by Laura Legend
They worked their way out from the edges of the dome and into a main thoroughfare. The street was packed with people and vendors. There were a couple of rickshaws, but no cars. Most buildings were two or three stories tall, but a handful of buildings in the center were glass and steel office towers. In general, the place had the feel of a festive, cosmopolitan bazaar.
“There are two other things you should know,” Zach said. He slipped an arm around her shoulder, pulling her closer so that they wouldn’t get separated as they weaved through the crush. “The first is that, though these crossover sites are spread out across the world, the distances between them are walkable. We just left your apartment in Oregon and walked for fifteen minutes. But this hub, the hub we’re in now, overlaps with the Overside in London. If we stepped outside, we could have lunch in Hyde Park.”
Crap, Cass thought. I should have brought my passport.
“The second thing to know,” Zach continued, “is that the unusual powers manifest in the Overside by practitioners of magic—or vampires or seers—are grounded in and amplified by the weird rules that govern the Underside.”
They stopped in front of what looked like a bar or strip club. A neon sign outlining the figure of a woman blinked and beckoned over the entrance. Next to the image, a scrawl of neon tubes spelled out “BOOBS”—but a section of the lights had burned out years ago so that, now, the sign just read “BO-BS.”
“There’s something about the Underside,” Zach concluded, “that is open to manipulation by mind. In the Overside, I can know the everyday world with my mind. But in the Underside, I can change the world with my mind. In the end, understanding your own powers will depend on understanding how they’re grounded in the weird rules of this part of the world.”
His voice trailed off. He saw Cass staring up skeptically at the sign.
“That’s all we’ve got time for now,” he said. “Stay close. And welcome to Bob’s.”
He pulled the door open and held it for her. Cass crossed her arms defensively across her chest and stepped inside.
The lights were dim and music blared. Cass had no idea what time of day it was in the Underside, but business was brisk. Most of it centered around the bar, but parts of it were clustered around the platforms, scattered around the room, that displayed the house dancers.
Surveying the space, Cass noticed that every one of the dancers was a man in his early twenties, dressed in nothing but a thong. This tuned her in to the fact that practically everyone else in the bar was a woman.
Whatever this place used to be, she thought to herself, watching the dancers bob and gyrate, it doesn’t look like an accident that it’s now called Bo-bs instead of Boobs.
Zach was at her elbow. He seemed a little surprised himself.
“Not what you remember?” Cass asked, giving him a pinch.
“Uhhh, not exactly.” Zach said. “But it’s been awhile.”
He pointed across the crowded space toward a service door, and added, “We need to get to that door on the far side of the room. That’s where we’ll find the guy we’re looking for.”
Cass nodded. They plunged into the crowd and headed toward the door.
It didn’t take long, though, before Zach started drawing a lot of attention. The mood in the room was boisterous and loose. The party had been going for a while, a lot of alcohol had been consumed, and Zach stood out in the press of laughing and dancing women.
Whistles and cat calls started to follow them. Hands reached out to snag him. About halfway across the room, Zach got pinned against a post by woman with pink hair and black fingernails who growled at him playfully, snuggled up close, and slipped a hand up under his t-shirt to stuff a twenty dollar bill into the waistline of his jeans.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa ladies,” Zach said, his hands up. “Just passing through here. Not part of the show.”
But this mild protest just set up a howl of laughter from the knot of women who’d closed in around them. A dozen hands were raised in the air, waving twenties, trying to squeeze closer.
Oh hell, Cass thought, you’re too damn cute for your own good, Zach.
“Ladies!” Cass yelled, raising her sword in the air, trumping their twenties. “That’s all for now—he’s with me!”
Everyone stopped and turned to see what was happening. The music stopped and everyone went silent.
Cass grabbed a fistful of Zach’s t-shirt.
“He’s mine,” she said, mustering a stern note of authority to go with her sword. “Now go find your own.”
When the ladies got a look at Cass with her sword, her fistful of Zach’s t-shirt, and the pissed look on her face, the energy went out of the crowd. A chorus of boos went up. Then the music started up again and everyone went back to what they’d been doing before.
Cass hauled Zach the rest of the way across the room by her fistful of shirt and didn’t let go until they were almost to the door.
“We’re barely down here five minutes and, already, I had to rescue your ass,” Cass quipped. “What kind of tour guide are you?”
“Cass,” Zach said, half joking, half serious, “you’re my hero.”
He fished the twenty out of his pants and offered it to her. Cass swiped it out of his hand and stuffed it into her own pocket.
“Alright. Enough with the gratitude and puppy dog eyes,” Cass ordered. “Let’s do what we came to do and get out of here.”
The door they’d been aiming for was guarded by a bouncer, a towering woman—Cass was pretty sure it was a woman—in a black leather vest, heavy eye shadow, and tight jeans that said: “if you think I’m a vampire, you’re probably right.”
Zach offered the bouncer his winningest smile. “We’re here to see Amare,” he said. Then, in response to the bouncer’s blank stare, added, “It’s urgent.”
This almost made the bouncer smile.
“What’s the password?” she asked.
