by Laura Legend
They circled around the back of the warehouse, moving silently and staying out of sight. Cass slung her sword across her back, leaving it in its sheath for now. A guard, already bored with guard duty, was positioned at the far corner. They watched him fidget for a moment, shifting from foot to foot, until he couldn’t resist the urge to pull out his phone.
Miranda signaled for Cass to take him out. Then, for good measure, emphasized that this needed to be “quiet” by mouthing the word and putting her finger to Cass’s lips.
Cass rolled her eyes and batted the finger away.
She crept up behind the man in his tight vampire jeans and heavy vampire boots and leather vampire jacket with chains. She could see, over his shoulder, that he was scrolling through his Instagram feed. LittleBaker53. Cass couldn’t help but see what he was looking at. He paused to admire a mouth-watering image of a luscious piece of chocolate cake displayed on an antique yellow plate and beautifully framed by the setting sun.
Cass wondered what filters the photographer had used to create that effect. Then she suddenly realized that she was very hungry again—dinner had never really happened—and her stomach growled with an easily audible rumble.
The guard dropped his phone and reached for his weapon. But before he could reach it, Cass swept his leg, unsheathed her sword, and clocked him on the head with its hilt, all in one smooth motion.
He dropped like a sack of potatoes.
Miranda waved her hands in exasperation, as if to say: stop playing around up there. Cass just pointed to the guy on the ground, patted her belly, and shrugged.
They found a side door and both peeked through its window to get a glance out how the warehouse was laid out on the inside. They couldn’t see much, though. Stacks of abandoned crates and boxes crowded near the door obstructed any clear view of the rest of the room.
Miranda closed her eyes, focused her attention, and steepled her index fingers. A spark of green light flickered at their tips. She pinched the light between both thumbs and index fingers and slowly pulled them apart until, in the arc of light between them, a skeleton key materialized. Miranda slid the key into the door’s lock, turned the tumblers, and silently opened the door, holding it politely open for Cass.
“Neat trick,” Cass couldn’t help but whisper even as she wondered why, if Miranda could do tricks like that on command, Cass was the one going through the door first.
From their new vantage point behind the crates and boxes, they could safely take stock of the room. The two vans were parked in the center, flanked by the black sedan. Cass couldn’t quite tell they what had in hand, but they were transferring long, heavy bags from one van to the other. Then, with a jolt, she knew exactly what was in them: those long, black bags were body bags. A cold shiver ran down her spine and she gripped her sword more tightly. Miranda squeezed her shoulder reassuringly and moved closer for a better look.
As Miranda moved closer, an enormous man heaved his bulk out of the backseat of the sedan. He made the sedan look like a clown car. When he stood up to his full height, his ponytail swaying, Cass wasn’t sure how he’d squeezed into that backseat in the first place. His movements, though, were compact and graceful. He radiated a kind of benevolent competence that seemed at odds with the kind of frantic, agitated hunger that, in Cass’s experience, always itched beneath the surface of the Lost.
“Damn,” Miranda whispered when she saw him. Cass looked from Miranda back to this giant and felt her stomach clench into tight little ball: he was looking right at them.
“Hello, Miranda,” he said and, with a pair of curt signals, he sent men to flank them from both directions. They wore gas masks and were armed with rifles. At the same moment, the side door behind them banged open and someone tossed a canister of tear gas in their direction.
The smoke spread quickly. Cass’s eyes blurred with tears and she doubled over, coughing.
“Cass!” Miranda called.
Cass couldn’t catch her breath enough to reply. She could hear that they were already on top of Miranda and that Miranda wasn’t going down without a fight. Crates and boxes flew as men in leather jackets and gas masks were tossed aside by an expanding burst of green light. Cass was also pushed back by the force of the blast. She was knocked off her feet and skidded across the warehouse’s rough cement floor. The good news, though, was that, for the price of few bruises, Cass was largely pushed clear of the cloud of tear gas.
She wiped the tears from eyes, drew in a deep, lung-clearing breath, and tried to zero in on Miranda’s location. Through all the smoke, she couldn’t see clearly what was happening on the other side of the room. Still, despite the smoke, she didn’t have any trouble pinpointing where all the shouts and screams were coming from.
Cass rolled to her feet and gathered herself to spring in Miranda’s direction. But when she took off running, she didn’t go anywhere. Like Wile E. Coyote off the edge of a cliff, her legs spun tractionless in midair. Surprised, she craned her neck to see what was happening and found that the monster of a man from the clown car had her hooked by the collar of her jacket. He held her suspended a few feet off the ground. He batted the sword from her hand and it went spinning across the room. He looked slightly amused by the surprised expression on her face and, generally, unconcerned.
