A Vision of Vampires Box Set

by Laura Legend

  She turned her attention to his head and took it in her hands—it was surprisingly light, as if his brain had nearly shriveled away—and rotated it to the side.

  The marks of a feral vampire were easy to discern, and he showed them all. His spine was ridged, sharp bones protruded prominently from his neck, and his brow had become heavy, shadowing the pits of his eyes. She tilted back his head and his mouth flopped open, revealing the extra ring of shark-like teeth. She gently laid his head back on the table, took his sharply clawed hand in her own, and squeezed it companionably. She choked back an unexpected sob as the grief welled up inside of her. This man had been her friend. He’d trusted her.

  Her grief wobbled toward anger.

  She could feel her own emotions growing stronger, more unruly, more hair-trigger by the day. How long did she have left before the same feral fate overtook her? How long did any of them? And once the Lost were truly and finally Lost, how long would the rest of the world last before it was overrun and eaten alive by a viral wave of death and transformation?

  Her hot, stifled sobs deteriorated into a deep cough that racked her body. She leaned against the table, squeezed her eyes shut, and tried to calm herself, pushing back the anger.

  She needed to buy just a little more time. They desperately needed to acquire an additional relic. If she could acquire just one—a powerful one—she could repurpose its power to maintain control of the Lost and hold the floodwaters at bay. They’d come so close to acquiring the chains of Saint Paul, but Maya Krishnamurti had double-crossed them. And Miranda had come even closer to winning the sarira, the tournament prize, before Cassandra Jones had somehow turned the tables and come out on top.

  The Heretic’s emotions snagged for a moment on the thought of Cassandra, but she forced her mind to keep moving.

  Now’s not the time. You need a relic—a relic, a relic, a relic!

  Fortunately, they were close to acquiring one: the Holy Coat, the seamless garment worn by Jesus prior to his crucifixion, the garment for which Roman soldiers had cast lots. It was an extremely powerful relic. It was exactly what they needed.

  Leaning against the table, The Heretic opened her eyes and surveyed the body cracked open in front of her. This body, twisted and broken, captured her own failure in physical form. This sliced and broken corpse wasn’t what she was looking for. This certainly wasn’t the kind of world she was looking for. She was aiming to create a world that was, like Jesus’ coat, seamless, unified, redeemed. She was looking for a way forward into a world where the Lost were no longer lost. She was looking for a way to piece back together what Jesus had fractured when he’d cursed Judas to live on as a vampire—undead—and set the coming of their present calamity in motion.

  She wasn’t going to find what she was looking for in a corpse.

  Death held no answers for her. She would have to take a closer look at life itself.

  The Heretic turned away from the body and washed her hands again in scalding water until her skin turned scarlet and the joints in her fingers ached. There was more than a hint of manic compulsion in how she washed them. She found herself to be, despite herself, increasingly fastidious. She didn’t like this change. The compulsion felt desperate to her and, more, it reminded her of Judas’s own obsession with spotlessness. She couldn’t let herself turn into him—but she couldn’t quite bring herself to stop scrubbing her hands either.

  Finally, a knock came at the door and jarred her out of the loop she was stuck in. Relieved, she turned the water off and dried her hands.

  Miranda Byrne was at the door—her eyes more hollow, her sharp teeth more closely crowded—bearing in her own body creeping marks of the feral future that stalked them.

  As she replaced her cloak, the Heretic glanced over her shoulder at Miranda. “It’s time to pursue the Holy Coat with every remaining resource at our disposal. It’s time to spend what power we have left—even if the immediate costs are steep and bloody. We have to have that relic. The fate of the world hangs in the balance.”

  The Heretic paused for a moment, then gave the order that Miranda had been after for weeks: “Gather the horde. We’re going to war.”

  “Finally,” Miranda said, her curt response betraying the fragility of her own control over her emotions.

  “Yes,” the Heretic responded wearily, her mind’s eye already filled with a horrific vision of the blood and fire and destruction to come, “Finally.”

  Miranda turned to go, anxious to set the wheels in motion.

  But the Heretic had one final question.

  “But first—where exactly is Cassandra Jones right now?”

  Chapter 2

  Cassandra Jones was dangling from the side of a mountain in Japan.

  She’d already climbed halfway up the face of the cliff. The muscles in her shoulders and hands ached, vibrating with a pleasant intensity. She felt stronger than ever.

  She’d just been running through the forest, along her normal route, when she’d come to the cliff face and paused, drawn by how the rock shone in the early morning sun. She’d touched the stone with the tips of her fingers, felt the hint of heat that the sun had already planted there, and before she knew it, she was climbing.

