by Laura Legend
Cass could feel the cool slab beneath the sheet but, despite the fact that there was obviously nothing under it, couldn’t bring herself to lift the corner.
She rubbed the now fading bruise on her wrist and Thomas’s words echoed again in her head.
Run. Don’t trust them. They can’t heal you.
Given what Thomas had revealed about his relationship to her mother, Cass wondered if that advice might not also apply to Thomas himself.
“Cass,” Thomas called. “Over here.”
Cass joined him at the far end of a workbench hewn from the wall. He’d just finished writing a note that he folded twice and then slid into his pocket. Cass was about to ask what he had there when he diverted her attention.
“What we need is in here.”
Thomas pointed to a dark hole in the rock about nine inches in diameter. Cass couldn’t tell how deep it went, but it was deeper than she could see inside at a glance.
“You’ll need to reach your hand in there.”
Cass arched both her eyebrows in disbelief.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” she said. “There’s no way I’m blindly sticking my hand into some mystery hole in a creepy vampire nightmare lab.”
“The hole isn’t an ordinary hole—”
“Damn right,” Cass interrupted.
“It’s ‘keyed’ to what the person reaching into it needs. To get what you need, you have to be the one to reach inside.”
Cass frowned.
“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of,” she said as she rolled up her sleeve. “Harry Potter got a whole damn room of requirement,” she grumbled. “Why do I only get some tiny hole in a rock?”
But, again, what did she have to lose at this point?
Cass took a deep breath and plunged her hand in up to her shoulder, feeling around inside the hole. Her fingers caught on a piece of fabric. She pulled the object out and held it up in the beam of Thomas’s flashlight.
She’d fished out a pair of Zach’s black boxers.
Thomas looked amused.
“What is—”
“That’s none of your business,” Cass said, folding the underwear and tucking them gingerly into her back pocket.
Thomas didn’t say anything.
Cass reached back into the hole, groping deeper into the unknown. This time she felt something rough and squishy, definitely organic. She steeled herself, closed her hand around it, and pulled it out.
She opened her hand in the light of the beam.
In her hand sat the ugliest, bluest, most wart-covered toad she’d ever seen in her life.
“Perfect,” Thomas said, “that’s exactly what we came for.”
27
JUST BEFORE DAWN, Gary found himself looking through the side window of the house in Corinth.
Dogen crowded behind him, trying to steal a look of his own, and accidentally pressed Gary flat against the siding.
Filled as it was with empty beer bottles and broken furniture, the vibe of the room did not jive with the classical music wafting from the stereo.
“I love this part of the third movement,” Dogen said, caught up in the swelling melody, his eyes closed.
Gary squeezed out from between Dogen and the house. Regardless of the music, the room itself was empty. There was no sign of Cass. And the sun would soon be up.
They returned to the front door and found it unlocked. Gary opened it as slowly and quietly as he could manage. He winced as it quietly creaked on rusty hinges.
Behind him, Dogen sneezed loud enough to set dogs down the street barking.
Dogen, for his all strength, was no master of ninja-like stealth.
Gary shushed him.
“Sorry,” Dogen said, too loud.
They entered the house. Dogen had to turn sideways and duck his head to fit through the door. It was obvious—especially from the smell—that the house hadn’t been lived in for years. Whoever had been here last night was squatting, not residing.
Gary picked his way through the garbage on the floor, holding his hat over his mouth to filter the air.
He did not find the idea of Thomas leading Cass here reassuring. Had Thomas led her into a trap? Why would he bring her here? And who else had been here first?
Gary’s streaming internal monologue of worry and worst case scenarios was interrupted by the sound of people angrily shouting in the back of the house. He couldn’t make out exactly what they were saying, but he could make out the f-word in at least three different languages.
“Cass!” Gary said, running for the back door.
Before he could get very far, though, Dogen clapped a hand on his shoulder and brought him up short.
“Let’s be careful here, friend,” Dogen said. “We don’t know who’s back there or what’s going on.”
“The Oracle said that we could cross paths with Cass at this location. That’s why we came. If she’s in trouble, I’m not wasting any time.”
Gary shrugged off Dogen’s huge hand and, kicking bottles out of the way, made for the back door.
Dogen followed. He couldn’t argue with that.
Gary burst out the backdoor and into the rocky backyard between the house and the entrance to the cave. The yard was filled with ten angry vampires. At the sight of Gary and Dogen, everyone in the yard froze.
A fellow in a leather jacket with “Renegade Lost Vampires” stitched across the back wheeled around to face them.
“Back to the scene of the crime?” he demanded accusingly. “And look what you’ve done! You’ve slaughtered our best poker dealer!”
Gary was still trying to process the jacket’s stitching, rainbows, and unicorn. He couldn’t begin to imagine how poker fit into this scenario.
Gary fired back.
“You’re really a bunch of renegade Lost vampires? And you had it stitched onto the back of a leather jacket? That’s like getting a tattoo that says ‘got cut from the JV squad’ as a badge of honor.”
The renegade’s pale face turned red with anger. He flicked his sunglasses off his forehead and down over his eyes.
