by Laura Legend
“So, how exactly do we prepare the compound from the toad?” she asked.
Thomas shrugged. “That part is simple. You simply lick the toad along its back. The distance you lick determines the dosage.”
Cass gagged a bit before she could respond. “You, y— … you want me to lick the toad’s back? With my tongue?”
Thomas appeared undisturbed by Cass’s reaction. “Yes, that is correct.” The hint of a smile flashed momentarily in his eyes, and for a brief moment Cass hoped that he was joking. But, like her dad, Thomas was not one prone to unnecessary jokes. He did, however, seem to be amenable to finding the humor in Cass’s current sticky situation.
Before she could reply, the toad croaked again, and this time his cry was longer, trailing off near the end in a manner that reminded her of a child starting to sob.
Was the toad trying to tell her something? Was he begging her to please, for the love of all that toads count as holy, not lick him?
“Tomorrow you’ll need a full dose.” Thomas explained. “But for today, only lick halfway up his back. That should be more than enough to give you a taste.”
“Perfect,” Cass said. “I’ll just get myself a small taste of this sad, warty toad.”
Cass took the slimy creature from Thomas’s hand, closed her eyes, tried to think about literally anything other than licking a toad, and then licked the toad. To Cass’s surprise, it tasted like black licorice and, despite herself, her stomach rumbled hungrily.
Cass lay back on the bed, her hands folded across her chest, and closed her eyes.
Thomas pulled his chair up next to the bed.
As far as Cass could tell, nothing much was happening.
“Just try to relax into it,” Thomas said. “Take slow, deep breaths.”
Cass tried to ignore the bed and the toad and her lingering doubts about Thomas. She tried to forget about her mother and Miranda and Zach and the giant Amazon woman hunting her. She tried to just breath—in and out, in and out.
A wave of colors rolled through her mind, washing over her. She tried to surrender to them.
At first, the waves were warm and pleasant. Over time, though, they kept coming, growing higher and darker and crashing more violently with each iteration.
“Thomas?” Cass ventured. “Are you still there?”
No answer.
A towering black wave broke, slamming into her.
She felt the bed crack in two beneath her.
And then she was falling through the bed and through the floor, falling down, down, down into a basement-like space.
It was pitch black.
“Thomas?” Cass called again, more frightened now.
Then the underground void began to contract all around her, shrinking and shrinking, until Cass felt like she was being buried alive in a box the size of a coffin.
There was hardly room to move her arms or legs.
The air was stifling.
And the only sound she could hear was a distant hammering, like someone up above was nailing shut the lid of her coffin.
29
CASS POUNDED AGAINST the coffin lid, screaming to be let out. Dirt fell through the cracks and into her mouth. She coughed, trying to clear her windpipe. A dull, low ringing filled her ears.
“This isn’t real,” she whispered to herself. “This isn’t real. It’s all just part of the trip.”
The trouble, though, was that it felt real.
A spike of pain shot through Cass’s weak eye. She clapped her hand across it, fighting the burn. In response, the burn grew hotter and brighter until Cass felt her eye combusting. The fire spread into her brain and out through her nervous system and into the rest of her body. And then, to her horror, Cass felt her whole body crumbling—from the outside in—to ash.
First her skin, then her muscles, then her organs, then her bones—until nothing was left but a searing, naked awareness of what she’d just lost.
Beyond the loss of her “self” and her body, this bare awareness persisted. And it persisted without contact or connection to anything outside of itself for what felt like an eternity.
It persisted until, eventually, Cass could feel her nervous system slowly regenerating, growing from this germ of awareness like a root from a split seed, sending out shoots and tendrils that framed a lattice of sensation around which her bones and organs and muscles and skin all regrew in turn.
Then all at once Cass was herself again.
Her eyes flew open and she found herself lying on the floor of a standard Underside hallway.
She was alone.
The concrete floor was cold. The hallway was narrow. A single bare bulb hung halfway down its length.
Cass got to her feet. They were bare.
So, it turned out, were her legs and her arms and the rest of her body.
She crossed her arms and hugged herself, trying to generate some warmth. She took a look down the hallway, checking both directions. As far as she could tell, there was no difference, no reason to prefer one direction over the other.
She started down the hall. Her legs were stiff and weak and awkward, as if she’d never used them before.
When she turned the corner to the next section of hallway, she found that the entire length of it was filled with doors. Every inch of the walls on both sides was completely covered in them—all of them flush with the wall, all of them lacking handles, and all of them marked by a lock that was cold to the touch.
“Holy shit,” Cass said, leaning against the corner for support, trying to take it all in. She’d seen doors like this in a hallway before, but she’d never seen a hallway filled, wall to wall, with such doors.
The bare bulb in the center of the passage flickered and, for a moment, the resulting darkness reached out for her with tentacles and claws.
But after that brief flicker, the bulb shone steady and the shadows retreated as quickly as they’d appeared.
