Page 26 of War Games (Jacky Leon #11)

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I landed in the dark, thumping hard against the ground. I had to get up, but I wasn’t sure what was up or down. Everything was so dark. I was lost.

I won’t get anywhere if I don’t try… but I’m so tired. I’m so fucking tired.

I laid there for some time, just trying to get my energy back but it never came. Eventually, no matter how tired I was feeling, I knew I had to move. I fought to sit up, my back aching once again. My head hurt, pounding with a fierce headache.

I was alone. So terribly alone.

I thought of what I had just lost. Another family. Like a painting, it appeared before me, watercolors in the dark.

“Look at what you lost now,” my voice said to me, but not mine.

With a swallow, I turned to see Gwen, so human, fifteen years older than I looked. Everything I could have been if I had never been a werecat.

“What do you want, Gwen?” I asked, not getting to my feet. I sat on the dark ground, turning back to the watercolor of my werecat family arguing. The scene wasn’t the one I had just left, though. It was Germany, Niko’s home, that he would have to give up. Subira stood against Hasan, a man bleeding, as my siblings chose their sides or stayed down, not wanting to get involved. They had been a perfectly fine family before me. Not perfectly happy, but okay.

I was the one who brought everyone to that point, standing with Dirk and Landon to protect them, to fight for them. To fight for my life with Heath.

I turned to look at a new watercolor image forming next to it. Another failure. Another broken family I couldn’t fix. A friend I couldn’t save. None of this would have happened if I hadn’t taken Fenris in. None of it would have happened if I could have noticed something was deeply wrong with him and helped him. If I could have saved him from himself, no one would have gotten so angry at each other.

“You really are a walking disaster,” Gwen said, exasperated, annoyed, and all too right.

“I just want to go back to Heath,” I said, pulling my knees to my chest.

“Really? You broke our family… Well, you tried to. You have been the bane of the werecat ruling family since the day they met you… Do you really think a third family is actually giving you a chance? Do you not remember something so important about how you even joined that family?”

“Please, Gwen, don’t…”

“You killed his son!” Gwen yelled at me, and that scene played out. Richard and me, fighting over Carey. “That’s what you do, Jacky. You don’t save anyone. You just end up hurting people.”

If we had known there was magic involved, we could have saved him, too…

“Why should he want you back? He finally got to see one son get married, but he’ll never get to see the other, thanks to you .”

“Stop, Gwen. Please.”

“I bet every day Heath wakes up wishing he had me over you, someone more put together, who can manage money and business with a successful career and a shred of experience being a real mother. I bet Hasan does, too, wondering why he got the disastrous daughter instead of the one who actually saves lives,” Gwen hissed in her ear. “Just like our parents always were grateful for me while you were always giving them trouble.”

“You just didn’t care about them,” I said, shaking my head. “You were grateful for the attention and didn’t care about how Dad was treating Mom.”

“I didn’t want to see our family get broken. You did,” Gwen snapped. “From the beginning, even when you were little, you wanted to see the family break up. I never understood why you couldn’t just keep your mouth shut about it. It was like you wanted us to grow up the children of divorced parents.”

“Dad was cheating on her with her best friend! We were taught that was wrong! That people didn’t do that to each other! I was doing what I was told was right!” I screamed, holding my head as Gwen railed against me.

It was everything I had said to myself privately for decades—never good enough, never right enough. I was the one who broke everything, then I was confused why they hated me. Of course, I was. Every time.

“Why can’t you just mind your own business?” Gwen demanded. “It’s easier if you did that. You always make things a bigger problem than they need to be. You can’t just get with the program. You couldn’t even come help me, your own twin, without making it a bigger problem than it needed to be.”

“You didn’t understand what was at stake.”

“I was your twin! I’m more important than the rest of them. Why do other twins have someone who will stick with them through everything?—”

“I did that for you!” I was shaking, unable to handle the abuse, every word cutting deeply into my soul. Every small whisper over the years was coming home for me now. “You never did it for me!”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have tried to ruin our family, then,” Gwen whispered, the malice in her tone like a poison. “But that’s just a bad habit for you. You do it to everyone.”

“No, I don’t!” I cried out. Tears were falling now.

“You don’t even save anyone. I do it every day. I tried to be like you once, and look at what it did to everything. Your way doesn’t work. You couldn’t save your lover’s own children… either of them. The daughter or the son. She got taken from you and will live with that trauma for the rest of her life. You killed him. And your friend… Well, you weren’t paying enough attention, and you know it. It led to even more destruction.”

“Please stop…”

“You’re useless to your family. They sent you out to waste your time, knowing you can’t help them at all with solving that boy’s death. Well, we all know who killed him, don’t we? Couldn’t even tell it was a teenager. You just killed him.”

