Hopeless: A Vision of Vampires 2

by Laura Legend

  Rose brushed the dirt off of Cass’s knees and took her hand.

  “Are you ready?” Rose asked. “Should we go find your dad?”

  Cass nodded.

  Then the memory started to fade around the edges. Everything started to go fuzzy. And the sharp smell of sweat and leather filled the air.

  But it wasn’t over yet. Not quite.

  Just as the vision was fading out, just as Cass was about to lose hold of her mother’s hand, that hand—so warm and firm a moment ago—turned cold and slippery and shadowy. And just as she lost her grip on that hand, Cass’s palm was nicked by the trailing edge of a razor sharp claw.

  Cass woke with a start to find herself back in the gym. Zach and Miranda were bent over her. They shouted with relief when her eyes opened. They tried to help her up.

  “Just give me a moment,” Cass said, trying to remember what her mother had said, trying to make sure that it was planted deep inside of her where she wouldn’t be able to forget it.

  “Kibo,” she whispered to herself, rocking back and forth,“kibo, kibo.”

  Zach was smiling down at her. “Let’s go champ. Are you ready? Give me your hand,” he said. Cass reached out to take his hand but stopped halfway.

  The palm of her hand was cut and slick with blood.

  Chapter Six

  Cass was wrung out by her experience in the gym, both the fight and the memory. She was emotionally and physically running on empty. She didn’t tell Zach or Miranda what had happened. Even if she’d wanted to, she didn’t know how.

  She wiped her bloody hand on her shorts, accepted Zach’s hand up, and pulled her street clothes back on. Miranda dropped her off at Java’s Palace so that she could get her car. Cass headed straight for her beat-up Volvo parked behind the café.

  All she wanted to do was go home and sleep.

  It was late in the evening now. The streets were mostly empty. Halogen street lights flashed overhead as she merged onto the freeway. She tried to focus on the road. But, out of the corner of her eye, she kept seeing groves of cherry trees, just off the freeway, popping with white blossoms. She ignored these mirages and wondered if there would be anything to eat in her fridge when she got back to her apartment. It had been awhile since she’d gone shopping.

  Cass drove on like this, her head barely tethered to her body, until she pulled off the freeway, parked her car, and got out to find that she hadn’t driven back to her apartment at all. Instead, she’d driven home, to her father’s house in the suburbs where she’d grown up.

  When she realized what she’d done, she almost turned around and got back into the car. Her relationship with her dad, already tense since she’d bombed out of her doctoral program and lost her job at the university library, was as fragile as ever. He’d tried for years to keep Miranda away and Cass safe from being exposed to that crazy world of magic and vampires. And now Cass was in the thick of it, up to her neck in magic and vampires, queen weirdo herself.

  Cass didn’t know how to talk to him either. She didn’t know where to start. She wasn’t even sure how much he did or didn’t already know. They’d never talked about any of these things. Her father could barely mention Rose’s name without his mouth going dry and his throat closing up. Almost twenty years later, that wound was, for him, still open and weeping.

  And now, a big part of Cass wished that her dad had succeeded in keeping her free of that world.

  Cass stood in the driveway, hesitating about whether to go in. It was late enough—after nine—that her dad might have already gone to bed. He liked to get up early. But her decision was made for her when she heard a loud crashing sound. She peeked around the side of the house and saw that the garage light was on.

  The string of softly spoken, but distinctly audible, Japanese curses that emanated from the garage made her smile. He was in the garage. And even if she wasn’t sure that he wanted to see her, she needed to see him.

  They’d never parked their cars in the garage. From the time they’d moved in, they only used it for storage. It was full of boxes of books, memorabilia, and who knows what else her father had squirreled away. Cass wiped her sweaty palms on her jeans, grabbed the handle to the garage door, and gave it a pull. The door swung upward, groaning on its tracks.

  Gary’s head was buried in a pile of boxes. In response to the creaking of the garage door, his head swiveled around, all the blood startled out of his face. When he saw that it was Cass, his face lit up for a moment, like a warm light buried deep in his heart had flickered on, like he was a lantern illuminated from the inside out. Then he recovered himself, remembered that he and Cass hadn’t really been talking, and offered her a more distant, “Hello, Cassandra.”

  “Hi, Dad,” Cass said. “What are you doing out here?” Cass toed the side of a box, titling it to see the handwritten label on the side: ROSE’S SUMMER CLOTHES.

  “Ummm, nothing,” Gary tried. “Nothing in particular. Just . . . rooting around.”

