by Laura Legend
However, as soon as her butt made contact with the cushion, a third vision exploded in her mind.
There was nothing gentle about its onset. It arrived like a spike driven through the side of her head.
This time, though, the vision unfolded from Cass’s own perspective.
Time flickered.
Snow was falling. The sky was bright but filled with clouds. Cass lay on the cold stone ground in her mother’s arms, her vision blurry. The sky pinwheeled. Her mother’s face, backlit by the bright sky, was cast in shadows. She wiped away tears. Rose was asking Cass if she was okay. But Cass didn’t know for sure and couldn’t say. Rose repeatedly looked over her shoulder, asking Cass all the while to talk to her. Something was coming. Something scary. Rose snapped her fingers in front of Cass’s face, calling for her attention. “Cass,” she said, “get up.” And then she pressed something into Cass’s hand, wrapping her fingers firmly around it.
Cass couldn’t recall this precise memory. How old had she been? Where were they? Had they gone sledding? Had Cass fallen off and cracked her head on something? Would the head wound explain why the memory didn’t seem familiar?
Rose snapped her fingers one last time and, waking with a start, Cass sat bolt upright in that basement armchair. Realizing she was still in the chair, Cass stumbled forward, trying to definitively break contact with the chair and the vision.
On the floor, Cass discovered that she was still holding whatever it was that her mother had pressed into her hand.
It was her mother’s sword.
Cass stood, dropped the sword in a clatter on her mother’s desk, and ran from the room.
33
THE NIGHT WAS almost spent. Zach was already in the train car’s narrow hallway looking for her.
When Cass burst from the room, she almost fell into his arms.
“Cass?” Zach said, surprised. He propped her up, trying to assess the situation. “Where have you been?”
Cass wasn’t sure what to say. She looked back over shoulder—just as she’d seen her mother repeatedly do, as if something might be chasing her—and into the cabin. It was just an ordinary, empty cabin. The door was just an ordinary cabin door.
Zach protectively positioned himself between Cass and the cabin and looked inside for himself. He saw the same. It was just an empty cabin.
“Cass, what were you doing in there? Why are you shaking like a leaf?”
“I—” Cass began, then trailed off.
For Cass’s benefit, Zach shut the cabin door.
“Were you sleepwalking? Did you have a nightmare?”
Cass wished.
“I—I saw something. I had a vision. I took a trip inside my dad’s mind? Or maybe my own? I saw myself as a child, and I saw my mom and dad together, and I saw . . . I saw something I don’t remember. I don’t remember ever doing anything like it. I was hurt and my mom was helping up and she was afraid. She kept looking over her shoulder. She gave me a sword and told me to get back up.”
Cass’s eyes were wide as if she were seeing the whole snowy vision again.
“She gave me a sword, Zach,” Cass said. She could still feel the deadly weight of the sword in her hand. “She wanted me to protect her. Or . . . it was too late for that. She wanted me to avenge her.”
Cass’s face hardened as she arrived at this realization.
It was a sign.
The vision felt to her now like a confirmation: she’d made the right choice. She was on the right course. If the only way to balance the books and be free of this rage was to pass through its bloody flames and destroy the Lost, then that’s what she would do. She would run straight into the fire and claim her revenge and hope she could survive it.
If her mother’s death insisted on haunting her, then she would do what had to be done to exorcise that ghost.
“Cass,” Zach said, troubled by the expression on her face, “I’m afraid.”
Cass looked him in the eye, her face like flint.
“Me too. But at least we won’t be the only ones. Not today. Today, it’s their turn to be afraid.”
In the grip of this decision, Cass pictured herself already on the side of the mountain. Their train arrived, they gathered their gear, they took a car just as she and Richard had done, and they hiked up a service road into the mountains, approaching the ruins of the castle from the backside. It was early afternoon by the time she opened her eyes and discovered that her body had finally caught up with her mind.
