by Laura Legend
He stepped reflexively over the remains of an unfortunate pigeon, eyes looking past the decay at his feet and into his own past.
He knew what awaited Cassandra Jones in Corinth. He remembered the hidden rooms, the bubbling mixtures, and the solid slab of rock.
Richard had gone to Corinth to die, and in dying, halt his transformation from human to vampire, from man to Lost.
People in Corinth were Turned.
No! Richard shouted to himself, refusing to consider the possibility. Whatever Cass needed, Richard was absolutely certain that the “cure” Thomas could provide in Corinth was not the solution.
He weighed the idea of racing through the Underside halfway around the world to show up unexpectedly and put a stop to whatever it was Thomas had convinced Cass to try.
I can’t give up on him. Cass had been clear in that last conversation they’d had. She was not surrendering anything. She was fighting. And even if Richard didn’t understand the illness she was fighting right now, he knew Cass, and he trusted her. He had to trust her in this—Cassandra Jones would make choices and decisions he didn’t understand, or even agree with, and he, Richard, would trust her. That was his choice, and he would walk with it until it had settled firmly in whatever remained of his soul.
Richard took in a deep breath and felt the cold crystallize against his lungs. He trusted Cass, and she would come to him when she was ready. His heartbeat sped up as he turned the corner. Richard kept walking.
22
THEY PARKED DOWN the road from the site. Cass felt like she was enjoying a residual bump from exercising her powers in the vision. She hopped out of the car with a rare bounce in her step and retrieved her sword.
Thomas smiled.
“Good nap?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Cass said, trying to put together what she’d just seen in her vision with the man standing in front of her now. “Something like that.”
She’d seen Thomas in both visions. Once with Judas and once with her mother. The company he kept was not impressing her.
But both visions had, in the end, led her back to trusting him. For better or worse, Thomas seemed to be at the center of this web, tying all the threads together. She would have to see it through if she hoped to discover the pattern they ultimately formed.
Atlantis, for his part, was also ready to go. He gave himself a good shake, repuffed his deflated fur, and bolted ahead of them. He evidently knew where they were going and had his own plans to attend to.
Thomas led the way. As they neared the site, Cass was surprised to find that she recognized it. Though the surrounding area had changed dramatically, the rest of the compound remained surprisingly intact: Thomas had brought them to the site of the medieval lab where, in her first vision, Cass saw him laid out on a slab.
This was getting interesting.
They approached the main entrance first. The compound still consisted of a house and some scattered outbuildings, all encircled by a shoulder-high stone wall and abutting the rocky ridge that marked the rear boundary of the site. Cass felt sure that, eventually, Thomas was going to lead her down into those caves where Judas had set up his lab.
The “materials” they needed to cure her must be in there.
The house, though, was bustling with activity. The lights were on and death metal was blasting through the open windows. They hopped a wall and snuck around the side. Through a window they saw that the squatting tenants were a band of Lost vampires. Seven or eight of them lounged in the squalid living room. Empty beer bottles littered every surface. An old wooden table prominently displayed an enormous keg.
It might have been harder to tell for sure if they were vampires if some of them hadn’t shown clear signs of going feral. Or if the topic of conversation in the room hadn’t been the Heretic— how much they hated her and how glad they were to be out from under her thumb. To top it off, one of them wore a leather jacket that had “Renegade Lost Vampires” stitched across the back above the paired images of a rainbow and a unicorn.
That last part especially sealed the deal for Cass.
“They’re renegade Lost vampires,” Thomas whispered.
“Yeah, I picked up on that,” Cass replied.
She was ready to move on—they didn’t actually need to get into the house—when Atlantis showed up in the middle of the party.
“Shit,” Cass spat, clutching Thomas by the arm and pulling him back to the window.
They both watched as Atlantis threaded his way through the chaos, knocking over beer bottles and rubbing up against legs and generally making a ruckus, leaving a trail of “Hey!” and “What the hell?” in his wake. Eventually he also brushed past the stereo and, with a flick of his tail, changed the station from the screech and roar of death metal to a live performance of Mozart’s Requiem.
As soon as the music changed, the uproar Atlantis had created went silent and every head in the room swiveled toward the stereo. The mournful strains of the music filled the room, and every Renegade Lost Vampire among them settled back into their seat, contemplative, listening with rapt attention.
Atlantis sat next to the stereo, watching what he had wrought.
After a full two minutes of pin-drop silence and full-body listening, the vampire with the jacket whispered that he’d known Mozart back in the day.
“We were mates,” he claimed. “Drinking buddies.”
Nobody cared. They all immediately shushed him and turned back to the music.
“Fine,” he said, stage whispering now. “Be that way. I’ve gotta take a piss.”
And with that, he banged through the rear screen door and around the side of the house. He already had his zipper down and his equipment out by the time he looked up, midstream, and saw Cass and Thomas crouched by the window.
“For what it’s worth, I think it’s amazing that you knew Mozart,” Cass said as she swept his leg and staked him in the heart with her sword. His body dissolved into ash, much of it settling into the pool of urine he’d only just started to make.
“Nice work,” Thomas said.
