by Laura Legend
She leaned in and, with a handkerchief, lifted it from the coffin, the string from which it had hung disintegrating in her hands. She held it up in the light for Richard to see.
“This is the real thing,” Cass affirmed, though she could hardly believe it. In forty-eight hours she’d gone from having an abandoned and discredited dissertation about Christian relics to having, in her personal possession, two authentic fragments of the One True Cross.
Richard pulled their first fragment, the piece from the Chapel of the Holy Chalice, out of his pocket. It was locked inside a clear, shatterproof vial. He held them up side by side. The fragments vibrated in concert when he held them close together and, even at a glance, there was no doubt they were made from the same distinctive wood.
“You did it, Cass,” Richard said. “Your talents and research brought us here. You were the key. You were right all along.”
The words hit Cass hard. She’d fought through so much doubt and disappointment just to stay afloat this past year. And now—here, half-way around the world—the thing she’d dreamed about deep in the stacks of her father’s library had come true. The thing she’d dreamed was real.
She felt like her heart would burst.
This, though, was tempered by a pang of sadness that father couldn’t be here to see it, to share it with her. He was one of the few people in the world who would appreciate the magnitude of what she’d done. But, feeling the weight of her mother’s blade in her hand, she was grateful, too, that he’d (almost) given his blessing when they’d parted.
Richard touched her shoulder.
“Cassandra, we should go.”
“Yes …” she said, stalling.
“What is it?” Richard asked.
Cass took the vial from Richard and held it together with the fragment in her own hand. She turned them both over, carefully examining the fragments from every angle. Then she saw it. She saw what was missing.
“Richard,” she began, “neither of these fragments has any blood stains. This fragment we found with the bishop is not the anointed piece. We were wrong.”
What little blood there was in Richard’s face drained right out of it.
“What?” Cass asked.
“Hurry. Let’s go,” Richard said rushing them back up the stairs.
When they reached the surface again, Cass called out excitedly for Zach and Miranda.
But Zach and Miranda were nowhere to be seen.
Cass felt a deep, black panic well up in her throat.
“Zach!” she yelled, “Miranda!”
Richard echoed her.
“Zach! Miranda!”
Nothing.
Cass was trying to get far enough outside of her panic to think straight when her phone buzzed in her pocket. She dug it out.
She had a text.
It was from the same number that had texted her days ago. The same number that had set this whole sequence of events in motion with that first, cryptic, out-of-the-blue message: “I’ve read your dissertation. We need to talk.”
There was nothing cryptic about this new message, though.
This time the message was crystal clear.
I have your friends.
Bring the fragments to the following coordinates by midnight tomorrow.
Tell no one.
Or they will die.
Chapter Thirty-Four
“It’s him,” Richard said. “The leader of the Lost. And he’ll do it.”
“No,” Cass said quietly, more to herself than Richard. She was gripped by a second wave of panic and, when this receded, she was flooded with a wave of anger so fierce it felt like her skin was on fire. Her face flashed red. Only the knuckles throttling her sword were white.
This wasn’t helpful, though.
Even the anger.
At least, not yet.
For now, she needed a clear head. And a plan. And, as the coordinates indicated, a way to get to Romania.
At least money was no obstacle. Richard routed his personal jet to Barcelona. They met the plane at the airport and within two hours were in the air. They couldn’t fly directly to Romania, though. They needed to conceal their true destination, even from Richard’s friends. They couldn’t risk it. So they flew to Istanbul, left their phones on the plane, and used cash to buy a pair of train tickets to Bucharest.
The train would take most of the day but they wouldn’t have any trouble arriving before midnight. They bought tickets for a private cabin and hoped, before arriving, to find a few hours to rest.
The cabin was comfortable but small. They pulled the blinds to blot out the sun and sat side by side in the shadows, listening in silence to the clack of the rails.
Neither said anything.
There was nothing to say.
But the silence didn’t feel hostile. Instead, working a notch below words, it opened a connection between them.
Richard, Cass could tell, was no stranger to silence. He knew how to sit with it. She had no trouble imagining that he’d spent some part of the past six hundred years locked away in a dungeon or monastery, bound by silence for years at a time.
She gauged his profile in the half light and tried to recall what he’d looked like in her vision: the hood, the less guarded look on his face, the beard.
He noticed her looking and, bowing his head, squeezed her hand.
The gesture was simple. And true. Tears welled in Cass’s eyes.
“Shhhh,” Richard said. He put his arm around her and pulled her close, cradling her head in the hollow of his shoulder.
They sat this way for a long time, his arm wrapped around her shoulder, her hand resting lightly on his chest. The rocking of the train was soothing.
Gradually, it dawned on Cass that, though her hand lay right over Richard’s heart, she couldn’t feel it beating. She lifted her head from his shoulder, trying to get a better look at him and pressed her hand more firmly against his heart.
Nothing.
Cass sat up straight, swung her leg across his lap, and straddled him. She needed to see his face. She needed to look him in the eye.