Gary suspected he’d touched a nerve with the crack about getting cut from the JV squad. Those kinds of emotional wounds often ran deep.
Gary continued, lowering his voice and aiming for menacing. “Now, where is Cassandra Jones? And what have you done with her?”
“What did we do with her?” the man shouted. “She’s right behind you, old man!”
The man in the jacket pointed at a figure on the porch behind Dogen and Gary. A hulking woman with bright red hair stood there, dressed in combat gear. She had to be at least 6’5”.
And, curiously, she wore no shoes on her comparatively tiny feet.
“She’s not with you?” Gary asked.
“I thought she was with you, old man,” the renegade retorted.
The woman, for her part, didn’t say anything. She just drew two curved swords from their sheaths, leapt from the deck, and unceremoniously sliced off a vampire’s head. The ash floated slowly to the ground in the gray morning light.
“Well, I guess that settles it,” Dogen opined. “She’s with us.”
From there, all hell broke loose.
Dogen barreled into a loose knot of three or four vampires, bulling some over and batting others aside.
When three simultaneously came after her, the woman smiled like she’d just been crowned queen at the Miss Mercenary Pageant. She sharpened her blades against each other and stood her ground.
The leader, though, went straight for Gary.
From his belt, Gary pulled a nine-inch hunting knife and braced for impact. His heart pounded violently in his chest and he found himself wishing he’d done more cardio, like his doctor always entreated.
Still, he didn’t think that this fight would be decided by the strength of their bodies alone—if so, he was done for—but by the strength of their wills. And, on that count, he had a distinct advantage.
He was fighting for something, someone
, that mattered more to him than his own life.
Mr. Renegade dove right for Gary, hoping to tackle him to the ground. Gary made himself wait until, at the last moment, he stepped lightly aside. The vampire only connected with a glancing blow, but, raking his half-feral claws across Gary’s chest, he drew blood.
The vampire rolled back to his feet. Gary had managed to stay on his. The smell of his own blood shocked his body into the kind of four alarm state that he hadn’t felt in decades.
The cuts burned like hell, but Gary felt alive. He felt strong.
Bloody and angry, he felt, frankly, young.
On the periphery of his vision, Gary saw Dogen smash some poor vampire wearing a terry cloth rainbow headband into the ground. He switched his grip on his knife and beckoned his sunglass-wearing opponent to come for him again.
The guy bared his teeth and snarled.
Gary knew what to do this time.
Mr. Renegade didn’t show any signs of learning from his failed first attempt. He was just going to leap straight for the throat again.
He took two loping strides forward. But as he was about to launch himself, Gary’s eyes twinkled green and he swapped the guy’s sunglasses for his companion’s rainbow headband.
Too late to stop his own momentum, the vampire stumbled forward, blinded by the headband, and fell at Gary’s feet. All Gary had to do was drop a knee into the vampire’s chest and stake him through the heart with the hunting knife.
Ash.
Gary took a look around, assessing the situation. There were only two other vampires left. Dogen wound up, punted one into the air, and Miss Mercenary 2018 took its head off mid-stride.
The remaining vampire was over the fence and halfway down the street before his companion’s ashes had settled.
The morning sky was purple, tinged with red.
Gary and Dogen turned to consider the woman.
She wiped off her blades and returned them to their sheaths.
Dogen dusted off his hands.
Gary leaned over, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. It was hard work feeling alive when you were sixty.
“I’m here to help,” the woman said. “My name is Red. Richard and Kumiko sent me to find Cass.”
Gary nodded, hands on his hips now.
“You’re Dogen,” Red added. “Everyone knows you.”
Dogen shrugged.
“But who are you, old timer?”
Gary wiped with the sweat from his forehead with an old red handkerchief.
“A friend of the family,” Gary said. Though he was grateful for her help, he wasn’t sure how far to trust her.
The door to the cave was open. They stepped into the antechamber and found a lot of ash and playing cards.
“It looks like Cass has already been here,” Dogen said, drawing his finger through a pile of ash on the table.
A door with an elaborate locking mechanism stood ajar. Gary examined the apparatus and rocked the door on its hinges. A hint of a smile played across his face as he imagined Cass cracking the code.
“Yes, it does,” he said. “Yes, it does.”
Red followed Gary and Dogen into the lab.
But it was empty.
Gary leaned against the table, unsure of where to go from here. This place was their one solid lead. Without something else to go on, it would be a dead end.
“Well, what now?” Red asked.
“I don’t have a clue,” Gary said blackly.
Dogen held up a folded piece of paper he’d found on the counter.
“I’ve got a clue,” he said to Gary, holding up the note. “It even has your name on it.”
He handed it to Gary. “Gary Jones” was written on the outside in a beautiful, flowing script. Inside was a note from Thomas, urging Gary to meet them in Jerusalem at the Temple Mount. They would need his help.
Gary read the note aloud.
Could he trust Thomas? They didn’t have anything else to go on.
But while he was still thinking it through, Red turned the tables on them.
“Thank you for your help,” Red said, standing outside the lab door. “I couldn’t have done it without you. Now if you’ll excuse me, your daughter and I have a little score to settle.”