  A small box, balanced precariously on a tall stack, toppled and lightly bounced off the side of his head, disheveling his salt and pepper hair and setting his thick glasses askew.

  “Uh huh,” Cass said, craning her neck to read the label on another box: CASSANDRA’S TEA SET. “I see.”

  “What are you doing out here tonight?” he asked, a touch too sharply. He frowned at himself and added, his tone softening: “It’s been a while.”

  Cass chewed on this for a minute, trying to decide what to say or how to start. She crossed her arms and rubbed her shoulders. Her breath plumed in the cool night air.

  “I was thinking about Mom,” she said.

  “Oh,” Gary responded, carefully inspecting his shoes. His hands looked like they itched for something to do. He turned back to the business of sorting through the boxes, looking for whatever he’d been looking for. “Why’s that,” he said over his shoulder, striving for a casual tone.

  “I remembered something today,” Cass continued. “I remembered something that, until today, I didn’t remember at all. The memory was blazingly vivid. And, like a lot of things in our family, it was both perfectly normal and very weird.”

  Gary was having a hard time focusing. He pulled a random box out of the middle of a stack and this sent two more tumbling into him.

  Cass almost laughed, but swallowed the giggle that threatened to sneak out. “You sure I can’t help you, Dad?” she asked.

  “No, no. Go on, sweetie. You were remembering something?” He pulled his leg free from the box that had pinned him.

  “We were in Japan, I think. I was maybe seven years old. You and me and Mom. We were at a cherry blossom festival. The whole grove of trees had exploded in white and pink flowers. It was a beautiful day. And we were all just . . . happy.”

  Cass scuffed the toe of her sneaker against the cement floor of the garage, staring at the ground. Her father had gone very still. He was looking right at her. She met his eyes.

  “Is that a real memory, Dad? Do you remember this?”

  He held her eyes.

  “Yes, Cassandra. That is a true memory. We traveled to Japan to visit family, as we often did in those days.”

  He paused, revisiting the scene in his own mind’s eye. “And you’re right. We were . . . very happy.”

  He broke eye contact and went back to his boxes, shifting one out of the way and stumbling over another.

  “I also remembered something else about that trip,” Cass said. “It wasn’t just the three of us. There was someone else there.”

  Cass saw him stiffen for a moment, then continue with the boxes.

  “There was an older woman. Tiny. White hair in a bun. Dressed in something like a kimono.”

  Gary stopped what he was doing. He stood up straight and stretched, his hands in the small of his aching back. He sighed deeply and looked back in Cass’s direction, a hint of fear in his eyes.

  “Cassandra,” he said slowly and sternly, “listen carefully. You are wrong about that part. No one
else was there. There was no tiny woman with white hair. You are, I’m afraid, remembering wrong.”

  Cass felt hurt. And she knew he was lying.

  Her weak, wandering eye twitched into focus, a soft burn igniting at the base of the socket, and she felt like she could see right through him. He was afraid. He was trying to protect her. But he was wrong. She didn’t need to be protected right now. She needed the truth.

  She was the Seer and she needed to see.

  She felt both angry and sad at the same time. She swallowed hard. “Okay, Dad,” she said coldly and shivered again. “I’d better be getting home. Good to see you though.”

  Her father didn’t immediately respond. Cass turned to go. She started down the driveway. She could hear her father tearing tape from the top of a box, rummaging through its contents, and then adding a quiet, “Ah ha.”

  He called after her. “Cassandra, wait. Wait just a moment please.”

  He jogged down the driveway to catch her. He had an old book in hand. It had a pink cover with a small combination lock and faded, handwritten pages.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, pegging the apology to nothing in particular. “This, though, is for you.”

  He handed her the book. CASSANDRA JONES was written on the front in a seven year-old’s handwriting.

  “I’ve been thinking, all day,” he confessed, “about that same trip to Japan. About that same visit to the cherry blossom festival. When I woke up this morning, it was the first idea in my head. I lay in bed for a long time thinking about it.”

  Cass waited for him to continue.

  “What are the odds,” he said, “that you’d suddenly remember the same thing. Then I was getting ready for bed tonight, but couldn’t stop thinking about your journal from that same trip. So I came out to the garage to look for it.”

  Cass still remembered the combination. She popped the lock and cracked the diary. The book naturally fell open to a spray of cherry blossoms, pressed for decades between the pages. Next to the blossoms, she found a single Japanese kanji written three times: kibo.

  Cass felt the void inside of her contract as tears snuck into the corners of her eyes. She pulled her father into a reluctant hug. He hesitated, then gave her a brief, fierce squeeze in return.

