by Laura Legend
“Very good,” Maya said. “Often, there are, in very old places like this, little pockets of the Underside adjacent to the everyday world or forgotten passages leading from one world to the other. These spaces aren’t always stable and, sometimes, they move of their own accord, slipping from one neighboring space to another. Sometimes, like a bubble, they just pop and disappear altogether.”
Cass craned her neck backward, trying to take in the size of the space while also remembering that, in the everyday world, all of this fit in a broom closet.
“I don’t know how I’ll even begin to sort through the books we have here,” Cass said, cowed by the undefined size of the stacks receding into the darkness. “It could take days for me to just get my bearings, and weeks of research after that to gather the obscure information about Paul that we’d need for the missing element of the spell-breaker.”
Cass trailed her hand along the spines of a row of leather-bound books, scanning the mostly Greek, Latin, and Arabic titles.
Maya smiled. “In this place, I think we may be able to take a more direct route. Are you familiar with a lost text called ‘The Gospel According to St. Paul’?”
“Yeah,” Cass said, “I’ve heard of it. But no one has read it. It’s been lost for almost two thousand years. Many scholars doubt there is such a thing. Its existence is only mentioned in a handful of apocryphal texts.”
Cass’s attention snagged on the cover of a book she’d just stumbled across on the shelf: Aristotle’s book on Comedy, the lost second half of his Poetics. She reached to pull it off the shelf but Maya, from behind, constrained her arm and gently pointed her face in a different direction. Her touch was firm but inviting. Cass felt a pleasant, electric shock travel down her spine as Maya whispered into her ear: “Not today, my dear. Not today. What we need is over there.”
Maya smiled and pointed at an old fashioned card catalogue, straight out of the fifties, positioned beneath a torch on the other side of the room.
“This is how we find the book we need. The book is somewhere in this labyrinth of stacks. The catalogue is the key to those stacks. The trick, though, is that an extremely valuable book like Paul’s Gospel is unlikely to just have a card of its own. But, if we’re lucky, we should be able to decode its location from a couple of other cards.”
Maya stooped down to examine the labels on the different card catalogue drawers. Cass watched over her shoulder. Maya ran her finger from one drawer to the next and stopped abruptly at the top of the third row.
“This is the one,” Maya said, sliding her finger into the drawer’s rounded brass handle.
But when she pulled, nothing happened. She tried again, pulling harder. Still nothing. The drawer was wedged in place.
“There is no way this damn drawer will have the better of me,” Maya threatened. She slid her index finger back into the brass handle and pulled, her triceps in sharp relief. When the handle itself began to bow outward, Cass feared that she’d just pull the handle clean off and leave the drawer intact. But before the handle could snap, the drawer came loose all at once. It came flying out of its slot, scattering a thousand manually typed index cards into the air.
“Mother!” Maya swore as the cards went airborne, swirling around them like a blizzard of fat, flat snowflakes.
Cass, though, didn’t panic. The moment the cards came loose, Cass felt a deep calm settle over her. The truth was that they couldn’t afford to fail at this. Miranda was in danger and they needed to act fast. They needed to find her.
And, especially, the truth was that Cass needed to find her.
Cass flashed on a memory of Miranda, graveside at Rose’s funeral, pulling Cass close and kissing her on the forehead. When the image flashed in her mind, Cass felt a small, white fire flicker and ignite in her head.
Time slowed to crawl, but Cass could still move freely. Unhurried, she stepped into the eye of the blizzard. Her weak eye wandered of its own accord from one card to the next, reading each of them as they fluttered by.
“Here,” she said to herself, plucking a card from the air. “This one.”
She pinched a second and a third between her thumb and index finger. “And this one. And this one.”
She wasn’t entirely sure what she was looking for, but when she saw a card they needed, it clearly stood out from the rest. It gave off a faint glow. Cass turned slowly in a circle, her wandering eye still scanning each card.
She plucked a fourth card from the air, then bent low to look more closely at a final card, already close to the ground. “And this one,” she finished, snagging the fifth.
Once she had all five cards in hand, time snapped back into its regular shape and the remaining cards that had, a moment ago, been suspended in the air, crashed to the ground in a heap, covering the stone floor in chaotic layers of white index cards.
Cass fanned out all five cards in her hand and held them up for Maya like she’d just been dealt the winning hand in poker.
Maya wasn’t entirely sure what she’d just seen. Her jaw was slack and her full lips formed a quizzical “O.”
Cass gave her a small smile. “What? I’m the Seer. Evidently I can do things like that.”
Cass spread the cards out on a nearby table and they took a careful look at them. The cards didn’t appear to have any clearly common features. Their subjects, authors, and dates of composition were wildly diverse.