“Ummm, the password,” Zach stalled. “The password is, uhhhh . . .”
“Wrong answer,” the bouncer said as she grabbed Zach by the throat and lifted him off his feet.
11
Zach’s face turned purple then blue. The tips of his toes scraped the ground but didn’t offer any traction. He tried to pry the bouncer’s hands away, but her grip was too strong.
He choked out a couple of unlikely passwords: “Open sesame . . . abracadabra . . . rook to knight one . . . please?”
This just made the bouncer more angry and she shook him like a doll.
Cass unsheathed her sword again and, with two quick strokes, gave the bouncer a haircut on one side and a wicked scratch, welling with blood, on the other cheek. It might have just been the lighting, but the sword glowed with a faint, white light. Cass held the point of the blade to the bouncer’s throat.
“This is our password,” she said.
The bouncer dropped Zach and stepped back in awe. She could sense that the sword, apart from whatever else it was, contained a powerful relic—a fragment of the One True Cross. “Correct,” she said, wiping blood from her cheek with the back of her hand. “That’s a bona fide password. Let me tell him you’re here.”
The bouncer slipped inside the door and then returned a moment later.
“Amare will see you now,” she said, ushering them inside the backroom.
Zach, his face still red, risked a wink at the bouncer as he followed Cass inside. She curled a lip at him and he hurried through the door. Still looking over his shoulder, he bumped into Cass who’d stopped just inside the door. Whatever they’d expected to find inside, it wasn’t this.
The room was large. Near the center of the room, Amare was seated at a desk. A handful of associates were positioned around the room. An antique, rotary telephone was attached to the wall behind him. The rest of the room was filled with a vast, complicated web of pneumatic tubes like the ones that bank tellers use, branching out into various walls, but all leading in the end toward Amare’s desk.
Zach took a pro
tective step forward, positioning himself between Cass and Amare—though this seemed ridiculous to Cass given that she’d saved him twice in the past five minutes.
Canisters whizzed by through the tubes, landing near Amare’s desk with a vacuum-fueled “thunk” of compressed air. The desk was elaborately carved. Amare appeared to be in his early twenties but his commanding presence hinted that Cass shouldn’t take that for granted. He radiated an unusual kind of peace and confidence. His white shirt contrasted sharply with his deep black skin and when he issued a couple of commands to his associates, it was obvious that his English was heavily accented by his native French. Given his inflections, Cass guessed that he was probably from North Africa, maybe Morocco.
He was, it seemed clear, an information broker, stationed at the heart of his pneumatic web like a spider awaiting its prey.
Zach and Cass waited patiently while he cleared a few items off his desk. Whatever system of exchange he was running, Cass couldn’t make any sense of it. The canisters that arrived were filled with nonsensical knick-knacks like collectible spoons and gift shop shot glasses. There didn’t seem to be any paper involved. The cute salt shakers and beanie babies that he shoved into canisters and sent back in the other direction didn’t seem to make any more sense than what had arrived. Amare, though, proceeded as if the symbolic value of all these exchanges was as obvious and natural as a series of letters scrawled on a page.
Finally, Amare looked up at them. His gaze was cold and appraising as he took Zach’s measure. But he couldn’t quite conceal a shock of pleasure and recognition when he realized who Cass was.
“Mr. Riviera,” he said. “And Ms. Jones. It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m glad you survived the interview at the door.” He glanced at Zach and smiled at Cass.
Zach’s face was still a bit red. When Amare mentioned their “interview,” he involuntarily rolled his head to the side, cracking his neck and loosening the tight muscles.
“What can I do for you two,” Amare asked.
“We need information,” Zach said. “I heard that you might be able to help us.”
“Both of those things,” Amare said in his accented English, “are obviously true. What, specifically, do you need.”
“Miranda Byrne. She was abducted last night. We need to know who has her and where.”
A canister whizzed by through a tube that ran above Zach’s head. Amare chewed on what Zach had said, swapped out a Topps baseball card for a ballpoint pen, and sent the canister back.
When he looked back up, his eyes were hard and narrow. “Yes. I heard,” he said. “But I’m afraid that I can’t help you with that. It is, shall we say, a bit above your pay grade.”
“Now wait a minute,” Zach started before Amare raised a hand and cut him off.
“Please,” Cass interjected, her voice betraying more emotion than she intended. “We’ve got to find her. You’ve got to help us.”
Amare was taken aback by the raw sincerity of her request. But still, he shook his head.
“You misunderstand,” Amare said, “this decision is out of my hands. It is above my pay grade as well. There is nothing I can do for—”
Amare, though, was himself cut off by the phone on the wall behind him. He leaned back in his office chair and lifted the handle from the receiver, unspooling its long, curled cord as he turned back to his desk.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I see . . . No, ma’am . . . I will make sure it’s done.”
He replaced the phone in its cradle.
“It seems you’ve been given a special dispensation,” he said.
Cass smiled hopefully, but Amare raised a finger in warning, stalling her celebration.
“But it’s going to cost you,” he continued. “I have something that you want. You must, in turn, supply for me something I need.”
