Page 17

Fifteen

“I told you to stay away!” My stepfather shouts, as his angry hands latch onto my ankles. The contact alone is enough to make me want to vomit. I hate when he touches me. I hate when he’s near me. I. Hate. Him.

“You get over here right now,” he mutters, still yanking at my limbs.

Still insistent that I need to be punished… again.

He grumbles some more, this time with an array of colorful obscenities. I bet none of his congregants would ever believe he is capable of saying such filth, but I can’t focus on what he’s saying—the stench is too overpowering.

“Fight me all you want, but you’re not going to find what you’re looking for in there. You good for nothing—” I somehow manage to wiggle my foot just enough that it loosens his grip on one of my ankles, and I kick at him. “Bitch!” he yells, trying to grab at me again. I use this as my opportunity to try to submerge myself deeper into the trenches of the decay and rot I feared would be hidden here.

I sneak a quick inhale through my mouth, hoping to spare my nostrils the burden of taking in the potent aroma that lay thick all around me.

My bent knees glide forward and every hair on my body raises, as a cool, slimy texture slithers onto my skin. Coiling its way around my leg, causing a lump so harsh to form in my throat, it feels like I’ve swallowed glass.

A boisterous rumble, angrier than I’ve ever heard from him before, erupts. The force he applies to my limbs, pulling me back to him—to where I don’t want to be—matches his tone.

“Get. Over. Here.”

“No!” I shriek. “No. No. No.” My breathing becomes as erratic as my heart, beating a mile a minute. “Just let me go! Let me see for myself!” I beg.

But it all falls on deaf ears. He’s already made up his mind.

“I know you burn like a sinner, but I wonder—” his voice trails, the belt buckle clinking as it comes undone and falls to the ground. “Hmmm,” he groans, “hmm, I wonder if I can fuck the sinner out of you.”

“I’m sorry,” I cry, pinching my eyelids shut. “I didn’t mean to find out.”

My pleas are too late.

“Shh pecadora, this will only hurt if you fight me. Don’t worry, He isn’t watching. This is your fault, though. You’ve steered too far off the narrow path. But don’t you worry, after I use my God given parts to exercise the demon out of you, He’ll care again, and He’ll watch over you.”

“I don’t want Him or you. You sick fuck!”

“I know, but it’s why I have to do this.”

I gasp, startling myself awake, but my eyelids remain shut, afraid that the nightmare will follow. Air burns my lungs upon inhaling. A dryness I can’t explain settling over my lips, trickling its way into my mouth. It increases with every staggered inhale I take as it's exacerbated by the cool, slimy sensation taking hold of my airways.

“Araceli.” Harlan coos my name, encouraging yet sadistic. His deep baritone forms a blanket over my body, summoning goosebumps to rise to the surface of my skin. They continue to prickle my flesh, making me painfully aware that something is physically choking me—or trying to—and it’s not Harlan’s hands.

I open my eyes, and a dizzying rush consumes my head. I take in not only Harlan’s broad frame hovering mine, straddling me, but the abundance of scales—slimy fucking scales—taunting me.

As quick as I opened my eyes, I’m already pinching them shut, or at least I try to, but Harlan clicks his snake-like tongue—that I’m now wondering if he had modified to mess with me, since he knows I don’t like snakes—before laying a not so gentle tap to my cheek.

“Eyes up here,” he commands, and as tempting as the directive is, especially coming from Harlan of all people, I don’t obey. Instead, I grant myself the vapid veil of serenity my eyelids provide me when shut. That way I can pretend there isn’t a snake making its rounds on my décolletage, and that my stepbrother hasn’t fallen farther than even I’m willing to go to help him.

“He won’t hurt you,” Harlan attempts to reassure me, but the snake’s hiss indicates otherwise. “Not if you cooperate, that is.”

I scoff internally, still not able to muster up the energy I need to fight him or this damn snake off me. Not yet, at least.

“What did you give me? I feel…” I pause, trying to determine how I actually feel. Aside from the very real fear I have of snakes—which Harlan clearly made note when we dropped acid before Heathen’s Cross—I surprisingly feel rested. Something I haven’t felt since, well, that night or since I stepped foot in this godforsaken house for the first time.

“You feel relaxed, don’t you? I, myself, love a light sedative every once in a while. It works quicker than melatonin and doesn’t have all those nasty side effects like the concoctions you usually flock to.” He sounds so sure of himself. Like there isn’t even the faintest of inklings in his subconscious that what he’s doing to me is wrong.

He’s sick… and it’s all my fault. The old Harlan would never do this. He would never do anything to cause me pain, let alone enjoy doing it .

He continues on, “I just wanted you to get some rest. We still have a long night ahead of us.” The cheshire grin on his face unveils more sinister intent. Something that usually would entice me, though now, coming from him, I feel an immense unease that won’t dissipate.

“No. We. Don’t.” My words are choppy. The tension in my jaw is mounting.

Harlan laughs at me, and with a snap of his fingers, the snake is practically charmed away.

Thank fuck.

“Oh. Yes. We. Do.” He corrects me. “You should be thanking me, by the way.” He spits, and a strand of saliva drips onto my cheek, only adding to the swarm of goosebumps already plaguing my skin. If it were anyone else, I would be disgusted. However, his warm, slippery spit transports me back to when he fucking devoured me like I was his last meal; when his spit became lost in the wetness he created at my center.

“How else are we going to finish what you started?” The cryptic nature of his question pulls me from reminiscing.

