Cass descended the stairs one at a time, her hand trailing along the iron railing embedded in the wall. Down in the tunnel, the air was warmer, damp, and a bit musty. The tunnel looked like a standard Underside passageway. The passageway was narrow, the walls were gray, and a single bare bulb hung from the ceiling halfway down its length.
At the end of the hallway, Cass found a single door, flush with the wall. It had no handle. But it did have a lock that was cold to the touch.
The door, though, wasn’t locked. It was open just a crack, like someone was expecting her. Cass pushed lightly against the door and then, on the rebound, pulled it open. The light emanating from inside was warm and yellow. She stepped into the room and the door closed gently behind her.
Cass recognized the space. She was in Kumiko’s private rooms at the monastery.
She called out, but no one answered.
Cass circled the low table in the outer room where Kumiko often gathered friends and colleagues and served tea. All of the places at the table were set.
Cass examined the settings and the implements for preparing the tea, but this didn’t feel like what she was looking for. This space was still too public, too familiar.
She pushed past the outer room and found herself in a small, back room with paper walls, a small bookshelf, Japanese style bedding on the floor, a single scroll of calligraphy hung on the wall, and a small low desk with materials for doing calligraphy in the corner. Apart from these items, the room was spartan in its austerity. This was Kumiko’s private bedroom.
Cass couldn’t imagine a possible occasion when, in the everyday world, Kumiko might invite her into this space. It would be like washing their underwear together or painting each other’s toenails. It was unthinkable.
This, though, didn’t make Cass more hesitant. Instead, it fueled her curiosity. Who was that tiny woman when she let her hair down and took off the kimono?
Cass took a closer look at the single scroll of Japanese calligraphy hanging on the wall. It was very old—much too old for Cass’s tenuous smattering of modern Japanese to decipher. Still, she reached out and gently grazed the edge of the scroll with the tips of her fingers.
As she did, Cass saw Kumiko as a child—or better, Cass experienced, in the first person, what Kumiko herself had felt as a child—as if the experience were happening to her. Kumiko was maybe six years old and was with her father, a thin man with a prematurely graying goatee. Her father was demonstrating the art of calligraphy and Kumiko, with fierce intensity, was trying to absorb all the details that defined what he was doing. Her father’s movements were both decisive and spontaneous as, in a few deft strokes, he created the very scroll that now hung on Kumiko’s wall.
The tips of Cass’s fingers broke contact with the scroll and the vision faded. Cass, though, could still feel the lingering warmth of Kumiko’s affection and admiration for her father.
Cass turned to the small bookshelf. The shelves were mostly empty except for several slim volumes of poetry and, on the top shelf, a single, twisting fragment of a tree branch. The wood was dark, almost black, with a hint of rust, as if it were partially petrified. Cass felt a familiar, magnetic pulse emanating from the wood, calling for her to touch it. She hesitated and, then, almost despite herself, connected with it.
This time, a vision or memory exploded into her head and she saw Kumiko, much older now, much more recently, trapped in a small, dark space. Her knees were pulled to her chest, her brow furrowed with that same fierce intensity she’d applied to watching her father. Cass felt in Kumiko a strong determination paired with a lingering fear as she struggled in her mind against some ancient, elemental power. Wherever Kumiko was trapped, that elemental power pulsed with a mind-fragmenting force that resonated in every one of her birdlike bones. Looking upward, Cass caught a glimpse of a small circle of light far above their heads; Kumiko was at the bottom of a deep shaft. Cass felt a primal fear grip her and, with a jerk, she let go of the fragment of wood and returned to the bedroom.
Back in the bedroom, Cass felt disoriented and unsteady. With more of a thump than she’d intended, she sat down hard on Kumiko’s bedding and tried to gather herself. She pressed with one thumb against the gap between her eyes and her vision began to clear as the fear faded. She leaned back, arms stretched behind her for support, and Cass’s hand brushed the small, cylindrical pillow at the head of the bed.
