by Laura Legend
Contents
Title
Dedication
Other books by Laura Legend
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Thank You!
Copyright
FEARLESS
Book 3
of
A Vision of Vampires
By Laura Legend
For Buffy and Faith, my favorite badass vampire slayers
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When you sign up for the monthly Legendaries newsletter, you’ll receive Lost on Fire, an exclusive novella set in the Vision of Vampires universe. This novella will not be published anywhere else, and is only available to the Legendaries.
Other books by Laura Legend
Faithless: A Vision of Vampires 1
Hopeless: A Vision of Vampires 2
Blameless: A Vision of Vampires 3
1
THOUGH HE’D ONLY been dead for an hour, the body already reeked. However, given that he’d been undead for more than a hundred years, the smell—like a long overdue debt—was to be expected.
The Heretic, alone in the Casino’s infirmary with the body, wanted to recoil at the foul smell. She wanted to close her eyes and stop her ears. She wanted to run from the room, lock the door behind her, and never look back again.
But she didn’t dare.
She’d come too far and sacrificed too much to get this close. She had to see this through, even if it cost her what little she had left.
She pushed back the hood of her cloak, unfastened the clasp that held it in place, and laid it aside. The dark robe was mostly for show. It gave her an air of mystery and authority that was useful in leading the Lost. Given the dominance of their passions and emotions, Lost vampires were especially sensitive to style and wardrobe—did this explain their widespread obsession with leather?—and they responded enthusiastically to pageantry.
Beneath the robe, though, she wore only a thin black dress that clung to her slight, athletic build. Her cheek bones were high and her brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She looked to be in her early forties. If she’d still used mirrors, even she would have had to admit that—apart from her deathly pallor and the dark rings that encircled her eyes—she looked good for someone who had herself died almost twenty years ago.
She washed her hands in the sink with soap and hot water, all the way up to her elbows, fighting the gnawing sense that, behind her back, the corpse was moving. Was it writhing on the examination table in pain? Making faces at her? Giving her the middle finger? God knew she deserved some—or all—of that.
But when she turned back to the table, drying her hands, the body lay still on the slab, motionless. It was already cracked open from stem to stern with its internal organs exposed.
The Heretic took a deep breath and steeled herself for a closer look. Given that Lost vampires commonly turned to ash when killed, the rare chance to closely examine an undead corpse was not something she could afford to pass up. She needed to know everything she could about the undead, inside and out, and she needed to know it as quickly as possible.
She flexed her own hands and felt, in the lithe distension of her fingers and the hardening of her nails, subtle signs of ferality creeping into her own body.
If this cadaver held any clues, she needed to find them.
The body hadn’t immediately deteriorated into ash upon death because this fellow hadn’t been an ordinary vampire. She’d almost freed him. She’d almost redeemed him. It had almost worked. Apart from Amare—with whom she had entirely succeeded—this man had been among those she’d come closest to redeeming. He’d been one of her most trusted lieutenants for years. He’d believed in her.
Coming close, however, was not the same as achieving success.
When she’d succeeded with Amare all those years ago—before, even, she herself had been Lost—she’d taken it as a sign, an omen, a portent. Now was the time for action. Now was the time to roll the dice. And so she’d wagered everything. But no matter how many times she’d since attempted the same redemptive transformation of a Lost vampire, she’d never achieved the same results. She couldn’t quite isolate the unique set of variables that had initially allowed her to succeed with Amare and that now prevented her from doing so again.
Her gamble wasn’t paying off. Her chips were almost spent.
The house was going to win.
Scalpel in hand, the Heretic made a smooth incision down the length of the body’s massive, pulpy heart and peeled the dark, nearly black, tissue apart with the nails of her other hand. If she had failed to save this man, if she’d lost him to ferality, it was because she hadn’t properly understood his heart. She’d lost him because what remained of his human capacity for reason had been swallowed whole by a raging storm of passions and emotions. His head had, in effect, been swallowed by his heart.
She turned her attention to his head and took it in her hands—it was surprisingly light, as if his brain had nearly shriveled away—and rotated it to the side.
The marks of a feral vampire were easy to discern, and he showed them all. His spine was ridged, sharp bones protruded prominently from his neck, and his brow had become heavy, shadowing the pits of his eyes. She tilted back his head and his mouth flopped open, revealing the extra ring of shark-like teeth. She gently laid his head back on the table, took his sharply clawed hand in her own, and squeezed it companionably. She choked back an unexpected sob as the grief welled up inside of her. This man had been her friend. He’d trusted her.
Her grief wobbled toward anger.
She could feel her own emotions growing stronger, more unruly, more hair-trigger by the day. How long did she have left before the same feral fate overtook her? How long did any of them? And once the Lost were truly and finally Lost, how long would the rest of the world last before it was overrun and eaten alive by a viral wave of death and transformation?
