by Laura Legend
Gary could see them, too. Already, the shadows were reaching for his ankles and clawing at the hems of his pants. Gary crawled onto the table with Cass, still holding her in his arms.
As she watched the shadows advance, Cass felt a terror bloom in her gut. The emotion was stronger than anything she could ever remember feeling. With her eye destroyed, there was nothing left to hold her emotions in check. There were no dams in place to protect her from herself. There were no breakers in place to short circuit ...
“Holy shit!” Cass said suddenly, turning to her father and shaking him by the shoulders.
Cass sprang up onto her feet on the table, trembling now with a powerful cocktail of terror and elation as her emotions surged.
Her weak eye was gone.
The cavern floor was rumbling. The aqueducts swayed. The wells shuddered.
The shadows had gathered into a writhing mass of tar fifteen feet across, filled with arms and legs and hands and faces that distended the membrane, as if twenty-some people were sealed inside of that darkness. Their faces gaped in horror, unable to draw breath. Their hands clenched and clawed. The figures inside seemed desperate to escape—but hungry, too, and just as desperate to swallow anyone else they could drag inside of the darkness with them.
Cass felt a deep revulsion roil inside of her at the sight of it.
She took her father’s hand and helped him stand.
The pool of shadows covered the whole of the cavern floor. There was no place to run. The darkness was creeping up the sides of the stone table. The main mass of writhing, dismembered body parts reared up in front of them, towering over them, preparing to strike.
Gary took Cass’s hand and braced for the worse.
“Cass, I love you,” he said by way of farewell, his voice cracking.
Cass squeezed his hand back.
“Dad,” Cass said confidently, rolling her one good eye. “Please. I’ve got this.”
Gary raised a quizzical eyebrow.
Cass ignored the towering mass and, instead, looked inside of herself for that familiar spark of energy, deep in the recess behind her weak eye, that she had sometimes been able to fan into a flame.
But instead of a spark—sputtering and constrained by her weak eye—she found a bonfire already roaring inside of her.
A blazing white light streamed from the black cavity where her eye had been. As it did, she felt time itself socket firmly back into place like a long dislocated shoulder finally popping back into joint.
The white noise that had plagued her for weeks burned away in the light, the spike of pain in her weak eye was gone, and her connection to the present moment felt strong and clear, calling for her to act.
The mass of shadows recoiled at the light streaming from her.
Cass vaulted off the table and, in response, the darkness cleared a space on the stone floor for her landing, retreating from any contact with her.
Cass felt the smoking white light inside of her expand to fill her entire body.
It streamed from her eyes, from her mouth, from the tips of her fingers, until light beamed from her entire body, filling the cavern, dispelling all the shadows, and illuminating with stark clarity the basement of her mind.
Then, glowing like the heart of a star, Cassandra Jones felt, for the first time in her life, completely like Cassandra Jones.
42
A FEW DAYS later, Cass met her father for coffee at Java’s Palace in Salem, Oregon.
Cass hadn’t been back here since—without exactly giving two weeks’ notice—she’d given up making coffee for a life filled with vampires, international intrigue, and continual heartbreak.
Still, though it had been awhile, she’d found an old Java’s Palace loyalty card with all five coffee cups punched through, and she wasn’t going to let a free latte go unclaimed.
But even to herself, her real motivation was transparent. She wanted to be someplace that reminded her of Zach.
She wanted to be someplace where they had, with enormous innocence, shared many laughs and winks. When Cass thought about Zach, she wanted to remember him here, with his apron and T-shirt and goofy grin, cracking a joke for her benefit as he filled another order.
If Cass could sit at a table in this place and enjoy a free coffee in his memory, then maybe she would have the strength to do what came next—even if she didn’t have him at her side.
Her father was a little late.
She already had her coffee and she had placed, in the center of the table, the neatly bound stack of letters she’d inherited from Thomas.
Her thoughts turned in his direction. She raised her cup of coffee in his memory and took a sip.
Thank you, Thomas, she thought. Thank you for pointing me in the right direction. And thank you sending my father to help me.
In Thomas’s honor, she decided, she would definitely have tacos for lunch today.
It wasn’t raining, but when Gary arrived he had an umbrella in hand, as if he expected a downpour. The spring weather was cool but, for a change, the sun kept breaking through the cloud cover.
“Coffee’s on me, Dr. Jones,” Cass said as Gary took his seat. “What would you like?”
“I’ll just take something black,” Gary said as he took off his hat and hung his leather jacket on the back of his chair.
Cass was glad to see that he was still wearing it. She went to the register to order for him. She didn’t recognize the barista there but, from the far end of the counter, her old supervisor did recognize her.
“I’ll handle this one,” the supervisor said, bumping the barista aside, looking like she intended to give Cass more than a little snark with her coffee.
“I didn’t think I’d ever see the likes of you and your evil eye in here again after you and Riviera left me high and dry without any—”
Cass looked up at her old boss and, at the mention of her “evil eye,” tucked her dark hair behind her ear, showing her eye to full effect.
