Beast, Part Two (The Church #5)

Sins

chapter thirty-seven

Summer

I have screamed until my voice is hoarse. My throat and head hurt. Although I’m pretty sure the pain in my head is due to the knot on the side of my head. My body is exhausted. I woke up not too long ago and realized I’m chained to the floor in some type of basement. Near me, is a small cot in the corner of the room and a bucket that I’m too afraid to look in.

Not too far from the bed is a small rectangular table that looks more like a work bench you might find in a wood shop. Across from me is a set of stairs. From the way the basement is set up, a wall blocks my view from the top of the stairs down to the fourth step from the bottom. Near the stairs is a shelf full of cleaning supplies and other random things. My chains don’t extend to that side of the room.

I have no idea where Gabe is. I pray that he’s not hurt. Gabriel’s father said that he wanted to turn Gabe into his next best weapon. I don’t know what the hell that means. Hopefully, he doesn’t intend to hurt him.

Noise from the top of the stairs grabs my attention. From the way the wall blocks most of the staircase, I can’t see who is coming down. Still, I climb up from the cot. The chains around my ankle rattle.

I hold my breath as the stairs squeak with each step the person takes. I’m caught off guard when a tall woman steps off the final stair. She has a lean athletic build with wide shoulders. Her gray hair is pulled back from her face in a tight bun. She’s wearing filthy overalls with a plaid shirt and work boots. A rifle is slung over her shoulder as she carries a tray with a bowl and kettle on it with her.

She eyes me with so much hatred, I question if she knows me from somewhere.

“Who are you?” I ask. I didn’t have time for pleasantries. I needed to know who this woman was and where my son was.

She places the tray down on the wooden table. She doesn’t speak until she turns to look at me.

“I can smell his impurity all over you,” the woman sneers. “You’re a dirty whore.”

Clearly, this woman is insane. I pray my son isn’t somewhere in the house with her unstable ass.

“Who the fuck are you, and where is my son?” I shout, but with as raw as my voice is, it doesn’t come out loud at all.

She places her hands on her narrow hips. “You bore a bastard for the beast. God is not pleased.”

She turns back to the items she placed down. Taking the bowl off the tray, she sets it down on the table. She then picks up the kettle and pours boiling hot water into the bowl. The water is so hot not only does steam rise from it, but it sizzles when it hits the bowl.

“I cannot have this filth in my home,” she says, speaking to herself.

The woman walks away from the table over to the shelf near the stairs. She takes down a container of bleach, then walks back over to me. She pours the entire bottle of bleach into the boiling water. My nose burns from the smell.

I try once again to reason with her. “Please,” I beg. “Just tell me if Gabe is alright? Is he here?”

She slams her hand down on the table, causing the things on it to rattle. She rolls her head toward me.

“My child is fine. He is upstairs sleeping.”

Her child? What the hell is going on? I want to find comfort in her words, but the fact that she called my son hers is alarming.

Even though I’ve never met this woman before, something about her feels familiar. I don’t know if it’s the cadence in which she speaks or if it’s something about her face.

“Do you know that when I gave birth to the devil’s son, he ripped my body apart so bad that I bled out on the table,” she goes on to speak, dropping a rag from the tray into the hot water.

“In order to save my life, the doctors had to take my uterus. I believed that it was Satan’s way of ensuring I would never carry another child again. But God whispered to me that night in the hospital, he said be still my good and faithful servant. For I will make a way.”

She turns to me with the freakiest smile I have ever seen. The feeling of familiarity strikes again. I try to rack my brain where I’ve seen her. However, nothing comes to mind. And I’m pretty sure if ever ran into her, I would remember her. She has one of those faces that’s hard to forget, and not in a good way. She gives off Kathy Bates in Misery vibes.

“God has awarded me a second chance.” She looks up toward the ceiling with a smile, as if she’s seeing God’s face. “This time, the child is pure and untainted by the devil despite his whore mother and demon father.” She says the last part with an evil sneer to me.

It then dawns on me why she sounds and looks so familiar.

I gasp. “Your Gabriel’s mother?”

“Yes,” she chuckles. “He was my curse, but now I have a blessing.”

Pure panic fills me. All the stories Gabriel told me about his mother and the things she did to him flash through my mind. The only thing I can think of is getting to my son.

“You bitch,” I snarl as I charge toward her, hoping my chains allow me to get close enough “If you hurt my son.”

She flips the gun around her shoulders and aims the barrel at me. I stop in my tracks. In my anger, I forgot about the weapon.