I was falling apart. It was like every nightmare I had since I was a child was playing out at the same time. Every deep, dark, depressing thought. I couldn’t breathe.

“It would be easier if you weren’t in everyone’s way anymore. Maybe then they could move forward, and no one else would get hurt,” Gwen whispered, so gently, her hand rubbing my head. “Lie down and stop fighting, Jacky. Stop fighting because it only hurts everyone around you.”

I started to slip, wondering how nice and comfortable it would be to just go to sleep. Gwen sat next to me, rubbing my hair.

“I’m sorry that the truth hurts so much,” she said. “I am. It’s hard to have to face these things, isn’t it? We both know it’s the truth, though. Look, there’s reality.”

I kept my eyes open to see the gold eyes light up in the darkness.

“A monster. You are what you are. You and the curse were made for each other. What did your new mother say? It was a woman who cursed her brothers. Another broken family, huh? That’s what the curse is, isn’t it?”

The gold eyes were distant, but I could feel the ground shake with each step the cat drew closer. Every slow step.

“It is,” I agreed softly, understanding that fundamental thing. Subira had explained it to me in the very Subira way she did everything. An ancient witch had looked at the moon and turned her brothers into monsters. Those two brothers made the rest of them. A broken family. Cursed to be broken. Cursed to break new families.

“I know you want so badly for you and Heath to make a new family, but it’s never going to happen. It can’t happen. You’re on the wrong side of things, and even if you weren’t… you don’t know how to have a happy family, Jacky. You never have.” Gwen was so gentle, so kind, and calm that I knew she wasn’t lying to me.

I didn’t know how. I had never really had one. Every minute I’d ever enjoyed of almost happy was just waiting for the next shoe to drop. Always waiting for the next moment I would have it all ripped away from me. Parents who didn’t accept me, siblings who despised me for ruining the happiness of the home, and one day, if I was lucky or unlucky, children who would blame me for all their troubles.

The cat drew closer, the gold eyes growing larger in the darkness as the watercolor paintings of my memories slowly faded, turning black and grey, no longer my problem. Just a history I was ready to forget now.

“It’s sad to watch you fight the losing battle, Jacky… If your five-thousand-year-old parents couldn’t bring peace and unity between the cursed, what really makes you think you can? You and I both know you aren’t that arrogant. You’re stubborn, but even you have to see reason at some point. They couldn’t even keep all of their own children alive. How do you expect to succeed where they failed?”

The cat drew closer and closer. Eventually, I could see it in all its detail. The gold eyes were mine. The tawny form with some light spotting and striping very faint on the coat. The massive paws, the claws it kept extending and retracting.

The fangs, several inches longer, going below its bottom jaw, the sign of every werecat.

A beast made for killing, a predator that destroyed no matter what else it wanted.

A curse.

“That’s you. There you are. You just need to accept you for what and who you really are, Jacky. You’ll be happier if you just play the role assigned to you and stop fighting the inevitable. You know what’s coming for you. Every moon cursed does, don’t they?”

The werecat growled and started to shift and morph into the vision of a creature I had once seen in the flesh.

Bipedal, monstrous, and the end of all the cursed.

It entered the Last Change.

And it kept approaching.

I knew if I just closed my eyes, it would devour me, and all the pain would end. I wouldn’t have to keep fighting the inevitable, as Gwen said. It would just be over. No more hoping for a family that loved me, just acceptance of the truth. No more ruining others lives while trying to help them. No more being disregarded.

Just me in my rawest form.

“That’s enough!” a voice boomed in the dark.

A thunderclap made me jump up, trying to find out what was happening. Gwen was standing next to me, glaring in a direction. The werecat growled viciously in the direction of the echoing voice.

“I guess your second chance at having a mother has decided she wants to say something to you,” Gwen said, smiling cruelly as she spoke, the rage in her eyes not leaving. “Can’t wait to see how you finally disappoint her. Or you can just accept your truth right now, Jacky, and leave the hope and pain of what is to come behind before the cycle can start again. You know how it ends.”

Subira walked through the dark, growing closer. I looked at her, then Gwen, then the werecat, before resting my eyes back on her.

Did I want to do this again? Did I want to disappoint her? Did I want to look in the eyes of yet another person I craved love and affection from only to see disappointment and anger? Could I handle that all over again?

“I said that’s enough, Jacky!” She lifted her staff and brought it down, another thunderclap, but this time, it felt like it made a direct impact with my head, blasting me to the ground. It was a painful landing, sending me skidding on the ground for several feet, leaving me separate from her, Gwen, and the werecat.

Ringing in my ears, I pushed myself back up and got to my feet, knowing everything had just changed. The scene in front of me hadn’t, with Subira, Gwen, and the werecat, but something was different.

Me.

I remembered everything.