Cass nodded, eager to agree. Zach held back, his eyes narrowing.
“What do you want?” Zach asked, taking a protective step back in Cass’s direction.
“I need a relic,” Amare answered. “A powerful relic that is protected by a powerful spell. I need the chains of St Paul. Bring them to me and I’ll tell you what you need to know.”
Cass knew exactly what he meant. She was familiar with this relic. The chains of St. Paul were on display in a basilica in Rome. They were, according to tradition, the very chains that bound the apostle Paul when he arrived in Rome for his trial in 61 AD. He was found guilty and sentenced to death for being a Christian. The relic wouldn’t be hard to find. The trick, evidently, would be acquiring it.
“We’ll do it,” Cass blurted out before Zach could say anything. “The relic is yours.”
“Excellent,” Amare said, “excellent. Move, of course, as quickly as you can to acquire it. The chains aren’t going anywhere, but my information about Ms. Byrne’s whereabouts may certainly prove to be time sensitive.”
He gestured to one of his associates as a series of new canisters whizzed through the tubes. “Show them the door,” he said.
Cass was ready to go, anxious to get started. Zach was a bit more reluctant to accept that the meeting was actually over. But it didn’t matter either way. Amare’s associates herded them toward the door.
But as they were being hustled through the door and back into the bar, Amare called out to them.
“Oh,” he said, “good luck. And be sure, Ms. Jones, to say hello to your friend, Richard York, for me. We go way back.”
Cass’s eyes went wide, her mouth hung open.
Say hello to Richard? Richard is dead! And despite herself, she was suddenly back there, watching the stones crash down around them. Every time she lost him, the loss seemed to cut deeper. This was why she needed Zach—he showed up. He was there for her. He was not a loss.
Cass started as she realized the door was closing.
“Stop! No! What!?” Cass cried as she tried to squeeze back inside. But the door had already slammed shut and its bolt had, with a decisive clunk, been slid home.
12
Amare could hear that, on the far side of the door, Cass was not going quietly. She pounded the door with her fists, shouting, until the bouncer hauled her away. He had intended to stir the pot by bringing up Richard, but he hadn’t intended to solicit that kind of reaction. There was, apparently, more there than he’d thought.
Amare signaled for his associates to turn down the lights, clear the room, and leave him alone. They left through a side door. He leaned back in his chair and stretched. The tubes kept whizzing. He put his head in his hands, his elbows propped on the desk, and gently massaged his temples with his thumbs.
“Why did you add that bit about Richard?” a soft voice asked from deep in the shadows behind him. “It was unnecessary. You hurt her.”
Amare wasn’t surprised at the voice or the question. He knew she would want to see the wheels of her larger plan finally, after so many years, start turning.
Amare pulled open a desk drawer and extracted a small pocketknife. It was razor sharp. He tested it against the pad of his thumb, drawing a thin line of blood. He sucked the blood clean and began, idly, to add some definition to an unfinished carving in the top of the desk. The whole surface of the desk was tattooed with an elaborate field of interlocking images and words and scrollwork.
“I wanted to see what would happen,” he said. “I wanted to read her reaction for myself. And I especially wanted to see if it was true, that she had, in some significant way, allowed herself to love Richard . . . to love a vampire.”
“I see,” the shadowy voice replied from an entirely different location in the room. “Is that all?”
Amare worked skillfully with the knife. He paused and gently blew the image free of shavings. He looked up, toward the direction from which the voice had last come.
“No,” he admitted. “There was something else, too. I wanted, if possible, to plant a wedge between her and the boy. If she grows too attached to Zach, if she comes to trust the Shield too deeply, everything w
ill be harder for us.”
“You did well,” the voice said from nowhere in particular.
They waited together in silence. The only sound was the knife.
“Master,” Amare continued, picking up the thread of his often expressed concern, “it may be a mistake to wait. Perhaps we should act quickly and bring Cass in now.”
More silence.
A hooded figure, the Heretic, stepped from the shadows behind Amare and rested its hand lightly on his shoulder.
“You are like a son to me, Amare,” the Heretic said. “You are like the son I almost had but never knew. And, right now, I trust you more than anyone else in the world. But it’s not time yet. We will need to carefully and patiently prepare her before trying to turn her. We will only get one chance. And if we fail, all is lost.”
The Heretic leaned over Amare’s shoulder to see what he’d been working on with his knife. Embedded in beautiful scrollwork, he’d carved “LUKE 15:24” into the surface of the desk.
“Be patient, Amare. Be patient. She will come to us. She will learn that not all of the Lost are lost.”
13
With little ceremony, Cass and Zach were tossed out of BO-BS and back onto the street. It was hard to tell what time it was down here in the Underside—it always seemed to be twilight—but the streets were even busier now than they had been before.
Cass felt both elated and frightened at the idea that Richard might still be alive. Part of her was already convinced that it was true: he was alive. But part of her didn’t dare believe it. She was only just barely pulling herself out of that tailspin. And helping Miranda had to take priority over everything else.
She wiped her eyes with the back of her sleeve, surprised to discover that actual tears had welled up.