Cass tried to kick free, but her legs weren’t long enough. The man just extended his arm and held her clear of his torso.
Cass was starting to get pissed. She could hear what a wild scrum Miranda was in. Cass twisted in his grasp, frantic to break free, but didn’t go anywhere.
For his part, the man held her up to the catch the light from the sedan’s headlights, like he was simply curious about something he’d found lying on the ground and was trying to figure out what it was.
“You,” he said with a rumbling voice, “are Cassandra Jones?”
Cass couldn’t tell from his tone of voice if he’d meant that as a statement or a question—though by the time he’d gotten to the end of the sentence he seemed puzzled enough by what he was seeing that it ended like a question.
He hefted her once or twice, as if trying to find some additional substance to her small, slight frame.
“Cassandra Jones?” he repeated when she didn’t reply.
And then it hit Cass: Yes, damn it, I am Cassandra Jones! When she thought it, she felt the force of it. And, more, when she thought it, she felt the truth of it.
Her weak eye burned in her skull. Wisps of white smoke trailed from the corner of her eye and time went slack. Where, a moment before, she’d felt cramped by the inexorable, inevitable crush of time, now it felt like there was room to move, like time had opened out onto a third dimension where the normal rules didn’t apply. Here, she could act with a simplicity and clarity of intention that normally escaped her.
“Yes,” she calmly said, “I’m Cassandra Jones. Nice to meet you . . . dickhead.” She kicked her legs up and locked them around his ham hock of an upper arm, slipped her arms free of the jacket he was holding, and swung to the floor where—mostly because it was the only part of him she could really reach—she used the whole of her momentum to punch him straight in the groin. He wobbled for a moment and then crumpled to his knees, his look of surprise now level with her own look of determination.
Cass spit in his face, but didn’t wait around to see what was going to happen next. She didn’t think that would hold him long. She darted into the smoke after Miranda.
But she was too late. Through the fog, Cass could make out how the Lost had corralled Miranda with four or five separate ropes and were working in concert now to pin her arms and wrap her up.
“No!” Cass shouted. “Miranda!”
Cass felt a surge of desperation battering the heavy doors in her heart, threatening to break free and sweep her away with them.
Miranda looked up and locked eyes with Cass.
“Cass,” she yelled, “these people are not—”
But she was cut off as the men gagged her, bundled
her into an open van, and slammed the door shut behind them.
Cass caught the glint of her dropped sword in their headlights and dove for it. As the van sped by, tires smoking, she rammed her sword into the wall of the van and held on for dear life as it accelerated toward the door. The driver, surprised, spotted her in his side view mirror, hanging from the side of the van. At the last moment, as they cleared the door, he jerked the van toward the wall in an effort to scrape her off. The wall clipped Cass on the shoulder and side of her head.
Cass rolled like a rag doll across the pavement, her sword clattering next to her. Her vision swam in and out of focus as the van’s taillights receded down the drive. But, despite her blurry vision, she didn’t have any trouble recognizing her old friend, the giant, when he stepped into view.
“It was nice to meet you Cassandra Jones,” he said, his voice slightly higher now than it had been before.
Cass reached weakly for her sword.
“Good night, now” he said, as his huge hand reached out toward her, swallowing her entire face, and everything went black.
Chapter Eight
It was early. Miranda’s Audi was parked crooked in the street in front of Zach’s apartment. It was the only place Cass could think to go.
She dragged herself to the door, her shoulder bruised and her forehead bloody, and gave it a half-hearted knock.
Nothing.
She tried again, leaning her head against the door and pounding with both fists. When Zach pulled the door open, rubbing sleep from his eyes and dressed only in boxers, Cass saw that she’d left a bloody mark on the wood.
“Sorry,” she said, waving at the mark and tipping forward through the door.
With her arm slung around his neck, Zach helped her inside.
The apartment was gorgeous. It was all clean lines, open spaces, modern furniture, and high end appliances. Everything was spotless and in its place. A couple of striking, original pieces of art were lit up on the wall by recessed lighting. An entire wall was nothing but built-in bookshelves. The books may even have been color-coded. And, as far as she could tell, Zach didn’t own a TV.
Cass had often dropped Zach off at his apartment after work, but she’d never accepted his invitations to come in. It had seemed like a line she shouldn’t cross. She valued his friendship too much. She didn’t know what she’d expected, but it wasn’t this. This was no barista’s apartment. This was not the life of a self-taught college drop-out getting by on minimum wage.
Before she had a chance to comment, her knees went weak and Zach helped her into a chair.
“Cass,” he said, eyeing the blood on her head, his voice thick with concern. “What happened?”
She took a deep breath. Once she started, everything poured out all at once.
