by Laura Legend
But she wasn’t making any progress. For every inch of control she won back, the legion of hands grasping after her took back more. There were just too many of them.
They were piling on now. Cass was driven to her knees. Her back began to bow. She couldn’t see or breathe.
“Cass,” she heard her father say again. “It’s okay. I’m right here.”
Cass had felt the truth of it the first time he’d said it. This second time, the force of it redoubled.
It was going to be okay.
Despite the fact that an army of shadows was smothering her and piling on top of her and tearing at her arms and legs, her father was still right there.
He would protect her.
Cass let them drag her down to the floor. Given that her attackers were shadows, they were surprisingly heavy. However, once she was on the floor, Cass saw for the first time that she was pressed flat against the edge of a trap door. The recessed metal ring that served as a handle was within reach.
Gathering all the strength she had left, Cass kicked and rolled, sending shadows flying like pins in a bowling alley. Then, before they could recover, she pulled the trap door’s ring and dove through the opening into the darkness below.
She thought she was going to get through cleanly until her trailing foot was snagged by a clawed hand and she found herself hanging in a black void. She couldn’t worry, though, about what was waiting beneath her. She had to act quickly or they would reel her back in. Already, she could feel additional hands reaching for her.
Cass hauled back with her free foot and kicked at the hand around her ankle as hard as she could. Fingers splintered. Slicked now with blood, the hand lost its grip and Cass tumbled into the darkness as the trap door above her slammed shut.
Cass landed on her back in an Underside hallway, knocking the wind out of her. On hands and knees, she gasped for breath.
She was alone.
And, more to the point, she was, as her father had promised, okay.
The hallway was cold. In both directions it receded into darkness with no ends or corners in sight. The walls of this hallway were, again, filled with mind doors, each marked with a placard naming the mind behind that door. The placards were, irritatingly, still in Comic Sans, and still brought Zach immediately to her mind.
Carefully, Cass set him aside.
She slowly got to her feet.
She touched the icy lock of the nearest door.
A revelation began to dawn inside of her as she considered her timesickness, the nature of the Underside, and these doors into other people’s minds. She stood perfectly still, patiently waiting for the idea to materialize.
Then, with a satisfying snap, several pieces came together and she realized something new, something crucial, about how her powers worked.
As the Seer, she could see into the truth of other people’s minds. And, as the Seer, she could see—and thus manipulate—the truth about time. She had already discovered, for example, that she could slow it, bend it, loop it, and fork it.
Cass began walking down the hallway, picking up speed as she went. She saw now how these aspects of her powers intersected.
She could step into other people’s minds and she could step into a space adjacent to the normal flow of time because, as Seer, her power—the way her body interacted with and gave physical form to magic—gave her access to the mind’s plumbing. She could step into this emotionally primal and timeless space shared by every mind.
Even if every mind lived in its own separate proverbial house with its own street address, the deeper truth, Cass saw, was that every mind—human and vampire alike—shared the same basement. Accessing this Unconscious space gave her access to other minds and it gave her access to a place where she could leverage some control over the flow of time.
“Holy shit,” Cass said out loud, almost running down the hall now with joy and the shock of understanding.
She had a nagging feeling, though, that she was still missing something. The crucial piece of the puzzle that would complete the image wasn’t there. There was a hole in the center of the picture. Cass couldn’t be certain what the picture would, in the end, show.
Ominously, she did feel certain that the missing piece somehow had something to do with her mother.
As Cass ran down the hall, she could hear the shadow people above her still dancing. Their floor—Cass’s ceiling—was shaking as the rave gathered steam again and the music grew louder. Cass could feel the music calling to her.
She slowed to a walk, stopped, and looked upward, feeling the bass notes vibrate in her bones. Part of her wished she was up there again, forgetting herself, lost in the party’s raw amplitude of emotion and sensation.
When she turned her attention back to the hallway, she was surprised to find that the door directly in front of her was different from the others. The door had a peephole that looked out into the hallway. Cass saw light flicker in the tiny circle of glass, as if someone on the far side were looking at her, watching her as she stared back.
Cass looked at the placard above the door. Rose Jones.
“Right,” Cass said, deadpan, “of course. The whole story always comes back to the dead mom. Who’s actually undead.”
Cass pressed her eye to the peephole but, looking through the glass backwards, she saw only that same negative space that occupied the center of the puzzle.
“What are you missing, Jones?” Cass asked herself. “What’s the missing piece of the puzzle?”
Cass tried to lay out the pieces of what she already knew.
Her mind turned back to what her mother was supposedly fighting for: to redeem the Lost. And then it circled back around to the thing that had just now come clear to her on the dance floor: that going feral meant losing your humanity and getting lost, permanently, in the basement of your own mind.
“Why did you succeed with Amare, Mom?” Cass asked the door. “Why did you succeed in redeeming him and then never succeed again? What was different about that first time? What changed after that first success?”
Cass pressed her forehead against the cool steel door. The cold soothed the ache in her weak eye.
Her weak eye.