This time, Cass was Kumiko in her thirties, still young, and decidedly in love. Kumiko and her lover were in bed. There was nothing between them but the thin, white sheet that covered them. The air was warm and fragrant with spring blossoms. The man wasn’t much taller than Kumiko, but his arms were strong and his skin was dark from the sun. Kumiko smoothed his mustache and bit her lip. The man laughed. They’d just been reunited. And, more importantly, they’d just reconciled. The man had traveled a great distance and had been gone for a long time. Kumiko had hurt him and sent him running. He brushed Kumiko’s eyelids with a kiss and apologized for how long it had taken him to return. Kumiko tasted the salt in the crook of his neck and offered an apology of her own. She glanced up at the scroll of calligraphy hanging above the bed, the same scroll that was still there now. “Do you know what it says?” she asked him, absently stroking the inside of his thigh. The man, distracted, shook his head. Kumiko pressed herself against him and whispered it into his ear: “Only those who forgive are blameless.” The man smiled and drew a line with his thumb from Kumiko’s collarbone, down between her breasts to her navel. This time, Kumiko was the one who laughed and, with both of them twisted up in the sheet, she rolled on top, pinning him beneath her.
A bit caught up in the moment, Cass almost forgot to let go of the pillow and break the thread of the memory. Once she remembered that she was not Kumiko, Cass tossed the pillow itself across the room like a hot potato and held her hands in the air in a gesture of innocence. She took a deep breath and tried to separate herself from all of the feelings that, as Kumiko, she had been . . . feeling.
That was a close one. There wouldn’t have been any way to forget what she’d almost remembered. Cass would never have been able to look Kumiko in the eye again without blushing.
With the thread broken, though, a warm, white light grew and enveloped Kumiko’s rooms. Then, when the light had receded, Cass found herself already out of the room and running down the Underside hallway, taking the stairs back to the surface two at a time.
Kumiko was waiting for her there.
“I know what we need to do,” Cass said. “But first we need to find Zach.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Kumiko lead them back through the park.
The trees were still and the leaves were silent. It seemed like they were, at the moment, passing through the eye of a storm. As they followed the path through the park, Cass felt some lingering effects from being inside Kumiko’s mind and experienced a kind of double-vision as her thoughts and perceptions were ghosted by Kumiko’s own. She could feel weak echoes of what Kumiko was feeling right now and she could see faint fragments of the park from Kumiko’s perspective. It was like Cass was receiving parallel feeds of the same events from slightly different perspectives. The effect was both deeply weird and strangely comforting.
But by the time they’d left the park and returned to the street, Cass felt grounded again. In fact, once the doubling had faded, Cass discovered that she felt more grounded—grounded in her own sense of self—than she had in some time.
Anchored by her past experiences seeing things in and through both Zach’s and Kumiko’s minds, Cass wasn’t alone. Exposed to their minds, she’d unlocked parts of her own.
At the edge of the park, Kumiko took Cass’s hand again and pointed across the street to a small, nondescript chapel with a wrought iron fence tucked into a row of townhouses.
“You’ll find him in there. Go to him,” Kumiko said. “He needs you,” she added with a twinkle in her eye. She nodded encouragingly and suppressed a knowing smile.
Did we just have a heart-to-heart moment? Cass wondered. Was this how it was going to be from now on? Winks and nudges about my boyfriend from a tiny, ancient witch? Am I going to catch Kumiko admiring Zach’s ass?
Cass wasn’t sure she could deal with that.
“It’s an old Shield outpost,” Kumiko continued, unfazed. “I’ll catch up with you in the morning at the arena before the fight.”
Cass nodded and steeled herself to enter the building. She and Zach hadn’t parted on the best of terms. What kind of reception would she get?
Screw that, Cass thought, I’ll decide what kind of reception I have.
When she looked back, Kumiko was already gone.
Cass crossed the street. The door to the little chapel was unlocked. The door itself was old and heavy, and the chapel’s street-level front was dominated by a wide stained-glass window. The colors in the window were muted from the outside, and the image seemed to be more geometrical than pictorial.
