Chapter 54: Fifty Four. Are you Free Now, Jase? Or are you Free-Falling?

It’s been close to two weeks since I found out my girlfriend is really an ancient spirit and body-snatcher. Twelve days exactly since I handed her off, helpless and unconscious, to be murdered by my brother’s wife.

Twelve days without her, and I feel just… wrecked. It’s like all my nerves have been scraped raw and I’m missing my morphine. The thing that calmed my temper, even before I discovered she was more than just a cat. She was the person who believed in me. She believed in me so genuinely. She thought I was kind and gentle, and she never saw me the same way my mom does and even Nick: as some already decided tragedy, a time bomb steadily ticking toward its monstrous end, with frequent ‘beware all’ explosions punctuating every benchmark of the count-down.

Cassi was never afraid of me, even when she was trapped as just a kitten cowering in the corner in front of a slavering, massive wolf. She stayed by my side anyway, until I could find my way back to human in the morning.

Maybe she was never truly helpless though. Maybe she was never trapped, and it was all an act to lure me in and manipulate me.

Ravenna said Cassandra liked having me as her toy, her pet, and all these feelings I have are just some love spell…

Maybe they are, but even knowing that does not make them any less potent.

I dream of her against me still. I dream of her smile, her smell, her hair, her eyes, and yes, her breasts and thighs and wetter bits. I’m only human, alright? I’ve got the base desires of every other male, but I didn’t just love that dead body she was piloting for all those weeks.

I loved how funny she was. I loved how much she cared, and how she listened. She really seemed to feel the things that I did. She loved my taste in music and my cooking, but I can’t even trust if she was being honest about that. I can’t trust that any of the answers she gave me about herself were true.

All her favorite things, favorite band, and food, even her favorite color… They were such great choices, half of them the same as what I’d pick. But she only gave those answers, painting the image of my perfect woman, after watching me, combing through my things, and learning all about me.

None of it was real, so why am I so stuck in my head thinking of her all the time? Thinking of us...

I spent this whole time out on the farm with my brothers, and Grace, and my dad.

I should be happy here. Mom’s in such a better place. She was even surprisingly sympathetic when I told her I traded Cassi off to Ravenna for her spell.

“You are a strong one,” she complimented, squeezing my shoulder. “And I get being uneasy. You can never trust a witch.”

“Not really what he needs to be hearing, Kat,” dad gently corrected her. “Not what any of us want to hear, in truth.”

Mom turned right around and apologized, but I can tell she hasn’t really changed her mind. She keeps grilling Mike about Ravenna and about the details of this cure-all spell whenever he stops by, and I find myself eavesdropping on his every vague, unhelpful answer.

“Mom. You won’t even be there, so stop asking about it,” was all Mike said to her last time, and that just made me all the more uneasy.

I’m not going in to work anymore. I’m still a high-school drop out, unemployable by any vet other than mad Doctor Carson, so now that we’ve cut ties… I’m not working towards anything. I feel like I’m stranded out here in this remote prison of my child-hood home. I leave dad to spend time with Liam and Felix, because I can’t force a good mood, not even around him.

He found me sitting off in the field today, on the ground, just staring out at all the stumps of cut down corn. Soon this will all be blanketed in snow, judging by the chill in the air, but for now it’s a mass graveyard of rotting yellow husks.

“Hey, Jase.”

“Hey. You need something?”

“Whew. Chilly reception. Guess I can’t blame you though. Saying I haven’t always been the best father to you would be a major understatement.”

I jerk my eyes away from the empty fields and start instantly to my feet. “What? No. I didn’t… You’re a great dad, and of course I’m happy you’re back.”

“That’s good to hear, temporary as that reprieve may be for us, right?”

“It is not going to be temporary,” I swear, eyes holding his. “Ravenna has everything she needs for her spell, so we just need to wait for the full moon and…” Then Cassi will die, and you’ll stay like this, dad. You’ll stay yourself, and so will Felix and Liam and everyone else, and that is a more than even trade, right?

“This girl you were dating, she’s going to die in this ritual, right?” I give a nervous swallow. “I can’t say that sits easy with me. Your mother insists she was an evil trollop of course, and as for me, I guess I never even met her, not that I remember anyway. But still… I know you can’t be alright with this.”

