by R. A. Boyd
Were they trying to tell Cass that she shouldn’t get her hopes up when it came to them? That there would never be anything more than fun and sex between the three of them? She’d take it.
“I don’t understand. How are you shifters but not shifters? I’ve seen you. You’re eyes, heard the animals growl inside you. Explain.”
Damon took a deep breath and stared down into his mug. “We haven’t told this story in so long. Fuck, couldn’t trust anyone but our own to share it with.”
This moment felt big. Bigger than it should have. Jax and Damon were going to tell her something that she knew would change her. How? She didn’t know. But she could feel it in the air; see it in the way they couldn’t sit still or get comfortable. Damon kept repositioning himself in the chair and rolling his cup back and forth between his large hands. Jax’s leg was jumping like he was listening to some high tempo she couldn’t hear.
She put her hand on Jax’s leg to calm him. “You don’t have to tell me if it makes you uncomfortable. But, something tells me that you have to let me in on it. If that’s the case then just say it. Let it out. I’d never judge either of you.”
Damon got up from the chair across from them and came to sit next to Cass, sandwiching her between their two large bodies. “You may not feel that way once you know the truth.” He pulled her legs into his lap and started rubbing his hands up and down her shins.
To her, it felt like the most contented, most caring place to be in the world. With these men.
Leaning in to smell her hair, Jax ran his nose along her shoulder. “We don’t have access to our beasts anymore. They’re ghosts now. Hiding within us like the remnants of long passed loved ones. That’s why the shifter community calls us Ghost Shifters. Our animals are dead. Only their spirits left to haunt us as a reminder of how we used to be. Hell, that’s not even how we were born.”
Sorrow laced his voice and it pulled at Cass’s heart. They’d lost a part of themselves. Did anyone else outside of the Were community know? Shifters came out about thirty years ago and said that they were just a natural part of human evolution, and were finally ready to come out among humans. She had never heard of Ghost Shifters.
“What happened?” she asked, her voice a whisper as she looked up at Jax.
He cleared his throat and then got up from the couch. Pushing the coffee table out, he sat down on it and faced her. Staring down at his hands he drummed his fingers together and made a clicking sound with his teeth. “We didn’t want to kill our brethren so a group of us came here to sit out the war. Our grace was taken from us because of it.”
Their grace? A war? Cass shook her head, looking back and forth between Jax and Damon. “I don’t understand.” She cupped her hands over her mouth as realization dawned on her. It couldn’t be. It didn’t make any sense.
Jax nodded. He looked down and his hair fell in his face, hiding his eyes. “I think you do.”
“Say it,” she said. “Don’t make me guess. I mean, I think I know where you’re going but you have to tell me.”
If she was really sitting here with two— no. They couldn’t be. It didn’t make any sense in her head. Her heart felt empty and full, and the hair on the back of her neck stood at attention.
Damon leaned forward and took one of her hands in his. He pressed her knuckles to his lips and left a lingering kiss. “God told us about a great creation, and we were in awe.”
“Most of us were,” Jax said.
“You were to be made in The Creator’s image and have a soul,” Damon said. “Free will. And a perfect haven was made for you. When Lucifer declared war many of our brothers and sisters took his side. Most of us didn’t. We knew he was wrong for going against the Creator, and we would fight to the death for our Father. But we didn’t want to kill our fellow angels.”
Jax wiped away tears that managed to escape Cass’s eyes. “A group of us who wanted to stay neutral came here and roamed among the animals that God had made. They were majestic, and we felt free being with them. For once in our existence, we made a choice for ourselves. We felt the effects of the war. It shook the Earth, as well as every other realm and dimension. Part way through the war a few of us decided to change back into our angel form and fight. We still didn’t want to hurt anyone, but we felt the call to do something.”
“But when we tried to change,” Damon said, “we couldn’t. We were stuck. We were confused. We couldn’t even communicate with one another. When the war was over Samael came and told us that this was our punishment.”
His voice was haunted and unsteady, and Cass could feel the pain in his words. It rolled through her body as if it were her own. She wanted to comfort him, wanted to hold him. Something kept her rooted in her spot. She had to listen. Had to know how this worked and how she fit in. Was she a distraction from the pain?
Damon continued as she listened. “He said that we would never know our true form again, but that we would shift between human and beast with no control. ‘You did not fight for the human beings that He is making, so you will share their form until you love it.’ I can still hear Samael’s voice. We were trapped in the animal form that we had chosen. It was a gift and a curse. We grew to love our animals and appreciate our form. And then, right after the Great Flood, we were made human again.”
“And we hated it,” Jax said, vitriol staining his voice. “Hated the sight of ourselves, only a shell of our angel form.”
Damon reached forward and clamped Jax on the shoulder. “When we look at ourselves in the mirror all we see are angels with no wings. And no grace. No light.” Damon swallowed and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. His jaw worked as he ground his teeth in frustration. “Don’t get me wrong, we have grown to love our human forms but we long for our animals. All of us do. But we made it out easy.”
Cass wiped her tears and wrapped her arms around middle, a chill settling into her body. “What do you mean? What you are going through sounds horrible.”