Clouds had moved in and it was threatening to snow. The first fat flakes spiraled lazily downward. The trees were thick but Cass could tell that, just ahead, the road would spill them into a clearing. They were almost there. They were almost to what was left of the castle.
The air was cold and the temperature was dropping but, compared to the icy temperature inside of her, the air felt warm to Cass. She pulled off her cap and gloves and stowed them in her bag. She drew her mother’s sword. Zach slipped one truncheon through his belt and kept the other in hand. They left their bags stashed under a nearby outcropping. They wouldn’t need them for what came next.
Under the weight of the lowering clouds, the forest was uncannily silent. As far as Cass could tell, they were alone. They hadn’t seen a soul since they’d started walking. During all that time, they hadn’t broken their silence either. Mute, they’d just walked hand in hand up the side of the mountain toward the ruins where they’d almost lost each other once before.
What more was there to say?
Despite the silence, Cass was confident that they were not actually alone. And this confidence buoyed her. She hadn’t actually come here looking for the relic. The relic was just bait.
She’d come here looking for a fight.
The ruins of the castle were, surprisingly, already significantly overgrown, as if Mother Nature wanted to reclaim the undead as quickly as possible. Cass and Zach kicked around the ruins but Cass didn’t see how they could recover anything buried under tons of rubble. That couldn’t be what Thomas had had in mind when he’d promised that Cass would know where to look.
They widened the circle of their search, still silent and still hand in hand. The snow was starting to fall more heavily. The sky was darker.
On the far side of the ruins, they found an outcropping. Cass felt her weak eye twitch into focus at the sight of it. The fire at the base of the socket, deep behind the eye, burned a fierce, icy blue. A faint white light glimmered from the base of the outcropping. Cass stepped closer for a better look and, with that change in perspective, she found herself suddenly staring into the pitch black mouth of a cave.
“It’s down here,” Cass said, turning to Zach. She took his other hand and felt her grandfather’s ring, loose on his finger in the cold. She pulled his face down to hers and kissed him. She kissed him like her life depended on it.
Then she turned around, facing the direction from which they’d just come, sword ready. She only had to wait a moment.
“Thank you,” Miranda’s voice, cracked and barely human, said. “Thank you for showing us where to find the relic. I always knew I could count on your help when I needed it most.”
Miranda was flanked by Amare and a group of twenty or so nearly feral Lost. She looked decidedly unwell—her dark eyes sunk deep in her face, her lips barely able to close over her teeth.
No fucking way, Cass thought, is that what the road to redemption looks like.
“You can count on me,” Cass replied, “as you always have. Today I will free you, once and for all, from the waking nightmare that your life has become.”
Cass began to smoke a dark light. Her mother’s sword, as if in anticipation of blood, glowed a deep red.
“Just remember that I’m doing this for you, Miranda,” she said. “And for your brothers and sisters at the monastery who you betrayed. And, especially, for my mother.”
Miranda’s eyes narrowed and she looked like she was about to say something, but swallowed it.
“Zach,
” Cass said without turning around. “Go get the relic.”
Zach hesitated, but when Cass swung her sword in an ominous burning arc, he decided he had to trust her. He pulled two glow sticks from his pocket, cracked them, and descended into the cave.
Miranda drew her sword.
Cass was alone.
34
ZACH HESITATED. BUT there was no going back now. He wasn’t going to let Cass down. If this was the only way to reclaim a life together, he would do what he had to. He cracked two glow sticks and, with the afterimage of Cass’s burning sword still bright in his eye, he descended into the darkness.
Just ten feet in, the cave was already pitch black. The glow sticks helped with his footing, but they didn’t push the darkness back very far.
Zach could already hear echoes of the fight outside and he was sorely tempted to turn around.
He tamped down his own fear and kept going.
He could already feel the power vested in the relic calling out to him, quietly but surely. He was definitely headed in the right direction.
He’d barely turned the first corner when he heard two or three pairs of footsteps in the cave behind him.
