by Laura Legend
How had she not seen them before?
When Thomas held up a finger and began his story, it felt to Cass like she was there, in person, witnessing what he described. The flickering boundary line between past and present melted away. She felt like she was seeing the past in the present, as if she’d been there when these events originally happened.
With his finger, Thomas drew a line in the air and a flaming “one” burned where he’d marked it, even after his hand returned to his lap.
“It all started with one,” Cass heard Thomas say, “and that one’s name was Judas.”
The flaming line, suspended in the air, flickered and took a new shape. It showed, in profile, Judas’s face.
“Judas was one of Jesus’ closest friends. From the moment their paths crossed, Judas willingly left everything he had and followed him. He knew exactly who he needed Jesus to be. Jesus promised to transform the world, to reconcile mind and body, to introduce heaven to earth, and to redeem its broken people. Judas believed that he would.”
In her mind’s eye, Cass could see Judas. She witnessed the day he met Jesus. She watched as he sacrificed everything and followed Jesus on foot, crisscrossing Judea and Galilee. She watched as Judas’s conviction grew and he became more and more certain that he knew how Jesus’s story was going to end: in triumph.
“But Jesus’s life wasn’t headed where Judas expected. And when it became clear to Judas that Jesus was not going to fight back, that he was, to the end, going to love his enemy, his faith shattered into a thousand pieces.”
The flickering image of Judas burst into a rain of sparks, trailing like fireworks toward the apartment floor.
“Then, partly because of Judas, Jesus was arrested and crucified.”
Thomas drew a cross in the air. It wavered, flaming, agonized, in the space between them.
“And with his crucifixion it looked for all the world like Jesus had failed and that Judas was damned.”
The wavering cross flickered out, and the whole room went dark in a way that shouldn’t have been possible in the middle of a sunny day.
“Did Jesus fail to deliver what he’d promised?” He let the question hang. “That has not yet been decided.”
For Cass, the darkness in the room felt thick and substantial. It crowded against her. More than just the absence of light—it felt like it had weight.
“According to Judas himself, something happened to him the night he betrayed Jesus. At the last supper, Jesus sent Judas away—but, first, he gave him a kiss.”
Thomas touched his lips with two fingers, then planted the kiss in the air, a tongue of fire that sputtered and hissed.
“In that moment, with that kiss, Judas felt something change inside of him. That kiss both broke him in two and empowered him to become something else. In the days that followed his betrayal of Jesus, he witnessed Jesus’s crucifixion, watched his fellow disciples scatter in fear, and felt himself changing. His passions and emotions grew stronger, his teeth sharpened, his skin paled, his thirst for blood grew, and he could no longer bear the light.”
Thomas drew a circle in the air, creating a miniature sun that lit up the room and pushed back the darkness.
“Judas withdrew in shame and fear. The other disciples circulated the story that he had committed suicide and gotten what he deserved for betraying Jesus. This was, in a sense, true. Judas had, in a very real way, died and become something else. Though he continued to walk the earth, he was now neither living nor dead. He was Lost. He had become the world’s first vampire.”
In her mind’s eye, Cass saw Judas lurking in caves, hiding in the desert, traveling by night for generations, trying to understand what he had become.
“For years, Judas thought that he had been cursed, that this was some kind of divine punishment. Then he discovered a great secret. He discovered that he, like a god, had been given the power to fashion others in his own image. That, with a bite, he could use his curse to rebel against the powers that worked upon him and gather a growing assembly of his own disciples.”
Thomas wiped away the sun, drew a whole series of lines, and then gathered them together.
“But Judas also found that each succeeding generation of vampires was weaker. The copies he was making of himself were imperfect. And with copies of copies, the imperfections magnified, and the Lost were more and more prone to being overwhelmed by their passions and emotions, more and more prone to going feral.”
The assembled lines multiplied, with those at the edges growing fainter and more irregular until they combusted and disappeared.
“During this time, Judas learned about the power vested in relics and experimented with repurposing that power to marshal and control his followers. He discovered that these relics, vested with power by those who believed in them, captured and stored the power of those believing minds. He could stabilize the minds of the Lost with the power drawn from these other minds.”
Thomas paused for a moment.
“And, eventually, this also led to his discovery of the Underside.”
As the story progressed, the fragments of the story at Cass’s disposal began to snap into place, piece by piece. As if she occupied the vanishing point in a painting, she could feel the lines of the story converging toward her.
“This also led him to explore ways of using the power of these relics to intervene in the process that transformed a human into an undead vampire. He experimented, looking for ways to stabilize the transformation and filter out the irregularities that were already starting to multiply in troublesome ways.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Cass saw Zach wet his finger and surreptitiously draw a line in the air in front of him. Nothing happened.
“Every attempt to intervene in the process failed. Every attempt except one—me. I was the first ‘Turned’ vampire who was not destroyed or Lost in the process. Judas had discovered that by halting the process of transformation midway, the result was a hybrid human being who had only a tenuous connection with their emotions and passions and in whom the mind, with its powers of reason and calculation, dominated.”
