by Laura Legend
From the moment they had learned of Cass’s escape, Richard had felt his once-lifeless heart contract with worry, and even fear. While he had no doubt that Cass could survive vampires, monsters, and magic, he was less certain about her ability to survive the illness that seemed to come in waves, increasing and receding, but never actually healing. As much as he disliked it, Maya’s coldly logical solutions—sedation, restriction, and monitoring—had, in the end, appeared to be their only recourse in their aim to keep Cass alive as he worked feverishly to find a cure.
And then she was gone.
For the thousandth time, Richard cursed his own inability to understand the woman who had upended his life, constantly rewriting a narrative he thought he knew by heart. He had been certain she would understand his actions here only came from his desires to protect her as she recovered. Apparently, she had not.
And then, out of all the places she could have gone, Cassandra Jones goes off and finds Thomas.
Well, he had done the same thing himself, hadn’t he, lifetimes ago. His family dead, and his grief overwhelming him to the point of destruction, Richard had gone to the strange, quiet man who, with his deeply tanned skin and talk of release, had stood out against the other pale, sun-starved Englishmen Richard knew.
He’d thought he was going to find some way to escape the pain that was his life and allow him to take revenge against the monsters who had destroyed everything he loved. And to be fair, that actually was the plan that Thomas had offered him. He just hadn’t expected the part about becoming one of the Turned. By being Turned—by allowing Thomas to turn him into a vampire, but stop the transformation halfway so that only a tenuous connection remained to his emotions all while enhancing his natural abilities for rational, abstract, logical thought—Richard had kept himself from being consumed by a grief so strong that, in its own way, would have deformed and ultimately destroyed him. Much like the Lost vampires, he would have given himself over to the extravagance of his emotions to the point that they ruled his every move. Instead, Turned by Thomas, Richard had then been tutored in his new life: Thomas taught him which animals held the best blood for his new Turned appetite, yes, but also showed him how he could eat his former foods in order to stretch out the time between these feedings. And Thomas, with Richard’s help, built an economic empire that knit together the human and magic worlds, all with the intent of ridding the world of the Lost.
Until suddenly it seemed that Thomas had rejected that original goal, or modified it somehow. He stepped away, leaving Richard on his own. Richard hadn’t mourned the loss—he’d been too driven, too rational, to worry about any effects such a change may have had on a personal level. He’d simply continued.
Until he met Cass.
And now Cass had sought out Thomas instead of staying with Richard.
Somehow, her leaving him at this particular point in time hurt Richard far worse than Thomas’s previous departure, even though he and Thomas had shared centuries, while he and Cass had shared … well, not much in terms of time. But an infinite amount more in terms of intimacy. The thought rose unbidden, and Richard shut it down instinctively, a habit he had cultivated—logically—since the moment Cass had turned down his proposal.
Richard had no idea how Thomas’s skills in the technicalities of Turning could help Cass in any way as she sought to regain her strength. Cass needed more life in her, not some sort of interrupted death.
Slowly, Richard became aware that his computer had gone to sleep. He was not writing emails today apparently. He shoved himself back from his desk and stood up in a single, fluid motion and then proceeded to head toward the elevator with the notion of taking a walk.
Richard pressed the button.
He would simply have to wait for Red’s next report. The thought made Richard slightly uneasy. While it was true that Maya only hired the very best in personal security, and that she motivated Red through an extremely generous benefits package (vision and dental had a way of making all sorts of people loyal these days), it was Richard, and not Maya, who had picked up Red—bootless—in the snow and seen her impressive fury at having been played by Cass. And it was Richard, not Maya, who had seen Red’s face when she returned to the chateau after Gertrude had stabilized at the hospital. There was something in Red’s eager acceptance of Maya’s assignment to track down and return Cassa that made Richard’s stomach turn. Still, Richard felt certain Red wouldn’t disobey a direct order.
