by Laura Legend
Cass snapped her fingers again.
“Up here, son,” she said, and reordered her pretzel bites.
Even if the eye didn’t bother her, this was why she needed sunglasses—for other people. It was too hard for them. If she wanted to keep a low profile and attract less attention, then it was either this or an eye patch. She hadn’t immediately ruled out the eyepatch—Cassandra Jones, Seer of the Seven Seas had a certain ring to it—but, in the end, decided that it would only attract more attention, not less.
So here she was, eating pretzel bites rolled in sugar and walking through the mall, admonishing teenage boys and hoping not to buy an eyepatch.
Cass took another bite and then licked the sugar off her finger.
A passing security guard crashed his Segway into a fountain.
Cass kept walking.
Looking away, she caught a glimpse of herself in a shop window and, for a moment, saw her reflection superimposed on a mannequin wearing a flattering red cocktail dress. Cass stopped and took a closer look. She was tempted to try it on, to take a minute in the dressing room and imagine herself in a different life, a life where she might actually have occasion to wear such a thing. Cass touched the cool glass of the display window with the tips of her fingers.
Let it go, Jones, the voice in her head said. You’re more likely to need a tactical vest than a dress.
Cass cleared her head with a shake. The voice was right. The sunglasses were just next door.
A bell chimed when she entered the store. The girl at the counter glanced up from her phone, frowned, and went back to swiping whatever urgent notifications desperately needed swiping.
Cass spun the racks of glasses looking for something simple, black, and classic. There wasn’t, actually, much that fit that description. She pulled a pair of glasses off the rack that reminded her of the kind her mother used to wear. The tinted glasses were large and square, the arms filigreed with a gold twist. Cass put them on and looked in the mirror. She looked, scarily, so much like her mother. Cass shivered and hastily returned them to their slot. There might be a time and place for reminding herself that she was the spitting image of the reigning queen of the Lost, but this wasn’t it.
She pulled two additional pairs off the rack. One pair reminded her of Zach, slick and athletic. The other pair, mirrored aviators, had an aristocratic vibe and reminded her of Richard.
Cass settled on the second pair, black and simple, and took them to the counter. The girl looked skeptically at Cass’s eye, then shrugged as if she understood what Cass was trying to hide. However, when the girl rang up the glasses, Cass was embarrassed to find that she didn’t have enough money. Even without the pretzels, the glasses would have been more than double what she had.
Cass felt a surge of unexpected embarrassment. Her cheeks flushed red. She really didn’t have a handle on her emotions yet. Even if these glasses reminded her of Zach, she couldn’t pay for them. She would have to put them back.
Cass held up a finger, indicating that the girl should wait just a moment. The girl sighed dramatically but waited as Cass swapped the glasses for the aviators. The girl took what was left of Cass’s twenty, added an extra two cents from the leave-a-penny dish to cover the difference, and tossed the glasses into a thin plastic bag.
Outside in the sun, Cass pulled out her glasses and threw the bag in a garbage can. She was pretty sure that Richard didn’t pay anything south of four figures for his sunglasses, but the style still reminded her of him. She would need to talk to him soon. She was almost ready to make her pitch. She just needed to get one or two more things nailed down.
She slipped the glasses on, cutting the afternoon glare and bringing the world into focus. A wisp of smoke curled from the corner of her missing eye.
Soon.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, incidents, and dialogue are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.
Timeless. Copyright © 2019 by Laura Legend. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be produced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Cover art by Momir Borocki
First edition
EPub Edition December 2019
Print Edition December 2019
