by Laura Legend
“Another one?” Miranda diagnosed.“Shit.”
“I’m afraid so,” Amare replied in his thick Moroccan accent. He kept his eyes glued to the creature and didn’t turn to greet her.
This was the third time this week that a Lost vampire had gone feral and tweaked out. The whole Lost community was teetering on the brink of the same fate. Even Miranda could feel the viral call in her own blood—the call to give in to her body and its hungers, to set aside consciousness, to lose her mind and finally be free of all her human fears and scheming.
Amare tossed the knife from one hand to the other, looking for an angle of attack. The creature bore all the telltale signs of ferality. Its arched spine had grown ridged and pronounced, it favored loping on all fours, its fingers and toes had lengthened and curled into claws, and a second row of shark-like teeth were visible behind its bloody tongue.
Was this going to be Miranda’s own future? Would she be overrun by her passions and hungers? Would her own appetites break her and eat her alive?
No, she wouldn’t let it happen. She had to trust that—as the Heretic had promised—something else, something entirely new was possible. They were so close to unlocking the secret. They had to succeed. In a very real way, Miranda had already bet her life that they would.
For the moment, Miranda couldn’t do anything about that all-consuming problem, but she could solve this one.
She skirted a stainless steel countertop, grabbed a butcher’s knife of her own, and flanked Amare. Between the two of them, they ought to be able to finish this quickly.
The creature reared up on its legs, roared, beat its chest, and flexed. Its veins bulged and its eyes bugged. Miranda could have sworn the thing was actually growing larger before her eyes.
Amare went high. Miranda went low.
Amare’s knife flashed, aiming for the heart, but the creature was fast and shouldered him into the wall, knocking the breath out of him. Miranda took a simultaneous swing at its leg and drew a deep, bloody line across its thigh. The cut, though, barely slowed the creature down as it pushed past her, crashed through the kitchen, and ran for the door to the service hallway.
Everyone else in the kitchen—Lost vampires all—dove for cover.
“Cowards,” Miranda spat at them as she gave chase. Amare was right behind her. Two vampires in hairnets, white aprons, and leather pants smirked from their hiding place and shrugged in response. Miranda gave them the bird and burst into the hallway.
The creature was already halfway down the hall. It ran past the door to the buffet and was headed for the exit at the far end—the exit that led directly onto the packed floor of the casino.
“Mother . . .” Miranda said, redoubling her speed. They wouldn’t be able to sweep this under the rug if their backroom brawl burst onto the casino floor. All hell would break loose as scores of fainting grandmas and doddering grandpas were eaten and dismembered.
The creature barreled through a cart loaded with dirty dishes, sending them hurtling to the floor. Miranda angled for the wall and bypassed the wreck. Amare hurtled the debris in a single bound and caught up with her. They were making up ground but not fast enough.
“Merde, merde, merde . . .” Amare was chanting to himself. He dove for the creature’s ankles just before it reached the door. He locked on but, instead of bringing the thing down, he just got dragged through the door with it.
Miranda caught up. Amare had the creature by the knees and it tumbled to the ground. A couple of gray heads turned their direction to see what was going on. In a moment, every head in the casino would be swiveling toward them.
Miranda couldn’t let that happen. As her mind had been weakening, her grip on the magic she’d practiced for decades had also become increasingly tenuous. But she didn’t have time, now, to wonder if she could still use it. Her eyes glinted with a hint of green as she spotted a blue haired woman in a scooter at a slot machine near the center of the room.
“Congratulations,” Miranda whispered as she cast a spell, her hands dancing. The woman pulled the lever and won the jackpot. Lights flashed and bells rang and every head in the casino, instead of turning toward them, pivoted to see who had won. A landslide of coins cascaded out of the machine.
With the distraction in full swing, Miranda looked back at Amare. He was barely hanging on. The creature had almost broken free. Miranda didn’t waste any more time. Knife in hand, she dropped an elbow into the creatures face, smashing its teeth, and then plunged the knife into its heart. Its body dissolved in a cloud of ash.
One older gentleman with a walker was still looking their way. He’d seen the whole thing.
“What . . . what was that?” he croaked, pointing a shaking finger at the ash settling to the ground—marking the spot where the feral vampire had been.
“That, sir,” Miranda said as she stood, dusting off her hands and straightening her jacket, “is why smoking is prohibited in the casino. We take that policy very seriously.”
Amare gripped Miranda by the elbow. “Well done,” he said quietly. “Thanks for your help.”