Cass started down the hall of doors, trailing her fingers along beside her, touching each of the cold locks in turn. All of the doors appeared to be locked tight. None of them was ajar and none them responded to her touch.
Cass stepped back from the wall and examined the doors more closely.
When she did, she noticed something else that was different about this hallway: above each door she found a placard, riveted to the wall, with a name. The font used on each placard was Comic Sans.
She couldn’t help but cringe. Her time with Zach had sharpened her sensibilities regarding font design: he had strong opinions, and found Comic Sans, with its crappy letterfit and uneven visual weight, to be practically morally offensive. Being Zach, he had, of course, taken every opportunity to point out inappropriate usage of the offensive typeface, to the point that Cass couldn’t help but notice it every time she saw it. Like now. Facing the seemingly unending hallway and its poorly designed name placards, Cass felt Zach’s absence here like a sharp, dissonant chord interrupting the underlying melody of loss that had been looping inside her unbidden ever since she’d looked into the monster’s eyes and seen Zach looking back at her.
Cass retraced her steps, reading the placards as she went. She recognized every name she saw. Kumiko Miyazaki, Rose Jones, Gary Jones, Donald Trump, Richard York, Beyoncé, Dogen—the list went on, including people she’d known in high school and colleagues from her graduate work.
Cass reached the end of the hallway and turned around to scan the placards on the opposite side. There was one in particular that she needed to find. She couldn’t accept its absence. It was a third of the way down.
“Zachary Riviera.”
In Comic Sans.
This door, though, was visibly different from the rest. The door’s lock wasn’t just cold, the whole door was frozen solid. A thin layer of ice covered the entirety of the door and extended into the cracks between it and the frame, sealing it shut.
Cass slumped to the ground, her back to the door, her knees drawn to her chest. The ice burned against her nake
d skin. A bone-deep shiver traversed her body, causing her to shudder. She rubbed her bare ring finger, worrying that the place where Zach’s woven ring had once marked the promise that bound them.
The grief that Cass had been trying to suppress for so long rose up inside of her like a tidal flood, threatening to break through the improvised dams she’d set into place.
She needed more time.
She needed time to put herself back together, to learn more about what had happened to Zach, and—if necessary—to process his loss.
She just wasn’t ready to deal with this yet.
Cass pressed her cheek against the icy door. The cold leached into her face. It crystallized her warm tears and reached down her spine and into her chest, freezing her grief in place.
The block of ice between her ribs didn’t feel good, but it did feel manageable.
It felt like it would buy her some time.
Perhaps this was itself one last gift from Zach—the ability to bear his loss and, at least for now, keep going?
The lights began to flicker again. The shadows began to pool and ooze toward her.
Cass curled into an even tighter ball and rocked gently back and forth against Zach’s frozen door.
She knew there was nowhere to run. There was nowhere to hide. She’d seen all the doors in the hall. She’d seen all the placards and the names.
And none of those doors were open.
The bare bulb hanging from the ceiling fizzled and popped in one last flash of light.
Then there was darkness again.
And in that creeping darkness, Cass realized that there was one name she hadn’t seen on any of those doors.
There was no door in this hallway that led into Thomas’s mind.
30
CASS WASN’T SURE how long she stayed that way, knees to chest, rocking back and forth in the dark as that single thought looped in her head: there is no door into Thomas’s mind.
But she was sure that this kind of psychedelic trip into the basement of her mind was not going to cure her.
As she waited for the effects of the drug to pass, she let the thought loop continually and focused her own attention on the persistent pain in her weak eye, hoping that if she just kept her eyes closed, nothing bad would be able to reach out of the dark and hurt her.
Eventually the drug’s grip began to loosen and Cass found herself in the corner of their hotel room with her back to the wall and her knees to her chest.
It was night now.
The hotel’s neon sign was reflected in their window. It smelled like a thunder shower had just passed.
Thomas was sitting quietly in his rickety chair by the open door, still as a stone. He was watching her very carefully and, as soon as her eyes opened, he met her gaze.
“Welcome back,” he said. “As difficult as that appeared to be from the outside, I hope you’ve returned with some hard won knowledge.”
Cass stretched out her legs and tried massage some life back into them. She was relieved to find that here, in their hotel room, she was still fully dressed, stolen boots and all. Even though she hadn’t seen a single other person during her trip, she’d never felt so naked and exposed.
The toad was back in his Tupperware on the table. He was looking in Cass’s direction. When Cass glanced at him, he croaked, as if in greeting.
She stood up, legs wobbly, and kept one hand on the wall as the pins and needles in her limbs subsided.
She had learned something crucial during that trip—but she doubted she’d learned what Thomas had intended.
She’d learned that, even if licking a toad beneath the Temple Mount was the only way to cure herself, it wouldn’t work as long as Thomas was her guide.
She just didn’t trust him.
And even if it was her fault that she couldn’t hear his voice while she was under, she’d still been left alone. He hadn’t been there for her when she needed him.
This first trip had been a nightmare.
She would be better off alone than having his opaque presence at her side.