“Not so fast, whore,” she taunts. “I have no fear of blowing a hole in your chest. In fact, I want to do it just to punish my son. I want to be the one that takes away his tramp. Don’t make it an easy decision for me.”

I take a step back, not wanting to trigger her anymore. It’s clear that she’s not playing with a full deck of cards. Even through Gabriel’s stories, I knew that his mother was crazy. However, seeing it firsthand is an entirely different thing.

“Now, take off those clothes,” she demands.

Her request has me confused.

“What? Why?”

“I told you, you’re tainted. And this is the house of a servant of the Lord. You need to strip and cleanse yourself,” she says the last part nudging her head toward the boiling water.

“Are you fucking crazy? I’m not cleaning my body with that shit.”

She moved so fast I didn’t see the blow coming. The butt of the gun cracks across my face splitting my lip and knocking me to the ground. I cry out at the impact.

“You will not use that filthy language in my house, whore.”

I would’ve pointed out that her calling me a whore wasn’t actually making her a saint, but the side of my face was too sore to argue.

“Get up and get those clothes off.”

I stumble to my feet and take off my shirt. Tossing it to the floor. I remove my bottoms next. I do it all fighting through the pain in my face.

“Bra and panties,” she growls.

Feeling vulnerable, I slowly take off my bra and panties. When I am wearing nothing but my birthday suit, I stand before her with one hand covering my mound and the other over my breast.

The woman looks at me as if she’s staring at shit. Her nose is turned up and her lips are turned down.

“You’re not much to look at, are you? Too skinny to hold on to. And you have the dullest brown skin I’ve ever seen. If the demon was going to go colored, he could have picked a prettier one.”

I inhale and count to three. I so badly want to go off on this woman, but she has the upper hand. Not only does she have that gun, but she also has my son somewhere in this house. I needed to stay alive to keep an eye on him until I could find a way out of this.

“Go on,” she says, pointing to the table with the hot water.

Slowly, I trek over to the bowl. Sticking my hands in the hot water, I hiss before yanking my hands back out.

“It’s too hot. I can’t touch it.”

“It’s no hotter than the hell you crawled up from. Now I said, clean.”

Tears spill down my face as I reach back into the scalding hot water. I whimper as I wring out the rag. My hands burn from the heat and the bleach.

I drag the cloth over my body, the smell of the bleach burning my nose while also stinging my skin.

It takes me nearly twenty minutes to finish bathing in the awful water. And in all that time, the water never cooled off. When I’m done, I drop the rag back into the bleach solution.

His mother walks over to me, but I scurry away from her. I didn’t want to be near her. She tosses me a long nightgown.

“Put that on,” she demands. “In my house, you will dress respectfully.”

I pull the thin fabric over my head and down my body. The bottom of the nightgown touches my ankles.

“Alright,” I say once I’m done. “I’ve done what you asked. Can I please see my son? I just want to know he’s okay.”

She stares at me for a moment. She then pulls a box out of the front pocket of her overalls and tosses it at me. I catch it in my hands. My earlier fear returns when I see what it is.

“I’m not taking this.”

Is there a possibility I could be pregnant? Absolutely. Gabriel and I have been screwing like rabbits the last few weeks. However, I really didn’t want to find out right now.

“I wasn’t asking you. The Devil wants whatever spawns you push out your loose vagina. So you will take the test.”

“Please,” I try pleading again.

She swings her gun around and aims it at me. Sucking up my emotions, I go over to the bucket in the room. I take the pregnancy test out of the box, pull up the long ass night gown, and squat over the bucket as I piss.

Please, for once, let Gabriel’s sperm not work. After I finish, I stand up straight and lower my gown.

“What does it say?” she asks, never lowering the gun.

I close my eyes as I look down at the stick in my hand. I send up one more silent prayer that we didn’t actually get pregnant and then open my eyes.

Immediately disappointment flows through me as I look down at the two pink lines. Any other time this would be good news, but all I could think about was being locked in this basement with this psycho woman, one child kept away from me, and another in my belly.

Gabriel’s mother laughs. “No need to tell me, I already knew you were anyway. God already told me.”

I toss the pregnancy stick to the floor. She chuckles and backs out of the room.

“For your sake, whore, you better hope its a boy. I don’t much like girls.” She turns and walks back up the stairs.

I’m left alone in the basement. My skin is burning and raw from the hot bleach bath. All I want is to see my son and have Gabriel hold me. I wrap my arms around my middle section, protecting the baby inside.

“Please, Gabriel. I need you to find us soon,” I whisper into the empty room.