by Laura Legend
But she didn’t say it out loud. Instead, she launched into another flurry of punches, a spark of dark anger and black hopelessness fueling her blows. She hit the heavy bag faster and harder, faster and harder, until the dark leather split down the side and a blizzard of white stuffing flew out.
Miranda let go of the bag, coughing as she waved away the gently floating cloud of debris and picked bits of stuffing out of her hair.
Just as fast, all that black energy drained back into Cass’s feet. “I’m sorry, too,” she said sheepishly.
“I can see that,” Miranda replied, then looked over her shoulder for Zach. “Let’s go, Riviera. We’re ready for you.”
Zach raised an eyebrow at the split heavy bag and the swirl of stuffing floating to ground.
Miranda had them gear up for some friendly sparring and ushered them into a hexagonal MMA ring. “Let’s go,” she said, “let’s see what you’ve got.”
Cass and Zach circled each other. Zach shuffled his feet, playful. Cass just tried to stay on her toes, quiet the thousand questions in her mind, and recapture at least a modest amount of focus before Zach tagged her with a punch to the face.
“You know how to fight,” Miranda said. “You’ve always been good at that. But this is different now. As the Seer, your powers run much deeper than you know. It’s not just about the body anymore. And it will take years of training and experience before you can bring many of your powers into play. Beyond your natural athleticism, your powers as a Seer are grounded in your ability to be truthful. As the Seer, you can ‘see’ the truth in a given situation and, if you can respond truthfully, if you can accept the truth, then your actions will be rooted in a power that is much deeper than the strength of your own muscles and bones.”
Zach took advantage of the fact that Cass’s attention was divided between himself and Miranda. He playfully tagged her once in the side of her face and then swept her leg out from under her, sending her tumbling to the mat.
Zach smiled his crooked smile, ready to tease her about it. But before he could say anything, Cass had already popped up from the mat with a dark look in her eyes.
“Whoa, tiger,” Zach said, his gloved hand outstretched, “easy. We’re just playing here.”
Cass shook her head, trying to clear the fog.
Miranda continued. “It will take time to explain how this works and even longer for you to feel your way into actually understanding it with both your mind and your body. And, to be honest, there may be much of it that can’t be taught and that you’ll just have to figure out on your own as you learn how to trust yourself and see the truth about yourself.”
Cass feinted a punch and Zach danced away to the left.
“But, for the moment, take this as a guiding thread: at bottom, the truth about the world is that everything with a beginning has an end. The truth about the world is that everything passes. The rock bottom truth about reality is time. And, as a result, all of your powers are grounded in learning how to deal truthfully with time, with both the costs of time and, especially, the power and potential of time.”
Cass could feel her weak eye twitching into focus in response to what Miranda was saying. She had noticed already that, when her powers kicked in, they depended on her being truthful and, more, that they tended to involve time slowing down. When this happened, it felt like time, normally closed and inevitable, had relaxed, opened up, and offered her space to act.
In response to her dark look, Zach had backed off a bit, waiting for Cass to make the next move. Feeling time open up a bit in this same way, Cass feinted a punch to Zach’s ribs and then, before he could recover, caught him with a roundhouse kick that clocked him in the nose, sent a spray of blood across the mat, and knocked him flat on his back.
Cass felt a surge of power. And she liked how it felt. Or, at least part of her did. Because, at the sight of Zach’s blood, the other part of her felt ashamed.
She was tempted to bury the first feeling beneath the second, to bury the joy of that power beneath her shame, but sensed that this would be the wrong thing to do. She sensed that, if she did that, she’d make things worse. She would, in a real way, be lying to herself.
She dropped to her knees next to Zach. He was already pinching his nose and trying to make a joke about how he really needed to stop hitting her foot so hard with his face. In her heart, Cass tried to acknowledge the truth of both feelings—both the power and the shame. She tried, in light of them, to bring Zach himself into focus.
Miranda watched with keen interest from the side of the ring. She looked like she was watching both the fight between Zach and Cass and the fight inside of Cass herself.