  Their hug was interrupted by a voice from behind them.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” Miranda said. “I really am. But something has come up. And I need Cass.”

  Chapter Seven

  Miranda tore around a street corner in her Audi, fishtailing for a moment onto the far side of the road. Cass braced herself, holding on to the door handle with both hands and wedging her feet into opposite corners under the dash. As a reward for her efforts, she only slide a couple of inches across her leather seat.

  Miranda was still wearing her sunglasses even though it was close to midnight now.

  Much as I love her, it’s a miracle she hasn’t killed anyone yet, Cass thought.

  It wasn’t clear why they were driving this way. They weren’t even in any real hurry. They had an appointment—maybe. But even that seemed loosely defined.

  Miranda had been hearing rumors for weeks now that the Lost had a new leader. The rumors referred to the new leader as “the Heretic.” Her sources couldn’t confirm who the Heretic was, but she had her own set of suspicions. Without more information, though, she was not yet willing to share those suspicions with her bosses. She would have to go it alone and do some digging first.

  Miranda explained that she’d had to do that more and more often recently. In fact, her entire escapade a few months back with Cass, Zach, and Richard was an off-the-books, unauthorized adventure. But once Judas was dead, she couldn’t avoid reporting the whole affair. And the powers-that-be were not pleased. They didn’t trust Richard York in the first place and they hated, above all, the change and instability that followed Judas’s death. She needed more information first. Then she could decide what to do, how much to share, and who to trust.

  For the moment, though, she only trusted Cass.

  “I’ve got a lead,” Miranda said, slamming on the brakes for a stop sign. Cass considered this a good sign—sometimes Miranda treated stop signs as optional. “I’ve got a lead on a source that might be able to tell us where the Lost are congregating now that Judas’s castle has been destroyed.”

  “Sounds solid,” Cass deadpanned. “A lead on a source who might meet us and who might have information about a location where we might be able to find people with more information that we could eventually use to figure out who is leading the Lost now.”

  “Exactly. You’ve got it. I’m glad you understand how this works. You’re really learning fast.” Miranda deadpanned in return, stepping on the gas and looking straight at Cass for a beat longer than felt safe given their rate of acceleration.

  They drove for another fifteen minutes, through an industrial park, past the outskirts of town, and pulled up quietly around the side of an abandoned warehouse just off a thickly wooded tree line. They parked in the shadows. If Cass had been assigned to scout a location for a movie where the hero had to meet an informant, this was exactly the kind of place she would have picked.

  “Okay,” Cass said, craning her neck and looking around the deserted lot, “where are we supposed to meet—”

  Miranda cut her off.

  “Shhhh,” Miranda whispered. “Be quiet. Just listen for a minute and tell me if you hear anything.”

  They sat in the car in silence, listening. The only sound was the car’s overworked engine cooling. Cass was beginning to get the feeling that their possible “source” might not be a friendly (or even willing) participant in tonight’s information exchange. Miranda looked steeled for . . . a variety of eventualities.

  The trees swayed in the cold wind. An owl hooted. The waning moon shone weakly in the clear night sky.

  “Oh, I also brought you something,” Miranda said, reaching into the backseat. She pulled out Cass’s sword, the one that her mother had left her and that now had a fragment of the One True Cross embedded in its hilt.

  Cass accepted the sword but gave Miranda a hard look in return.

  “Just in case,” Miranda said, “things get a little off-script.”

  “Right. Just in case,” Cass replied, hefting the sword, wondering what she’d gotten herself into.

  They could see several pairs of headlights coming down the service road now. Two vans, a black SUV, and a black sedan. They stopped in front of the building. A handful of burly looking guys in leather jackets jumped out and stationed themselves in various, watchful positions near the entrance to the warehouse. One of them undid the heavy padlock, unthreaded chains that secured the main door, and rolled the door back. Both vans and the sedan pulled inside the warehouse.

  Cass could tell from their standard issue leather jackets that the crew were Lost.

  “I don’t like this, Miranda,” Cass said. “I don’t like the look of it one bit. And there are definitely more of them than there are of us. And why do they always wear those clichéd leather jackets? Is there a vampire dress code? School uniforms?”

  “We’re just going to take a quick look around,” Miranda said, ignoring her snark. “We just need a peek at who’s in the backseat of that black sedan.”

  Miranda cracked her knuckles and rolled her neck, loosening her shoulders. Her eyes glinted green in the moonlight.

  “Stay close,” Miranda cautioned. She was out her door before Cass knew it and Cass had to hurry to catch up.