Then, before either of them could move, Red slammed the door shut and bolted it from the outside.
All three crossbars clunked into place with an ominous note of finality.
28
IT WAS SO late it was early.
Thomas found them a cheap room in a seedy motel in Jerusalem. He grabbed some amazing shawarma from a little shop across the street whose tattered pale blue awning had seen better days. They ate in silence.
Cass found herself wondering why she didn’t have shawarma for breakfast every day.
By the time they’d finished, though, Cass was exhausted. She took a long look at the skeezy bed and tried to convince herself that she was tired enough to crawl inside those covers. Instead, she kept imagining what a UV light would reveal. So, with socks and boots still on, she laid her coat on top of the bedspread, curled up in a tight ball, and crashed until late in the afternoon.
When she woke, the sun was already low on the horizon and the shadows were long. She felt nearly as gray and tired as she had been before but, given that she didn’t feel worse, she was going to take it as a win.
She sat up. Thomas was in a chair by the door. The door was open and the evening breeze was cool. Though the motel was a nightmare, their room did offer a stunning view of the old city in the fading evening light. The worn, pale Jerusalem stone was punctuated by the fading red of terra cotta roofs and the occasional green slash of pine, cypress, and olive trees. Thomas was looking out at the skyline, hands in his lap, posture erect. He looked like he’d been sitting there for ages and like he could sit there, unmoving, for ages more.
Just the sight of him—so quiet and alert—made Cass feel more grounded in the present.
Thomas’s gaze, though, was distant. If Cass hadn’t known that he was virtually immortal, she would have thought that he looked like someone preparing to die.
“Are you ready to work?” he asked softly without looking over his shoulder.
Cass glanced at the blue toad.
“Maybe?” Cass said.
The blue toad they had retrieved from Judas’s lab sat in a Tupperware bowl on the table. Holes had been poked into the top for air.
When Thomas turned to face her, Cass could see that he had been holding the banded stack of her mother’s letters in his lap. He hefted the stack of thirty or so envelopes as if he was weighing their import.
The sight of them made Cass uneasy and reminded her, before she’d even had a chance to fully wake up, that she wasn’t sure what she knew about Thomas or what she believed about his theories of redemption—or, in the end, about her mother’s attempts to prove those theories true.
A thousand competing threads of love and betrayal, of dreams and losses, all intersected in those pages. Her mother, her father, Kumiko, Miranda, Richard, Zach, Judas. Cass didn’t dare hope that she would ever be able to untangle all of those snarled lines.
How would she ever know what to do? It was so much easier to be decisive when all the lines were drawn in a firm black and white. Back when being a seer meant just that: seeing the truth of things. But the further in she went, the fuzzier the truth seemed to be.
Thomas left the letters on the table and picked up the bowl with the toad.
Right, Cass though to herself. I forgot. I don’t have to figure out what to do. The toad is going to sort this all out for me.
“The toad,” Thomas began, “secretes a psychedelic compound.”
He pulled off the lid and picked up the toad. It squirmed a little in his hands. And though Cass knew it was an old wives tale, she couldn’t help but worry that Thomas was going to end up with warts. For his part, the toad stopped squirming and peed on Thomas’s hand instead. The urine trickled down his arm, off his elbow, and
onto the carpet. Thomas, unperturbed, wiped it off his arm with a tissue. Neither he nor Cass moved to clean up the floor.
Cass figured it was a fair bet that some psychedelic toad urine might actually improve the motel carpet’s level of hygiene.
Thomas pushed ahead.
“Psychedelic compounds are useful for stripping away ego and accessing the deeper, unconscious portions of the mind. And, because they open a door into the basement of your mind, they can also help you access the timeless infrastructure that sits beneath the Underside. That timeless, archetypal place is, of course, where you’ll need to go to pop your own experience of time back into joint.”
The toad looked up at Cass with big, sad eyes.
“Okay,” Cass said. “I think I’m clear on the theory. How does it work in practice?”
“We’ll experiment first with a smaller dose to give you a feel for how the psychedelic trip works. Then tomorrow we’ll repeat the trip, but in the heart of the Underside beneath the Temple Mount.”
Cass nodded along.
“For the trip to be maximally effective, it’s crucial to pay close attention to ‘set and setting.’ Your own, initial mind ‘set’ is a crucial factor in whether the trip is liberating or terrifying. If you’re open to whatever the experience brings, you’ll succeed. If you fight what you find there, you’ll be in for a rough ride. In this sense, the key to a good psychedelic trip is to surrender to the experience.”
Richard, Cass remembered, had been urging her to do the same thing. But surrendering didn’t come naturally to her. Even when it was Richard asking.
“In addition to your mind ‘set,’ the ‘setting’ in which you take the drug can be also be massively influential. To achieve what we hope to achieve—to heal you—you’ll need the right mindset, the right setting beneath the Temple Mount, and the right person to be at your side guiding you. If you don’t trust your guide the whole experiment will fall apart.”
That last part might be tricky, Cass reflected, given, well, everything.
The toad croaked. His big, sad eyes seemed even bigger and sadder. Cass couldn’t shake the impression that his croaking sounded uncannily human.
