by Laura Legend
Maya wasn’t entirely sure what she’d just seen. Her jaw was slack and her full lips formed a quizzical “O.”
Cass gave her a small smile. “What? I’m the Seer. Evidently I can do things like that.”
Cass spread the cards out on a nearby table and they took a careful look at them. The cards didn’t appear to have any clearly common features. Their subjects, authors, and dates of composition were wildly diverse.
Maya flipped one of the cards over. A three digit number ran down the side of the card. She flipped the rest of the cards and, along varying edges, each card had a similar set of digits. Cass chewed on her lip, looking for the right configuration. She reached past Maya and rearranged the cards into a star-shaped pattern. Organized this way, the numbers flowed from the edge of one card to the next, forming an unbroken sequence.
“That’s it,” Maya said.
At a glance, Cass memorized the number. She grabbed a torch from the wall and, with Maya in tow, began to work her way back into the stacks, orienting herself to the system that organized the collection.
About eight rows back, she turned down an aisle on their left, and hopped onto a wheeled ladder mounted to the shelves. Like she was riding a scooter, she rolled herself down the aisle. About halfway down, she dragged the toe of her boot, bringing the ladder to a stop. She climbed several rungs up the ladder, pulled a slim manuscript from the shelf, and jumped off the ladder from there, landing lightly on her feet.
“Bingo,” Cass said, holding up the book.
As they hurried back through the door into the Overside library, Maya and Cass could hear Zach lecturing the librarian on proper feline feces disposal techniques. Atlantis mewed helpfully in the background. Cass peeked around the corner to see the poor librarian slumped in her chair, sneezing, head bowed down atop her desk in defeat. She didn’t see them as they quietly crossed to the front door.
“For the last time, young man, you must leave. Leave out this door. And leave the door open.” The librarian’s voice rasped, her throat red and raw from the sudden onset of a truly miserable allergy attack.
Zach glanced at Cass, who nodded at the slim book under her arm in return. Without another word, he scooped up Atlantis and followed them out the door.
22
It was past midnight. Cass, Zach, and Maya, clad in black, slipped along the side of the basilica where the chains of St. Paul were secured and displayed. They were looking for the side door used by priests and caretakers. This entrance would get them close to the chapel of relics.
The night was cloudy, starless, and dark. They shuffled along in the darkness until Maya found what she needed to locate first—the point at which the basilica’s security system connected with the city’s electrical and information infrastructure—and she stopped without warning. Cass, following Maya, ran right into her. And Zach, following Cass, then ran right into her. They ended up in a noisy, tangled pile of arms and legs, half caught in a bush.
“Damn amateurs,” Maya hissed, shrugging them off and getting down to work. “Watch where you are going.”
Cass and Zach, meanwhile, took their time untangling themselves.
Maya pulled some tools and equipment from her bag and spliced herself into the basilica’s security system. With a bit of digital jujitsu, she overrode the alarms and disarmed sensors that governed the chains of St. Paul.
“The digital end of this break-in is the easy part,” Maya reminded them. “Breaking the spell will be the difficult part.”
Maya popped the side door open and, single file, they stole inside and toward the chapel of relics. The chains of St. Paul were displayed in a glass case, lit by interior lights.
“They’re beautiful,” Cass whispered, edging around the altar and closer to the case. Even several yards away, she could feel them resonating with more than a thousand years of invested power. She felt powerfully drawn to them but, still a few feet from the case, something that felt like a magnetic field repelled her and she couldn’t get any closer.
“Alright, Maya,” Cass said, reaching out with her hand to test the field again, “you’re up.”
Maya took a deep breath, cleared her mind, and repeated the incantation, careful to include the missing element they’d recovered from Paul’s lost Gospel. A few sparks of green light leapt from her hand and fizzled out, leaving the field intact. She tried again with the same result.
Cass noticed, then, that something in the room didn’t feel right. Something felt off. But before she could say anything, Zach interjected.