He stopped and listened for a moment: three. Three pairs of footsteps.
He didn’t know whether to feel insulted or complemented that, compared to Cass, he only rated three vampires. He tossed one of his glow sticks on the ground and left it behind so that, when the group passed by, he could get a look at what he was up against.
He hurried around a second bend and waited. To conceal himself, he hid the remaining glow stick in his pocket. Waiting, he could feel the darkness yawning wide behind him.
The space at his back felt larger. It felt darker. It felt empty.
In response to that yawning emptiness, he wished that he was not alone.
It would have been helpful to have Dogen at his side right now. He would even have been happy to have Richard at his back, staring down the void, keeping the darkness at bay. He owed Richard his life. And, crazy as it sounded, he owed Richard the time he’d had with Cass before the monastery fell. It might have been years before he’d had the courage to propose to Cass as Richard had done—or, as Cass had, in turn, proposed to him.
Cass.
He could see her so clearly in his mind’s eye. He’d spent years memorizing her features. The way she tucked her dark hair behind her ears, the fold at the corner of her eye that marked her Japanese heritage, her perpetually chapped lips, the strength in her hands, her narrow, athletic hips.
His train of thought was interrupted by the arrival of his pursuers. The group passed by the glow stick, one by one. In the front, a tall fellow with a ridged spine and knobby joints. In the middle, a stocky, compact woman. In the rear, an imposing fellow with dark skin and a black down jacket: Amare.
“Shit,” Zach whispered under his breath. “Amare.”
Even without a clean look, Zach could have picked out Amare just from his bearing. Unlike the other two, there was nothing stooped or frantic or feral about him. He carried himself with an uncanny calm, as if he knew a powerful secret that he wasn’t yet ready to share.
The first two walked right past the glow stick. Amare, though, stopped. He knelt and picked it up, his face lit by the eerie green light. Then he stood, looked ahead into the darkness, and crushed the stick in his bare hand. The stick burst and covered his hand in glowing goo.
The only light in the cave, now, was coming from Amare’s green, glowing hand.
Zach felt his way along the wall for a few meters until the corner was well behind him, then he pulled out his own light again. He picked up his pace on the uneven ground, spurred on by the thought that a glowing, disembodied fist was pursuing him into the bowels of the earth.
Former barista loses fight to glowing fist, he thought. News at eleven.
It wasn’t long until Zach reached the floor of the cave. The space was high but relatively narrow. He worked his way along the wall, searching for some clue as to the location of the relic, following the now significantly stronger energy he could feel radiating from it.
Since his “episode” with the sarira, Zach had found that he was, in general, much more sensitive to relics than he had been previously. He could feel this one, even from across the room, tickling something in the back of his brain. And, in response, he could feel his mind recoiling, as if by crowding his brain to the front of his skull he could run away from that deeper part of himself.
Zach found what he was looking for on the far, tapered end of the cave: an ancient vault door.
But he could already hear that green fist getting closer. Any moment now, his pursuers would clear the final bend and join him on the floor of the cave.
As if he were a pirate trying to wheel his stolen ship around, Zach faced the vault door, grabbed hold of a spoke, and spun the giant tumbler that engaged the vault’s lock. The tumbler groaned for a moment, resisting him, but then it gave way and spun. The locking mechanisms inside clinked and clanked until, with the bolt finally drawn, Zach could feel the door settle lower on its hinges.
He could feel the power radiating from the Holy Coat as it leaked through the door’s crack.
Zach grabbed spokes on opposite sides of the tumbler and leaned backward, bringing his weight to bear, and pulled backward with everything he had. The door creaked and, grinding against the stone floor, opened just a few inches.
His pursuers were on the floor of the cave now. Glancing over his shoulder, he could see a glowing fist about thirty yards away.