“You’re welcome,” Miranda returned. “But we both know this is just a finger in the dike. If we don’t secure an additional relic soon, this kind of ferality will spread like wildfire. And then it won’t just be a handful of senior citizens in danger. The whole world will be overrun.”
Before Amare could respond, a voice broke in from directly behind them.
“Fortunately,” the Heretic said, “I know just where to find that relic.”
Chapter 2
Cassandra Jones was running.
The sun was barely up, its light slanting through the dark trees as she flew down the trail. It was theoretically Spring in Japan, but this high in the mountains the thin, sharp air was still cold in her lungs. She wasn’t worried, though, about the temperature. She’d known that once she got moving, it wouldn’t be hard to keep warm. A pair of running shorts and a sports bra were plenty. Her dark ponytail bobbed as she kept her eyes fixed on the trail in front of her, dancing through the maze of roots and rocks that broke up the path. She worked her way higher and higher into the mountains. She was only two miles into the run, but her skin was already beaded with sweat.
She felt good. She felt strong. She felt like she could run all day.
Her head felt better, too. Her trip via the Underside into Zach’s mind had seemed to unlock a part of her that had been barred for a long time. Now, finally, she could feel some aspects of her own emotions with sharpness and immediacy. Some parts still felt distant and secondhand—frozen and locked away—but the parts of her experience that had thawed felt vibrant and raw. It was weird after all these years to feel again what had been numb for so long. It was like she’d lost a psychic tooth and couldn’t stop pressing her tongue into that supersensitive gap in her teeth just to feel what she could feel.
The trail broke free of the tree line and Cass picked her way across a field of boulders. The view of the valley below was striking. She stopped for a moment to feel the sun on her skin and admire the view. In the open, the breeze was stronger but still pleasantly cool. While her view of the Shield Monastery was obscured by the mountains from here, she could see the narrow, winding road that led up the valley to its front gates. That road, though, was rarely used. Instead, almost everyone came and went through the tunnels that connected the monastery with other Underside hubs around the world.
Cass was glad that the monastery was out of sight. Even though she’d settled pretty well into living there the past few months so that Kumiko could take charge of her training, Cass still had mixed feelings about the place. She couldn’t quite shake its associations with Miranda’s transformation into one of the Lost. Cass felt a pang of guilt at the thought—she had failed Miranda, she was too late to save her—and that pang was more raw and painful than she would have liked. Maybe there were advantages to having your emotions kept at a safe distance.
Cass glanced back toward the tree line from which
she’d just emerged and saw a flicker of shadows immediately inside the dark mouth of the trail. It sent a chill down her spine.
It’s just the damn wind in the trees, Jones, she told herself. But that didn’t stop her from breaking into a run again, headed in the opposite direction. She finished crossing the boulder field and reentered the forest. It took her eyes a few moments to adjust to the contrast in light and she slowed a bit, watching for roots. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she really was being followed now. Once her eyes adjusted, she picked up her speed again, her feet barely touching the ground.
She had the nagging sense that the shadows weren’t impersonal, that they somehow had something to do with Miranda. Cued by her ever-present guilt—always just under the surface, ready to emerge—Cass’s mind automatically replayed that traumatic moment in the monastery library when the Heretic had sunk her teeth into Miranda’s neck and Miranda’s body had gone stiff and pale. The moment played on a loop in Cass’s head and the more it played, the more it felt like the shadow of Cass’s own guilt was following her, blaming her, loping along behind her and making up ground.
A mild panic rose in her chest.
This is bullshit, she thought, there’s no way I’m going to live like this. She took the next bend in the trail and stepped off the path, fists up. She took a deep breath and held it, listening. Someone was coming. She could make out the sound of footsteps.
When the figure turned the corner, Cass drew further back into the shadows and watched them run past.
It was Zach. He was dressed for winter in a hoody and athletic pants.
That doofus, Cass thought, relieved, as she took off after him. I’ll teach him to scare me.
Running quickly but silently, Cass covered the ground between them in only a few seconds and then, when she was right on his heels, she almost shouted into his ear: “Zach!”
Zach jumped just like she’d hoped, startled. But then he tripped over a rock and went tumbling to the ground. Cass was so close that she couldn’t avoid him, stumbled herself, and landed squarely on top of him in a tangle of arms and legs.
“Aiyee!” Zach started to squeal before he realized what had happened. Then he pulled Cass closer and tried to smoothly transition into something that sounded less like a five year-old. “I mean, Hi-ee, Cass,” he repeated, dropping his voice an octave.
“Shut up,” Cass responded, leaning in for a kiss. Zach shut up and pulled her closer, running a finger up her bare spine.
Cass rolled off and popped up onto her feet.