“Ladies,” Zach said, “may I be of assistance?”
He took a look over Maya’s shoulder at the spell-breaking incantation, muttered an “Alrighty, then” once he had grasped the form and details of the spell, cracked his knuckles, and squared himself to the case. He closed his eyes for a moment, bowed his head, clapped his palms together, repeated the incantation, and pushed the palms of his hands outward toward the glass case. A wave of green light surged from his hands and the protective field around the case collapsed.
“Ha!” he shouted, then remembered it was important to keep quiet.
As the green wave of light washed over and through her, Cass felt the small hairs on the back of her neck stand up and goosebumps pimple her arms. She shivered in the incantation’s afterglow. Zach clearly knew what he was doing with magic. Why was she surprised? But her feelings were mixed. In addition to the pleasure of the spell’s power, the green crackle of magic also left her with a pang of grief. For Cass, magic couldn’t help but mean Miranda.
Cass pushed aside her fear for Miranda and helped Maya remove the lid from the case. Zach stood behind them, congratulating himself. “You’re welcome, ladies,” he joked, brushing imaginary lint from his shoulders and straightening his imaginary tie. Maya reached into the box and retrieved the heavy, iron chains. She bent down and secured the chains in her bag, then patted the pocket of her vest to make sure that she still had the Pauline manuscript.
Zach beamed and Cass couldn’t help but smile in return. They’d done it.
Still, something felt off about the room.
They worked their way down the colonnaded hall and back toward the door they’d originally come through. The farther they got from the chapel or relics, the deeper the shadows felt. Part way down the hall, Cass stopped. She had her head cocked to the side, trying to put her finger on what was wrong, when a voice came from the shadows. The voice felt both powerfully familiar and violently strange.
“Thank you for breaking that spell,” the voice said. “No vampire—Turned or Lost—could do it.”
On cue, a dozen of the Lost stepped into the faint light, surrounding them.
“Now,” the voice continued, “hand over the relic.”
“Screw that,” Maya said, kicking the nearest vampire in the knee and then, with her bare hands, wrenching his arm in a bone-crunching maneuver that left it twisted in the wrong direction.
Maya tossed Cass the bag with the relic. “Run, Cassandra,” she said. “And do not look back. I will be right behind you.”
Cass slung the bag over her shoulder and took off running. Miranda was what mattered most now.
When a vampire in a red leather jacket—straight from the set of “Thriller”—blocked her path, Cass drew her sword and slid feet first between his legs. With one sweeping stroke, she cleanly severed both legs at the ankles as she passed beneath him. He stood there for a moment, not sure what had happened, then toppled to the floor in a bloody heap, his feet still squarely planted on the floor next to him. Cass looked back for a moment to confirm her suspicion: the moron was, in fact, wearing just one white glove.
Cass scrambled back to her feet and ran again. She could hear Zach behind her and Maya behind him. The only clear path forward led her back to the chapel of relics. She looked around the chapel, searching for an exit. But the only way out now was down.
She leapt a railing with a “Do Not Enter” sign and bolted down a tight set of stairs into the
catacombs beneath the basilica. Zach and Maya were right on her heels now. Gunfire from Maya’s Glock echoed cacophonously in the tunnel until it was drowned out by a volley of frustrated screams.
Cass took one hard turn, then a second. But she came to a screeching halt when the passageway ended abruptly at Paul’s crypt.
The passage was a dead-end.
23
There was no place to go. Cass had led them into a cul-de-sac. Zach and Maya barreled around the corner into the same space. They were dismayed by the ashen look on Cass’s face.
“Back here,” Cass said, signaling that they should take up positions on the far side of the crypt. Cass stationed herself just around the corner from the entrance. She braced herself against the wall, sword pointed toward the corner, level with her own head, ready to impale whoever came careening around the corner next.
She only had to wait a moment. The ploy worked better than she’d expected. A vampire about her size, all black leather straps, buckles, and tassels, ran head first into the blade.