Cass nodded, but she felt a little sad. Had she just killed the last person on earth who’d personally known Mozart? If so, the world was a poorer place for it.
Thomas gestured in the direction they needed to go. Cass followed along. They came to the last of the outbuildings and stopped, hearing voices around the corner.
Thomas looked back at her, a finger to his lips. In the pale moonlight, he looked uncannily like a cadaver, and Cass couldn’t help but flash on the image of him, laid out on the slab with Judas attending.
Another knot of four vampires was camped out around the entrance to the cave. They had a fire going and their own supply of beer in coolers. They didn’t look like they were going anywhere anytime soon.
Thomas took Cass by the arm and pointed in the opposite direction, back along the ridge.
“This isn’t a problem,” he said, “I know where the backdoor is.”
23
THEY CIRCLED WIDE of the campfire vampires to the far end of the ridge in which the caves were embedded. The evening’s fat moon granted them plenty of light.
The “backdoor,” though, was covered in a loose avalanche of rubble. Thomas offered to let Cass sit while he cleared a path but, tired as she was, she was more sick of sitting and even more sick of being waited on. She rolled up her sleeves, ignored the gathering pain in her weak eye, and started moving rocks. Within ten minutes, she’d worked up a good sweat and her arms began to ache with that welcome swelling that followed a work out. Twenty minutes in, they’d almost cleared the entrance and Cass felt like she’d just participated in the most meaningful work she’d completed in a month.
Nothing like moving rocks from one spot to another to make you feel like you’ve accomplished something. She made a mental note to try moving rocks around more often when she got home.
Beneath the rubble they found what Thomas had been looking for: a vertical shaft that had been boarded u
p with thick wood and serious nails.
“Perfect,” Thomas said as he bent down and casually pulled the boards free.
Watching him, Cass was reminded that, despite his mild appearance, she really had no idea how strong he was or what he was capable of doing. If push came to shove, could she take him in a fight? Even on a good day she couldn’t be sure that answer was yes. Hopefully, she would never have to find out.
Thomas pulled a flashlight out of his bag and took a look down the shaft. Cass took a look over his shoulder. The shaft went straight down for about twenty feet before turning at a right angle and tunneling under the ridge.
“You jump first and let me know how it goes,” Cass said.
Thomas, though, had already pulled a length of rope from his bag.
“Are you an eagle scout, or what?” Cass teased.
“I try to always carry some rope with me. You never know when you might need to tie someone up. And, on occasions like this, it can also be helpful.”
Using the frame to which the boards had been nailed, Thomas tied an elaborate knot in the rope. The rope extended about twelve feet down the shaft and, once they got to the end, they could drop from there.
“Are you okay?” Thomas asked, noticing that Cass had pressed the heel of her hand against her weak eye.
He already had a hold of the rope and was ready to descend.
“No trouble,” Cass said, blinking rapidly and ignoring the pain. “We are a ‘go.’”
Thomas went over the side and, when he reached the bottom, disappeared down the tunnel. Cass followed. She dangled for a moment at the end of the rope, wondering if she should bother to register this situation as some elaborate metaphor for her life, then figured she was too tired for metaphors and dropped to the sandy floor.
Thomas had already moved on without her. She could hear him up ahead but couldn’t see him. It didn’t matter much, though. It wasn’t like there were any other directions to go.
Cass flicked on her own flashlight and started down the passage. It was narrow, barely tall enough for her to stand up straight, braced with old timber, and filled with debris. So long as it didn’t eventually taper to a death-inducing crack in the wall that would trap her forever, she could deal with it.
Halfway down the passage, Cass came across a skeleton dressed in armor. From the style, she would have guessed that the armor was French, maybe thirteenth-century. The skull’s empty sockets stared up at her. Inky shadows appeared to pool unnaturally around the warrior’s bones, moving of their own accord.
Cass moved on. This was no time for sightseeing. And she had no desire to give those shadows time to gather themselves into some more recognizable form.
The next ten feet involved nothing more difficult than chopping her way through the curtains of cobwebs that Thomas’s own passage hadn’t cleared so much as tangled. Cass paused for a moment, trying to strain the webs from her face and hair, when she heard a conspicuous rattling of metal and bones in the passage behind her.
She flashed her light back in that direction but couldn’t see anything more than cobwebs. She held her breath, listening. When she didn’t hear anything else, she hurried on, trying to catch up with Thomas.
But as she continued to fight through the webs and debris, she couldn’t quite shake the feeling that the skeleton was indeed following her, creeping along behind her, making small noises but stopping every time she stopped.
Nearing what felt like the tunnel’s end, Cass could have sworn she’d even felt its warm breath on her neck, accompanied by a voice that whispered her name.
“Cass—” it whispered, its voice uncannily similar to Zach’s, “Cass—”
This time, Cass spun around with her sword in hand. Her flashlight flickered. A gust of air pushed through the shaft, setting every cobweb aflutter. The skeleton reared up from out of the darkness, full of sticky shadows and sharp, clacking nails.