“Break time’s over,” she said. “We still have six or seven miles to go.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Zach replied, getting to his feet a bit more slowly. He groaned a little and then looked at his torn sleeve and brush-burned elbow. “Ow,” he added, “can I get a kiss for this?”
“Yes, if you can catch me.”
And with that, Cass was off like a shot, laughing.
Cass didn’t get very far, though, before it was obvious that if she didn’t slow down, Zach wasn’t going to catch her. She was too fast. So she started to bleed off some of her speed, attempting not to be obvious about it. Zach, though, was rumbling along with sufficient effort and concentration that she needn’t worry about him noticing.
Just as Zach was about to catch up, the trail once more broke free of the tree line and skirted the edge of a dramatic cliff that overlooked the rest of the valley, giving them a clear view of the monastery. Cass came to a halt and Zach happily bumped into her from behind, reeling her in as if she was going to fall to her death without his protection.
The drop was vertiginous. But that wasn’t what bothered Cass.
In addition to the heat from Zach’s body, she could feel a faint, almost magnetic pulse call out to her when she fixed her attention on the ancient well at the center of the monastery compound. She’d felt the pulse frequently, at varying degrees of strength, in the months since she’d first seen it.
She didn’t like the way it tugged at her now, insistent, calling after her.
She needed to look into that.
Chapter 3
Cass looked ridiculous. She hated the traditional blue fighting garb that Kumiko insisted on her wearing when they trained. There was a time and place for looking like a cross between a sixteenth-century Smurf and a ninja—wait, was there?—but Cass didn’t see why they needed it for sparring. The next thing she knew, Kumiko would insist that she wear one of those upside-down wicker baskets that traveling samurai sported on their heads.
Cass tugged at her sleeves uncomfortably and adjusted the robe’s belt.
“Focus, Cassandra,” Kumiko instructed, “or I will insist that you also wear a takegasa on your head.”
Cass frowned. Can this witch read my mind?
Dogen smiled and nodded. He seemed to like the idea—though Cass suspected that he would smile and nod along with anything Kumiko said.
Dogen was her sparring partner today. He beckoned Cass forward, inviting her to attack him. His massive body cast an even larger shadow across the ring. Cass’s job was to learn how to intentionally engage her powers as a Seer, instead of just stumbling into them when she got lucky in a moment of peril.
“Time,” Kumiko intoned from the sidelines, “is the truth at the heart of reality. Everything real arises and everything real passes away. To ‘see’ the truth as a Seer, you must grasp the truth of time.”
Right, Cass thought, see the truth of time. Also, do that while fighting a three-hundred-pound man who would smile with affection while squashing you like a bug.
Dogen positioned himself at the center of the sparring ring so that Cass would never be far from his reach. Cass danced at the edges of the circle, postponing their clash. She was supposed to practice the most basic physical manifestation of her powers: getting time to slow and expand so that she had more room to operate.
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, focusing her attention on the recess behind her weak eye. She could feel the tiny flicker of heat back there that was associated with engaging her powers. She tried to feed the fire by willing it to grow—Fire, grow! she thought to herself—but nothing really happened. Time marched on at its regular, mad pace.
In the meantime, however, Dogen’s patience had run out and he’d decided to get things started. He took a swing at Cass’s head with a fist the size of a coconut. Cass ducked and rolled. Except, rather than rolling away and trying again to engage her powers, she simply followed her old fighting instincts and rolled between his legs, kicking Dogen in the back of the knee and knocking him off balance. Unfortunately, Cass hadn’t really considered the consequences of this move because, as she now plainly saw, she was about to be flattened by Dogen’s giant, looming ass.
You’d make a terrible lumberjack, Jones, Cass thought to herself as she squeezed her eyes shut and braced for the impact.
But a moment later, when she found that she hadn’t been flattened, she snuck a peek and saw that she was surrounded by a shimmering green shield of light. Kumiko had saved her. The look on Kumiko’s face, however, said that she may have saved her so that she could take a shot at Cass herself.
The green light died away and Dogen, having regained his balance, reached down to offer Cass a hand up.
“Smooth move,” he joked, smiling.
“Thanks,” Cass said sarcastically, dusting herself off. She couldn’t help but offer a little smile in return. Dogen’s good nature was infectious.
“Dogen, you’re dismissed for today,” Kumiko said, frowning at them both.
Dogen shuffled off and Kumiko joined Cass in the center of the ring. Kumiko, not even five feet tall, gestured for Cass to sit down so that she could look her in the eye. Cass complied, though she was reluctant to accept the reprimand she guessed was coming her way.