A country Western vampire? Cass wondered.
Cass threw her weight into to blade, pitching the woman to the floor and severed her head. She crumbled into a pile of white ash.
The next one, though, arrived, before Cass could recover and brace herself again. The second vampire blew around the corner and ran right into Cass, knocking them both over. Cass ended up on the bottom, her sword-arm pinned at an awkward angle. This woman was considerably bigger than the last, her mass straining her snakeskin leather to its limits. Cass couldn’t help but admire the kind of confidence it took to wear an outfit like that.
The woman grabbed Cass by the shoulders and shook her. Cass hit the woman hard under the chin with the heel of her free hand, snapping the woman’s mouth shut and severing the tip of her tongue. The bit tongue fell to the ground and flopped there. They both paused for a moment and looked at it, bewildered, then the woman’s eyes went black and she shook Cass again. She banged Cass’s head against the stone floor and offered a slurred snarl, ready to sink her bloody teeth into Cass’s exposed neck.
BLAM. BLAM.
Maya fired two shots into the vampire’s chest and the woman slumped to the floor, injured but not dispatched, trapping Cass beneath her weight.
Maya cleared the corner of the crypt, her pistol aimed at whoever might come around the corner next. When no one did and everything—for the moment—seemed quiet, she reached down with one sleeveless arm, grabbed the vampire by the seat of her snakeskin pants, and hoisted her off of Cass. Cass struggled to her feet, rubbed the back of her head, and buried her sword in the vampire’s heart, turning her to ash.
Cass felt a little unsteady on her feet and her vision was blurry. Worse, waves of black emotion—fear, anger, despair—were crashing against the weakening barricades in her heart, threatening to break loose. She staggered back a step, placed a hand on the wall for support, and tried to clear the cobwebs from her head.
Zach was busy looking for another way out. They couldn’t go back the way they’d come, but that didn’t mean that they were as trapped as they seemed. He closed his eyes and tried to extend his awareness into the space around them, “feeling” for the presence of some kind of adjacent space in the Underside. He felt along the corners of the space behind the crypt, then down along the floor. When he turned back in the direction of the crypt, he stopped.
A faint noise was coming from inside the crypt itself.
“Do you guys hear that?” Zach asked. “Cass, give me a hand with this.”
Zach leaned into the crypt, leveraging his weight against its stone lid. It trembled but barely moved. Cass joined him and, together, the stone lid started to slide. They pushed until it crashed off the far side and the crypt yawned open in front of them, pitch black inside.
Zach took Cass by the elbow. “Listen.” he said. They both strained to listen.
“Meow,” the crypt said.
They both did a double-take as Atlantis jumped out of the crypt and into Cass’s arms. Zach took a second, closer look inside the crypt.
“Stairs,” Zach said. “There are stairs inside.”
Atlantis purred and squirmed in Cass’s arms.
“Good work,” Maya replied without looking around, her gun still trained on the corner. She backed along the wall toward them.
Cass handed the bag with the relic back to Maya. “Ladies first,” Cass said, gesturing with her sword toward the stairs.
As Maya hopped over the lip of the box and down into the stairwell, Atlantis hissed and took a swipe at her. Cass brushed it off, distracted by the thought of what might come around the corner next. Zach, though, noticed.
“Down you go, big boy,” Cass said. “Seers bring up the rear.”
Zach thought about objecting, but didn’t want to waste their time. He jumped into the crypt. Standing a couple of steps deep, he called for Atlantis to make it easier for Cass to swing over the edge. The cat jumped from Cass’s arms, by-passing Zach, and disappeared down the stairs into the darkness.
“I see how it is,” Zach said, winking at Cass. “I suppose I’ll have to be happy with winning one of you over.”
Cass gave him a tired smile but, before she could follow him into the darkness, time thickened and slowed. Zach appeared frozen in place, halfway down the stairs.
Stillness. Silence. Then a shattering sound.
“Cassandra,” the powerfully familiar and violently strange voice called again, echoing down the hallway. “Cassandra!”