Just as he felt certain Cass would continue to evade Red’s attempts to bring her back.
Back to Richard. Whom she had left.
The elevator dinged and the sleek chrome door slid open.
Richard entered. Moments later, the elevator slid noiselessly down the taut cable to the bustling street below; he exited and began to lose himself in the crowd.
17
ONCE THEY WERE in the suite, Thomas laid Cass on the bed.
Before she could pull off Red’s boots, she was dead to the world. Her body and mind were wrung out. She’d used up all of her reserves to make it this far.
She was out for nearly twenty-four hours straight, sliding between sleep and the scrolling white noise of her timesickness.
Thomas stayed by her side. Atlantis wandered in and out.
Intermittently, Cass would wake over the next few days, eat some of the food Thomas had brought for her, and then pass out again.
It would take their cruise ship the better part of a week to reach Spain. There was no hurry. Thomas let her rest.
On the evening of the fourth day, Cass woke feeling—at least for the moment—anchored in the present. She felt like a fever had broken. Her stomach rumbled with hunger. Thomas was nowhere to be seen.
Cass rolled out of bed and stretched, reaching for the ceiling and standing on her toes. Her muscles felt sore and weak, but they also felt, refreshingly, like muscles. She found a sandwich and some fruit on the table and downed it all in a few bites. Her skin felt sticky and her clothes smelled ripe. She was still wearing Richard’s shirt and jogging pants. Except for removing her boots, Thomas had left her as she was.
Cass headed to the bathroom, peeling off layers of pasty clothes and turned on the shower as hot as she could bear. She stood in the water for a long time. When she got out, she couldn’t stand the idea of putting those clothes back on, so she settled for the bathrobe on the back of the bathroom door.
Cass poured herself a glass of water and stepped out onto the balcony. The night was clear and the air was cool but, after her steaming shower, it felt good. Cass could hear laughter coming from the main decks, but things were starting to wind down on the ship. She took a sip of her drink and tilted back her head and looked at the stars.
A pair of security guards passed by on the deck beneath her.
“I’m glad to see you up,” Thomas said, startling her.
Cass jumped a little and dropped her drink over the side of the railing. She watched it tumble, dumping its contents onto the head of one guard and cracking the other on the shoulder. The wet one cried out and looked upward. The other one looked like his feelings were hurt. Cass stepped back from the edge of the balcony and tried to stifle the laugh that unexpectedly bubbled up.
“It’s especially good to hear you laugh,” Thomas said. “When people lose track of the present and get swallowed up by the past or the future, the first thing they lose is the ability to laugh.”
That rang true to Cass. And it did feel good to laugh again.
“My dad used to sneak up on me like that,” Cass said, sitting on the edge of a lounge chair. “He would just appear out of nowhere and continue a conversation we’d been having the day before, expecting me to remember what we had been talking about.”
Now that she’d said this out loud, she realized that Thomas reminded her of her father in more ways than one.
His calm reserve, his scholarly demeanor, his willingness to sit at her bedside while she was sick, his age and salt and pepper hair. Cass had no trouble
imagining Thomas buried deep in the reading chair in his secret library, cut off from the world, enjoying a book and a drink in his cardigan sweater.
At the thought of her father’s cardigan sweater, Cass realized again how much she missed him. The feeling overwhelmed her.
She wondered what he was doing right now. And she wondered how he would react if she ever found the occasion—and the courage—to tell him about Rose. She honestly didn’t know. Beneath the sweater, he’d always been a mystery to her, a cipher, like Thomas.
Her dad wasn’t here, but Thomas was. She could, at least, try to learn more about him.
Thomas was gazing out over the railing at the wine-dark sea. The moon was round and fat on the horizon.
“I’m grateful for your help,” Cass began. “Though, to be honest, I don’t know anything about you ... not really.”
Thomas turned back to her.
“I have something for you,” he said. “And then we can go for a walk and work on your questions.”
