by Laura Legend
With a pair of tweezers, he placed one of the fragments under the lens of a microscope.
“Billions of minds, past and present, can reshape reality itself with the power of their beliefs, tapping into forces they don’t understand with the strength of their convictions, unconsciously wielding magic. Christianity is a case study in exactly this phenomenon: mass delusion bending reality into a corresponding shape. The fact that it is a delusion—that Jesus is no more God than I am—doesn’t rob those beliefs of their power.”
He was bent over the microscope, fine-tuning the focus. He went silent for a moment, then stood up straight and adjusted his tie. He was obviously disappointed with what he’d seen.
He replaced the first fragment with the second.
“But as I was saying, the blood is the key. And, in my case, his blood, Jesus’ blood, is the key. That is why I need the One True Cross. As holy relics, the fragments gather and focus the power of that mass delusion we call Christianity. But as fragments of the bloody instrument of torture that robbed Jesus of his life, some of these relics still bear his blood. And that blood will set me free.”
Cass noted that the items scattered on his work bench included the weapons that she and Richard had brought with them. In particular, the items included her mother’s blade. Her fingers itched just thinking about it.
Judas lapsed into silence, examining the second fragment.
“This,” he said, his posture gone rigid, “is not the anointed piece.”
He spun on his heels and paced sharply in Cass’s direction. He stopped immediately in front of Cass and slapped her hard across the face with an open, gloved hand.
“I know that, asshole,” Cass said, and spat blood onto his immaculate white shirt.
“Where—where—” Judas stuttered, “where is it!”
He gripped Cass’s head between his hands and began to squeeze.
“We are short on time. You will tell me,” he coughed, his face just inches from her own, his fetid breath hot on her cheek, “where it is.”
“Go to hell,” Cass said, slamming her forehead with vicious force into his nose.
Judas stumbled backward, his blackened nose crushed and crumbling.
Cass was seeing stars and had to fight to keep from blacking out herself.
Judas bent over, coughing uncontrollably.
Cass rattled her cuffs again, hard enough that the steel cut deeper into her flesh. She could feel blood dripping from her wrist and off the end of her fingers.
But it was still no use.
Judas recovered, slowed his breathing, and stood upright. He reached up to probe with his finger the ruin of flesh and cartilage that used to be his nose.
“Damn,” he said. And then he peeled the black and mangled tissue off his face, exposing the sinus cavity beneath. He tossed the tissue aside. A thin, black fluid trickled out of the cavity.
He straightened his tie and collected himself.
He looked, now, like an impeccably dressed skeleton.
“I apologize for the interruption,” he said, his voice wet and nasal. “Now, where were we?”
Cass felt a plunging feeling of despair. She bowed her head and closed her eyes, resting her chin against her breastbone. She felt another wave of anger flickering deep in her chest, but it didn’t catch fire.
Then she felt the rough tongue of a cat licking blood from the tip of her finger.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
“Let’s try a different tack,” Judas said, returning to his workbench.
He collected the two additional fragments that Cass had brought and carefully inserted them into a kind of golden crown.
He held it up for Cass to see.
“Do you recognize it?” he asked.
The crown consisted of a twisted circlet of thorns, overlaid with ribbons of gold and bound at three points by gold and sky-blue bands.
“The relic of the crown of thorns,” Cass realized, “given to Louis IX, King of France, in 1238. It’s displayed on the first Friday of every month in the Cathedral of Notre Dame.”
“That is correct,” Judas confirmed, “except for one detail. It was displayed on the first Friday of every month at Notre Dame. Now, obviously, it’s here.”
He walked back toward her, still carrying the crown.
“Now, as you and I know, this relic is almost certainly fake. But, as I’ve just explained, we also know that its authenticity isn’t decisive. This object has been invested with power either way. And in this case, it strikes me as an especially suitable object for linking and focusing the power of all twenty-nine surviving fragments of the One True Cross that I have painstakingly acquired.”
As he neared, Cass could feel a hum of power emanating from the crown. And, too, she could see more clearly how profoundly she had ruined his blackened face.
No collection of holy relics is going to fix that, she thought, swallowing back the bile that was creeping up her throat.
The closer he got, the stronger the hum of power became, until finally the hum coalesced into a throbbing pulse. Cass could felt it thrum through her. And she could feel it most strongly in her weak eye. Her eye throbbed sympathetically with the crown and a spark of heat deep in that socket started to grow. Cass closed her eyes, fighting to gather her attention.
“Ms. Jones,” Judas said, snapping his fingers. “Over here.”
Cass’s eyes fluttered open.
“You look just like her,” he said. “It’s really quite remarkable. Her face practically shines through yours.”
What the hell was he talking about?
Judas registered the look of panic and confusion on her face. Her concentration was shattered.
“Your mother, Ms. Jones. You look just like your mother.”
A white hot tongue of anger sprang to life inside of her. Her teeth clenched and her eyes narrowed.