“What does it matter?” I murmur. “My family’s more important than some girl I just met. And I don’t know if Mike or mom mentioned it to you, but she apparently cast some love spell on me…” My eyes lower, turning away. “So I guess I never felt anything real for her anyway.”

“But you did feel for her, and it was probably a pretty intense connection.” He pauses, but I do nothing to fill the silence. “You should talk about it,” he continues to press. “It doesn’t have to be with me--”

“Who else is there?” I mutter, sinking back to the ground. “I’m still the black sheep of this family, dad, especially now that Mike’s…” Pardoned, excused for all the horrible things he’s done. That does not sit easy with me either. Not at all, but I can’t say that out loud, not to either of my parents. “This family will always see me as a traitor. Hell, even you should see me that way.”

“Jase…”

“I gave you over to Carson. I betrayed mom, and I trusted a monster. I trusted two monsters,” And I fell in love with the demon who cursed our whole clan. “so Aiden’s right. I don’t belong in this family. I never did really.” Even once this curse is cured, I’ll always be an omega to them, an outcast and loner.

There’s nothing dad can say to change that. Still, he gives no heavy sighs, and he doesn’t turn and walk away. Instead he asks, so meekly, “Mind if I sit?”

“You can but… I’m not good company right now,” I warn him. “You’d be better off heading inside. Felix and Grace still haven’t told you their engagement story. They probably want to. It’s pretty funny.”

“Yeah, they told me yesterday,” he fills in, sinking down beside me. “And I’m happy for them.”

“But worried for me?” You shouldn’t be, dad. You should be worried about yourself, and this ritual, and Ravenna…

He sets his hand on my shoulder. “You belong in this family, Jase. Sure, your mother can be stubborn and say some harsh things, and Aiden can be difficult, but even he will come around eventually because you did nothing wrong,” he emphasizes. “Aiden just can’t admit that, because his rule has always been that anyone who makes your mother cry...”

“...has to die,” I finish, grinning a little in spite of myself. “He started saying that at ten years old. Felix told him it sounded badass, mostly just to spare his feelings.”

“It was badass,” dad responds, and it is comical hearing that phrase come out of his lumberjack looking middle-aged mouth. “That ten year old boy, standing up to a raging beast…”

I know the incident he’s talking about. Mom almost never cries, never in pain and never in sadness, not in front of us anyway. A few tears of pure frustration did leak out however during the especially difficult years of Mike run off and dad losing his mind and his temper. He hit her once, ripped up her cheek. Her responding uppercut used to snap him back to his senses whenever that would happen, but not this time. This time he was all yellow eyed and viscous, so little Aiden threw himself in between them and almost lost an eye for it, winding up with those unhealing scars all over the left side of his face. Mom tasering Victor’s ass and then the sight of his ten year old son lying bloodied on the barn floor did finally bring dad back to his senses that afternoon, but way too late.

“You have nothing to apologize for, Jason,” my father insists. “I do. And if I live to a hundred, that will not be enough time to make up for what I’ve done.”

“That was not you,” I counter. “That was a demon invading your body.” Just like Cassi did to all those girls... “Aiden was Cassi’s fault. All of this is her fault. The curse she cast turned the father I look up to into the kind of monster who beats his wife and sons. She turned mom into a callous executioner preparing to off our entire family eventually, and to immediately off any woman we get intimate with. She turned my life into hell, and she deserves to die!

“So why can’t I stand the thought of it?!” Shit. I did not mean to confess that. Still, there’s no judgment in dad’s eyes, just patient understanding. “I want these feelings to be the pathetic result of some siren’s enchantment. They should have just gone away with her, but they won’t. It is not some shallow spell.” I turn my eyes back out to the fallow fields around us. “Why the hell do I keep sitting out here, day after day? It’s because I need to see this ugly, dead color.” Yellow. “Yellow was her favorite color.” But not a rotting gold like this.

* “Yellow like the sunshine,” she said. “and not like your scary-ass eyes sometimes. Sorry. But that’s a far more wicked yellow.” *

“She knew exactly how to tease without hurting,” I tell him. “She could make me laugh so easily. Then when she’d look into my eyes…”

* “Your eyes are the perfect color when they’re like this,” she sighed, “that piercing blue… Well, shit, now it’s a tie. Maybe blue’s my favorite color. But blue like your eyes. Not like the ocean.”

“You don’t like the ocean?”

“Hate it.”*

“What person hates the sea?” We joked about it then. We could joke about almost anything, and I remember her every tease. “I remember her every freaking word.”

