by Laura Legend
“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.
8
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 of 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. He 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.”
9
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 tactical-Zach, stuffing various pockets full of small but useful items they might need.
Except for the dark circles under her eyes, Cass almost looked like herself when she emerged from the bathroom in a towel and a puff of steam. Zach handed her the similarly dark, layered clothes he’d picked out for her from her closet and sent her back in again.
Cass reappeared in a couple of minutes. “Okay,” Cass said, cinching her belt. “Let’s go then.”
“Sure,” Zach countered. “Just one last thing: you’ve got to close your eyes for thirty minutes and get some rest.”
“Zaaaccchh,” Cass resisted, her voice trailing off in exasperation, “we’ve got to go. We’ve got to find Miranda.”
“Yes,” Zach agreed, “but you’ve also got to be worth something when we get there. Otherwise, we�
�ll just get eaten or, you know, become vampires ourselves. Both of which are bad.”
He eyed the bed in the corner of the room and opted for the couch instead. He sat down and patted the spot next to him. “Just thirty minutes. Sit down here with me and close your eyes for half an hour and then we’ll go.”
“Fine,” Cass said, tired of arguing. She plopped down on the couch and curled up next to him, her head resting on his shoulder.
“Good. Now close your eyes.”
“Okay, but I’m not going to sleep. I’m way too wired to sleep. In fact, I’ve barely slept for months.”
She snuggled closer, closed her eyes, and tried to find somewhere more comfortable to lay her head than his bony shoulder. Gravity decided for her. Her eyes fluttered shut and she was basically snoring before her head hit his lap. Zach pulled a blanket from the back of the couch and draped it over her. He smoothed her still damp hair, squeezed her shoulder, and bent to give her a peck on the cheek. As he leaned in, Cass murmured something in her sleep, turned toward him, and brushed his lips with a kiss.
Cass slept for more than twelve hours. It was ten at night when, finally, she stretched and opened her eyes. Zach was seated at the kitchen table with his laptop. A ping indicated that he’d been messaging someone. The only light in the room came from the street and the glow of his screen. Cass sat up, tossed the blanket onto the back of the couch, and pulled her hair back into a ponytail. Zach leaned back in his chair and flipped on the kitchen lights.
“You look human again,” Zach said.
“I feel human again,” Cass said, echoing his judgment.
Her head felt clear—the white, chaotic noise that had clouded her mind for weeks had receded. She rolled her shoulder in its socket with only a hint of soreness. She couldn’t even be upset that he’d let her sleep so long, not when the results were so clearly what she needed. If we’d left from Zach’s apartment, I was so far gone I’d be dead by now, Cass realized. The first vampire we saw would have kicked my butt.
“Dr. Riviera, you’re hired,” Cass exclaimed.
“Excellent. My next prescription is for actual food. Sit down.” He plated a giant omelet for her and added a tall glass of orange juice. When he pulled the juice out of the fridge, she saw that he’d restocked it while she was passed out on the couch. Also, the apartment was, in general, suspiciously clean and tidy.
Cass was ravenous. She shoveled it down. The more embarrassed she felt by her manners, the more Zach seemed to enjoy watching her eat. She sat back, patted her flat stomach, and tried, for Zach’s sake, to manage something like a burp. He was impressed.
“It turns out,” Cass said, “that all I really need to get along in life is someone to cook for me, clean my apartment, and tuck me into bed. All I really needed was”—Cass almost said “a mother” but instead, after a moment’s hesitation, said—“a wife.”
Zach laughed as he refolded her blanket and laid it neatly over the back of the couch.
Cass pulled on her socks and boots.
“Now,” she said, “let’s find Miranda.”
He gathered her dishes, rinsed them in the sink, dried them, and replaced them in the cupboards. He glanced at Cass and the couch over his shoulder.
“First, the couch,” Zach replied. Cass started to shake her head vehemently, but Zach insisted. “It’s important. I promise.” Cass stared at him.
“Let’s start with this,” he said. “You tell me about the couch.” He looked so serious, eyes wide and pleading. She gave in.
“We’ve had it for years,” Cass started. “It’s been around longer than me. It’s been around longer than my dad. It was my mom’s in college. It feels like part of the family. Dad was happy, though, to send it with me when I asked if I could take it to my own place. Umm, what else? It’s very comfortable. But . . . it’s also weird. Like, sometimes it seems to move around the room on its own—a couple feet in one direction, or a couple feet in another. And sometimes I find things in it that I have no idea how they got there. Money, books, underwear, silverware, you name it.”
Cass fell silent for a moment. Zach waited for her to go on.
“And sometimes,” she continued, “I get this really weird feeling like . . . like there’s nothing inside the couch. Like, literally nothing is inside the couch. A void. Like, if I pulled off the cushions I wouldn’t see the couch frame or the floor but just some kind of hungry, yawning abyss.”
