Chapter 36 Scarlett
Scarlett
Present Day
Tick tock.
I giggled, and Pastor Gordan immediately went silent, his eyes finding mine, clear anger in his pure eyes.
But I couldn’t help myself. What he was saying was bullshit.
He claimed that in order to meet Peter at the gates of Heaven, we must wash the blood from our white robes, and in order to do that, we must carry a holy man’s child and bless the world.
However, we would only qualify if the child we carried was a boy.
This is because we are already impure, so any girl we birth would carry that impurity into her bloodstream, but not the boy.
Boys were holier.
The best part was that the only men who qualified were the Leaders of the Church of Daylight or higher.
But, even after all that, the funniest part of this whole sermon, was the fact that they already ripped my fucking uterus out of me.
Carry their child? I couldn’t even carry Azrael’s.
A hand wrapped around my arm, tearing me from the pew. “You like being punished, don’t you, Izbrannik Bozhiy?”
No, I hated it. I hated it with every ounce of who I was. Ever fiber of my being. I hated what they had turned me into. What they had done to my mind. I hated feeling the new fear grow inside of me with every passing day. A new fear to add to the one that had long since consumed me.
What if Azrael would no longer take me back?
No, he didn’t care if I was pure. He didn’t care if I was silent or couldn’t stop laughing. He didn’t care if I was wild or quiet or a fucking psychopath like him.
But what if he did care about all the injuries they left inside of me.
What if I lost my mind? Would he care about that? It only made the laughter worse.
Kat pulled me out of the Gallows and down the hall, the familiar click of heels following.
I kept laughing, louder and more maniacal as the crisis of what the cost of this was kept growing under my skin.
But how could they not expect that? They had just, officially, condemned me to Hell in their fucked-up religion, not that it would be any different than this place. They only confirmed that I would be here forever.
And ever.
And ever.
Tick tock tick tock tick tock.
I could hear Azrael’s watch better these days. Louder, clearer. It was like he was living in my mind. I mean, he was always there when I needed him. Dancing with me around the office, washing me in the shower, talking to me in the theatre. He was never once late.
Kat threw me down at the bottom of the stairs and stepped back.
I turned onto my back, laughing so hard, tears filled my eyes. They had wanted noise, so I gave them noise. They wanted reactions, so I gave them reactions. They wanted an obedient, broken little doll?
Fuck them.
I had learned a lot over the past 94 days, but mainly what I had learned was how different Azrael must have been before he left that asylum.
He had gone in as a Shadow. Trained to observe, to learn, to adapt.
So, that’s what I did because that’s how I was trained.
To observe.
To learn.
To adapt.
But what he failed to teach me was what came after. What came after you saw all there was to see? What came after you learned all that there was to learn?
What came after you adapted?
None of the others would speak to me. In fact, on the third night I had left my room to enter another, just to get information, the girl in there screamed.
And screamed.
And screamed.
I had to kill her and her roommate. They were better off for it, but I wasn’t.
I had still been caught. Caught because I had lusted for blood so deeply that I only saw red. I ripped them apart, doused the room in red. Shredded their skin from their bodies, ripped their muscles from their bones, tore out their vocal cords just to get them to be quiet.
And because of them, I was caught.
Caught and brought to a room located in a trap door in the floor, under the couch in the living room. They locked me in there for days. Darkness and dripping water, no food. Not even a morsel. Once a day, Kat came down to clean me, but only after Mack and Eckers had their way with me.
Over and over again.
Oh, and the punishment Lady Elise had deemed fit for me all those months ago? It was a shot. A shot anyone, and everyone was allowed to give me whenever they wanted their way with me so that I wouldn’t hurt them.
They were so afraid of me hurting them, they needed to sedate me.
The shot took away my ability to move. I was still aware. I could still feel everything. I could still make noise, but I couldn’t move. Not even a simple twitch of the finger. I couldn’t do anything but take it.
So, when they came down to that room to do what they wanted, they made sure to give me that because they were afraid of me.
Lady Elise took me out of that place, the first time, only after she heard me make a noise. I don’t even remember making it, but I had. I laughed, I think. After a week of being down there, I laughed.
After I went back to my room, they had people outside of my door so I wouldn’t escape again. They liked their new job because it gave them access to me.
I had been sent to that room eight more times after that. The other men in charge of watching the house had visited me while I was down there too. One of them forgot to give me the shot, so I killed him with my teeth and cracked nails. He put up a fight, but I fought harder.
I still remembered the look on Lady Elise’s face when she stormed down there, looking for her youngest boy and found me, covered in blood, bathing in it, his heart in my hands.
I could still feel his warm blood dripping through my fingers.
It made me want more.
It wasn’t until this morning that I realized she never replaced him.
It’s been two weeks, and she never replaced him.
Picking them off one by one could work. Kill them, get punished, wait.
“Tick tock goes the clock, the seven trumpets release. Tick tock goes the clock, I see the mark of the beast.”
“Do you think baring a child is funny?” Lady Elise asked, looking down on me.
I thought it was delusional. I thought that it was strange that she didn’t know what they did to me.
She knew all about me. Who my mother was, when she died, the exact date I had been bought by Azrael, the exact amount he had spent.
Why didn’t she know that I could never, in their eyes, be cleansed?
When I did nothing but laugh, she lifted her chin, a smug little smile touching her face.
“It’s December, Chosen One, and as most know, Christmas is the season of giving.
” She stepped forward and grabbed my jaw between her frail, easily breakable fingers.
“It’s also the season of beginning again.
You will be made new, Scarlett, willing or unwilling, that’s up to you. ”
She released me and turned away, my giggles becoming more frantic, more detached.
I threaded my hand back into my hair, turning partway towards the steps, wondering if there was anything left inside of me to rebuild. I couldn’t stop.
Why couldn’t I stop?
Tick.
Tock.