The voice gripped something deep inside of her, rooting Cass to the spot. A rumbling sound filled the hallway—some combination of heavy footsteps, trembling walls, and the grating of metal on stone.
Cass fought to regain control of her body and reenter the flow of time. She forced her legs to move, one step at a time, until she cleared the blind corner. She had to see what was coming. She had to see what was calling her name.
But once she’d turned the corner, it was clear that the monstrous thing that had come into view was not what had been calling her name.
The towering monster was misshapen and lop-sided. One eye glowed red and the other socket was empty. Rows of razor sharp teeth gnashed in its mouth. One giant arm noisily dragged an enormous axe across the stone floor while the other arm hung shriveled and limp at its side. Its clothes were mostly tattered and moldering, the only exception being a shiny leather vest with the beast’s name lovingly embroidered inside a pink heart: “FRED,” it said. The monster had the look of some feral, half-dreamed nightmare set free in the waking world.
Cass tightened her grip on her sword and dropped into a defensive stance. She fought to regain control of both her body and her emotions. She didn’t see how she could defeat whatever this thing was. Maybe she could just give Zach and Maya time to escape. Hopelessness swelled in her gut, rising like black bile in her throat, but she pushed it down again.
The monster filled almost the entire passageway. Cass decided she’d better seize the advantage before she lost what open ground remained, trapping her in the crypt.
Okay, “Fred.” Here we go, Cass thought.
She advanced, sword raised, as the monster swung its axe in a great, looping circle, taking a chunk out of the ceiling and embedding the blade deep in the stone floor. Cass danced to the side, avoiding the swing, ducked under the haymaker that followed, and cleanly severed the thing’s limp and shriveled arm with her sword. The monster cried out in alarm and pain, its voice pitched high and innocent like the voice of a child who’d just discovered the world was a cruel and lonely place. Cass choked down the shame and pity that rose in her and looked for a way to take advantage of the beast’s confusion and distress. She decided to go straight for its heart, the location clearly marked by the pink, embroidered heart that framed its name.
Sorry, Fred, Cass thought as she lowered the point of her sword, aimed at its heart, and ran at the thing like a jousting knight.
Cass, though, was a beat too slow. The m
onster backhanded her against the wall and her sword clattered to the floor between its legs. It threw back its head and roared at her in anger and pain, sniffling back tears. It lifted a giant foot to squash her before she could get back up, but Cass rolled away just in time. The beast stomped again and again, each time just missing Cass.
Cass, though, was running out of hallway. She struggled to her feet, braced against the back wall.
Then, like a bolt of lightning, the scene before Cass cracked in two as she heard that familiar, violent voice call her name again: “Cassandra!”
It felt to Cass as if, in response to that crack of lightning, time itself had been split down the middle, as if time had forked between two possible paths, two possible worlds, while she, somehow, remained poised between them, undecided. One fork unfolded along a line where, with its next move, the monster pinned her in the corner and crushed her head against the wall. The other fork unfolded along a line where, with her next move, Cass swept the monster’s weak leg and sent it crashing backwards, splitting its head like a melon on the axe still embedded in the stone floor.
With a gentle push, Cass chose which line of falling dominoes to set in motion and then, almost as a spectator, watched the events unfold: she swept the leg, the monster toppled backwards, and its head split open. When the sequence ended, Cass found herself thrown abruptly back into time, snapping back into alignment with her own present self, standing victorious over the beast’s body as blood and brains drained from its skull.
Aligned again with her own present body, time started flowing smoothly, regularly again. She could hear Zach calling for her, panicked, from the crypt. One moment she had been there in the crypt with him, the next she was, from his perspective, gone. Whatever bubble of time Cass had just been living in, hadn’t included him. Atlantis rubbed up against her leg—he’d come back for her—pulling her with his tail toward Zach, the hidden stairs, and the possibility of escape. Cass moved to follow the cat, unsure what had just happened or why.