Maya flipped one of the cards over. A three digit number ran down the side of the card. She flipped the rest of the cards and, along varying edges, each card had a similar set of digits. Cass chewed on her lip, looking for the right configuration. She reached past Maya and rearranged the cards into a star-shaped pattern. Organized this way, the numbers flowed from the edge of one card to the next, forming an unbroken sequence.
“That’s it,” Maya said.
At a glance, Cass memorized the number. She grabbed a torch from the wall and, with Maya in tow, began to work her way back into the stacks, orienting herself to the system that organized the collection.
About eight rows back, she turned down an aisle on their left, and hopped onto a wheeled ladder mounted to the shelves. Like she was riding a scooter, she rolled herself down the aisle. About halfway down, she dragged the toe of her boot, bringing the ladder to a stop. She climbed several rungs up the ladder, pulled a slim manuscript from the shelf, and jumped off the ladder from there, landing lightly on her feet.
“Bingo,” Cass said, holding up the book.
As they hurried back through the door into the Overside library, Maya and Cass could hear the Zach lecturing the librarian on proper feline feces disposal techniques. Atlantis mewed helpfully in the background. Cass peeked around the corner to see the poor librarian slumped in her chair, sneezing, head bowed down atop her desk in defeat. She didn’t see them as they quietly crossed to the front door.
“For the last time, young man, you must leave. Leave out this door. And leave the door open.” The librarian’s voice rasped, her throat red and raw from the sudden onset of a truly miserable allergy attack.
Zach glanced at Cass, who nodded at the slim book under her arm in return. Without another word, he scooped up Atlantis and followed them out the door.
Chapter Twenty-Two
It was past midnight. Cass, Zach, and Maya, clad in black, slipped along the side of the basilica where the chains of St. Paul were secured and displayed. They were looking for the side door used by priests and caretakers. This entrance would get them close to the chapel of relics.
The night was cloudy, starless, and dark. They shuffled along in the darkness until Maya found what she needed to located first—the point at which the basilica’s security system connected with the city’s electrical and information infrastructure—and she stopped without warning. Cass, following Maya, ran right into her. And Zach, following Cass, then ran right into her. They ended up in a noisy, tangled pile of arms and legs, half caught in a bush.
“Damn amateurs,” Maya hissed, shruggi
ng them off and getting down to work. “Watch where you are going.”
Cass and Zach, meanwhile, took their time untangling themselves.
Maya pulled some tools and equipment from her bag and spliced herself into the basilica’s security system. With a bit of digital jujitsu, she overrode the alarms and disarmed sensors that governed the chains of the St. Paul.
“The digital end of this break-in is the easy part,” Maya reminded them. “Breaking the spell will be the difficult part.”
Maya popped the side door open and, single file, they stole inside and toward the chapel of relics. The chains of St. Paul were displayed in a glass case, lit by interior lights.
“They’re beautiful,” Cass whispered, edging around the altar and closer to the case. Even several yards away, she could feel them resonating with more than a thousand years of invested power. She felt powerfully drawn to them but, still a few feet from the case, something that felt like a magnetic field repelled her and she couldn’t get any closer.
“Alright, Maya,” Cass, reaching out with her hand to test the field again, “you’re up.”
Maya took a deep breath, cleared her mind, and repeated the incantation, careful to include the missing element they’d recovered from Paul’s lost Gospel. A few sparks of green light leapt from her hand and fizzled out, leaving the field intact. She tried again with the same result.
Cass noticed, then, that something in the room didn’t feel right. Something felt off. But before she could say anything, Zach interjected.
“Ladies,” Zach said, “may I be of assistance?”
He took a look over Maya’s shoulder at the spell-breaking incantation, muttered an “Alrighty, then” once he had grasped the form and details of the spell, cracked his knuckles, and squared himself to the case. He closed his eyes for a moment, bowed his head, clapped his palms together, repeated the incantation, and pushed the palms of his hands outward toward the glass case. A wave of green light surged from his hands and the protective field around the case collapsed.
“Ha!” he shouted, then remembered it was important to keep quiet.
As the green wave of light washed over and through her, Cass felt the small hairs on the back of her neck stand up and goosebumps pimple her arms. She shivered in the incantation’s afterglow. Zach clearly knew what he was doing with magic. Why was she surprised? But her feelings were mixed. In addition to the pleasure of the spell’s power, the green crackle of magic also left her with a pang of grief. For Cass, magic couldn’t help but mean Miranda.
