Innocence (Burning Beliefs #1)

Chapter Thirty-One *edited*

Chapter Thirty-One

SERENA'S POV

Cas's whole transportation thing is so weird. It's like legit weird. It feels like your play dough, pulled into a long tube and then mushed back together all sticky and salty. Have you ever tasted play dough? Let me tell you, it does not taste very nice. I have the same feeling in my mouth right now, like metal but worse.

He's put me back at the warehouse to collect my mind. All of those drugs around that place was making me go crazy, Dean almost caught me stealing some of the painkillers from inventory. Hell, I could've gotten high off saline solution if I wanted to. Anything to escape this drowning feeling. Like emotions are my prison.

But I'm not like Gracie. I don't want to not feel. It's not just something you can love and then get rid of. When you experience love (or at least what I think is love), it feels so warm and bright and beautiful and hopeful, like a supernova going off inside your soul, exploding like a thousand colors and shattering the spectrum as a million new shades are created! I love feeling happiness, a fuzziness like pressing up against the cushion of a fluffy cat. I love feeling exhilaration and excitement, too. This golden shower of energy buzzing through your veins, shimmering like stars and pouring onto you in a confetti parade of white and gold and silver and everything shining.

I just don't like the bad feelings. Hatred, which claws like a demon out of hell in your stomach, scraping at your insides and gutting out your stomach. Sadness, which twists your soul into crystalline fragments, freezing with teardrops of snowflakes. And pain. Agonizing pain. A gnawing at your throat, a flood of warm, stickiness in your stomach, a clinging sickness in your skin, crawling like spiders. You become paranoid with pain. Thinking something's there when it's not.

And I think that insanity can be considered a feeling. A bad feeling. Pretending like something will happen differently when you've done it a million times only to fail desperately at success. When you're insane, the only success you get is failure. When you're insane, laughter is your escape, your means of screaming, and your wide, hollow eyes point the truth like a laser beam, but only experts know how to read the language it's written in. Honesty is very difficult to speak, the tongue inflections and 's' sounds and everything are very intricately woven.

I sigh. I cross my arms, the warmth from my hands sinking into my skin. Everything is in its place, just as we left it. A small stain on the wooden floor from Sam's blood, and little pieces of yellow tape and mud stains left from the forensic team who came to investigate, are all that's different. Of course, this became a cold case very very quickly.

The smell of something burning is coming from the gray door. I let a small, desperation escape my lips and I turn away. I know what's inside. I don't want to know, but I do.

Zach. I let the name sink into me. Before, it created this hopefulness, a light at the end of the tunnel. Now, it creates a giant blotch of paint on my soul, in a dark, mushy black like walking through a swamp. It creates the shape of a question mark.

How could I not have seen it before? He killed the Angel in the alleyway, why else would he be holding a knife? And I know he's good at heart. When he didn't know that I was Nephilim, he tried to protect me from all of that. It's giving me a headache: good or bad?

Trying to kill me and my family: bad. Protecting me from his bloody life as a hunter: good. All of those cute little moments we had together as a couple: good. Keeping his huge, explosive secret from me: kind of both. I sigh. It's a tie.

What was it Dad wanted me to get? Sardines, or... shit. He said it was in the prison rooms. The refrigerator was with the cells. I didn't know that's where Zach was! Well, I might as well get this over with. Dad said he wouldn't be "picking me up" until 4:30, and it's 4 o'clock right now.