A Car's Tires on a Road

I want it all with you

It'd been almost two months since we'd returned to the bunker and there was still no trace of Carly or Cas. We had no leads, no idea what we were supposed to do, really, and the time ran by in a slow crawl, so slow it almost seemed like it had stopped entirely.

At first, we'd buried ourselves in research, searched all the books for anything, every day, and every night we went to bed with nothing. I tried not to think about Cas too much, but that's like trying not to breathe. Of course I thought about Cas.

I wasn't made for love, I was made for war. I was born to fight evil and to save lives. And for a long time I'd done that with Cas by my side, with my best friend there who'd had my back through the apocalypse, and through Leviathans and the Darkness, through Purgatory, Hell, and Heaven. Who'd had my back even when I was corrupted by the Mark of Caine. Who'd been there for me, taken care of me, fought for me and because of me. Who'd lied to me, betrayed me even, and through all that, through all the steps of the way, he always came back to me. I'd always thought that's enough.

I wasn't made for love, but in some screwed-up way it's like Cas was made for me.

Most people in this world feel guilty about being who they are. They want to please the people around them, seem cool and fun and like a great person altogether. They lie and adjust and sham their way through relationships. I'd never really understood that, I'd always just gone with being myself, was never ashamed of being a horny, hungry asshole who'd started out as Dad's good little soldier and then continued shooting first and asking questions later.

I was made to follow. If it were my father's orders or the beliefs he'd raised us to believe in or my own desperate need for free will, there was always something I followed.

He'd never really put it in straight words, but I liked to believe Cas was following me. He'd acted against everything he believed in, only to follow what I believed in, and something about that felt like a kind of love I'd never had before. Some part of me had known for a long time that he loved me, I just still didn't know if it was the same kind of love.

I still didn't know what of all that'd happened was real and what was Carly's impact. If he'd approached me and kissed me out of his own free will, or if Carly had made him. It was a disturbing thought that Cas might have nothing to do with it, might have been controlled, might have never wanted to do that. It was disturbing to think about how his lips never should have touched mine, never would have, to think that I might have just taken advantage of it. That I might have used Cas. That he might hate me now.

Two months is a long time to go without contact, to go without knowing what had happened to him and where he was, but I was fairly certain that I would simply know if Cas were dead. I was just so sure I'd feel it somehow, feel that he wasn't there anymore, that he couldn't be found anymore.

Carly must still have him in her claws, I tried to tell myself. I tried to believe he could still be saved, that I could find him, if only I'd figure out where. But reading books upon books didn't seem to help anything, there didn't seem to be any lore about a creature like her.

It kind of made sense now, though. That case. I believed she was the one who'd had us chasing around after the wrong ideas, researching in all the wrong places and all the wrong directions, distracted and confused us by screwing with our heads and with the dead bodies, by putting bibles in their hands, faking a vampire bite, or cutting out a heart. She must have carved Croatoan into that wall, too, and she'd probably caused that whole dark cloud in the park messing with me to make me think it really was that Mala Hora thing she'd come up with.

She was good, I thought as I leaned back into my seat in the library and abandoned the book in front of me that didn't have any answer for me either. I took a long sip of my drink, giving her credit for a moment, for all the ways she'd thrown us off her scent.