“Fuck!” Cass said, standing up and pushing back from the door.
She knew what the difference was.
The difference was her weak eye.
Rose had succeeded at redeeming Amare. Cass still wasn’t sure how it worked other than, as Thomas had told her ages ago, it involved somehow finishing the interrupted process that had initially resulted in the Lost vampire, but there was no doubt that Rose had figured it out. But the solution had taken Rose longer to puzzle out than she’d hoped, and Cass had been growing older, and increasingly subject to her maturing, potent emotions, without the balance of her twin. Rose feared her daughter would be lost to her own type of ferality before she could figure out how to make the healing process safe for Cass. Hoping to buy time, she’d cast a spell to short-circuit Cass’s powers and emotions, routing them through her wandering eye, so that those unchecked powers wouldn’t overwhelm Cass before she could return with a cure.
But Rose, without an unshackled and fully empowered Cass in her life, hadn’t been able to duplicate the initial success.
Cass felt like her head was going to explode.
The force of the revelation was overwhelming. But here in this deep place there was no place to hide from the truth.
She, Cassandra Jones, was the missing piece.
She was the thing that had changed.
She was the skeleton key.
Her mother had had it backwards the whole time.
Her mother had wanted to redeem the Lost so that she could save Cass from her powers. But the truth was that only Cass’s unhampered powers could redeem the Lost.
Cass had no idea how this would work in practice, but she knew without a doubt that, as the Seer, she could succeed where her mother had failed. She knew that she, as the Seer, could bring balance back to t
he world.
And as much as her heart flinched at the thought, she knew that it was her calling, as the Seer, to redeem the Lost.
That’s literally what she was for.
Cass didn’t have the faintest idea how she would explain this to Richard or Kumiko or anyone else. In fact, she didn’t have a clear idea of how she would explain it to her own father.
Wrapped up in this whirlwind of thoughts, Cass jumped when a knock came from the other side of her mother’s door. She looked down the hallway in both directions, as if she might find someone else who could confirm that they, too, had heard the knock.
No one.
Another knock, louder.
Cass touched the door, hesitating, but she didn’t see how she could open it from this side.
The knock quickly escalated to a thunderous pounding that shook the fillings in her molars.
“Mom?” Cass called, her voice trembling. “Mom, are you there? I think we need to talk?”
The door began to bow outward.
The hinges bent.
The lock buckled.
A hand slipped through the crack, reaching for Cass.
40
CASS PULLED A key from her pocket. She didn’t know how it had gotten there, but it looked just like the skeleton key that Thomas had been using.
It was ice cold. No surprise there.
The grasping hand withdrew behind the bent door and returned to its desperate pounding. The door became increasingly misshapen, but the lock and hinges still held.
Cass tried the key in the door’s lock. It slipped right in and, before Cass could decide for sure that she wanted to draw the bolt, the key turned of its own accord.
The pounding on the opposite side of the door stopped abruptly, as if it were surprised at this turn of events.
Cass removed the key and returned it to her pocket.
With a gentle push from the other side, the door swung awkwardly open, wobbling to a stop halfway.
The bulb in the hallway flickered. Time, like the ground in an earthquake, felt unsteady beneath Cass’s feet. The door opened onto a pitch black darkness that greedily swallowed all the light that reached it.
Cass couldn’t see anything inside. She cocked her head and took a tentative step forward, listening for any sound.
A scream rocked Cass back on her heels and a figure burst from the darkness, hands outstretched, reaching for her throat.
“Stop, Mom!” Cass said in a choked voice as she tried to peel the assailant’s fingers from her throat.
The figure, still half-immersed in darkness, tightened its grip. Cass’s eyes bulged. The pain in her weak eye spiked.
The door, though, was within Cass’s reach. She grabbed its edge and slammed it against the figure’s head—once, twice. They stumbled backwards for a moment, then roared forward again.
Cass slammed the door, pinning her assailant’s body between it and the frame.
Cass leaned in hard, bracing herself against the door, trying to squeeze the figure back inside.
“Give. Up. Mom,” Cass grunted. “You were right about what needed to be done. But you can’t do it. You need to be saved as much as any of them. You have to let go and step out of the way. Let me help you!”
For a moment, the figure’s resistance subsided and Cass thought maybe she’d gotten through. But when Cass relaxed just a bit, her opponent seized the advantage, blew the door open, and sent Cass crashing backward against the wall.
Cass’s vision blurred. She felt like she might have broken a rib.
As the world stopped ringing, the face of her opponent came into focus.
Cass wasn’t fighting her mother.
She was fighting herself.
Blood trickled down Shadow-Cass’s chin from a split lip. A tendril of black smoke was trailing from its weak eye. It hovered as if waiting for Cass to reenter the fight.
Cass got back to her feet and shook out her sleeves, trying to figure out how to untangle this delicate knot. Knowing herself, she decided to start with the direct approach: “What do you want?”
Shadow-Cass remained silent.
“Why are you here? Why do you want to harm me?”
Nothing. Cass could feel her impatience with her shadow self beginning to grow.