With a snort, Damon sat back and rubbed his hand over the back of his neck. “There was a group of angels that came with us under the pretense that they didn’t want to hurt anyone either. But it was a lie. They just wanted to see who would win and then take that side.”
“Fucking cowards,” Jax said.
Damon looked over at him and shrugged. “They were tossed into the pit with the ones who stood against God. They knew no allegiance. But He knew our hearts. There was no cowardice or malice in us. Only sympathy for our wayward brothers and sisters.” He scratched a thumbnail over the scruff of his chin and the sound bounced off of the wall behind them. Sadness pulled at his lips, regret flashed in his eyes. They still suffered. “We were told that one day our grace would be given back to us and that even though we would never be true angels again, we would be able to live between both worlds and enjoy what we love. Shifting. And our mate would bring it back to us.”
Disappointment hung in Cass’s chest. So that’s who they were looking for. She was an in-between until they found their true mate. Cass took a deep breath and smiled at them. Putting a hand on each of theirs she said, “You’re looking for your mate. You are both such good men. I don’t know you but you’ve been nothing but good to me since we met. I hope you find her.”
“We have,” Jax said, wrapping his large hand around hers. His touch warmed her from the inside. His eyes held such adoration as he gazed at her. “We knew as soon as we touched you in the market.”
“You think we follow women home all the time?” Damon said, bringing her hand to his lips again. “If we wanted the truck out of that snow we could have pushed it up the street. Hell, the both of us could have carried it.”
They laughed and she just sat there, dumbfounded at their revelation. They were talking about her. She could give them back their grace and their animals?
A laugh burst through her lips so hard she had to put her hand over her mouth to stop the spittle from spraying out. “You guys must be wrong. I can’t give you your grace.” S
he shook her head and stood up.
She walked across the room and sat near the bottom of the stairs that lead to her second floor. They didn’t know what the heck they were talking about. She was damaged inside, cried at the drop of a dime, and was still mourning the loss of her husband. And they thought she could fix them? She couldn’t even fix herself.
“Guys. You’re wrong. I’m a thirty-three year old widow who works from home because being around most people makes me want to punch them. My niece came here because she knew I’d spend the holidays alone since she wasn’t going to be able to make it for Thanksgiving. Laurel usually spends that week with me. She knew that Christmas tree over there would stay in a box in the attic if she didn’t come and make me put it up. She took pity on me!”
Cass was going to have another break down if they didn’t leave. She didn’t want them to, but she couldn’t stand to have either of them see her like that. Again. Damon had eased her pain in the kitchen, but now it was raging its way back to her.
They were strong. They’d endured millennia of pain and rejection. They were strong and they needed someone just as strong.
“You should go.” Cass crossed her arms over her chest and looked at her Christmas tree and the snow falling outside of the window behind it.
Part of her felt guilty for sending them out in this mess. According to Jax and Damon, everything would be okay though. They’d be safe no matter how much snow had fallen while they pushed, or carried, the truck up the slick hill.
Cass shook her head and stood up, the pain and dread breathing its way over her shoulders and down her spine. “Please. Just—”
“He’s haunting you,” Damon said, looking up at her from the couch. “Andrew is. I don’t think he means to cause you grief, but if I had to guess I’d say that his presence isn’t letting you heal.” He shook his head as his gaze fell on a spot just behind her. “I believe you’re just fine until you think of him. He hears your call and wants to comfort you, but his spirit is bringing all of the pain that you’re trying to get away from right along with him.”
The words were like a cold slap in her face, and at that moment she felt like throwing every insult and curse word she knew at him. Andrew loved her when he was alive. He was her best friend, her confidant, her lover, her everything. How dare Damon try to convince her that Andrew would cause her pain like this.
“He wouldn’t do that.” Her voice shook in anger, anguish, and betrayal, and she could feel a fresh swell of tears building behind her eyes. “Andrew would have died before he let anything hurt me.”
Damon’s eyes grew grim and a line formed between his dark, furrowed eyebrows. “Andrew is behind you. I saw him when we first walked through the door. He was standing at the top of the stairs looking down at you. And in the kitchen, when I opened the door, he was standing over you. He said to ‘fix this.’” Damon moved toward her and bent down in front of her as if begging for the forgiveness he knew he would need. “Cass. He doesn’t mean it. He’s hurting and is drawn into your pain. You have to let him go.”
She was trembling now. The only reason she hadn’t backed away from him was because she would fall up the steps if she’d tried. “I can’t,” she said. “I don’t know how. How— how can you see him? Do you see him, too?” she asked, looking at Jax.
Jax gave her a forced, tight-lipped smile and shook his head. “No. Only Damon can. He’s the healer of the clan. That’s how all Alpha/Omega triads work. The Omega helps us heal. We’ve been alive so long and have lost so many people we can’t help but be haunted. Damon helps us, and them, let go.”
“Tell her that I never meant to hurt her,” Andrew said, his voice a disembodied whisper to Damon’s ears. His lips didn’t move, but Damon could hear every word meant for Cass. “Tell her I was waiting for her to find love, and that I didn’t know that me being here was… killing her.”