A shopping bag of some clothes lay on the table in their room. Cass stepped into the jeans and pulled on a t-shirt and hoodie. Everything fit perfectly.
They left the room and walked a circuit on the main deck of the ship.
Cass waited for Thomas to find a place to begin. They were a quarter of the way around the loop before he did.
“I was a wealthy merchant. I was constantly traveling. And, most importantly, I was as deeply invested in gathering knowledge as I was money.”
A party of six men in their eighties, all in Speedos, passed them going in the opposite direction.
Cass could only hope they were headed for the pool.
“The world was a more mysterious place back then. We barely understood any of it. Hell, we’d barely seen any of it. And I was hungry for knowledge of every kind. Especially for knowledge of the arcane.”
An officer of the ship stepped out onto the deck and Thomas deftly steered them around a corner and out of sight.
“It was clear to me that knowledge was power. I wanted to know how to bend the world to my will. I wanted to know how to command it. And, most of all, I wanted to know how to master my own body and control my own passions and emotions. So, on my travels, I would meet with any scholar or mystic or alchemist or magician I could find. I would test them all, compare what they said, and extract whatever information proved true and useful.”
Thomas steered them back onto the outer ring of the deck. In the moonlight, his profile was sharp and his expression was intense. Cass had no trouble believing that he had been—and in some ways still was—a ravenous seeker.
“The deeper I went into this arcane world, the more I heard one name mentioned again and again. Sources who lived thousands of miles apart, effectively located on different sides of the world, would talk about a shadowy figure named ‘Judas.’”
Though she knew it was coming, Cass still flinched a little when Thomas finally mentioned his name.
“So I tracked him down. I knew there must be something to him. No reputation spreads that far and runs that deep without something substantial behind it. The first time I saw him, I knew I was right. When we met, Judas, too, saw something in me. I had the kind of connections and resources that could be useful to him. We collaborated for more than a decade and I funded all manner of his projects and experiments—without, at the time, knowing their full scope.”
Cass’s concentration was momentarily broken as a group of six women in their eighties, all in bikinis, overtook them from behind. Watching them speedwalk down the deck in the moonlight, joking and laughing, Cass couldn’t decide if she wanted them to cross paths with the old men or not. Then she realized that Thomas was looking at her expectantly. She nodded quickly.
“Then I discovered that I was dying. My body was cannibalizing itself. Cancer, I know now. I knew that Judas had been hiding deep secrets from me. I knew there was more to his work than he had revealed. I confronted him and demanded to know the truth. He just laughed. But then he got serious, took my measure for a minute, and told me the story I told you when we first met. Finally, in light of the revelation that he was a ‘vampire,’ he made me an offer.”
Cass was riveted. They’d reached the prow of the ship and stopped. Thomas’s voice grew more quiet and his eyes became distant and unfocused.
“He’d come close to perfecting the process we now call ‘Turning’: of creating hybrid vampires who were so coolly rational that, rather than being threatened by their emotions as the Lost were, they instead had their emotions severely dampened in order to more fully access their rational selves. Such an imbalance is itself a different kind of impairment than that of the Lost, but it is one that may be borne more readily while living on in this world. In me, Judas saw the perfect test subject: someone who was highly motivated and who had already spent a lifetime seeking after and preparing for a moment of transformation like this.”
Cass realized she was holding her breath, as if she didn’t already know how the story turned out.
“It worked,” Thomas said. “Judas Turned me and my death became a door back into this world rather than a passage to someplace else.”
Thomas let go of the railing and straightened up, ready to move on.
“I spent the next two hundred years working with Judas, helping to perfect the process of Turning, selectively offering it to a handful of prime candidates, and helping Judas to choose sites for hubs and ‘build out’ the infrastructure for the Underside. I am intimately familiar with the plumbing that made the Underside the bustling, parallel world it is now.”
“And that,” Cass cut in, “is why you’re confident that you can cure my timesickness?”
