Fifty Two. Through A Lover’s Eyes (Specifically the Heart-Melting Gaze of Jason Galanis)

I miss Cassi.

It’s pathetic how quickly that withdrawal set in. I started aching for her just hours after she left my side. I could feel her with me in the basement after Ravenna and my family left the clinic. I expected to still feel her with me in the shower, and in my bed, even after I went all yellow-eyed and scared her off.

I thought she followed me upstairs anyway, but the second I shut the door she was just… gone.

That was a relief for all of ten minutes.

I’m so exhausted, it should have been an easy thing to fall face down on the pillows and just black out for the rest of the evening. I can’t. My mind just won’t shut up. At first really basic things like ‘I should eat something’, and then the more serious worries like ‘I should call Dr. Carson again.’ Even if Nick says he’s fine…

What the hell do I care? Even if he’s collapsed in his home or gone back to the hospital, why should I care how he’s doing? He lied to me. Just like Cassi lied…

She said Ravenna was the liar though, so maybe I should have let her explain. Maybe I owed her at least that much…

Or I owed her nothing at all, because our entire relationship has just been one long act of her using me to protect herself.

Though she’s so powerful she never even needed my protecting…

My thoughts are all tangled. I can’t keep lying here in the dark. I need to do something. Walk, clear my head.

I’m back out in the main room in an instant, throwing on a jacket and heading for the door. Nick asks where I’m going. I tell him the truth, “I don’t know. Just… out.”

I could drive back to the farm. I could talk to my dad. He’s himself again, his real self, and I do want to see him. I want to spend as much time with him as possible before...

Before the full moon comes, and he turns right back into a monster.

Ravenna says she can stop that from happening though. All she needs is for Cassi to--

Not Cassi, Cassandra. It’s an important distinction to make. Cassandra is a foreign and inhuman entity. She’s not the girl I was talking to all these weeks and falling in love with…

I won’t care if Cassandra winds up… I should not care if she...

Shit, I can’t even think the word, and the minute I start to picture her getting hurt like that – freaking ritually sacrificed – I want to vomit.

It shouldn’t be this painful for me. She’s my enemy, and I should be angry with her, not confused, and broken, and aching with regret.

The only one I am angry with though is Dr. Carson. I’m so furious with him, I can’t even think straight. He went and turned Mike into a monster. Then he lured me in and let me sign up as his guinea pig without even telling me about that. Sure, he warned me there were risks. And sure, he prevented me from injecting these vaccines he was developing…

Still, what was the point of all the endless sample collecting and study if he never tried to give me any of the developed cures? Every supposed inhibitor he gave me on the full moons just made it all the harder to focus and meditate and keep in control. Why is that? Why couldn't I just try his latest vaccine instead?

That shot seems to have worked to cure Grace, so I really aught to try it on myself. Carson would never permit that though. Hell, he wouldn’t even let me try that reagent that keeps his own temper in check when he’s ingesting my blood...

I get the sense there’s still some awful truth about him that I’m missing. He has told me nothing but lies this entire time I've been working for him.

I am sick of people lying to me. People who I trusted.

I head downstairs and break open the door to Carson’s office, because today of all days it’s pissing me off beyond measure that this is the one room in the clinic to which I have no key and no access. I dig through the files on his computer to which his password was all too predictably Nicolas with a zero for an o.

The private reports about me have details I find unnerving. I know the doc was trying to use my blood as a cure for his own disease, but the fact that he thought he needed to ‘increase’ my healing factor and not just utilize it…

Reading these logs just puts me in an even worse mood, and it takes me a while to find the document I first broke in here to read. It’s in the trash, the report about ‘Subject M’, but it was never fully deleted.

Reading the details of that first test and the chemical compounds in that injection… Carson didn’t just lie to me. He’s a selfish monster no different from Cassandra.

I don’t drive to his house to confront him. I walk. I need the time, out in the cold night air, to calm down and clear my head.

