It took them longer to get back to the Underside than they would have liked. Richard’s patience was wearing thin by the time they arrived at their destination: a small, private bank where the relics were secured, just across the street from the arena.
For once, the streets were nearly empty. Everyone was in the arena watching the last match of the day. And, from the reverberating sound that rocked the building, Zach guessed that everyone must be packed in there pretty tight.
This quarter-final match was Cass’s fight, and Zach felt torn standing out here while she was fighting in there. Part of him, though, was relieved that he wouldn’t have to watch her get hit—he knew she could take the beating, but he wasn’t sure he could watch her do it. He also knew that if they didn’t prevent the relics from being stolen, it wouldn’t matter if Cass won the tournament. There wouldn’t be anything left to win.
He would have to trust her to do her part while he and Richard did theirs.
From the front of the building, the bank simply looked closed. The doors were locked, the lights were off, and the security gate was down. Everything looked quiet, so they circled around the back of the building to the service entrance in the alleyway.
In the alley, the heavy steel service door was broken and ajar, its frame half-wrenched from the wall.
Zach and Richard exchanged a look. Zach gestured toward the door, as if to say, “You first. This is your damn rodeo, remember?”
Richard nodded, then literally rolled up his sleeves. He flexed his arms, fisted his hands, and cracked his neck. Zach took the hint—who knew what they would find on the other side of the door—and wove a spell, casting a modest shield that shimmered a faint green in the gray Underside light.
Zach would have rolled up his sleeves too, but he was wearing a T-shirt. So he just flexed a little in solidarity.
Without touching the door, Richard slipped through the crack and Zach followed him. The room was lit with bright fluorescent lights and was dominated by a huge vault at the far end. A woman, her face masked by a black scarf, was drilling through the vault door with what must be the contraption that Jinn had designed. The drill was powering through the steel, occasionally throwing off green sparks that indicated the hybrid device wasn’t just mechanical. That made sense to Zach. Surely the vault itself was protected by both steel and magic.
Something else, though, immediately caught Zach’s attention. Even through the vault, he could feel the power of the relic pulsing through the steel door. The sarira, legendary for their effect on magicians, were calling out to him. He’d seen a lot of strange and powerful things over the years, but he’d never felt keyed into a power like this before, especially with this much distance still between himself and it.
As Zach took this all in, the door behind him groaned on its bent hinges, closing the gap through which they had come. They were surrounded by four giant women—Amazonian in bearing, all wearing tactical gear.
The woman with the drill never even looked up from what she was doing. Her focus was unbroken.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” the tallest of the four Amazons said. “To be honest, we’d actually been hoping for you. This job has been a little dull so far.”
She pulled out a pair of stun sticks and fired them up. Charges arched ominously from the ends. Then she slapped a pair of night vision goggles down over her eyes, laughed a throaty laugh, and flicked off the lights.
“Don’t worry,” her disembodied voice said, “this won’t hurt much. Eventually.”
The pitch black of the room was broken only by a thin bar of light from a crack in the broken door, the occasional arc of stun sticks, and the drill, alternately sparking orange and green as it burned through layers of steel and spell.
Zach wove a second spell, expanding and tweaking the nature of the shield he’d initially deployed. Giant women, determined to hurt him, would be able to break through it or work around it, but it would at least slow them down and give him a chance to fight back. The edges of the shield shimmered a faint green that was easier to see in the dark, but that probably didn’t show up at all for anyone using night vision.
He’d take whatever advantage he could get.
Zach heard Richard cry out, his pained expression momentarily lit by a stun stick that had nailed him in the side.
Zach used that bit of light to orient himself in the room. He tried to position himself in a corner as one Amazon came in hot from his left, her stun stick sparking, but deflected by his shield. He took advantage of her surprise and kicked her hard in the ribs, then wrenched one stick out of her strong hand. While he was doing this, though, he took a punch from second attacker who also glancingly connected with her stun stick.
Zach felt his knees buckle as the current coursed through him.
Richard also cried out again, though one of his attackers now had a broken, bloody nose.
Zach’s muscles spasmed and his teeth clenched. He didn’t want to find out what a full strength dose felt like. Richard must be built like an ox to still be standing.
Zach felt a little disoriented, but he used the growing pulse of energy from the sarira to get his bearings in the room. Already down on one knee, he looked for the stun stick that he’d dropped on the floor.
There.
He dove for the stick and grabbed it. But before he could use it, the lead Amazon’s foot pinned both his hand and the weapon to the floor. She laughed her unsettling laugh and, accounting this time for Zach’s shield, delivered a full charge.
Zach felt his eyes roll back into his head as every muscle in his body seized and burned.
This is bad, Zach thought. Very bad. They’re going to win. They’re going to get away with the relic.
And, in fact, at just that moment, the drill whirled to a stop. The smaller woman stood, dusted off her hands, and spun the vault door open. A deep, red light poured out of the vault. The woman shielded her eyes and, though Zach had other things to worry about, he couldn’t look away. The sarira appeared to the be the only item in the vault, displayed unassumingly on a small table in the center of the room.