“They’ve got Miranda. There was a giant man in an abandoned warehouse. I punched him in the balls. The Lost have her. Miranda was tracking down a lead on who their new leader is. She took me along for backup. There was tear gas. It was a trap. Miranda almost killed us driving over there. She’s such a terrible driver. I attacked a van with my sword but when I had to fight the wall, the wall won and they got away. That’s how I hurt myself.”
Zach sat perched on the arm of the sofa next to her, trying to take it all in. He reached out several times to check her head wound, but Cass waved him off.
Cass couldn’t quite decide what to make of Zach’s expression. It was two parts concerned and two parts unreadable. But the thought of Miranda at mercy of those vampires solicited a wave of anger that nudged her back toward coherence.
Cass heaved herself out the armchair and, in the process, knocked the throw pillow to the floor. Zach scooped up the pillow and returned it to its proper spot. She took a couple of unsteady steps toward the kitchen, stopped and looked at her own reflection in the polished stainless steel of the refrigerator, and groaned at the site of the blood. Though her shoulder would be sore for a couple of days, the head wound was, fortunately, superficial.
Cass turned on the water in the sink, took a long drink from the tap, and washed her face. She saw Zach wince when she reached for the white, neatly folded dishtowel and held it to her bloody forehead—but he bit his tongue and didn’t say anything.
“We have to go after her, Zach,” Cass said quietly.
Cass opened the freezer, popped out a couple of ice cubes, wrapped them in her bloody towel, and pressed them gingerly to her face.
“Cass,” Zach tried again, softly shaking his head. “I think this may be out of our league.”
“You’re not hearing me, Zach,” Cass continued. “We don’t have a choice. If we don’t go after her, nobody will. She’s my aunt. My family. And, apart from my dad, she’s all I’ve got left. I’m not just going to sit on my hands and hope for the best.”
Zach nodded his head in reluctant agreement. He might be willing to pass the buck when it came to Miranda, but he couldn’t resist that kind of plea from Cass.
Cass could see that she had him. A tiny smile shone through the worry on her face.
“Thank you, Zach,” she said. “Seriously. I wouldn’t even know where to begin without your help.” She removed the bloody wad of ice from her forehead. Her hair was matted, her lip was split, and she had dark circles under eyes.
“I could kiss you for this,” she teased. She felt the beginning tendrils of guilt start to grow in her gut as Richard’s face flashed across her mind, but she quickly pushed them back down. That wasn’t going to help anyone.
Zach involuntarily blushed as Cass, not quite as playfully as she’d intended, admired him in the flattering cut of his boxers.
“Uhhh, right,” Zach said, retreating to grab a pair of pants from his bedroom. “Maybe later.”
When he returned, he not only had pants but some antibacterial ointment and butterfly bandages.
“Sit down, Beautiful,” he said.
She gratefully took a seat at the kitchen counter and, this time, let him clean and bandage the wound. Her brushed her hair back from her face and lifted her chin to get a better look at the cut. Cass was careful to avoid his eyes until he was done.
He tossed the packaging and bloody towel into the garbage can.
“Okay,” he said, sizing her up. “That’s better. I’ll take that kiss now.”
Cass smiled, tilted her head, puckered up, and closed her eyes.
Zach kissed the wound he’d just bandaged and said, “Also, I’ve got an idea about where we might start. There’s a guy I’ve been hearing about recently, an information broker, that we could go see.”
“Sounds good,” Cass said. “When do we start?”
“We can start,” Zach replied, “as soon as we finally have a serious conversation about your couch.”
Chapter Nine
Cass’s apartment was a comparative wreck. This was especially true of the old couch with its cracked leather cushions.
It was mid-morning by the time they made it back over there. Zach had a grabbed a duffle bag of gear from his own apartment, but he’d also insisted that, wherever their search for Miranda took them, that search would have to begin at Cass’s apartment. And it would have to begin after Cass had a chance to rest.
Cass was so tired and wrung out from the past twenty-four hours—the dreams, the sparring, the memory, the visit to her dad, the fight at the warehouse, the loss of Miranda—that she couldn’t even think of decent arguments against this plan. At this point, coffee alone wasn’t going to pull her through.
First thing, Zach ushered Cass into the bathroom, set the hot water running for her shower, and then firmly shut the door behind him. While Cass was showering, he called in sick to Java’s palace. Avoiding the couch, he parked himself on a hard kitchen chair and sorted through his gear, trying to decide what they’d need for something like this. He decided to go for warm layers, well-worn boots, and a warm but light nylon jacket. Long before Cass exited the shower, he’d stripped down to his boxers and re-dressed as some version of tact
ical-Zach, stuffing various pockets full of small but useful items they might need.