“If we can secure the materials we need and make it to the original Underside site in Jerusalem,” Thomas replied, “then I am quite confident that you will be able to cure yourself.”
Cass nodded. She could live with that.
Thomas reached out and gave Cass’s elbow a reassuring squeeze in a way that again reminded her of her dad. It was exactly the kind of awkwardly parental gesture that her father specialized in.
She wondered again what he was doing right now.
Almost certainly he was at home in his chair with a book.
18
GARY COULDN’T BELIEVE that he was about to lose an arm wrestling match to a stick-thin hundred-year-old woman. He was even older and weaker than he thought. Sweat popped on his forehead. In her velvet track suit, the woman looked pleased with herself. She was smirking and calmly applying more and more pressure, securing better and better leverage. Gary’s arm began to waver. He ground his molars together, looking for some hidden well of strength. He wasn’t sure there was one.
Gary and Dogen had gone to see the Oracle in the London hub. Gary had dried Dogen out, flushing him with pots of coffee, a long cold shower, and a serious night of sleep.
Dogen looked like himself again. Standing behind Gary in the Oracle’s little shop, Dogen dwarfed everything around him. He made the room look like some trick of perspective was in play that made everything appear—Gary and the old woman included—a third smaller than it should. Every muscle in Dogen’s body was tensed and the veins in his forearms bulged as if he were the one fighting.
Dogen had offered to take this arm wrestling match, but the Oracle had refused. She was the one who set the price for her services. What she wanted today was an arm wrestling match, and she wanted it with Gary. Gary had sized her up and agreed. If he won, she would help. If she won—well, they would see what he might be willing to give.
Gary had agreed. How hard could it be?
The old woman bore down on him. Her eyes were like lasers, piercing into his own. The sleeve of her crushed velvet track jacket slipped down her bony arm and revealed a wrinkled tattoo: a wreath of laurels with a ribbon curling through it that bore the words “1912 Women’s Arm Wrestling World Champion.”
Hanging on for dear life, Gary groaned when he saw it. The Oracle, though, just smiled a
t him and batted her eyes.
Gary jumped a little in his seat and almost lost it altogether when, under the table, he felt her toes caress his calf and start to inch their way up the inside of his thigh.
Gary swallowed hard and brushed her foot away with his free hand.
He had to think about Cass. There was no plan B. If he didn’t win this match, the Oracle wouldn’t help him. And if the Oracle didn’t help him, he would never track Cass down in time.
He could feel deep in his gut that Cass’s situation was desperate. She needed him.
But what could he do? How could he pull this off?
As he had demonstrated in the bar, Gary had only ever been good at one particular kind of spell: he could cause objects to spontaneously change places. This had never seemed to be an especially useful skill, especially compared to what Rose and Miranda could do, so he’d always kept himself on the sidelines, always positioning himself in the role of the scholar and sidekick. But today, if he was going to save this match, he would need to find a way to leverage that power, in Cass’s best interest.
He racked his mind, frantic for a plan. As the old woman’s foot crept back up his leg, he could think of only one thing to try. It seemed like a terrible idea. But when his elbow began to slip out from underneath him, he knew he had no choice.
He squeezed his eyes shut, whispered the spell to himself, and with a shimmer of green, he swapped his underwear for hers.
Suddenly he was wearing a tight black thong and the Oracle was wearing his tighty-whities.
A look of surprise and confusion immediately registered on the Oracle’s face.
Gary took advantage of her momentary lapse and, with the combined strength of his love for Cass and his old man’s bicep, he went for broke and slammed the woman’s arm down on the table, winning the match.
Dogen, startled by the upset, couldn’t help but cheer.
Gary beamed in victory.
The Oracle shifted around in her seat, a quizzical look on her face as she felt her way into her new briefs. Holding Gary’s eyes and watching him shift uncomfortably in his own chair, she guessed what he’d done.