What does this asshole know about my mother?
“Do you know the truth about your mother?” Judas asked. “What lies have they told you? How deep in the dark are you about what happened to her?”
Bastard! Cass screamed in her mind.
Her mother’s necklace burned against her breast, as if talking about her had set it on fire. She wasn’t sure what that meant, but now that it was lit, the pendant, too, began to throb in sync with the approaching crown.
“Perhaps someday you’ll learn what really happened.” Judas said. “It’s really not for me to say. But what is pertinent is the fact that you lost your mother. You are familiar with what it feels like to lose someone you love. You are acquainted with the abyss of pain and grief it leaves inside of you.”
Judas paused and positioned the crown on his head. It flared with a pulsing white light. Cass couldn’t tell if that light was visible to everyone in the room or just to her, but it was blinding.
“Now, unless you’re able to give me the anointed piece, you will lose someone again.”
He paused, looking first at Zach and Miranda, still unconscious on the stone floor. But his gaze settled on Richard. He saw the look of panic on her face.
“It didn’t take long, did it?” he smiled. “You really shouldn’t mix work and love, Ms. Jones. It never works out. Say goodbye to Mr. York.”
Judas held out his hands, gathered the throbbing white light emanating from the crown, and shaped it into a crackling ball of energy. Then, like he was some kind of Sith Lord, a stream of white hot electric light shot from his fingers, knocking Richard back onto the floor and breaking his chair. The lightning convulsed his body and Cass swore she could see the occasional, flashing outline of his skeleton through the crackling sparks.
“Nooo!” Cass screamed. Her eye cleared and focused. She could feel the power growing inside of her, time beginning to slow. And she could feel the pendant trembling against her chest, as if it had a life of its own.
“Stop!” she yelled.
Judas paused and gathered the lightning back between his hands.
“This is si
mple, Ms. Jones. Just tell me where it is.”
“I don’t know,” she yelled over the chaos. “I don’t know where it is.”
She said it forcefully, aiming to convince Judas of the finality of her answer. But as soon as she’d said it, she doubted the truthfulness of her own statement. She felt her connection to her power—a power dependent on her truthfulness—flicker and dim.
How could I be lying? she wondered. Why is my power failing? I didn’t find the anointed piece! I don’t know where it is!
But even in her own mind, her protest rang hollow.
She could tell that Judas had noted the indecision clouding her face. He had hit a soft spot. There was something there. And he would undoubtably push harder.
Again he unleashed the lightning and Richard writhed and convulsed on the stone floor.
“He won’t be able to take much more of this, Ms. Jones,” Judas pressed.
Cass’s pendant burned and trembled.
“Do you love him?” he taunted.
Cass didn’t dare venture a response to that one.
But Judas didn’t stop there.
“Do you believe that God is going to save you? That he will send his angels to defend you? No one is coming to rescue you, Ms. Jones. God is a lie. Jesus can’t save you anymore than he could save himself, nailed to that cross, bleeding and powerless.”
A surge of power flowed through Judas and into Richard’s smoking body and, in response, Cass’s pendant flew straight out, as if it were pulled by a powerful magnet, straining against the chain that bound it to Cass.
“DO YOU BELIEVE?” Judas thundered.
Cass searched her own heart, hoping to find some shred of faith in God or Christ or miracles, something she could cling to and put her faith in.
But there was none.
The only bright image she found in her heart was an image of her mother—and of that frozen moment when she had miraculously seen herself through her mother’s eyes.
“No,” Cass admitted, “I don’t believe. I never have.”
As she said it, she knew that, this time, she was telling the truth.
She was faithless.
But, too, she was truthful.
And, galvanized by the truth, her body was flooded with a power and light that was not her own, that came from someplace else altogether.
She strained against her handcuffs and stood.
Her chair splintered and the links binding her cuffs snapped.
Her vision expanded and she took in every detail of the room.
She was a Seer.
“Judas!” she roared, shaking off her chains.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
A concussive wave of energy rippled out into the room. Cass was its epicenter. Books, equipment, and henchmen scattered.
Pushed backward, Judas stumbled as an orange tabby darted between his legs.
At the same moment, though, her mother’s pendant broke free of its chain and flew across the room, pulled by the cumulative, magnetic power of the other relics Judas had collected.
Judas found his footing and snatched it out of the air.
In the palm of his burning hand, the pendant’s casing evaporated.
“Yesss,” Judas hissed through his ruined sinus cavity.
Oh shit, Cass thought.
Some buried part of Cass had known all along. She’d worn that pendant around her neck every day for fifteen years and, since the day her mother had given it to her, she’d been following its silent call. She’d been drawn into years of research, into graduate work and a dissertation, and into this final mad scramble for the other fragments of the One True Cross by the gift her mother had left her: the anointed piece.
Her whole life had been spent trying to find something she already had.
But now she’d lost it.
And now Judas held the final piece of the puzzle in the palm of his hand.