Zach pulled again, straining against the weight of the door and drawing—despite himself—on some of the power from the relic. The door gave way, as if this concession to the power of the relic was what it had been waiting for, and it moved another foot before the hinges bent even further and it stopped. Jammed into the stone floor now by its own weight, the door was not going to move again.
His pursuers were almost on top of him now.
Zach tossed his glow stick into the vault and squeezed through the crack after it. If those bastards could open the door any farther, let them try. But, at least for the moment, they would have to come through the door one at a time and he would be waiting and ready on the other side.
Zach took a quick look around, assessing his environment. The vault was entirely empty except for a single, museum-grade display case. The Holy Coat was hanging inside.
Zach could feel his molars rattling in time with the energy pulsing from it. He could feel his body swelling against the limits of his own skin, the slack in his shirt pulling tight. He could feel his mind wanting to recede, swamped by the call of the relic’s power, as his eyes flickered red. He could feel a pair of incipient horns pressing against the inside of his skull.
He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, pushing back against the power. He shook his head and tried to think of Cass.
“No, goddammit, no,” he whispered to himself, urgently.
A long arm with a knobby elbow reached through the door. His first guest was arriving.
Zach grabbed the arm and pulled hard, slamming the vampire’s head against the far side of the door. Then he gave the arm some slack, pulled the rest of the torso through, and staked the guy’s heart. He disappeared in a cloud of ash.
Zach stepped away, coughing. Everyone agreed that, despite the lack of longitudinal studies, you didn’t want to breathe that stuff in.
Zach waved the cloud of ash away. Seizing the bit of cover her partner’s death had provided, the second vampire had already pushed her way through the crack. She was in the room. She lunged for Zach, trying to take him out at the knees. Zach stepped aside, took only a glancing blow, and cracked her on the back her head with the blunt end of his truncheon. The woman went down, but she pulled Zach’s feet out from under him at the same time, and he went down with her. She scrambled to get on top of him and lunged to take a bite from his neck. Zach shoved his truncheon crosswise into her mouth. Her teeth closed around t
he bar. Zach’s eyes flickered a deeper red and he raked the truncheon sideways, shattering rows of teeth as he pulled it from her mouth. He flipped their positions and, with her pinned beneath him, staked her through the heart.
Zach’s muscles swelled. His breathing was heavy. Buttons on his shirt popped and the seams of his pants split.
“No,” Zach breathed, squeezing his head between his hands.
Amare had already slipped inside during Zach’s fight with the woman. He was standing near the door, his green fist still glowing, watching Zach. He appeared to be fascinated by what he was observing.
He also did not appear to be the least bit worried by it.
For his part, Zach was pretty sure that Amare was wrong to be so cavalier.
“Thank you for what you’ve done here,” Amare said. His calm, deliberate voice was inflected by his Moroccan accent. “I’m well aware of what it has—and will—cost you. I will not allow your sacrifice to be in vain. If the world survives, it will owe its survival to this relic and, in part, to you.”
Zach’s chest heaved, his eyes burned red.
“Fuck you,” Zach said, pushing back against the power flooding his body and mind, trying to reassert some control.
“I know it is hard to hear,” Amare continued, unperturbed, “but, as Jesus said, unless the seed dies and is buried in the ground, it will never bear any fruit.”
Then, as if his movements were just an extension of his words, Amare went after the case containing the relic.
“Oh, no you don’t,” Zach said, as much to himself as to Amare.
Leading with his shoulder, Zach checked Amare into the vault’s stone wall. Amare took the brunt of the impact but managed to get a grip on Zach. They grappled. Ordinarily, Zach wouldn’t have been a match for Amare’s upper body strength but, juiced by the relic, it was almost a fair fight. Amare, though, was a more experienced wrestler and it wasn’t long before he outmaneuvered Zach and had him in a chokehold.
The more he struggled, the firmer Amare’s hold seemed to become. The pressure Amare brought to bear was enormous. Zach felt like he was either going to pass out or his head was going to explode, and he wasn’t sure which was going to happen first.