Cass pushed through the heavy wooden door and into a narrow hallway lined with several more doors. A few of the doors had numbers on them and looked residential. They were probably (very, very tiny) rooms for monkish Shield visitors to use during their stay. But the first door on Cass’s right was a solid set of double doors that swung into the chapel.
This seemed like the place to start. Where else to find her choirboy but in the chapel?
Cass opened the double doors just a crack and slipped through. Inside, the room was dim, lit only by the ambient gray light that filtered through the stained glass. Cass waited for a moment, giving her eyes a chance to adjust.
From the inside, the mosaic hummed with life, as if the glass panes not only conveyed the faint light that passed through them, but also stored that light like battery cells against the coming of a darker day. Lit up like this and seen from the interior, the pattern in the glass was clearer. A cobalt circle of glass dominated the heart of the design. It was framed by a pair of rectangles that, as they stretched upward, shattered into smaller fragments, branching outward like the limbs of a tree. The whole assemblage was encompassed by a swirl of colors that radiated outward from the dark eye at the center.
The image was striking. And, despite how spare it was, Cass got a creeping feeling that she was looking at a depiction of the strange, magnetic well she had almost plummeted into in the monastery’s courtyard.
The chapel itself was long but shallow and had only four rows of pews. A vague, non-denominational altar was paired at the front with a lectern.
In the front row, Cass spotted Zach seated in a pew with his head bowed.
Cass cleared her throat, but Zach didn’t turn to look. As far as she could tell, he hadn’t heard her. He was locked deep in prayer or contemplation, his brow furrowed, the corners of his mouth frowning in earnest concentration. He looked worried and ashen and not quite himself.
Cass walked to the front of the chapel and quietly sat next to him. Zach opened his eyes, saw her, and a spark of joy lit up his face. Had he been thinking about her? Was she an answer to his prayers?
Zach pulled her to him, intending to embrace her, but Cass turned his face towards her—his chin rough and unshaven—and parted his lips with an eager, unsubtle kiss.
Cass didn’t think she’d ever been so glad to see someone before. Zach tried to pull back and say something to her, but she wouldn’t let him go. In the afterglow of her trip inside Kumiko’s mind, she was starved for him. She leaned in hard, pressing him back against the pew, and placed her hand on his chest. Zach sighed and mumbled her name as her hand trailed down his chest to his belt where, with one deft gesture, she unbuckled it.
Zach sat bolt upright.
“Whoa there, beautiful,” Zach said, squeezing her hand in his own. “I’m glad to see you, too. But in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re actually in a church at the moment.”
Cass hooked two fingers through his buckle’s clasp, tugged at it playfully, and then groaned and buried her head in his shoulder.
“Yeah, yeah” she muttered into the crook of his neck.
“Still,” Zach said, “despite the presence of God, I need to tell you something very important.”
He kissed her again. His lips were soft, but chapped. With his hand on her hip, he pulled her closer.
“What?” Cass murmured between small, insistent kisses.
Zach’s hand slipped under her sweatshirt, up her ribs—slowly, as if he were counting each rib, one by one—and then cupped her breast. Cass felt like she was going to melt into the pew . . . until, without warning, Zach gave her nipple a more-than-playful pinch.
Cass jumped and slapped his hand away as Zach laughed and clung to her.
“That was mean,” Cass said as she stifled a laugh of her own, the spell of the moment broken. “But I do love the sound of your laugh.”
“I just didn’t want you to forget,” he said. Then, more soberly, he added, “I love you. And no matter what happens, that will never change.”
On that more-ominous-than-intended note, the look on Zach’s face turned serious. The blush in his cheeks faded, and the ashen look returned.
“What is it, Zach?” Cass prompted. “What’s wrong? What happened to you in that bank?”
Zach stared at his hands in his lap. He looked at them as if they weren’t his, as if they might belong to someone else.