Damon felt the man’s anguish. It mingled with Cass’s and almost brought him prone to the ground. They were both suffering. He nodded and told Cass what Andrew said.
Andrew moved away from Cass and as he did Damon could see the ease making its way back into her body. That spirit was a weight on her.
“Tell her not to fear this time of the year again. She needs to release me. Only she can, I think. I’ve been tethered to this woman since the moment I saw her. Cass is the love of my life. She’ll heal you both in more ways than you fathom. She’s the balm of my existence.”
By the time Damon had finished telling her what Andrew had told him, she was a mess of tears. And relief. Andrew’s words of explanation and goodbye were healing her from the inside in a way that Jax and Damon couldn’t.
“Cass,” Damon said. “What happened on the 18th and 19th? I saw your calendar in the kitchen.” On the wall of the kitchen was a regular calendar with positive words of affirmation on it. But drawn onto those two days was a hand with the middle finger pointed up. “What happened to him?”
Her body stiffened and she stopped breathing for a moment. Damon wrapped his arms around her legs and brought her down to sit on the bottom step.
Over and over she swallowed, trying to find the courage to tell them. She closed her eyes and more tears fell down her smooth, full cheeks. “Andrew and I went bike riding the morning of November 18th. We got up really early. Didn’t eat breakfast. Just left. About halfway through our ride he got really dizzy, fell and hit his head. He was wearing a helmet though, but he cut his cheek. We went to the emergency room so he could get stitches.” Cass let out a shuddering breath, and it took a minute before she could continue.
Jax got up from the couch and went to sit behind her on the steps. “You don’t have to tell us now. Does she?”
Before Damon could answer, Cass shook her head and chewed the inside of her cheek. “No. You guys told me something big, and I need to let him move on. It’s not right for him to be here waiting for me to get better. I’ll get better, Andrew,” she said, absently looking around the room. “I promise.”
Damon nodded at Andrew and gave him a half-hearted smile. “Go on, Cass. Just finish it.”
“The doctors said it was probably low blood sugar that made him dizzy. But I knew it wasn’t. He kept talking about our wedding like it was just a few hours before that. We’d been married almost ten years by then. Something was off. I just knew it.” She shook her fist in front of her, getting angry and letting go of some of her grief.
“I told them to do an MRI or something. Just check him out. They told us to come back if he had any other symptoms, and they just let it go. He was about to be discharged. When I looked at him to complain and tell him I was taking him to another hospital he had this odd look on his face. Like he knew it was ending. He said, ‘Don’t mourn me for too long, Cassiopeia. I’d feel guilty if you did.’ And then he laid back in the bed and just stared at me for a moment. And then he didn’t blink. He was just looking at me.”
This time when the pain wracked through her body it wasn’t because of Andrew being too close. She was reliving the moment she knew her husband was lost to her. Damon could feel it moving through her like an icy wave of agony.
She wrapped her arms around her legs and fought to breathe. “I started screaming for the nurse, and when she ran into the room she looked at me like I was a lunatic. She starting belittling me, and God help me, I punched her in the face and broke her fucking nose. I kept yelling to just look at him, and when she did she just… So many doctors and nurses were in and out of that room just pounding on his chest. Tubes and wires were everywhere. I sat in the corner on the floor like an idiot and the whole time he just looked at me. Unblinking, unseeing eyes just looking at me.
“He’d had a stroke that morning. If they would have just checked and not assumed it was blood sugar… And then he had another stroke, right there in the hospital room. He had a modified DNR. They could resuscitate him but legally they couldn’t hook him up to life-support machines.”
Cass let out a wail so helpless that it reverberate
d through him. And through Jax. Damon could see it and feel it. Damon was afraid she’d never breathe again. She squeezed herself tight and rocked back and forth on the steps, and damn-it he hurt for her. If he could take away the pain, the torment that had been eating away at her he would have done it. He would bare it as his own. But he couldn’t.
Her emotions were like a tipping iceberg and he was stuck to the side that was going under. Damon sank into despair with her. He couldn’t help it. The woman he loved (loved?) and who could restore him was in so much grief, so much anguish, and he couldn’t do anything for her.
“They transferred him to another unit and from then until the moment he took his last breath he stared at me. Every time the nurses came in to close his eyes they would pop back open after a little while. I wanted to move, to make him stop looking at me. But I didn’t know if he could see me. They said he couldn’t. But what if he could see me sitting there? What if he was fighting to make his way back to me? At 11:48 the night of the 19th the life just left his eyes. He was gone. And even though the machines kept beeping I knew he was gone. I moved to close his eyes, and they didn’t open again. After about two minutes, this long loud beep sounded off. His heart stopped.”
Damon wanted to reach for her, but he was there in this moment with Cass, experiencing her pain. He could feel it. Yeah, he’d been able to get a feeling off of the other members of their group to help them, but this was different. He felt hopeless, broken-hearted. If he was mortal he may have died from it. How the fuck did she live feeling like this? These emotions would have driven a lesser man or woman insane. And here she was, fighting not to let go.
She had told them that she was damaged. No. She wasn’t. She was being eaten up inside by something none of them could see. In the short amount of time he’d been in sync with her emotions he thought he would break in half.