The supervisor looked straight into Cass’s blackened, eyeless cavity and a look of revulsion passed across her face. She looked away, weirded out.
Cass, though, felt good.
She experienced time in a way that felt clean and grounded. She felt strong—or, at least, she felt like her full strength would come back quickly with a little work on her end. And, what’s more, Cass felt unselfconscious about her appearance, as if now, with just one eye, she were truly beautiful for the first time.
The woman filled Cass’s order, glancing over her shoulder the whole time, unable to stop herself from rubbernecking another look. Cass took the coffee and gave her a parting, eyeless wink that sent her scurrying into the back.
At the table, Cass could see that Gary was already thumbing through the stack of letters.
The handwriting was as immediately familiar to him as it had been to Cass.
“Dogen sends his love,” Gary said. “He’s anxious to see you again.”
“I feel the same,” Cass said as she handed him the coffee, sat down at the table, and took the stack of letters in hand.
“Dad,” Cass began, looking for a way to soften what had to come next, “I know what I need to do, now. I know what comes next.”
“Those are letters written by your mother?” he asked, the waver in his voice betraying him.
“Yes. Written to Thomas and given back to me by Thomas.”
Gary took a sip of coffee and tried to swallow this news.
Cass pulled the first letter from the top of the stack and opened it. The stationary inside was covered, front and back, in her mother’s flowing script, paired with a series of tables and diagrams.
Cass held it up for her father to see.
“The letters all go on like this,” Cass said. “They are, at times, quite technical and there are some parts I don’t understand. I’m going to need your help.”
Gary hesitated. “What do they say?”
“The letters sketch a series of potential techniques and procedur
es ... for redeeming Lost vampires.”
Gary took a long look out the window, obviously torn between the idea that Rose was Lost and the idea that, perhaps, she might yet be saved.
“Dad,” Cass continued, “I need to finish what Mom started—even if she isn’t in a place where she can help me do it.”
Cass took his hand.
“Are you with me, Dad? Will you help me? Will you stay beside me?”
Gary looked her in the eye, wiping away a tear from his own.
He put the hat back on his head and, with a green twinkle in his eye, said, “Cass, I’m never leaving you again.”
Cass, still surprised by the direct and undiluted force of her emotions, felt a deep sense of gratitude, purpose, and conviction come to life inside of her.
Despite all she’d lost and all that they might yet lose, she had her dad again.
“Okay, then” she said, grinning. “The first thing we need to do is find the one person who has already been redeemed.”
She looked out the window at the emerging sun.
“The first thing we need to do is find Amare.”
THE END
Epilogue
IT WAS DIFFICULT to surprise Maya. Receiving word of Red’s death, however, did surprise her, at least in part. She had not anticipated that particular outcome from this assignment. It was inconvenient to have her personal general unexpectedly dispatched while out on a routine retrieval.
Maya sighed.
Cassandra Jones, it seemed, was destined to be inconvenient in Maya’s life in so many ways.
Her effect on Richard was certainly inconvenient, but at least it had the additional attraction of also being highly entertaining. Watching Richard “work” since Cass’s unexpected departure had been one of Maya’s secret guilty pleasures—it had been even better than “Fixer Upper,” the home renovation show that held some kind of hypnotic sway over her, compelling her to watch even when the episode was a repeat she had already seen multiple times. Richard would occasionally appear in the office, head down, eyes serious, but Maya knew that within the hour she could look out onto the street below and see him walking away.
For a while, Maya had contemplated making small bets with several of the admins on her floor as to how long he’d last before disappearing. Highly unprofessional, yes, but also an extremely entertaining possibility.
In the end, she’d decided against the action. Better to appear blameless as Richard slowly hollowed out the ground on which he stood, eroding decades and even centuries of carefully cultivated confidence and support.
Maya had crunched the numbers. Sooner, rather than later, Richard would falter, and Cassandra Jones would reveal his flaws in a way that would make his continued leadership of York Enterprises unthinkable. Of this, Maya was certain.
A slight smile played at the corner of her mouth, briefly illuminating her features with determination and focus. She was powerful, and she would become increasingly so.
Maya deleted the message that had informed her of Red’s death. There was no need to share that particular report with Richard.
He would figure things out soon enough.
And Maya would be there, ready to step in, when he did.
Thank you for reading Timeless, book 5 of A Vision of Vampires! If you enjoyed this book, would you please leave a review on Amazon? I would be so grateful!
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Other books by Laura Legend
Faithless: A Vision of Vampires 1
Hopeless: A Vision of Vampires 2
Blameless: A Vision of Vampires 3
Fearless: A Vision of Vampires 4
Here’s an excerpt from Ageless, book 6 of A Vision of Vampires. Enjoy!
Ageless
Book 6 of A Vision of Vampires
By
Laura Legend
Chapter 1
Nothing.
He was free to will what he wanted. But the monster never did what he willed.
