Chapter 213
The next few weeks passed by both slowly and at breakneck speed, depending upon the given day of the week. There were three weeks of school between Thanksgiving break’s end and Christmas break’s beginning. In that amount of time I realized how much I hated going to school and pretending to be normal when nothing was anymore. Any chance I got, I was on the IAC with Brandon, sometimes even in class, and most of my evenings I spent either talking to him or hunting through the archives, watching past hunts or reading reports. I did get to spend one more weekend during those three weeks at LIGHTS, and my parents let me go without them, which was cool. Cadence tried training me again, but even after our emotional connection, it just wasn’t working, and she handed me back over to Aurora. Since I’d finished the rest of the Thanksgiving week with her, I was happy to be back with the redhead. She just got me better. It didn’t hurt that both Jacinda and Brit had been assigned to other areas and were no longer at KC, which meant of the mean girls I’d encountered in the locker room, only Merial remained, and she wasn’t so tough on her own. The other new girls were just as lost as I was, so we got along just fine.
By Christmastime, I was starting to feel more and more depressed about my situation. I knew my friends could see it, and as much as Lucy and Emma tried to reach out to me, I cut them off, too. My grades didn’t suffer because I literally had the interwebs in my eye, so I could look up the answer to anything without my teachers ever knowing. But after football season was over, I quit cheerleading. I wasn’t going to cheer for the basketball team this year. And after eight years of piano lessons, I quit that, too. It wasn’t so much that I told anyone I didn’t want to take them anymore, I just stopped going. My mom tried arguing with me about it at first, but she couldn’t make me go. No one could really make me do anything.
I wasn’t trying to be difficult. Honestly, I think it was a combination of things. The voices were getting louder, the team at LIGHTS was getting more distant, or so it seemed. And with Christmas right around the corner, I was reminded of last Christmas, when everything was turned upside down, but I had one constant to keep me sane then. I didn’t know how I was going to do Christmas without Elliott.
Brandon understood more than anyone else seemed to, which was ironic in a way since he had never had a Christmas with his dad, the same person I was so desperately missing, but when I cried at night because I missed Elliott so much my heart physically hurt, Brandon was the one who calmed me. Sometimes, we’d sit in front of mirrors and turn our visuals on so it was like we were actually looking at each other. Other times, we’d look up at the moon and remember it was the same one we were both looking at even though there were hundreds of miles between us. And we both believed that Elliott could see that same moon, too, though maybe the dark side of it.
“Cass,” Brandon would remind me every night, “he wouldn’t want you to be sad. You know that, right? He’d want you to be happy, especially at Christmas. You had a great holiday last year, and so did he, mostly because of you.”
“I know, I know,” I’d say. “It’s just so hard.” I could never explain it to anyone, how someone I’d known for such a brief amount of time had made such a huge impact on me, and now there was just a crater left in my heart.
“You’ll get through it, though. I know you will.”
He was right, of course. I did manage to get through Christmas. Cadence came home, bringing Aaron with her, but Brandon decided he needed to spend some time with his mom, so he went to Pryor. Amanda was working toward getting her drinking under control, but the whole time he was there, he was miserable. When Cadence brought me back to headquarters a few days after Christmas, I was overjoyed to see him and hugged him for much longer than I probably should have in front of my parents, my sister, and Aaron.
I trained a lot while I was there and got stronger and smarter. Ashley pushed me to work harder. She was fast, and I didn’t want her to be faster than me. Aurora kicked my booty in a way that made me happy to have it kicked. And Brandon made me laugh even when I was running up The Hill. When I was there, at headquarters, I was happy. It was only when I thought about having to go home, having to finish my junior year—and then my senior year—that an overwhelming sense of depression came over me.
I spent New Year’s Eve in Kansas City. Most of the team was out on a hunt, but Brandon stayed in Cadence’s newly remodeled apartment with me. I thought when the ball dropped in Times Square on the Central Time Zone replay he might forget our pact and try to kiss me, but he didn’t. Boy, was that a relief….