Thomas was watching her face intently, as if he could read in her expressions what was going through her mind. He leaned back in his chair and stretched, a hint of a smile on his face.
Cass knew what she needed to do.
Feeling finally returned to her legs and arms. She took a hesitant step forward, then another. The ground felt firmer each time.
Much more than her own health and happiness hung in the balance here. As the Seer, the world needed her.
She had to cure her timesickness. She had to get control of her powers and stop this flickering, whatever it took.
The toad croaked again and Cass, for all the world, thought she heard it saying something.
She stopped halfway across the room and stared at it.
The toad repeated its croak and the refrain distinctly echoed what she thought she’d heard the first time.
“Muuutherfeecker. Muuutherfeecker.”
Cass’s bag and sword sat next to the second chair at the room’s table. The stack of letters from her mother was also still there, closer to her side of the table than Thomas’s.
Thomas had turned his attention toward the city lights, visible through their open door. He wasn’t watching her anymore.
Cass moved more slowly than she needed to, pretending to be even weaker than she was.
She made for the second chair, as if she needed to sit down. But when she was close enough to reach the hilt of her sword, she snatched it up off the floor and, in one motion, used her full weight to clock Thomas in the side of the head with the blunt end.
He tipped over in his chair, unconscious before he’d even hit the ground.
In the process, though, Cass had misjudged the height of the table and had sent the toad’s Tupperware spinning off the edge and onto the floor next to the open door.
The lid popped off and toad hopped out.
Cass froze.
So did the toad.
A gentle breeze ruffled the curtains.
A newspaper tumbled past their door.
The toad looked at her with its big, sad eyes, croaked, “Muuutherfeecker,” and began hopping as fast as it could—as far as it could—away from Cass.
31
“NO! STOP!” CASS yelled.
The toad did not listen.
Cass grabbed her bag and sword. Her hand hovered for a moment over the stack of letters, indecisive, then she scooped up the lot of them and thrust them into her bag.
She kicked Thomas’s feet out of the way, whispered a “sorry!” and shut the door behind her.
The toad was already halfway down the stairs.
How was the damned thing so fast?
Cass couldn’t say, but she hadn’t cold-cocked a thousand-year-old half-vampire just to be defeated by a toad.
She tried taking the stairs two at a time to make up some ground, but dizziness and creeping white noise convinced her to take it a little slower. By the time she reached the bottom of the stairs, the toad was out into the street.
The moon was still full and fat in the sky. Everything looked bleached beneath its light. Luckily, the pale stones of the city made the blue toad easier to see during the night.
The toad stopped, looked back at her, and croaked.
Now it was just teasing Cass.
She slipped her arms through the shoulder straps of her bag and slung her sword through the cross straps. She was going to need both hands free.
For the moment, the toad was just waiting in the center of the road. Cass figured that she might have better luck if she tried to circle around from behind. It watched her as she ducked down behind some cars and worked her way up the street behind it. She snuck along the bumper of a car, only feet away from where it crouched.
However, just as Cass dove for the toad, a drunk couple stumbled into the street, laughing and flirting and bumping into cars. The toad slipped through Cass’s fingers and she ended up with skinned knees on th
e rough surface of the road.
The couple turned and stared at her.
The toad stopped just a feet few away and croaked again.
“Gooofeeckyuuuselfff.”
The woman grabbed the man by the arm and, bent over with laughter, pointed back at Cass.
“Did you hear what that frog said to her?” she asked, wiping away tears. “Oh Lord, I love this city.”
The toad cut through an alleyway. Cass scrambled back to her feet and reached the next street just in time to see the toad hop into a bar. The door was open in the cool evening air and the music inside was loud.
The sign above the door blinked on and off: “Robert’s.”
Cass groaned inside at the name. Of course. A “Robert’s” in Jerusalem made as much sense as a “BO-B’s” in the Underside.
Oh come on! she yelled at the universe.
It was almost more than she could handle at the moment.
She sighed, suppressed the voice in her head that wanted to narrate the moment (“a seer walks into a bar ...”), and stepped inside.
The room was dimly lit. The mood was raucous. A soccer match played on the big screen TV. Hardly a table was empty.
Cass scanned the room, looking for any stray psychedelic toads.
There.
He was waiting under a table manned by two rough-looking men.
When they saw Cass looking their way, one of them whistled. She didn’t have time to properly educate catcallers right now. She took two quick steps and slid feet-first across the polished concrete floor, hoping to snag the toad before he knew what hit him. Instead, the men jumped back from the table when they saw her coming. Their drinks spilled, chairs banged to the floor, and the toad escaped toward the back of the bar.
The men shouted complaints.
“What the fuck!?”
“Watch what you’re doing!”
“Your frog just propositioned us!”
“You owe us a round of drinks!”
Keeping one eye on her elusive amphibian, she stood, brushed herself off, and moved to go.
One of the men took her by the arm.
“Hey, beautiful, what about our drinks?”