Mustering all of his remaining strength, he focused his whole attention on getting the monster’s pinky finger to twitch. The monster yawned and rolled its neck, popping the vertebrae, but its hands might as well have been made of stone.
Zach screamed a silent scream, pounding uselessly against the walls that imprisoned him in this perverse version of solitary confinement.
In response, the monster picked its nose, stared for a moment at the prize it had found, and then licked its finger clean.
It was salty.
Zach tried to think about something else, anything else. He tried to imagine what Cass was doing right now. Where she was. What she was wearing. This, it turned out, was too easy to do. He imagined her in her apartment, surrounded by books and dirty dishes, cracking the wooden arms of her practice dummy with blow after blow, her dark hair damp with sweat, her weak eye focused.
The rain slowed. The moon slipped free of the clouds.
The monster stood and lumbered across the courtyard. It stopped to look up at the moon. It poked around in some of the rubble, looking for God knows what. Then it wandered over to the remnants of the well at the center of the courtyard. It looked down into the depths. The well held no water. It had no power. No energy pulsed from deep inside of it, grounding this site in the Underside. The cord had been cut, the link between those worlds destroyed. All that remained was a pile of stones and the charred trunks of the ancient trees that had flanked it.
Zach wondered again about the true meaning of these wells. And this, in turn, inevitably turned his mind back to Cass. The power emanating from the wells had been, for him, a kind of poison, a way for the monster to reach out and threaten his transformation into what he had now become. But, for Cass, the wells had been something else altogether and she had been drawn to them like a moth to a flame.
Why? Did it have something to do with her powers as the Seer?
He didn’t know.
He didn’t understand anything.
He’d lost everything.
Zach fell to his knees. Tears streamed down his cheeks. Sobs racked his chest. He could barely breathe from grief.
He had to let go of Cass. He had to give up hope. He couldn’t continue to live like this.
He had to surrender to fate.
But, as he wiped away tears, Zach realized that something had changed. Something had happened.
The monster’s actions had just mirrored his own intentions.
The monster had fallen to its knees. The monster had shed tears and wiped them away. The monster had—itself—sobbed with grief.
How had he done that? What had been different this time?
And, more importantly, how could he do it again?
Chapter 2
Cassandra Jones hesitated at the door, frightened by the thought of what she might find inside. She should have brought backup. She should have tracked down Dogen and forced him to come with her.
Could she do this alone?
Her heart was racing. Her breath was short. Her feelings were raw and intense, unfiltered by the dampers that for nearly twenty years had kept her from having any direct contact with them.
Cass felt like a surfer trying to ride what were now monster waves, roaring in from the horizon. Sometimes she succeeded, sometimes she got pounded face-first into the sand. But either way, it felt good to feel—even if what she felt didn’t always feel good.
Her hand trembled as she reached for the door to her local mall in Salem, Oregon. The sun shone brightly on this Saturday afternoon.
Pull yourself together, Jones, she thought. You’re the goddam Seer. You’ve plumbed the depths of the Underside and visited the basement of the world’s collective mind. You’ve slain monsters and won international fighting tournaments and tracked down powerful relics that were lost for centuries.
She took a deep breath.
You can do this. You can walk through a mall and buy
a pair of sunglasses.
Cass clenched her jaw, pulled open the door, and stepped confidently across the threshold.
She could do this. What was the worst thing she’d find? Teenagers loitering at cellphone kiosks? Late capitalism? Overly aggressive hair extension salespersons? Would she be forced to buy a hermit crab with a bat symbol painted on its shell?
Cass took in the lay of the land.
There was a hermit crab kiosk straight ahead, partially blocking her view of a booth selling fidget spinners. But the mall itself was a ghost town. There wasn’t a teenager in sight. Did teenagers even still go to the mall? Was that still a thing? Or did they just lay in bed all day with their phones, texting mean things, snapping selfies, and watching porn?
She really had no idea.
Cass took a look at the map posted on the wall and found the store she was looking for. It was to the right and past the food court. As she walked that direction, she would get occasional head swivels from bored mattress salesmen but ignored them. But when she got to the food court she bumped into something she couldn’t ignore: cinnamon sugar pretzel bites. She only had a twenty dollar bill in her pocket, bummed from her dad, but she was willing to dip into her budget for this.
She smoothed the twenty flat between her fingers and ordered the pretzels.
The kid at the counter, though, didn’t hear a word she said. He was staring, mouth open, at the empty, blackened cavity where Cass’s weak eye had been. Cass couldn’t tell for sure if he was horrified or turned on. When she snapped her fingers to get his attention, he swallowed hard enough that she guessed it was a bit of both.
She couldn’t blame him, really. She felt liberated without her wandering eye short-circuiting her powers and emotions. And, in fact, for the first time in her life, she felt devastatingly beautiful in her t-shirt and jeans. Was it really this kid’s fault that, when he finally looked away from her ruined eye, he ended up staring at her chest?