“That’s right,” Miranda said. “Don’t run from it, Cass. Let the truth be whatever it is. Let your feelings be whatever they are. Don’t bury them. See the truth of them. Your feelings don’t have to stay locked up behind those heavy doors. You weren’t the one who put them there in the first place.”
I wasn’t the one who put those doors there in the first place? Cass thought with alarm. What is Miranda talking about? Who put them there?
When she thought this, time slowed to a crawl for Cass. Sound dropped out altogether and a profound silence took hold.
Cass looked at Miranda. Then she looked at Zach. Everything came into incredibly sharp focus. She looked at the spray of cherry red blood on the mat. The blood came into focus as the outline of a flower, as several flowers—as a spray of cherry blossoms.
A memory of cherry blossoms welled up from somewhere deep inside her and bloomed in her mind. Her muscles went slack and Cass slumped onto Zach’s chest.
The room went fuzzy. The sharp scent of blossoms filled the air.
Cass was seven years old. She was holding her mother’s hand. In Japan.
5
Cass was seven years old. She was holding her mother’s hand. Her hand was dry and warm and strong. Rose Jones was wearing a white blouse and pink pedal pushers. The breeze was warm. The sun was high in the bright morning sky. Rose smiled at Cass and gave her small hand a squeeze.
They were in Nagano, Japan, at a cherry blossom festival.
Cass’s dad was there too. In relation to little Cass, Gary Jones seemed impossibly tall and impossibly young. He was wearing brown chinos and a dark blue polo. Cass was standing between her parents. Pulling Cass close, Gary leaned over her head, whispered something in Rose’s ear, and kissed her mother on the cheek. Rose laughed and smiled. Though he was raised mostly in the U.S., Cass’s father was deeply Japanese in appearance and demeanor. Here, in Nagano, with Cass’s mother, he seemed happy and at home in a way that Cass couldn’t remember ever seeing.
A warm breeze stirred and blossoms fell like snow around them. Cass pulled free of Rose’s hand and joined their dance, twirling like she was a flower spinning through the air, until she, like the blossoms, fell to the earth, dizzy and giddy.
When she looked up from the ground, Cass noticed that someone else was with them, too. A tiny, older woman in a kimono-like jacket with white hair pulled back into a bun and held in place with a pin: Gary’s aunt.
The white haired woman pointed out some auspicious features of the blossoms, commented on the weather, and gave Rose’s bicep a friendly squeeze. It was clear that, though she was Gary’s family, she was here for Rose. Her bond with Rose was obvious, substantial, and grounded in something deeper than the coincidence of a family connection.
The morning was perfect in its simplicity.
Cass was filled with a rush of simple, uncomplicated joy at the scent of the cherry blossoms, the feel of the dark soil between her fingers, the sun filtered through the tree branches, and the presence of family. She popped back up from the ground, twirled again, and started to weave her way in and out of the trees, her arms outstretched.
She realized, with a jolt, that, in this memory, her feelings were entirely her own. Nothing was held at arm’s length. There were no heavy doors with imposing locks. She just felt, simply and directly, w
hatever she was feeling. People made sense. She made sense. She let out a “whoop” and her mother, pausing mid-conversation with the older woman, laughed out loud at the sound of it.
Cass felt free, unbounded. She ran and ran, in and out of trees, in circles and figure eights, in widening gyres around her family until she lost track of exactly where they were. She stopped to listen for the sound of their voices. She was breathing hard and leaned against a tree.
A cloud passed in front of the sun and a shadow slanted across the ground toward her. She could see it coming. When it arrived, the shadow was cold and her skin, glistening with sweat, grew clammy. Goosebumps crawled up her arms, across her shoulders, and up the back of her neck.
Cass shivered. A creeping fear grabbed her.
The cloud darkened and spread and the sun was more firmly blotted out by its passing. Cass spun in a panicked circle, looking for some sign of her parents. She ran from tree to tree, looking for the light.
“Mom!” she called. “Mom!”