My neck twists, eyes now on his. “What the fuck are you talking—”

He waves his inked finger my way, retrieving a notebook from his back pocket. My eyes widen. That’s my notebook.

“Where did you get that?” My accusatory tone causes him to laugh, arrogantly so.

“I found it.”

“Liar!” I spit at him, but all my saliva does is spew droplets onto my face.

I flinch upward, but he scoots forward and onto my chest, trapping my arms under him before he lowers his mouth to my face, licking up my spit. Humming as he does it, so every stroke of his tongue vibrates my skin, distracting me.

“You—” I begin, but my voice isn’t angry, it's breathy. I push through the current of twisted intrigue his new persona evokes throughout my entire body. Trying to ignore that his tongue’s modification reminds me of a serpent’s, or how badly I want to take his gauged lobes to my lips and sink my teeth into them. “You stole it,” I manage, through a half pant, though it's not enough that my statement is mooted.

His tongue skims my cheek before he rolls and flicks the wet muscle over to my chin. He takes his time there, circling the edge of my chin in alternating jabs with either side of his tongue, before he drags it to the column of my throat. This teasing dance continues, with my laying motionless to the spell he’s put on my body until he’s satisfied with the wanton need he’s creating inside me. It’s then, as a whimper betrays my silence, that he decides to retract his tongue from my skin—leaving me high and dry.

“Asshole,” I mutter.

“Come again?” He lifts his brows. “Oh, that’s right, you can’t,” he singsongs before his voice drops to a dangerously low and seductive octave. “I won’t let you.”

My eyes roll. Hating that every word he’s spewing my way is slowly breaking through the strong front I need to maintain if I want to get what I came here for. Which, at this point, feels so futile. The necklace I came for, that he took, it’s supposed to protect me, though looking at what he’s become, I’m starting to think that’s impossible.

I should’ve never come back.

This was a mistake.

He lifts the notebook up. Pages shuffle, wafting the musky aroma of aged paper my way until he lands on a random spot. “Here we go.” His throat clears, but he doesn’t dive right in. Instead, he looks over the book, boring those ocean blue eyes that are so deceivingly peaceful looking my way. “You should’ve never opened the can of worms you did when you wrote me that bullshit letter. I was going to leave you alone. I had every intention of letting you slip away from my memory, even if it left me eternally lost and aching to be inside that tight cunt forever. But you just had to interject yourself, once again, into something bigger than you. ”

My lips part, about to ask what the fuck he means by something bigger than me. What, to apologize? I wrote to him to apologize for the time that’s slipped us by.

“Shh,” he coos. Let me read.”

‘His body, already bloodied and beaten, hangs on the cross. The same cross he made us look at as he punished us for our sins. Now the only punishment that will be heard in this room is in the echoes of a wailing man, not a god or a descendant of him, begging for a life that neither of us deem worthy of saving. His cries fill the room, though with each one, my patience grows thin as does the fleeting compassion I once had for a man so innately rotten and so unbelievably volatile.

“Are you ready, hermano?” I ask, as he hammers a nail into his father’s hand.

“Why?” his dad, our victim, croaks. “Why are you doing this?”

I step in front of my brother, demanding that the ultimate sinner look at me. Not for who he wants me to be in his story, but for who I am.

His penance.

His damnation.

“Hammer,” I instruct, leaving my outstretched hand out, waiting for the wooden handle to graze my palm.

“What are you going to do to me?” he pleads.

“Payback,” I deadpan as I strike my clenched hammer-wielding fist down onto the top of his head.

His skull breaks with ease. The only simple thing that’s ever come from him. But I don’t want to only injure him—I want to annihilate him. For what he did to us, to them, and all the ones before.

Blood drips onto his forehead, staining his skin, begging me to continue, and I do. One strike after another. Blood for blood. Eye for an eye.’

Harlan slams the book closed and I flinch. “You know, for someone who claims to write fiction, I find it rather convenient or, I don’t know, ironic, that everything you write has some truth to it. Some, of course, more than others.”

This is ridiculous. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The cross part, yes, there is some truth to that. I mean, it was inspired by the first and last night that Harlan and I shared, but the torture scene he just read, that’s purely fictional.

He clenches his jaw. A notable knot forms in response as he shakes his head in disbelief. “I bet you believe that, don’t you? Tell me then, if it’s all fictional, then when are you going to tell me this isn’t the first night you’ve returned to the very property you swore you’d never return to?”

As I marinate on what he’s saying, all I can think of is what he’s conveniently forgetting. I never swore not to return. I was kicked out. Threatened to never return. There’s a difference. That’s not something he’d ever have to contend with, though. He partook in the same things I did that night at Heathen’s Cross, yet the consequences that I suffered were not the same as his. His father allowed him to exist while I was the one who was shunned. Not Harlan.

“This is the first time.” I defend myself because it’s the truth.

Harlan tosses the book on the floor and dust lifts from the soiled floorboards. Who knows when the last time this place was cleaned? Probably around the same time Harlan was who I remember him to be, an angel with an unsteady halo. It was always waiting to fall, but never did I think it’d shatter quite like his has.

“When were you going to tell me?” His question is full of venom.

I lift my brows at him, signaling for him to continue. I’m so confused. I'm so tired. I don’t know what he wants me to say, or what I can say to convince him that whatever he’s conjured himself into believing, isn’t true.

“Don’t play stupid with me. When were you going to tell me what you started and were too chicken shit to finish? Were you going to leave another mess for me to clean up when you do what you do best and disappear?”

What the fuck is he talking about?

He groans, increasingly aggravated. “Fuck, Araceli, don’t make me show you the camera footage.”