“You loved her,” my dad offers, and I feel my heart clench. “There is nothing evil in that feeling. You just didn’t know the truth about her--”

“I still don’t.”

She told me about her parents and her past, but that was just Cassi’s past, the history of a dead girl. She never told me anything about her real self and her first life. All she talked about were the shallow facts of deceased college girl Cassi Banks. I was in love with a corpse, a ghost, but…

No dead girl connected with me on that level. It wasn’t the body that won me over when she said she loved me. She won over my family. She put herself bravely right in between my scary-ass witch-hunter mother and the innocent girl she was set on murdering.

Losing Abby was less painful than this. I fought with Abby on an almost daily basis. We were dumb-ass teenagers with amped up hormones, so that’s no surprise really. Dating Abby was all stress and worries, thinking she’d get sick of me, or cheat on me, because she loved to flirt and make me jealous, making me ‘prove I cared’. She was the worst thing for my temper, and I was always terrified I’d lose it, or that my mom might find out about us and kill her… And that last worry actually came to pass of course.

My mom killed the girl I thought I was in love with.

I killed her. And I didn’t think I would ever get past that. I thought I’d carry that grief and guilt right into my early grave.

I had a few one night stands (I used protection, don’t worry), but those meaningless acts had zero connection to them. I could never afford to get serious, so having those women around just made me feel worse.

Rigid routine, my job and my duty: stopping Mike from his hunts. That’s all I had.

But then I had Cassi. We weren’t just dating and living together...

My dad’s right, I loved her. I love her still. And yes there was that same stress of keeping secrets, just like I had to do with Abby, but the rest of the time… She made me happy. I never doubted her intentions or her feelings for me, not at all. She was mine. I was not some pet to her as Ravenna claims. She gave herself over to me in every way that mattered. She gave me everything.

And again, I am letting her die.

I am going to be responsible for Cassi’s death, just like I killed Abby.

“I should be angry about what she did to us, dad. I should be angry with her, but I’m not. I am angry with myself, because I promised I’d protect her. Then I just…” I handed her right over to Mike and Ravenna. I sold her down the river to her death.

“Come on inside.”

I let dad lead me in for dinner. I help set the table, then take my seat and try to force the smiles as mom feeds mashed potatoes to her visiting grandson, and Grace holds hands with Felix, and Liam and Aiden kick each other beneath the table and start to squabble.

I can’t smile though. I just keep staring down the table at Mike.

He’s been visiting a lot this past week. He brings Jack every time, and yes, I admit it, the kid is not some new moon magic illusion. It is a real, human baby, my nephew, and he is loud but adorable. Now mom’s gone total softy, accepting him as her grandson, and dad is likewise thrilled to spend his days babysitting. Seeing him act so gentle and patient again… I really do wish I could just enjoy these dinners, enjoy our time together and laugh along with everyone else.

I can’t do it though. It’s not just that Cassi’s gone, it’s that she’s bound unconscious somewhere while Mike is just sitting here and...

I do not want him here.

I guess I’m just being paranoid, but there is something… empty in his eyes. When he smiles, it’s not warm. It’s unnerving. Even though I know he’s not trying to threaten anyone. No one else even seems to see it. Mom and dad and Felix all just think it’s great to have him back and nothing is amiss, but I can watch him playing with his own son and I can tell that there is something missing, something wrong with him, like it’s a chore to be acting so loving.

I keep thinking of all those girls he killed, ‘needed sacrifices’ to give Ravenna her power…

Why the hell are we all placing our trust in someone who uses innocent lives as fuel for their spellwork?

I haven’t even seen Ravenna since that day at the clinic when she brought dad back to his senses. Apparently she has some corporate job downtown that keeps her far too busy to make the nearly two hour drive out to our farm on a weekday. She’s just an ordinary businesswoman, the way Mike and even Nick describe her. Hardworking and caring, and so what if she also happens to be immortal? All she’s ever wanted was a family and an ordinary life.

All Cassi ever wanted was an ordinary life too. She told me that. And I can’t help thinking, even now, that I believed Cassi way more than I do shallow, unsettling Ravenna, the supposed savior of this family.

Her miracles were nothing but manipulation. I see that clearly the next night at dinner, when all at once dad loses it, endangering his own grandson and snapping right back into a monster in need of a cage.