Cass saw that moment of crisis and discovery. She saw the look of hope that crossed Judas’s face when he realized that he’d succeeded with Thomas. And, more, she saw those hopes dashed when he realized that there was no way to apply these same discoveries to saving himself or those who were already Lost.
“Judas and I worked together for many years before going our separate ways. In the time since that break, I perfected the technique for Turning humans and carefully and systematically transformed small numbers of people who desired to be transformed in this way, to be cut off from the trouble and grief of their own emotions and to live lives of calm calculation, empowered with perspective by a fragile kind of immortality.”
Thomas drew a fiery, horizontal line in the air and snipped it in half.
“After the loss of his family, Richard was among the first that I Turned. Since then, the network of people has slowly expanded and been carefully curated in order to maximize our influence on human affairs and put us in a position to check the growth of the Lost—though now, as you know, it may be too late to stop the whole horde from tipping over the edge into ferality. And, if they do, they will sweep across the face of the earth like an exponentially multiplying plague.”
In her mind’s eyes, Cass saw this apocalyptic moment with perfect clarity. She saw the world’s lights grow dim and the power go out. She saw the plague blossom like black flowers through all the world’s major cities and spread until nothing human was left and the horde cannibalized itself into oblivion.
The vision broke the thread of fire that, traveling the length of her spine, had grounded her in this visionary state. Her posture buckled and she gasped out loud, fighting back a wave of nausea and bracing herself with hands splayed out on the floor in front of her.
“But here is the question,” Thomas continued. “Here is the question that I have been asking myself for hundreds of
years. Why did Jesus do this? Why did he set this whole chain of events into motion? Why introduce vampires into the world? Was it a curse? Was Judas being punished? Was Judas just God’s way of planting the seed that would eventually—finally—inaugurate the end times and the destruction of the world?”
Cass’s stomach cramped violently. She was bent over nearly to the floor. She looked up at Thomas who, to this point, had paid no attention to her distress.
Thomas met her eyes. He brushed the hair back from her eyes and, at his touch, the pain receded.
“I’ve come to a different—though surprising—conclusion, Ms. Jones. I believe that Judas is what Jesus came to do. I believe that Judas’s transformation was Jesus taking us one step closer to saving the world, to reconciling mind and body, to bringing heaven to earth, to giving us immortality. The key to understanding this is to see that Judas was just a way station. In the same way that my transformation was arrested halfway, I believe that Judas’s own transformation was itself arrested halfway.”
Cass straightened, unable to break with Thomas’s gaze.
“The Lost aren’t what a cursed human being looks like, Ms. Jones. The Lost are what a human being looks like when they are only half redeemed. We don’t need to roll the transformation backward. We need to push the wheel of redemption another turn forward.”
29
THE KETTLE ON the stove whistled.
The spell was broken.
The hand-drawn fireworks dissolved, time resumed its normal pace, and daylight filled the room. Cass was once more just sitting on an ordinary hardwood floor in a studio apartment in Harlem. Though it couldn’t have taken the tea more than a few minutes to boil, she felt like she’d been sitting on the floor for hours. Her hamstrings were stiff and sore. She unfolded her legs with slow, tingling deliberation.
Thomas was up and already pouring water for tea into four mugs.
Zach looked dumbfounded.
Maya was shaking her head, her jaw firmly set. She appeared both skeptical of Thomas’s story and a bit angry that she’d been subjected to it. It was surely all a bit too . . . mystical for her, with too many deductions drawn too hastily from too little evidence.
Maya, though, hadn’t seen the accompanying vision. Unlike Cass, she hadn’t seen the world end.
Thomas, as he set out the tea, looked utterly unconcerned about whether they believed him or not. That wasn’t his job. He wasn’t the one who’d come looking for them, after all.
Thomas invited them back to the table. Their cups were steaming. The fragrance was, as before, amazing.
Cass took her seat at the table, her mind and heart churning.
“Thomas—” Maya began again.
For a third time, Thomas quieted her.
“Now it is time for tea. After tea is the time for questions.”
So they sat in silence at the table, slowly sipping their tea. Cass took a deep drink. As the hot tea slid down her throat, she felt it radiate a warmth and peace out into her shoulders and up into her head. But when the tea got to her stomach and met the cold, compact ball of anger and fear that had taken up residence there, the tea lost. The warmth of the tea filled her stomach for a moment, but this warmth was almost immediately eclipsed by that blisteringly cold marble of ice.
Cass didn’t know what to make of Thomas’s story. Some of it fit with what she’d been told. Some of it fit with what she’d begun to intuit about the nature of the problem posed by the Lost. Some of it would force her to rethink everything she thought she’d known.
She took another sip of tea and, again, the comforting warmth briefly flared before being doused.
Cass tried to see Judas as Thomas had painted him—as a tragic figure, as a father afraid of his own ruined children, as a proto-scientist searching for a cure—but she couldn’t make it fit with her own experience of him. By the time Cass had met him, his passions and emotions had become cancerous, devouring his own body from the inside out, his flesh black and necrotic as he struggled to secure a relic powerful enough to push back the darkness and let him walk again, for the first time in two thousand years, in the light.
She thought about how he had almost killed Richard.