Cass, rather than retreating, threw her shoulder into the monster and, with a clash of bones and armor, rammed it against the tunnel wall. When she pulled back, however, it latched onto her, hooking her clothing with bent ribs and sharp claws. Cass took a step backward, hoping to put some distance between them but, when she tried plant to her back foot, she found only ... nothing. Behind her, the shaft dropped abruptly.
Her arms pinwheeled in the air but it was too late. She was going over the side.
The skeleton still clung to her. As they fell, Cass decided that she could at least make sure that her new friend bore the brunt of their impact. She twisted her body and they crashed onto the ground. Their impact caused the skeleton to explode into a thousand pieces, bones scattered in all directions. Cass, coughing from all the dust, rolled away from the debris and found when she came to a rest that though the shadows were gone, the skull’s empty sockets were still staring at her.
It was hard not to feel like Zach was literally haunting her.
Cass had fallen about six feet. Thomas was waiting for her at the bottom.
“Rough first step,” he said.
“Always,” Cass replied, trying to pull herself together.
The tunnel itself only continued another fifteen feet before it ended in a heavy wooden door. The door was braced shut from their side, as if whoever had last used this tunnel had been trying to keep something locked away on the other side.
Thomas lifted the heavy crossbeam out of its brace and Cass gave the door a hard pull.
The door groaned on its iron hinges and opened to reveal five very surprised vampires playing strip poker.
24
EVERYONE FROZE—CASS, Thomas, and all five vampires.
It looked like a tableau from a kinky parody of a Norman Rockwell illustration. But instead of a comedic pack of dogs playing around a cozy poker table, there was a comically cliché party of half-naked undead in the antechamber of Judas’s Iscariot’s secret vampire lab.
A still-burning cigarette fell from the mouth of a shirtless man. A beer bottle remained half raised in the hands of the woman next to him. The dealer tossed her next card off the edge of the table. A fourth vampire teetered precariously, balanced on the rear legs of his chair, his arms stretched high in a yawn. And the fifth abruptly stood, knocked over his chair, and lost his unbuckled pants, revealing a pair of red silk boxers.
As the pain in her eye flared, Cass seriously considered just waving politely, pulling the door closed, replacing the crossbeam, and beating a hasty retreat.
But then she thought, What the hell, Jones? Even a pale shadow of a seer ought to be enough to take on this set of scrubs.
“Typical,” the woman with the bottle spat, “just when I start winning, the fucking mod squad shows up.”
Thomas stepped protectively in front of Cass and set his bag on the floor next to the door.
The yawning vampire clapped all four legs of his chair to the stone floor and pointed at Thomas.
“Hey, I know you,” he said, standing. “Everybody knows you. Back from exile, are you? Get tired of playing hermit?” He picked up his chair and smashed it against the floor, breaking it into splinters and hefting two loose legs as weapons. “Well, you should have stayed lost, asshole. We’re sick of you and your bullshit ideas and your little protégé—the “Heretic”. His face contorted with mockery as he spat out his insults. “We came all the way out here to get away from that crap. I’m going to enjoy beating you to pulp.”
That last bit about the Heretic hit Cass like a slap across the face. Did even low-level vampires know that Thomas and the Heretic had worked together? This—taken together with the letters—was definitely something that she and Thomas were going to have to have a chat about.
But not right now.
The chatty, sarcastic vampire cracked the two legs of the broken chair together and started to advance on Thomas. But before he could get very far, the shirtless fellow—with a new cigarette burn—tugged on Chatty’s sleeve and pointed at Cass watching from the shadows behind Thomas.
His eyes were wide and his lower lip trembled.
“S-s-seer,” he stuttered, “Seer!”
“Yeah, I see her alright.” Chatty replied.
He didn’t, though.
Not really.
Cass drew her sword and stepped into the light.
“Oh, shit,” all five of the vampires groaned simultaneously.
After her tournament victory and her slaughter of the undead at the Shield Monastery, every vampire in the world knew what Cass looked like.
Cass adopted a wide stance and swung her sword through a series of broad arcs, trying to look confident and intimidating. It almost worked, too, until, when she tried to draw on her powers, her weak eye shorted the circuit and time began to flicker and roll. Pain shot through her eye and into her brain. Her knees buckled and, as she started to slump toward the floor, she saw hope flash in the eyes of the vampires.
Maybe they weren’t done for after all.
Thomas stepped up, caught Cass around the waist before she could fall, and slung her arm over his shoulder.
The vampires arrayed themselves in a semicircle around the two of them, forcing Cass and Thomas toward the center of the room. The man with the red boxers shoved the old wooden door closed. The dealer stationed herself by the main entrance.
There was nowhere to go.
Cass’s vision was fuzzy, crowded with a fresh wave of white noise. Chatty came at them and took a swing at Thomas’s head with his chair legs.
Thomas—as if he and Cass were waltzing as a couple—spun neatly out of the way. Cass’s vision cleared for a moment and strength momentarily returned to her legs. She used their shared momentum to swing her sword arm and, with a backhanded stroke, took off the guy’s head.
He turned to ash. His chair legs dropped to the floor.
There were four left.
Time flickered for Cass. She was in the room and then she wasn’t.
Present, then absent.