Without the foot of steel between them, the waves of power from the relic washed over Zach, penetrating layers of skin and muscle, setting the bones inside of him on fire. Zach cried out as his eyes burned red.
The Amazon stepped back, a look of fear in her eye—she hadn’t expected her prone opponent to start glowing red from the inside out.
Zach looked down at his hands and body. His skeleton, burning bright red, was visible through skin and tissue. As he stared at his hands, they began to throb and bulge in sync with the power, pressing against the limits of his body. Then they expanded and elongated, pressing again.
Zach screamed.
Everyone in the room was frozen in place, staring at him.
As his body swelled and grew, Zach could also feel his own mind receding, swamped by the call of the power that racked him. It felt like his ordinary body and mind were trapped inside of a larger entity—a gargantuan, magical body and mind—suspended like an insect in amber.
His clothes were in tatters. He stumbled to his feet and found that, even with his head bowed, his shoulders scraped the ceiling of the room. A short pair of horns sprouted from his forehead.
What the hell am I becoming?
He didn’t know. His thoughts shrunk to a single, pulsing point: save the relic, save Cass. Every other thought was obliterated by these two pounding waves.
The woman looked at the relic, took a good look at Zach, and offered her expert evaluation of their current situation.
“Shit,” she said, as she cut her losses, grabbed her bag, and ran for the door.
Zach flexed and bellowed. With a backhand flick, he sent one of the Amazons crashing into the wall. With another blow, he tossed Richard and one of the other women across the room.
The woman with the scarf was almost to the door. Zach came rumbling across the room after her. She shoved at the steel door, willing it to mov
e on its bent hinges just the few inches she needed.
She slipped through the crack just as Zach barreled into the door and burst through the brick wall that framed it, sending the door and a load of bricks hurtling into the opposite alley wall. Zach shrugged off the debris that clung to him, looking for the woman with the scarf as the dust began to settle.
She had cleared the door but had been thrown to the ground by the force of his exit. She rolled back to her feet, dusted herself off, and gave him an ice cold stare.
The lone, nearly senseless thought still throbbing in his head—save Cass—sent Zach thundering after her.
The woman, though, didn’t flinch. She held her ground and waited for him.
Once he was right on top of her, the woman leapt into the air, planted a hand on his shoulder, and vaulted cleanly over the top of him. Zach’s hand reached out after her, but his momentum carried his mass forward, and the only thing he got a hold of was her bag. The shoulder strap snapped and she left it behind, dangling in his hand, as she sprinted down the alley and turned the corner.
Now that he’d gone halfway down the alley, the distance between Zach and the relic in the vault had increased enough that its power over him had begun to weaken. But when the doorless wall separating him from the vault collapsed altogether, sealing off the room, he felt a wave of dizziness overcome him. He stumbled into the opposite alley wall and then to his knees. His bones began to cool and shrink, his horns receded, and his vision of a world colored red burnt itself out.
Everything went black.
When Zach came to, he was himself again, alone in the alley, clutching the thief’s broken bag.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Cass came back from her quarter-final victory in high spirits. She’d defeated her opponent without much trouble and she’d won over some of the crowd. Scattered chants of “Seer, Seer,” had punctuated her win. And it seemed like even the remainder that disliked her loved to hate her, at least.
But when Cass came through the door and dropped her gear in the kitchen, she found that the mood in the apartment was dark. Richard was reclining on the couch in the sunken living room. A single table lamp was lit. He was dirty and shirtless, his feet propped up on the coffee table, an ice pack pressed to a fresh head wound, and a glass of Scotch in his hand. He looked, in general, battered.
“What the hell happened to you?” Cass asked. “I’m supposed to be the one taking the beatings here.”
Richard tilted his head back and looked at her upside down over the back of the couch.
“Cassandra,” he said, his speech a touch slurred, “our conquering hero. Sorry to miss your fight. While you were busy winning the tournament, we were making sure you still had a prize to win.”
“What?” Cass responded, joining him on the couch. With one leg folded under her, she scooted close and took the ice pack from Richard. She tenderly fingered the bloody bruise beneath the ice and then held the pack in place for him.
Richard sighed and finished his drink. He rattled the remaining ice in the tumbler, then set the glass down and leaned back, settling deep into the cushions.
“I received information that someone intended to steal the tournament prize. Such information in a situation like this is … delicate. I could have turned the information over to the organizers and let them handle things in their own way of course—law and order in the Underside are somewhat nebulous under the best of circumstances—but I did not believe that I could trust them. And given the stakes, I needed the assurance that this would be handled properly. I recruited Zach to help me track down a few clues that led us, this evening, to interrupt the thieves mid-heist.”
Cass leaned in closer and absently placed her free hand on Richard’s chest while she adjusted the ice pack.
Richard’s heart almost stopped when she touched it.
He swallowed hard, cleared his throat, and continued.
“We stopped the heist and saved the relic. But we didn’t capture the thieves and, unfortunately, the bank itself basically collapsed around us. The thieves had cut the power and, in the dark, I had trouble seeing exactly what took place, but something happened to Zach—or, maybe, something was done by Zach?—something that both scared the crew off and brought the walls down.”