Actually, as much as I pretended that I didn’t want Brandon to kiss me because I wasn’t interested in starting a relationship with him, it had more to do with my Vampirism than anything else. My fangs tended to show up whenever I became overly emotional in any capacity—angry, scared, morose. What if a romantic moment between us meant a sharp and pointy moment for me? The thought of my fangs popping out when Brandon tried to kiss me for the first time made me want to avoid it altogether. Luckily, he seemed content to stay in the friend zone at least for a while longer.
Not only were my fangs a continuing issue, so were the voices in my head, and I don’t mean the ones on the IAC. It seemed like the murmurs from my bloodsucking brethren were louder all the time. Now, I could pick up a word or two every once in a while. Since there was still no context, it didn’t make it meaningful, but it was eerie nonetheless. I’d done some research on Zabrina in the archives and learned as much about her as I could. If I were a full-blooded Vampire (don’t mind the awful pun), I would think of her as my mother, and Giovani would be my uncle. So would Jack. Holland would be my grandmother. Gibbon would be my cousin. It was weird to think I could be part of a deranged Vampire family. I guess that’s why they prefer to be called clans so that it doesn’t sound like some backwoods monster version of Deliverance (not that I’ve ever seen that movie.)
The crazier it got, the more I hid in my room. My mom finally resorted to letting Brandon drive up to visit me as often as he could just so I would have contact with people, and he started visiting sometimes two or three times a week. He’d drive into town after his training on nights he didn’t have hunts, stay for a few hours, and drive back, which worked since he didn’t have to sleep much now. Most of the time, we’d just watch movies or listen to music, but sometimes we talked about our families, and he told me some pretty horrible things about what it was like growing up with Amanda for a mom. Once again, I wondered what Elliott had seen in her or what had made her change so drastically. It was sort of nice, I must admit, to be reminded that I was not the only one with problems, and mine were literally all in my head.
Then one day toward the middle of January, I came home to find my sister at my house. I wasn’t expecting her to be there, and neither were my parents, apparently. My dad was still at work when I got home from school to discover her on my sofa talking to my mom. I could tell by Cadence’s expression something was going on, but I had a feeling she wasn’t about to tell me what it was, so when she asked me to go to my room so she could talk to Mom, I just did it. She did promise to take me to LIGHTS that weekend, and while I tried not to get my hopes up, I was looking forward to it. It had only been about two weeks since I’d been there, but that was too long.
Something was changing. I could feel it in my bones. Like the tide shifting or the moon waning, we were on the precipice of something. Something meaningful. I just couldn’t put my finger on it, like the name of an actor on the tip of my tongue that just refuses to come to mind, or the memory of a song where the lyrics won’t fall into place. It was an itching in my blood, one I couldn’t reach, but it was coming.
And the others knew it, too. The conversations started to crescendo. Still stray words here and there, but talking just the same. Murmurs gained voice; whispers became declarations. Whatever was about to happen, I had a feeling nothing would ever be the same.
I began to do some research that same afternoon that Cadence had come home. She was only there for a few hours, and she left before my dad came home from work. It was almost like she could feel it, too, like she was being pulled toward something and couldn’t see where she was headed but knew she had to move nevertheless. Sometimes I preferred to use my laptop for research because the IAC was a little difficult to manipulate. It only took me a few moments to see what was most likely the cause of my anxiousness.
There was a blue moon coming.
January would have two full moons this year. It doesn’t happen often—hence the saying, “once in a blue moon.” I read that some people argue that it’s only a true blue moon when it’s talking about a season, not a month, but this foreboding sensation that seemed to be climbing told me that it didn’t really matter what those people thought if they’d never experienced a blue moon as an immortal. I was certain this moon was what had all of us crawling out of our skin. I just didn’t know why. And I felt like I needed to.
While I could’ve asked my sister and received a non-answer, I thought it would be best to wait until I was at LIGHTS in a few days and see if I could get some information from people who tended to be a little more forthcoming with answers. Perhaps Aurora would know something, or Jamie. I knew I could ask Aaron, but it didn’t seem like the kind of question one runs all the way up the flagpole, so I was content to wait until I got to headquarters to dig a little deeper, even though the situation had me on edge to the point that I was constantly grinding my teeth and my fingernails were practically wasted to the nub.
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