I light something on fire and we stick that up his ass? Make him feel the burn, ya know?”
My god, they were sick fuckers, but it still paled in comparison to what uncle Gordon had been doing.
“Just kill him. I wanna get Ren out of here, and somewhere safe.”
Ash turned to me, noting the kid still wrapped around me, which was fucking awkward, because he was probably only a foot or so shorter than me, and I had no idea how I hadn’t fallen over trying to carry him.
“How’s he doing?”
I glared at my monstrous kin on the floor. “How do you think? He was almost raped by this cunt and his bitch out there.”
“Language!” Gordon snapped, like he thought he had any power here.
“Seriously, gut him, bleed him, I don’t really care. I don’t need to be involved now, because Ren’s my priority. He needs to get away from this place.”
Blaze grinned, stepping over Gordon, and accidentally on purpose kicking him in the face.
“I’ll get my kit.”
Ethan groaned as he watched him leave. “You’re gonna let him firefuck his ass? Man. Nobody lets me do what I want to do.”
“What were you going to rape him with, you twat? You don’t have that in you.”
Ethan opened his mouth, and hesitated. “Yeah, never mind. Uh, I get to stab him though. Or… I’ve got it, I’ll cut off his junk, assuming he’s not built like a Ken doll down there.”
Ugh. I turned and walked away, because I didn’t want to see or hear, or ugh, smell, any of this.
“Just make sure he dies, and nobody else sees that fucking wall.”
“Shouldn’t we document it? These kids were all raped because of him.”
I turned to offer Ash a sad smile. “I’m sure the last thing they want is another reminder of that hell. I know I could have lived without seeing it.”
I carried Ren the hell out of there, because he didn’t appear to have paid attention, and I didn’t want him to start doing it now. He’d almost ended up on that sick wall of victims himself.
“Are they gonna kill him?”
I groaned, because clearly he’d paid more attention than I’d realised.
“Yeah.”
“Hope they make it hurt.”