About how he’d intended to kill Miranda and Zach.
About how the Lost—his willing creation—had overrun the monastery.
Then, an only half-formed thought crystallized in Cass’s mind: surely Judas had also had a hand in murdering her mother.
The harder Cass tried to rethink Judas in light of Thomas’s explanation, the more her attempts were swamped by her grief, and the angrier she became.
The anger she felt made Kumiko’s path of implacable opposition to the Lost feel like the only legitimate response.
If Judas is what God intended, then it was no wonder that Cass couldn’t bring herself to believe in God. She would never be able to bring herself to hope that these monsters were somehow the door to a better, truer world.
No, as a seer, her responsibility was to finish the job—not of saving the Lost, but of wiping them off the face of the earth before they did the same to the rest of humanity.
Cass put down her tea cup and looked up at Thomas. She felt her face harden into a mask.
Thomas looked as if he could read in her expression the whole of the argument that had just unfolded inside her. He finished his tea and put down his own teacup.
“Thank you for your . . . stories,” Maya said. “But we came for something more.”
“Yes,” Zach interjected, still lost in whatever tea-inspired thoughts were spinning around in his head. “That tea was amazing. Could we have more?”
“Tea is not what we came for,” Maya hissed at Zach.
“No. You came for revenge?” Thomas offered pleasantly.
Maya ignored his provocation. “We need to know the location of the Holy Coat.”
“Ah, I see,” Thomas said. “You’ve come in search of another stop-gap, another band-aid. Given your extremity, you need a more powerful drug to mask the increasingly serious symptoms.”
“We just need to find the infected,” Cass cut in, “so that we can put them out of their misery.”
Thomas looked into his teacup, swirling the dregs that remained at the bottom as if he were trying to read them.
“Judas recovered the Holy Coat a very long time ago, before certain plans and paths had fully crystalized into their present form” he finally said. “He did not share this knowledge, and for all practical purposes, the Holy Coat remained lost. His intent, thus, was to preserve and concentrate the exterior investment of belief within the relic. He was saving its power for a rainy day, for a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency type of moment.”
“Where?” Cass asked, her voice cold.
“The coat is still locked away in the ruins of Judas’s castle in Romania.”
“Yes,” Maya said, “but where in the castle?”
Thomas glanced at Zach with a sad look in his eyes. Then he held Cass’s gaze.
“If you pursue this path, there will be a price to pay,” he said quietly to Cass. He directed himself to her as if the two of them were alone in the room.
Cass blinked.
“There always is,” she agreed.
Thomas turned his attention back to Maya.
“Go to the ruins. Ms. Jones will know how to find what you seek.”
30
THEY STOPPED TO grab some gear in the basement of York Tower.
For Cass, it felt good to have her sword at her side again. The grip burned in her hands. The blade, perfectly weighted, felt light and supernaturally keen. She swung the blade in slow, cross-body circles. Though her emotions felt frozen in a sea of anger, her body felt loose and agile and strong.
Cass fingered the grass ring on her left hand. It still glowed a faint green.
Time to fix this, Jones. Time to actually protect the people you love for once and carve out some space for a new life with Zach.
Maya equipped them with some warmer
clothes. The Romanian mountains were not going to feel very spring-like. Everyone got boots, dark pants, gray sweaters, and vests. Maya added a striking red scarf to tie back her hair, shoulder holstered a pair of 9mm’s, and fastened a long blade to her right thigh.
“For you, Mr. Riviera,” Maya added, presenting him with a wooden box, “a present from Richard.”
Zach slid back the top of the case. Inside, he found a pair of modified truncheons with sharpened ends for staking vampires through the heart. They were similar to the ones Zach had used on that night, so long ago now, when he and Richard had first fought side by side to defend Cass.
“Excellent,” Zach said, pulling them from the case, spinning them in his hands, and slipping them into loops at his waist.
Inside the box, Zach also found a note from Richard. Cass snuck a quick glance: KEEP HER SAFE was all it said. Apparently not noticing Cass’s intrusion, Zach folded up the note and put it in his pocket.
Then, winking at Maya, Zach added, “It’s so nice of Richard to remember our anniversary. Give him my thanks when you see him next.”
“I think we’re ready, then,” Maya said. “Just one more thing.”
She tapped a message into her phone and her personal squad of Amazon warriors joined them, their long, muscled bodies clad in flexible yet form fitting fighting leathers, legs strapped with various knives and daggers, backs bearing an impressive variety of swords, deadly whips, and the occasional bow. Zach flinched when he saw them. Remembering their last encounter with Zach in the bank vault, the Amazons also did a subtle double-take when they spotted him. Their hands went straight to their weapons as they looked to Maya for instructions.
“Relax, ladies,” Maya said. “Mr. Riviera is on our side.”
Cass, though, couldn’t help but feel a twinge of irrational jealousy at the thought that this squad of six-foot-tall supermodel killing machines knew something about Zach that she didn’t: they had seen, up close and personal, what Zach had transformed into when he’d been exposed to the sarira. And, in general, she did not find their fearful, knee-jerk response to Zach just now very reassuring.