Cass fell back onto the sofa, blew hair out of her eyes, and stared at the ceiling. Richard took charge of his own ice pack again.
“Shit,” Cass said.
“There are only two days left in the tournament. Just the semi-final and final rounds. With assistance from York Enterprises, the relic has been moved to a new secure location, hidden from prying eyes. Now it’s just up to you to win it.”
“And Zach’s okay?” Cass asked.
“He appears uninjured. But as to whether or not he’s okay, I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him yourself. He’s in his room.”
With his freehand, Richard gestured toward Zach’s room. Cass hopped over the back of the couch, gave Richard’s hand a grateful squeeze, and headed for Zach’s room.
Cass offered a gentle knock on the door and, when no one answered, let herself in and quietly shut the door behind her.
Zach had only barely gotten out of the shower. Steam from the bathroom trailed out into the bedroom. A pile of tattered clothes lay on the closet floor. Zach, dressed in just a towel, was standing next to the bed going through a bag of gear that Cass had never seen before.
Cass bit her lip when she saw him, his hair still wet and his skin dark—he looked both strong and vulnerable at the same time and the mix was deeply appealing—and she expected that he’d be embarrassed about the towel. Instead, he seemed worried about the bag. He quickly zipped it up and awkwardly shoved it under the bed, almost losing his towel in the process.
“Careful there, tiger,” Cass teased. “Some things can’t be unseen.”
Zach blushed, hung his head, and sat down hard on the edge of the bed. He ran his fingers through his damp hair and stared intently at the floor.
“Hey,” Cass said, settling into a spot next to him on the bed and slipping her arm around his waist. “You okay?”
Zach exhaled deeply, but didn’t respond.
Cass slid her hand up to his sore nipple and gave it a gentle pull.
He gave her a weak smile in return and fell back on the bed, trapping her arm beneath him.
“Just a little reminder,” Cass said.
She leaned in closer, her free hand lightly tracing the outline of his Zach’s ribs, waiting for him to talk when he was ready.
They lay together in silence for a couple of minutes. Then Zach opened his eyes and turned his head toward her. He studied her expression and kissed the corner of her weak eye. Both of his eyes were bloodshot, an explosion of deep red veins radiating inward toward his nearly black irises.
“Zach,” Cass prompted, “what happened at the bank?”
“I don’t know what to say, Cass,” Zach began. “I don’t know how to describe it. I’m not sure what happened.”
Cass kept quiet and gave him room to try.
“Once the vault was open, the sarira—they did something to me. For a moment, they changed me. And trapped me. And I didn’t know if I’d ever get loose again.”
Cass felt an involuntary tremble pass through Zach’s body, from head to toe, and settle in his still-shaking hands.
“I’ve never felt so powerful. Or been more scared.”
Cass squeezed his trembling hand, willing it to be still in her own.
“There are stories, legends—I thought they were just your typical kinds of exaggerations, built up layer by layer over the years. But now I wonder if there isn’t something to them.”
Agitated, Zach stood up, almost losing his towel again. He pulled it tight around his waist and began to pace back and forth. Cass sat up, following him with her eyes.
“One legend is about a famous Shield magician in the Middle Ages who experimented with these kinds of relics, augmenting his strength and changing his form
until he had effectively encased himself inside another body and mind. Once he was in, though, he couldn’t control the power he’d gathered and he couldn’t get free of the body either. He crippled the Lost for hundreds of years, and Judas himself barely escaped, but he also almost destroyed the Shield in the process. In the end, the Shield itself was forced to put him down.”
Cass was riveted by the story, though she wasn’t sure what to make of it. The scholar and scientist in her was skeptical, but in the end this story wasn’t much stranger than everything else she’d seen and experienced in the past few years.
In particular, though, she wasn’t sure what the story meant for Zach, or what it revealed about the events at the bank today. She was hesitant to pressure him for more details. He seemed fragile enough at the moment that, probably, the only way he could talk about it was to come at it sideways.
Explanations could wait.
Cass stood up, fixed Zach’s loose towel for him, and pulled him close.
Zach returned her embrace with one hand while, with the other, he absently rubbed the place on his forehead where a short pair of horns had budded just hours ago.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The following day, Cass found herself back in the ring. She hadn’t thought they could pack any more people into the arena than they already had.
She was wrong.
If there were fire codes in the Underside, they were definitely being broken. Cass could barely hear herself think amid the pre-fight rumble of the crowd.
The price you pay, Jones, for your own excellence.
Kumiko snapped her fingers in front of Cass’s face.
“Over here,” Kumiko said. “Focus.”
Cass turned her full attention to Kumiko, happy for any last-minute advice.
“You’ve never seen anything like this man,” Kumiko began sourly. “You aren’t ready for this.”
Cass glanced over at her semi-final opponent, the last person standing between her and the championship fight. He was a tall Middle Eastern man with a thick, white beard, dressed in desert garb. He was warming up with some type of “whirling dervish” moves. Also, he happened to have four arms and four eyes.
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