Her hot, stifled sobs deteriorated into a deep cough that racked her body. She leaned against the table, squeezed her eyes shut, and tried to calm herself, pushing back the anger.
She needed to buy just a little more time. They desperately needed to acquire an additional relic. If she could acquire just one—a powerful one—she could repurpose its power to maintain control of the Lost and hold the floodwaters at bay. They’d come so close to acquiring the chains of Saint Paul, but Maya Krishnamurti had double-crossed them. And Miranda had come even closer to winning the sarira, the tournament prize, before Cassandra Jones had somehow turned the tables and come out on top.
The Heretic’s emotions snagged for a moment on the thought of Cassandra, but she forced her mind to keep moving.
Now’s not the time. You need a relic—a relic, a relic, a relic!
Fortunately, they were close to acquiring one: the Holy Coat, the seamless garment worn by Jesus prior to his crucifixion, the garment for which Roman soldier
s had cast lots. It was an extremely powerful relic. It was exactly what they needed.
Leaning against the table, The Heretic opened her eyes and surveyed the body cracked open in front of her. This body, twisted and broken, captured her own failure in physical form. This sliced and broken corpse wasn’t what she was looking for. This certainly wasn’t the kind of world she was looking for. She was aiming to create a world that was, like Jesus’ coat, seamless, unified, redeemed. She was looking for a way forward into a world where the Lost were no longer lost. She was looking for a way to piece back together what Jesus had fractured when he’d cursed Judas to live on as a vampire—undead—and set the coming of their present calamity in motion.
She wasn’t going to find what she was looking for in a corpse.
Death held no answers for her. She would have to take a closer look at life itself.
The Heretic turned away from the body and washed her hands again in scalding water until her skin turned scarlet and the joints in her fingers ached. There was more than a hint of manic compulsion in how she washed them. She found herself to be, despite herself, increasingly fastidious. She didn’t like this change. The compulsion felt desperate to her and, more, it reminded her of Judas’s own obsession with spotlessness. She couldn’t let herself turn into him—but she couldn’t quite bring herself to stop scrubbing her hands either.
Finally, a knock came at the door and jarred her out of the loop she was stuck in. Relieved, she turned the water off and dried her hands.
Miranda Byrne was at the door—her eyes more hollow, her sharp teeth more closely crowded—bearing in her own body creeping marks of the feral future that stalked them.
As she replaced her cloak, the Heretic glanced over her shoulder at Miranda. “It’s time to pursue the Holy Coat with every remaining resource at our disposal. It’s time to spend what power we have left—even if the immediate costs are steep and bloody. We have to have that relic. The fate of the world hangs in the balance.”
The Heretic paused for a moment, then gave the order that Miranda had been after for weeks: “Gather the horde. We’re going to war.”
“Finally,” Miranda said, her curt response betraying the fragility of her own control over her emotions.
“Yes,” the Heretic responded wearily, her mind’s eye already filled with a horrific vision of the blood and fire and destruction to come, “finally.”
Miranda turned to go, anxious to set the wheels in motion.
But the Heretic had one final question.
“But first—where exactly is Cassandra Jones right now?”
2
CASSANDRA JONES WAS dangling from the side of a mountain in Japan.
She’d already climbed halfway up the face of the cliff. The muscles in her shoulders and hands ached, vibrating with a pleasant intensity. She felt stronger than ever.
She’d just been running through the forest, along her normal route, when she’d come to the cliff face and paused, drawn by how the rock shone in the early morning sun. She’d touched the stone with the tips of her fingers, felt the hint of heat that the sun had already planted there, and before she knew it, she was climbing.
Since her strength had begun to expand a few months ago during the tournament, Cass had been looking for new ways to test herself. She’d been looking for ways to press outward toward whatever her limits might be. The fact that she hadn’t found those limits yet both encouraged and frightened her. Could she run a four-minute mile? Yes. How long could she keep up that pace? She wasn’t sure. Could she pop out a set of a hundred pull-ups? Sure. How many more could she do? She didn’t know.
She just knew that she felt strong. And she knew that she felt alive—especially when she was testing that strength.
Cass swung from one handhold to another, the sun warm on her back in the chill mountain air, veins popping in her forearms as she scrambled upward, barely relying on toeholds. Her head was clear, full of little more than gray rock, white clouds, and blue sky. She slid sideways along a narrow shelf, just wide enough for the tips of her fingers, then jammed her hand into a crack that she could follow upward for another twenty or thirty meters.