Figures, Cass concluded. You can’t make this stuff up.
Richard lay in a smoking heap next to her, groaning, his clothes in tatters, the wicked scars across his back visible.
What haven’t you been telling me? How did you already know Judas? What’s your endgame?
She slung one of his arms around her neck and dragged him out of immediate danger, leaving him next to Zach and Miranda in the corner of the room.
Judas, meanwhile, had inserted the final, bloody piece of the cross into his crown of thorns.
He was lifted off the ground by the attendant power. He floated a foot above the ground with his hands outstretched.
And then, for just a moment, crouching next to her friends, Cass thought that it was over. That is was too late. That she’d lost and that he’d won.
In that moment, Cass saw Judas as if he were lit up from within, his muscles and organs became translucent and the bones of this skeleton glowed white. She could see all of his black and rotting flesh healed and his nose repaired and the marks left by time’s slow passage erased.
He was clean.
He was beautiful.
Cass felt like she was seeing what God would see were he to smile down on Judas. Or, she felt like she was seeing what Jesus must have seen in Judas when he’d trusted him with his life.
Cass felt a rush of melancholy compassion for this cursed man.
Judas spun gently in the air, turning toward Cass, a look of triumph and satisfaction on his healed and self-possessed face. A storm of roiling light swirled around him.
“Goodbye, Ms. Jones,” he said.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
But the smile on Judas’s face didn’t last long.
The storm of roiling light started to fill with dark clouds and the thorns in Judas’s crown began to dig deep into the flesh of his scalp. With a look of horror, Judas began to writhe and tug at the crown. His limbs bent in unnatural directions and his body began to collapse inward, as if he were a sheet of paper being crumpled and thrown away.
The crown, though, was not coming off.
Judas’s face was wracked with pain and his body twisted in the air, wrestling with the crown.
The anointed piece, displayed as the centerpiece of the crown, slid downward and pierced his forehead, sinking through skin and bone and into his brain.
Judas’s eyes widened and his body now hung in the air, limp and still. The clouds swirling around him slowed and flickered from black to white.
He stared straight ahead, pale and inquisitive.
A revelation dawned across his face.
Then he spoke.
“My God,” he whispered. “Dear God … it’s true.”
Tears streamed down his face.
Cass was riveted, frozen in place until, out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of Atlantis darting across the room and onto a workbench. The cat deftly wove its way through an array of equipment until, at the end of the bench, it stopped and looked directly at Cass.
My sword.
Cass leapt into action, taking advantage of the lull.
She saw Richard stagger back to his feet, but couldn’t worry about that now.
She hurdled a box of equipment and summersaulted into a crouch in front of the workbench.
Atlantis purred.
The walls of the castle where beginning to shake and tremble. Cass didn’t like the look of it. She needed to act fast.
She snatched her sword off the bench.
The storm surrounding Judas had gone black again and the winds were picking up speed.
From the center of the vortex Judas cried out in agony, “Father in Heaven, I believe! Have mercy on me!”
Chunks of rock began falling from the ceiling.
Richard had lurched into the center of the room.
Cass doubted that any gods were going to help Judas now. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t offer him mercy.
With a running start, she launched herself into the air and swung her sword through a mighty arc that passed cleanly through Judas’s neck, neatly separating his head fr
om his body.
He was free.
His head and body turned to ash.
The ash was immediately sucked into the vortex.
The crown of thorns clattered to the ground at Richard’s feet.
The loose anointed fragment of the cross spun for an instant in the wind until Cass reached out and plucked it from the air.
The castle was disintegrating around them.
Cass and Richard locked eyes through the storm and, maybe for the first time, she saw him simply, plainly as he was. There was no pretense left. She could see that this was the real Richard. This was the truth.
But, as always, she couldn’t tell what that truth meant. She couldn’t feel, in the first person, the force of it.
As she thought this, a huge section of the stone ceiling came crashing down between them, separating her from Richard.
When the dust cleared, Cass could only see a ton of crushed stone piled where Richard had stood.
“Richard!” she screamed, her throat raw, the anointed piece biting into the palm of her clenched fist.
Stones continued to fall and she felt Atlantis brush against her leg, his tail curling and pulling her toward Zach and Miranda. Both were awake and struggling to get their legs under them. Supporting them both, Cass led them out of the room and down the hall toward the entrance.
They burst through the main door and into the open air, cutting through a billowing fog of dust and debris and ran for the edge of the forest.
They sheltered at the foot of an ancient tree, a safe distance from the castle, and watched the remainder of the castle collapse with thunderous rumble.
Atlantis wasn’t with them, but Cass wasn’t worried.
Richard, on the other hand—she didn’t see how anyone could have survived that.
Whatever strength Cass had left vanished. She fell to her knees and leaned into Zach, who pulled her close.
The dust began to settle and the sun, just creeping above the rim of the mountain, shone through the morning fog, burning it away.