“How can we figure this out? How do we make whatever the hells this is actually work?”
Shadow-Cass cocked her head to the side, then gracefully gathered herself into the fighting stance Cass knew so well.
“Fine,” Cass said, “I can get behind this. You’ve had this coming for a while.”
Her doppelgänger nodded.
Almost in perfect sync, they both uncorked a series of blows that sent them bouncing back and forth, from one side of the hallway to another, moving away from the original door.
When Cass finally landed a solid kick in the teeth that rocked Shadow-Cass backward, she felt her own mouth fill with blood.
She spat the blood onto the floor.
What did you expect, Jones? You just kicked yourself in the teeth!
When, a moment later, her reflection returned the favor with a punch to the ribs, Cass couldn’t help but notice that Shadow-Cass also grimaced pain, holding her side.
They were each, simultaneously, both attacker and victim.
The trail of black smoke from both their eyes had grown thicker.
Cass could feel her powers trying to kick online, but they flickered in sync with time’s continuing instability instead. There were plenty of sparks, but the fire wouldn’t light.
Cass used the back of her hand to sweep her hair out of her face. To her surprise, she could still hear her father’s voice, urging her to trust him, to let go, and to surrender to the experience.
Cass took a long look at her doppelgänger and considered it. Both of them were half bent over, breathing heavily.
Both had black eyes and split lips.
Both were smoking.
Should she just give up and take the beating? Should she surrender? What would happen then? What would that even look like, in these circumstances?
Cass wasn’t sure, but she didn’t care for the idea.
No, Cass thought. That’s not right. I’m not the only one who needs to “surrender” here.
Cass rolled her neck, popping the vertebrae.
This bitch is the one who is going to surrender, whether she wants to or not.
Cass dove back into the fray as the pain in her eye flared and tinged her whole world red. She connected with an elbow that sent her reflection crashing backwards into a locked door, leaving a Cass-shaped dent in the sheet of metal.
Cass blocked a flurry of kicks before twisting her opponent’s arm, hyperextending the elbow.
As a reward for her efforts, Cass felt her own arm go numb with agony.
In response, Shadow-Cass put her head down and rammed Real-Cass, lifting her off the ground and slamming her into a door. The force of the impact popped the door right off its hinges and the pair of them tumbled in a mess of arms and legs into someone else’s mind.
Cass saw immediately that they were in some kind of sadomasochistic boudoir. In the corner, a couple who looked vaguely familiar—from her pharmacy, maybe?—was doing something with a beachball and dental floss that Cass would never be able to unsee. They looked up in surprise. Their faces registered both fear and, to be frank, more than a hint of curiosity.
“Sorry,” Cass said, happy to avert her eyes. She made a mental note to switch pharmacies if she ever got out of this as she grabbed a riding crop from the wall and sent their fight rolling back into the hallway.
Cass wasn’t sure how much more of this she could take.The black, throbbing pain in her eye rippled out into her entire body, threatening to engulf her whole world. The hallway was filled with so much smoke that she could barely see, let alone breathe.
Time flickered and stuttered, interlaced with static.
Cass knew she had to finish this here and now. If she didn’t end it, it wo
uld end her.
Numb arm hanging loosely at her side, Cass tried to gather herself. She looked her reflection in the eye and they exchanged a respectful nod.
“Time to surrender,” Cass said. “Time to let go. Time to stop being afraid of yourself.”
With a subtle bow, Cass waved her opponent forward.
Her reflection took the bait and let loose a big roundhouse swing.
Cass let the blow glance off her shoulder and packed everything she had into an open-fisted strike that nailed Shadow-Cass smack in the weak eye.
Connecting squarely with her target, Cass both saw and felt the result.
The eye exploded in a shower of fire, smoke, and sparks.
In a flash of blinding light, Cass’s world contracted to a pinpoint of darkness. She wobbled on her feet, her equilibrium shot to hell. She stumbled backward and fell, expecting to hit the floor at any moment, but just kept falling.
Mid-fall, she lost the thread and blacked out altogether.
When she recovered painful consciousness, Cass found herself back in the cavern, laid out on the stone table. Her dad held her in his arms.
The look on his face was anguished and ashen.
“What?” Cass asked reflexively. “What is it, dad?”
Gary’s only response was to pull Cass into a tight embrace.
Then Cass knew.
Her weak eye was utterly destroyed.
A black, smoking cavity was all that remained.
41
CASS’S VISION WAS blurry and strangely flat. She pulled back from her father’s embrace and, with the tips of her fingers, gently probed the dark cavity where her weak eye had been.
The tissue was cracked and tender, cauterized, but there was no eye.
The lights in the cavern sputtered.
Cass felt her body flooded with horror and dismay. She’d destroyed her own eye!
Jones, what have you done?!
The lights continued to sputter, growing weaker and dimmer rather than simply going out. Time faltered. The shadows began to pool on the floor and in the corners of the room. They grew viscous and sticky and crawled across the floor toward the stone slab where Cass lay, gathering into something larger and uglier and more inhuman as they went.