She stopped herself, wondering how crazy she sounded. It’s a couch, dammit, she thought to herself, not an existential crisis!
Zach just nodded his head in agreement. Then, to her surprise, he said: “It seems like you basically already know what there is to know about your couch. You’ve just never taken it seriously. In a nutshell, the truth is that your couch is a kind of door. It’s a kind of ‘portal’ to a part of the world where magic and vampires and such are taken for granted as part of the fabric of reality.”
Cass stared at him, her mouth slack.
“Grab your gear,” he said. “I thought you were in a hurry. It’s time to go.”
Well, what did you expect? she asked herself. It’s no weirder than vampires who only wear black leather being a real thing.
Cass grabbed her jacket and sword. Zach shrugged into his own jacket, pulled a cushion off the couch, and set it carefully to one side. Even from a few feet away, Cass could see that, inside of the couch, a narrow set of stairs descended steeply into darkness.
“Cassandra Jones,” Zach said, stepping into the couch, “welcome to the Underside.”
10
The walls of the tight stairwell were cold and smooth. Cass trailed her fingers along the side of the wall as she descended but, in the darkness, she couldn’t quite tell what they were made of—concrete? stone? The stairwell emptied into a long, narrow hallway. In the middle distance, a bare bulb hung from the ceiling and burned with a green tinged light.
Zach looked back to make sure that Cass had followed him down. She was right on his heels. She felt a little queasy, like her normal relationship to gravity had been tweaked somehow, but nodded for him to go on.
Zach pressed down the hallway, Cass in tow. He seemed to know where they were going. About halfway down the hallway, adjacent to the hanging bulb, they passed a heavy, unmarked door.
Cass felt the door tug at her, call for her, and stopped. The door was flush with the wall. It had a lock for a key but no external handle. Cass grazed the lock with her thumb—it was extremely cold—then traced the edges of the door, from top to bottom, with her fingertips.
“Zach, what is this door?” she asked.
Zach turned back. He hadn’t realized Cass had stopped. He examined the door. He hadn’t seen it as he’d hurried past.
“To be honest,” he said, “I don’t know. I’ve never seen a door like this in the Underside before. There are stairwells and hallways and huge hubs—but not doors like this.”
Cass pressed her ear against the door, but didn’t hear anything.
“We’d better go, though,” Zach prompted. “Now that we’re ready, it’s important to move as quickly as we can.”
Cass agreed and they continued at a brisk pace down the hall, hit a ninety-degree turn when the hallway forked, and then continued down another hallway that looked basically identical to the first.
“The basics of this place—of the Underside—are pretty straightforward,” Zach explained. “We don’t know who originally built it or discovered it, or how long it’s been around, but these days it basically gives those who don’t quite fit in with the everyday world a place to call home. Magicians, the Lost, the Turned,” he paused and looked back at her, adding, “Seers.”
Their hallway come to another “T” and, after a glance in both directions, Zach choose left.
“The Underside,” he continued, “is like a fourth spatial dimension appended to the everyday world. It doesn’t belong to that world and it isn’t constrained by the same rules or the normal laws of physics. The U
nderside does, though, at certain key locations, crossover with the everyday world.”
Zach reached back and took her hand, flashed her a crooked smiled, and they broke into a light jog. The end of their current hallway opened onto an array of bright lights.
“Sometimes, these crossover sites just amount to small portals like the one we used in your couch. Usually, portals like that have to be specially constructed. But, for the most part, these crossover sites mark places where the Underside pokes out into the Overside and occupies shared space with the ordinary world. There are a dozen such overlapping sites across the planet. These sites functions as ‘hubs,’ as small cities in their own right that are hidden behind the ordinary facades visible from the Overside.”
Zach gave her hand a squeeze.
“Hubs,” he said, “like this.”
They emerged all at once from their narrow hallway into an enormous domed space, filled with a twilight sky and the busy lights and sounds of a small city.
Cass’s jaw dropped, her mouth forming an involuntary “O.” They’d emerged in an alleyway. Cass took a couple of steps into the street and spun in a slow circle, head craned back, trying to take it in.
“Okay,” she said, trying to process this, “okay. Before I get too far in redrawing my internal map of the world, are there any other hidden planets or alternate dimensions I should know about?”
“This is the only other one you need to know about . . . for now,” Zach said, winking.
Cass punched him in the shoulder.
“Owww,” he groused, rubbing the bruise.
“What else do I need to know, then, about this one?”
Zach picked up the thread of his explanation, keeping Cass at arm’s length in case she took another swing at him.
“Like I was saying before I was interrupted, the Underside isn’t constrained by all the normal laws of physics. For instance, the buildings that occupy crossover sites are much larger on the inside than on the outside. Entire Underside cities like this one unfold inside of what, from the Overside, look like normal office buildings or casinos or monasteries or whatever. Also, hubs often have allegiances and this particular hub is mostly aligned with the Turned.”