Richard, as if he were ashamed at what she’d discovered, kept his gaze downcast.
She responded by taking his head in her small hands and kissing his forehead, just barely grazing his skin with her lips. She softly kissed his temples and his eyes and his ears and trailed down his neck to the open collar of his shirt and the notch of his collarbone.
“Cassandra,” he said.
“Shhhh,” she said, straining to listen.
She unbuttoned his shirt, slowly and carefully. She traced a wicked scar across his breast and then placed her ear directly against his heart. A flicker of heat deep behind her weak eye emptied her mind, time slowed to a crawl, the sounds of the train disappeared, and she listened with an intensity she’d never managed before.
Her head rose and fell against his chest with the air in his lungs.
She placed a finger lightly on his neck, right against his jugular.
And then—there, deep inside the cavity of his chest—she heard it. An extraordinarily faint and irregular heartbeat.
Part of him was still alive.
A whistle blew and the train began to slow.
They were already there.
Chapter Thirty-Five
From the train, they took a taxi up into the mountains. The taxi let them off at the end of a long, gated driveway that wound upward through a thick forest. From there, they walked. The air was cold. The night sky was clear. And, this far from any lights, the stars were sharp and bright.
Once they were a mile or so up the drive, Richard tossed the large canvas bag he’d been carrying onto the shoulder of the driveway. It clanked and rattled.
Richard had cobbled together some supplies.
In the shadow of the trees lining the drive, they stripped out of their street clothes and into something more tactical: uniformly dark clothes and good boots, all of it designed to maximize their freedom of movement.
When it came to their gear, Cass only had two rules: no corsets and no leather of any kind.
“I agree that they’re not a good fit for the occasion,” Richard observed dryly, “but there’s no need to make such hard and fast rules.”
Cass considered his objection.
“Let me add a single exception to that rule, then,” she said, retrieving her sword from the canvas bag. “Corsets and bustiers may be worn on special occasions—but only if everyone present is similarly dressed.”
Her mother’s blade whistled and flashed in the starlight as she tested its weight in her hand. Then she turned back toward Richard with the sword pointed casually in his direction.
He looked at the blade and back to Cass. “Excellent rule,” he said. “Well thought out. I’m one hundred percent on board.”
Richard reached into the bag and retrieved Zach’s modified truncheons, both the one that he’d given to Richard and the one that had been left at the crypt. He tucked them into his belt and tossed the bag with their street clothes into the woods.
They had about two miles left to go. The driveway rose steeply and once they’d reached a decisive bend in the road, their destination came into view.
A castle, Cass thought, incredulous. A goddamn Romanian castle. I should have known.
“Now what?” Richard asked.
“They know we’re coming. And if we don’t appear in the next hour, we’re risking Zach’s and Miranda’s lives. There’s nothing to do but walk right up the drive and knock on the front door.”
It took about twenty minutes to reach the main door. When they arrived, Richard did as Cass had suggested. He knocked on the enormous wooden door. They could hear the sound echo through the space behind it.
They only had to wait a few moments until the door groaned open. Despite the courtly ambiance, the man who opened the door looked more like a goon than a butler. In fact, none of the assembled welcoming committee would have passed on Downton Abbey.
But, just as Cass was thinking this, the group parted and revealed a thin man dressed in an impeccable suit. Except for the cloud of black flesh seeping up the right side of his face, he might very well have passed as a duke or a count.
Surely, Cass mused, this guy must be an actual count. If he’s not Count of the Lost (or whatever), I’m Joan of Arc.
The thin man stepped forward, unfazed by the naked blade in Cass’s hand.
“Please,” he said, “come in. It’s so rare that we have guests here. Just, please—for the sake of your own friends—check your weapons with my … colleagues here.”
Richard hesitated but Cass sheathed her sword, stepped across the threshold, and handed it to one of the goons as if he were checking coats.
The thin man clapped his hands and laughed to see her respond with such civility.
“Excellent, excellent,” he said, drinking her in. “You have turned out to be so much more than I’d ever dared hope. We’ve been through so much together the past few days, I feel like we’ve been friends for years.”
Cass smiled an obviously fake smile. The well-dressed man smiled back and tried to make eye contact, but was foiled by her weak eye. He wasn’t sure where to look, so—like most everyone Cass had ever met—he simply broke off trying.
The gaunt man turned on his heel, coughing into his gloved fist. Even from six feet away, Cass could see flecks of blood.
Richard was still lingering at the door.
“And, of course, you are not alone.”
Richard scowled.
“Hello, Richard,” the thin man said, directing a wink at Cass.
The way he said it, Cass couldn’t help but think that he and Richard had already met.
She was right.
“Hello, Judas,” Richard replied.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Despite the veneer of hospitality, they were prisoners.
Judas’s men herded them through a maze of corridors to the castle’s solar. The room had high, vaulted ceilings and was dominated at one end by a massive fireplace and on the other by a series of desks and museum-grade storage units for artifacts.