The black shadow followed her through the trees. The warm breeze died. The air grew colder still. The tree branches stopped swaying. The leaves stopped rustling. The birds stopped singing.
Cass started to run. Faster and faster. As fast as her little legs could take her.
The shadow was still coming.
She tripped over a tree root and fell. She skinned her hands and knees. The shadow was gliding across the earth, swallowing everything in its path. Cass tried to call out again, but she couldn’t find her voice.
The shadow swallowed her.
All the color drained out of the day. And then the anger and fear drained out of her, too. A heavy door slammed shut inside of her and the blessed sense of emotional intensity that had saturated the memory was gone. Instead of feeling like a seven year-old, bubbling over with the hope and promise of life, she now felt almost thirty, bruised by life, barely hanging on to her second-hand emotions by a thin thread.
“Mom,” Cass croaked, her voice weak.
Silence.
“Mom!” Cass cried.
A voice from behind her responded. “I’m here, sweetie,” Rose said.
Cass looked up. Rose took Cass into her arms, pulled her into her lap. She wiped away Cass’s tears and smoothed her hair.
“Shhhh,” Rose said. “It’s okay, now. It’s okay.”
Cass circled her arms around her mother’s neck and squeezed hard, pulling her close.
“Cass, I need to tell you something. We don’t have a lot of time. And I need you to remember what I say. Can you promise to remember?”
Cass sniffed back more tears and nodded her head against her mother’s shoulder.
“I’m going to give you a magic word. Remember it. Keep it safe. And you can use it whenever you feel afraid. Just whisper this word to yourself. Think of me and then say it three times.”
Cass nodded again.
“Are you ready? The word is kibo.”
“Kibo,” Cass repeated to herself, pressing it into her mind like a stamp into wax. “Kibo.”
“That’s right,” Rose said, her eyes flashing green. “You’ve got it. Now hang on to it. It’s an old Japanese word. It means hope.”
Hope, Cass thought as the word cut through the fog of that memory, drawing her out of the past and back toward the present. Cass, though, didn’t want to leave the memory just yet. She couldn’t bear to let go of her mother again already. She squeezed harder and hung on to her mother for dear life.
“But what if I don’t feel any hope. What if all I feel is . . . hopeless?” Cass asked, breathless. “What do I do, Mom?”
Rose pulled back and took a look at Cass. She held Cass’s head between her hands and took her measure, looking deep into her eyes, like she knew that she wasn’t talking to a seven year-old anymore.
“Hope isn’t something you can have by yourself,” Rose said. “Hope isn’t something you can have all alone. It’s something that can only be shared. That’s why, when you say the word three times, you have to also think of me.”
The cloud was gone. The sun was out. The warm breeze stirred again.
Rose brushed the dirt off of Cass’s knees and took her hand.
“Are you ready?” Rose asked. “Should we go find your dad?”
Cass nodded.
Then the memory started to fade around the edges. Everything started to go fuzzy. And the sharp smell of sweat and leather filled the air.
But it wasn’t over yet. Not quite.
Just as the vision was fading out, just as Cass was about to lose hold of her mother’s hand, that hand—so warm and firm a moment ago—turned cold and slippery and shadowy. And just as she lost her grip on that hand, Cass’s palm was nicked by the trailing edge of a razor sharp claw.
Cass woke with a start to find herself back in the gym. Zach and Miranda were bent over her. They shouted with relief when her eyes opened. They tried to help her up.
“Just give me a moment,” Cass said, trying to remember what her mother had said, trying to make sure that it was planted deep inside of her where she wouldn’t be able to forget it.
“Kibo,” she whispered to herself, rocking back and forth,“kibo, kibo.”
Zach was smiling down at her. “Let’s go champ. Are you ready? Give me your hand,” he said. Cass reached out to take his hand but stopped halfway.
The palm of her hand was cut and slick with blood.
6
Cass was wrung out by her experience in the gym, both the fight and the memory. She was emotionally and physically running on empty. She didn’t tell Zach or Miranda what had happened. Even if she’d wanted to, she didn’t know how.