Cass pushed aside her fear for Miranda and helped Maya remove the lid from the case. Zach stood behind them, congratulating himself. “You’re welcome, ladies,” he joked, brushing imaginary lint from his shoulders and straightening his imaginary tie. Maya reached into the box and retrieved the heavy, iron chains. She bent down and secured the chains in her bag, then patted the pocket of her vest to make sure that she still had the Pauline manuscript.
Zach beamed and Cass couldn’t help but smile in return. They’d done it.
Still, something felt off about the room.
They worked their way down the colonnaded hall and back toward the door they’d originally come through. The farther they got from the chapel or relics, the deeper the shadows felt. Part way down the hall, Cass stopped. She had her head cocked to the side, trying to put her finger on what was wrong, when a voice came from the shadows. The voice felt both powerfully familiar and violently strange.
“Thank you for breaking that spell,” the voice said. “No vampire—Turned or Lost—could do it.”
On cue, a dozen of the Lost stepped into the faint light, surrounding them.
“Now,” the voice continued, “hand over the relic.”
“Screw that,” Maya said, kicking the nearest vampire in the knee and then, with her bare hands, wrenching his arm in a bone-crunching maneuver that left it twisted in the wrong direction.
Maya tossed Cass the bag with the relic. “Run, Cassandra,” she said. “And do not look back. I will be right behind you.”
Cass slung the bag over her shoulder and took off running. Miranda was what mattered most now.
When a vampire in a red leather jacket—straight from the set of “Thriller”—blocked her path, Cass drew her sword and slid feet first between his legs. With one sweeping stroke, she cleanly severing both legs at the ankles as she passed beneath him. He stood there for a moment, not sure what had happened, then toppled to the floor in a bloody heap, his feet still squarely planted on the floor next to him. Cass looked back for a moment to confirm her suspicion: the moron was, in fact, wearing just one white glove.
Cass scrambled back to her feet and ran again. She could hear Zach behind her and Maya behind him. The only clear path forward lead her back to the chapel of relics. She looked around the chapel, searching for an exit. But the only way out now was down.
She leapt a railing with a “Do Not Enter” sign and bolted down a tight set of stairs into the catacombs beneath the basilica. Zach and Maya were right on her heels now. Gunfire from Maya’s Glock echoed cacophonously in the tunnel until it was drowned out by a volley of frustrated screams.
Cass took one hard turn, then a second. But she came to a screeching halt when the passageway ended abruptly at Paul’s crypt.
The passage was a dead-end.
Chapter Twenty-Three
There was no place to go. Cass had led them into a cul-de-sac. Zach and Maya barreled around the corner into the same space. They were dismayed by the ashen look on Cass’s face.
“Back here,” Cass said, signaling that they should take up positions on the far side of the crypt. Cass stationed herself just around the corner from the entrance. She braced herself against the wall, sword pointed toward the corner, level with her own head, ready to impale whoever came careening around the corner next.
She only had to wait a moment. The ploy worked better than she’d expected. A vampire about her size, all black leather straps, buckles, and tassels, run head first into the blade.
A country Western vampire? Cass wondered.
Cass threw her weight into to blade, pitching the woman to the floor and severed her head. She crumbled into a pile of white ash.
The next one, though, arrived, before Cass could recover and brace herself again. The second vampire blew around the corner and ran right into Cass, knocking them both over. Cass ended up on the bottom, her sword-arm pinned at an awkward angle. This woman was considerably bigger than the last, her mass straining her snakeskin leather to its limits. Cass couldn’t help but admire the kind of confidence it took to wear an outfit like that.
The woman grabbed Cass by the shoulders and shook her. Cass hit the woman hard under the chin with the heel of free hand, snapping the woman’s mouth shut and severing the tip of her tongue. The bit tongue fell to the ground and flopped there. They both paused for a moment and looked at it, bewildered, then the woman’s eyes went black and she shook Cass again. She banged Cass’s head against the stone floor and offered a slurred snarl, ready to sink her bloody teeth into Cass’s exposed neck.
BLAM. BLAM.
Maya fired two shots into the vampire’s chest and the woman slumped to the floor, injured but not dispatched, trapping Cass beneath her weight.
Maya cleared the cornered of the crypt, her pistol aimed at whoever might come around the corner next. When no one did and everything—for the moment—seemed quiet, she reached down with one sleeveless arm, grabbed the vampire by the seat of her snakeskin pants, and hoisted her off of Cass. Cass struggled to her feet, rubbed the back of her head, and buried her sword in the vampire’s heart, turning her to ash.
Cass felt a little unsteady on her feet and her vision was blurry. Worse, waves of black emotion—fear, anger, despair—were crashing against the weakening barricades in her heart, threatening to break loose. She staggered back a step, placed a hand on the wall for support, and tried to clear the cobwebs from her head.