It doesn’t work out that way though. Marching for an hour and a half through the city at two in the morning just tenses me up all the further. I almost want to be attacked. I’m exhausted, wrist sprained and knuckles bleeding, all injuries unhealing under the lightless new moon, but I would have welcomed a fight anyway. There’s a group of six guys sharing a smoke out back of a dive bar. Perfect. They think themselves more than a match for me no doubt, so bring it on.

The second they meet my eyes though, they turn right away and keep walking. I guess I’m the scary one tonight.

I always am really.

Carson should be scared tonight. I didn’t even bother to try calling him again, to tell him I’m coming or give him time to wake up and compose himself. I just started pounding on the door at three in the morning. I knock so hard I bruise the side of my good hand, and the people next door start switching on their lights, peeking out their curtains at me: the unhinged stranger in hoodie and sweats, banging on the door of their most respectable neighbor in the middle of the night.

Carson switches on the porch light finally, and immediately unlocks the door, pulling it right open. “Jason? What are you doing here?”

“Dad’s back. He’s cured.” Why did I decide to start with the good news? Because I knew already that Carson wouldn’t be smiling when he heard it.

Nope, his expression is all veiled and unsettling, as he makes the excuse, “I told you not to test those vaccines without me there to supervise--”

“It wasn’t the vaccine. It was a witch,” I explain. “She cast the curse in the first place, and now it’s been undone. Isn’t that a good thing, doc? Aren’t you happy about it?”

Carson swallows, looking to my bloodied hands. “That’s… You’re all…”

He doesn’t seem to remember that it’s the new moon tonight and that’s the reason I’m not healing. He really thinks I’m cured, and he’s not happy about it at all. I think somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that’d be his reaction though. I just need to be sure… “Dad’s himself again, and mom took him home today,” I repeat. “He’s back on the farm. But you’re doing better anyway though right?” I press, striding right inside and shutting the door. “You devised some safe and completely scientific chemical to arrest your nerve degeneration, so you don’t need access to cursed werewolf blood. You’re definitely looking healthier.” Hell, his hairline has even stopped receding, and I swear some of the gray hairs are growing in brown again.

“And I am feeling better,” Carson stammers, rubbing at his hands. “But there are still more tests to be run. And this cure… Did you check the blood-bags we had in storage? Those samples are unchanged still, right? Don’t tell me they’ve been purified…”

“Oh, I don’t know. I did use the majority of those in a blood transfusion for Aiden though.”

“You what?!” Carson is incensed, and you know what, so am I.

“And I did notice, when raiding that fridge that those samples were all dated October, this month.” My eyes weigh into him in scathing rebuke. “And I gotta say, I did not see any scientific treatment for your family’s disease recorded in any of your logs, doc. But I did see you’ve been taking blood directly from Subject V in place of Subject J these past two weeks. I guess you thought my dad could recover from all those pints of blood-loss, and I guess you thought that there was nothing wrong with lying to me about it! You have always been lying! You never even wanted me to get better, did you? You just wanted to use me! Just like you used Mike!”

Carson exhales. “So you broke into my office and went searching through logs you could not possibly understand in full--”

“I understand everything. You gave Mike an accelerant! He came to you for a cure, and instead you tried to dope up his healing factor, which caused the virus to react and proliferate like crazy until he all out attacked you!”

“But I learned from that error, and I took care to counterbalance the rabies like parts of this disease while working to increase your own healing factor, Jason.” I turn cold, hands clenching. The vet stares down at those hands and just glares all the more resentfully. “Now look at the shape you’re in. You’ve gone and erased months and months of work, trusting some witch of all things--”

I seize hold of him by the throat. My hands are shaking, but my eyes are burning bright yellow again. I can see them reflected in Carson’s own unsettling, dark gaze.

He doesn’t gasp out a terrified apology the way he’s supposed to. He sighs in relief. “Ah. It was a ruse. I see. You just wanted to truth. But you are clearly not cured--”

“No. But my father is,” I swear. “And if you come near either of us again, I will break your neck.”

I would have killed him already if it weren’t for Nick, the one person left in this godforsaken world that I can actually trust.

Or at least… I thought he was. Until I made my way home that morning and found Cassi lying dead on our couch.