She wiped her bloody hand on her shorts, accepted Zach’s hand up, and pulled her street clothes back on. Miranda dropped her off at Java’s Palace so that she could get her car. Cass headed straight for her beat-up Volvo parked behind the café.
All she wanted to do was go home and sleep.
It was late in the evening now. The streets were mostly empty. Halogen street lights flashed overhead as she merged onto the freeway. She tried to focus on the road. But, out of the corner of her eye, she kept seeing groves of cherry trees, just off the freeway, popping with white blossoms. She ignored these mirages and wondered if there would be anything to eat in her fridge when she got back to her apartment. It had been awhile since she’d gone shopping.
Cass drove on like this, her head barely tethered to her body, until she pulled off the freeway, parked her car, and got out to find that she hadn’t driven back to her apartment at all. Instead, she’d driven home, to her father’s house in the suburbs where she’d grown up.
When she realized what she’d done, she almost turned around and got back into the car. Her relationship with her dad, already tense since she’d bombed out of her doctoral program and lost her job at the university library, was as fragile as ever. He’d tried for years to keep Miranda away and Cass safe from being exposed to that crazy world of magic and vampires. And now Cass was in the thick of it, up to her neck in magic and vampires, queen weirdo herself.
Cass didn’t know how to talk to him either. She didn’t know where to start. She wasn’t even sure how much he did or didn’t already know. They’d never talked about any of these things. Her father could barely mention Rose’s name without his mouth going dry and his throat closing up. Almost twenty years later, that wound was, for him, still open and weeping.
And now, a big part of Cass wished that her dad had succeeded in keeping her free of that world.
Cass stood in the driveway, hesitating about whether to go in. It was late enough—after nine—that her dad might have already gone to bed. He liked to get up early. But her decision was made for her when she heard a loud crashing sound. She peeked around the side of the house and saw that the garage light was on.
The string of softly spoken, but distinctly audible, Japanese curses that emanated from the garage made her smile. He was in the garage. And even if she wasn’t sure that
he wanted to see her, she needed to see him.
They’d never parked their cars in the garage. From the time they’d moved in, they only used it for storage. It was full of boxes of books, memorabilia, and who knows what else her father had squirreled away. Cass wiped her sweaty palms on her jeans, grabbed the handle to the garage door, and gave it a pull. The door swung upward, groaning on its tracks.
Gary’s head was buried in a pile of boxes. In response to the creaking of the garage door, his head swiveled around, all the blood startled out of his face. When he saw that it was Cass, his face lit up for a moment, like a warm light buried deep in his heart had flickered on, like he was a lantern illuminated from the inside out. Then he recovered himself, remembered that he and Cass hadn’t really been talking, and offered her a more distant, “Hello, Cassandra.”
“Hi, Dad,” Cass said. “What are you doing out here?” Cass toed the side of a box, titling it to see the handwritten label on the side: ROSE’S SUMMER CLOTHES.
“Ummm, nothing,” Gary tried. “Nothing in particular. Just . . . rooting around.”
A small box, balanced precariously on a tall stack, toppled and lightly bounced off the side of his head, disheveling his salt and pepper hair and setting his thick glasses askew.
“Uh huh,” Cass said, craning her neck to read the label on another box: CASSANDRA’S TEA SET. “I see.”
“What are you doing out here tonight?” he asked, a touch too sharply. He frowned at himself and added, his tone softening: “It’s been a while.”
Cass chewed on this for a minute, trying to decide what to say or how to start. She crossed her arms and rubbed her shoulders. Her breath plumed in the cool night air.
“I was thinking about Mom,” she said.
“Oh,” Gary responded, carefully inspecting his shoes. His hands looked like they itched for something to do. He turned back to the business of sorting through the boxes, looking for whatever he’d been looking for. “Why’s that,” he said over his shoulder, striving for a casual tone.
“I remembered something today,” Cass continued. “I remembered something that, until today, I didn’t remember at all. The memory was blazingly vivid. And, like a lot of things in our family, it was both perfectly normal and very weird.”