“Cass—” he began, then trailed off.
Cass waited.
Maybe now was not the time. They had a big day ahead of them tomorrow. They could take this slow. She wasn’t going anywhere.
Cass pulled Zach’s head into her lap. They sat in silence for a long time, the light from the stained-glass window wavering gently on the wood-paneled wall in front of them.
Zach was clearly exhausted.
Cass gently traced the edge of his ear with the tip of her finger and, as his eyes fluttered shut, she kissed him on the forehead. Leaning into the corner of the pew, Cass closed her own eyes and, before she knew it, she was out, too.
They slept through the rest of the night, neither of them stirring, until the front door to the building banged open. Cass and Zach both jumped to their feet as shouting filled the hallway outside the chapel.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Richard burst through the chapel’s double doors and slammed them shut behind him. He appeared a bit battered, a thin line of blood running down his bearded cheek from a cut on his forehead, and he was breathing hard.
Cass and Zach, barely awake, stared at him, trying to make sense of the situation. Richard stared back, an eyebrow cocked at the look of the two of them. Cass straightened her shirt and smoothed her hair. Zach looked away, coughed, and buckled his belt.
A big body crashed into the other side of the double doors. Richard dug in, bracing the doors with his back, and forced them closed again.
“If you two have it wrapped up over there,” Richard said, “I could use a hand.”
Richard’s own hands were full. He had a sword in each. When Cass leapt over a pew to come to his aid, he tossed her one of the katanas and kept the other for himself. Cass snatched it out of the air and tested its balance. She looked pleased to have a sword in hand again. Zach, though, did not look pleased, and held his empty palms up, shooting Richard a hard look.
“What?” Richard shrugged. “I’ve only got two hands.”
Whatever was out in the hall crashed into the doors again, this time harder, and Richard was only able to force them shut this time with help from Cass and Zach.
This wasn’t going to work as a long term strategy. Zach upended a pew and jammed it into place, bracing the doors closed.
“That should buy us a minute,” Zach said. “What’s the story, here, Richard?” he added, suspicious. “What have you brought to our doorstep?”
“This,” Richard responded, “is a little present that was already on its
way. I just happened to intercept it before it could catch you with—erm—your pants down. A handful of the Lost, going feral, have decided to take the outcome of today’s championship fight into their own hands by eliminating their champion’s competition. If we can just get Cassandra to the arena, she should be safe there.”
Cass took this in and nodded.
“Thanks for coming,” she said warmly.
Richard gave a small smile and looked away.
“So we just need to get to the arena without getting eaten by a pack of feral vampires?” Cass summarized.
“Right,” Richard confirmed.
“No problem,” Zach added, “except that we just barricaded the room’s only exit.”
Cass took a look around the room and frowned. Then, returning the stare of the window’s giant, cobalt eye, a smile crept across her face.
“Not quite,” Cass said, taking charge, a whiff of smoky light trailing from her own eye.
Cass popped her hood up over her face and, with a running start, crashed through the stained-glass window and onto the street, rolling onto her feet in a cloud of light and shattered glass. She shed her now shredded sweatshirt and, in just a T-shirt and jeans, struck an aggressive pose with her sword at the ready.
Zach and Richard exchanged a glance that acknowledged, all else aside, the one thing they could always agree on: Cass was—literally—smoking hot. They gathered themselves and jumped through the window after her.
On the street, several vampires—inexplicably decked out like 1950s greasers in classic, James Dean-esque leather jackets and rolled jeans—were waiting for them. In the abstract, their plan to take out the Seer before the match had seemed like a good one. But now that they’d caught sight of Cass, tattered and smoking in the street right in front of them, they appeared to be having second thoughts.
Cass didn’t wait for them to think it through.
She took two quick steps, then pinwheeled into a kick that caught one of the vampires under the chin, lifting him off his feet and lopping off the end of his tongue as his jaw, filled with rows of razor sharp teeth, snapped shut.
Blameless: A Vision of Vampires 3 Page 14