With a secure handhold in the crack, she rested her weight on her feet, leaned back, and shook out her free arm. She looked up at the vaulting sky, took a deep breath, then examined the cliff face. It was broken into various adjoining planes, some of which could be linked to and traversed, some of which remained inaccessible. Navigating the face of the rock felt to Cass a bit like trying to navigate her own mind. Some parts of her mind had been unlocked, recovered from the minds of Zach and Kumiko. But other parts remained distant and inaccessible. Some of her feelings were vibrant and urgent, but others still felt distant and secondhand—as if they belonged to someone else.
Cass leaned in toward the mountain and, alternating hands, began quickly ascending the crack. As she settled into a rhythm, she could feel the subtle burn behind her weak eye indicating that her powers as a seer were active. She welcomed this burn, but she couldn’t depend on it. This deeper sense of connection with her powers seemed to come and go of its own accord and she couldn’t always control it.
Her powers were, at least in part, out of her hands.
Someone else had sequestered her emotions. And someone else had short-circuited her powers by routing them through the breaker of her cloudy, wandering eye. Had it really been her own mother? Had it been the last thing her mother had done before her death? Kumiko thought so. And Cass’s own vision seemed to confirm it. Rose had done this to her.
Cass’s mind snagged on the thought her mother, but she pushed past it, refocusing her attention on the cliff. She’d come to the end of the seam she’d been following and would need to switch gears. She’d prefer to tack right, but it looked as if her only real option was to use a series of handholds that lead off to the left. She didn’t have far to go now, though. Maybe ten or fifteen meters before she was at the top. She could make it work.
She stretched upward with her left hand and noticed how the morning sun cast a sharply defined shadow of her arm’s movements against the rock. Cass tightly gripped the handhold with the tips of her fingers and tested its strength with part of her weight. When she swung outward and pulled her body upward, her shadow followed.
Without knowing it, she’d been shadowed her whole life by the loss of her twin brother. Everywhere she’d gone, every day she’d spent with her parents, had been shadowed by the grief and tragedy of his having died at birth. Now that she knew this, Cass couldn’t help but look back over the course of her life, filling in the blanks and rewriting crucial moments. If her mother had felt compelled to lock away Cass’s emotions and short-circuit her powers, it had been because of her lost brother. She and her brother had been meant to be seers together. The strength of his mind had been meant to balance the strength of her emotions. Without him, Cass was half a seer—a danger to others and, especially, to herself.
Cass reached upward again and tested another hold. But, this time, the lip of rock from which she hung cracked and sheared free of the cliff.
Cass felt her heart leap into her throat—from here, the fall was more than a hundred meters—as she scrambled with her free hand to find something, anything, to hang on to. Amid a cascade of stone and debris, she slipped down the face of the cliff a full meter before she snagged the edge of a tiny outcropping with her free hand. Her momentum, though, still swung her outward, away from the rock face, separating her from her shadow. For a sickening moment she was suspended in thin air and the only thing still connecting her to the mountain was a quarter inch of pad at the tips of two fingers.
Cass squeezed hard. Her fingertips bit into the rock and she swung back against the stone, reconnecting with her shadow. Her heart racing wildly, she found additional support with her other hand.
Shit, Cass thought as the adrenaline pounded through her veins. Holy. Shit.
At that moment, Cass remembered something important: she didn’t actual
ly know what she was doing. She’d never rock climbed before in her life. She’d just been relying on her strength and her ability to “see” the truth of the cliff as she scaled it.
Cass slowly shook her head and calmed herself with a deep breath.
To be honest, this wasn’t so different from the rest of her life. She didn’t really know what she was doing there either. And not just when it came to being a seer and saving the world, but with Zach and Richard. She couldn’t help but feel the pull of her attraction to Richard when she was with him, but that attraction didn’t undercut her commitment to Zach. Instead, it underscored it. Things might have gone differently with Richard, but they hadn’t. They’d gone the way they’d gone. Sure, she was making it up as she went along, hanging on by her fingertips as the mountain crumbled around her, but she was hanging on.
And more than anything else, she’d been successfully hanging on to Zach.
Cass pictured Zach’s goofy grin and casually athletic build and suppressed a smile of her own. There would be time for him later. For now, she needed to focus on not dying. If she came home dead, she would hurt Zach’s feelings for sure.
In less than a minute, Cass climbed the remaining ten meters swiftly and surely. When she rolled over the lip of the cliff and onto solid ground, she lay there on her back, staring up at the sky, feeling the burn in her limbs, the sun on her face, and her heart pounding in her chest.
She stared into space, her eyes blurry and unfocused.
There was so much she hadn’t been told. So much she didn’t understand. So little she could control.
She rolled forward and hugged her knees to her chest, looking out over the valley and toward the Shield monastery.
Her warm breath clouded the cold mountain air.
A fox appeared on the ridge behind her, padding out from the tree line on his white feet. He lifted his black nose in the air, gathering what information he needed, then brushed against Cass’s thigh, nuzzling her hand.