Normally, Cass would have been fascinated by both the castle and the high-tech gear. But her fear for Zach and Miranda sat like a rock in the pit of her stomach. When she saw both Zach and Miranda bound and unconscious on the floor she felt simultaneously relieved and infuriated. It was a weird cocktail of emotions.
Cass and Richard were shoved into a pair of wooden chairs and handcuffed to the legs.
Judas was smooth. Everything he did was measured. He seemed calm and in control. But every minute or so he would suffer a painful convulsion that would crack that facade, contorting his blackened face, and reveal how deeply he was suffering.
“I believe you’ve brought me something,” Judas said to Cass.
He approached Cass’s chair.
“I’m grateful that you were willing to travel around the world to assist me. Your initial response seemed less open to helping.”
He circled around them, behind Richard’s chair, and rested a hand on Richard’s shoulder as if they were friends.
“I suspected, though, that a dashing man of international mystery like Mr. York here would pique your interest in a way that I never could. Once I’d baited him with some carefully planted warnings and clues, I knew he’d be able to hook you. So thank you both for your help—however unwitting. I couldn’t have done it without you.”
Cass rattled her cuffs angrily—and uselessly—against the chair. Her wrists where already bruised and bleeding from straining agains them.
“Now, where is it?” he asked, circling and staring intently at Cass.
Cass remained silent but, for just a moment, glanced involuntarily at Richard.
“Of course,” Judas said, approaching Richard. He studied Richard for a moment and took in his bearing. Then, without needing to search him, he reached directly into Richard’s jacket and plucked the vial from his pocket.
Judas held the vial up to the light, studying both of the fragments they’d recovered. He was pleased with what he saw. He started to smile his thin smile but, before it could widen, he was racked by a convulsion that bent him over, hands on his knees, coughing up something black and vile onto the floor.
“Oh dear,” he apologized, wiping the corners of his mouth. “So sorry. You can tell how much I need the gifts that you’ve brought.”
He removed the glove from his right hand and showed it to Cass.
“In fact, you can see the problem for yourself.”
He held his hand just inches from her face. The flesh of his hand had deteriorated dramatically. Unlike the creeping black that had only recently clouded his face, his hand was in an advanced state of decomposition. He flexed it for her—the bones of his knuckles clearly exposed through the cracked and flaking skin—but, somehow, his hand was still alive.
“Too many years,” he explained, walking away with the vial toward the work benches and equipment on the far side of the room. “I’ve been confined to the darkness for too many years. I think there may be something about flesh that needs the light, that yearns to be touched by the sun. And without that light—well, eventually, the flesh turns on itself.”
He paused for moment and looked upward, trying to recall something.
“What was it my old, old friend said so long ago before he condemned me to this interminable darkness? ‘The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.’”
He pulled the cover off a high-powered microscope.
“It took me a long time to diagnose the nature of my problem. And even longer to formulate a solution. The solution snapped into focus for me when I stumbled across a scrap of Mesopotamian myth about shadow demons. The legends said that these shadow demons would feed on the blood of holy men and then, flush with that sacred blood, they could walk freely in the light of the sun.”
He laughed.
“Shadows! Walking loose in the light!”
He observed Cas
s’s shadow, cast against the wall by the fire at the other end of the room.
“Imagine snipping it loose,” he said, pantomiming a snip with a pair of scissors, “and setting it free. This, Ms. Jones, is the gift you’ve given me. The power to remain a thing of darkness while no longer being banished from the light.”
He adjusted several elements of the microscope.
“With this curse, I’ve been given a kind of perverse power. I have the power to reproduce what I am with a bite and, thereby, turn others into vampires. I make others like me. But this power has been sharply limited up until now. It’s been confined to the darkness all these years.”
He switched on a desk lamp.
“But now, unafraid of the light, what will stop me? What will stop me from spreading like a virus without a natural enemy? The world—slowly at first, but then with a kind of exponential inevitability—will be transformed into a reflection of my own image. Jesus Christ himself cursed me with this curse when I betrayed him. But now—now, I’m going to turn that curse into a gift and give birth to an entirely new world. Everyone who survives will become, like me, a shadow. Everyone who survives their old lives will become undead.”
Jesus? Cass thought. Is this guy supposed to be Judas Iscariot himself? One of Jesus’ own twelve apostles, the one who betrayed him for thirty pieces of silver?
Judas watched Cass’s face as she put the pieces together. He was pleased.
Cass looked at Richard. “Judas,” she said, “as in … Judas Iscariot.”
Richard nodded in confirmation.
“That is an old, old name,” the thin man said. “Much maligned. But it will do.”
Jesus Christ!
Then he turned back to the bench and removed the fragments from the vial.
He continued. “The key, of course, is the blood. The cross itself is helpful, but it’s not the main event. The cross is a holy relic and, as a relic, it is invested with power by the countless people who believe that it has power.”