  Since her strength had begun to expand a few months ago during the tournament, Cass had been looking for new ways to test herself. She’d been looking for ways to press outward toward whatever her limits might be. The fact that she hadn’t found those limits yet both encouraged and frightened her. Could she run a four-minute mile? Yes. How long could she keep up that pace? She wasn’t sure. Could she pop out a set of a hundred pull-ups? Sure. How many more could she do? She didn’t know.

  She just knew that she felt strong. And she knew that she felt alive—especially when she was testing that strength.

  Cass swung from one handhold to another, the sun warm on her back in the chill mountain air, veins popping in her forearms as she scrambled upward, barely relying on toeholds. Her head was clear, full of little more than gray rock, white clouds, and blue sky. She slid sideways along a narrow shelf, just wide enough for the tips of her fingers, then jammed her hand into a crack that she could follow upward for another twenty or thirty meters.

  With a secure handhold in the crack, she rested her weight on her feet, leaned back, and shook out her free arm. She looked up at the vaulting sky, took a deep breath, then examined the cliff face. The cliff face was broken into various adjoining planes, some of which could be linked to and traversed, some of which remained inaccessible. Navigating the face of the rock felt to Cass a bit like trying to navigate her own mind. Some parts of her mind had been unlocked, recovered from the minds of Zach and Kumiko. But other parts remained distant and inaccessible. Some of her feelings were vibrant and urgent, but others still felt distant and secondhand—as if they belonged to someone else.

  Cass leaned in toward the mountain and, alternating hands, began quickly ascending the crack. As she settled into a rhythm, she could feel the subtle burn behind her weak eye indicating that her powers as a seer were active. She welcomed this burn, but she couldn’t depend on it. This deeper sense of connection with her powers seemed to come and go of its own accord and she couldn’t always control it.

  Her powers were, at least in part, out of her hands.

  Someone else had sequestered her emotions. And someone else had short-circuited her powers by routing them through the breaker of her cloudy, wandering eye. Had it really been her own mother? Had it been the last thing her mother had done before her death? Kumiko thought so. And Cass’s own vision seemed to confirm it. Rose had done this to her.

  Cass’s mind snagged on the thought her mother, but she pushed past it, refocusing her attention on the cliff. She’d come to the end of the seam she’d been following and would need to switch gears. She’d prefer to tack right, but it looked as if her only real option was to use a series of handholds that lead off to the left. She didn’t have far to go now, though. Maybe ten or fifteen meters before she
was at the top. She could make it work.

  She stretched upward with her left hand and noticed how the morning sun cast a sharply defined shadow of her arm’s movements against the rock. Cass tightly gripped the handhold with the tips of her fingers and tested its strength with part of her weight. When she swung outward and pulled her body upward, her shadow followed.

  Without knowing it, she’d been shadowed her whole life by the loss of her twin brother. Everywhere she’d gone, every day she’d spent with her parents, had been shadowed by the grief and tragedy of his having died at birth. Now that she knew this, Cass couldn’t help but look back over the course of her life, filling in the blanks and rewriting crucial moments. If her mother had felt compelled to lock away Cass’s emotions and short-circuit her powers, it had been because of her lost brother. She and her brother had been meant to be seers together. The strength of his mind had been meant to balance the strength of her emotions. Without him, Cass was half a seer—a danger to others and, especially, to herself.

  Cass reached upward again and tested another hold. But, this time, the lip of rock from which she hung cracked and sheared free of the cliff.

  Cass felt her heart leap into her throat—from here, the fall was more than a hundred meters—as she scrambled with her free hand to find something, anything, to hang on to. Amid a cascade of stone and debris, she slipped down the face of the cliff a full meter before she snagged the edge of a tiny outcropping with her free hand. Her momentum, though, still swung her outward, away from the rock face, separating her from her shadow. For a sickening moment she was suspended in thin air and the only thing still connecting her to the mountain was a quarter inch of pad at the tips of two fingers.

  Cass squeezed hard. Her fingertips bit into the rock and she swung back against the stone, reconnecting with her shadow. Her heart racing wildly, she found additional support with her other hand.

  Shit, Cass thought as the adrenaline pounded through her veins. Holy. Shit.

  At that moment, Cass remembered something important: she didn’t actually know what she was doing. She’d never rock climbed before in her life. She’d just been relying on her strength and her ability to “see” the truth of the cliff as she scaled it.

  Cass slowly shook her head and calmed herself with a deep breath.

  To be honest, this wasn’t so different from the rest of her life. She didn’t really know what she was doing there either. And not just when it came to being a seer and saving the world, but with Zach and Richard. She couldn’t help but feel the pull of her attraction to Richard when she was with him, but that attraction didn’t undercut her commitment to Zach. Instead, it underscored it. Things might have gone differently with Richard, but they hadn’t. They’d gone the way they’d gone. Sure, she was making it up as she went along, hanging on by her fingertips as the mountain crumbled around her, but she was hanging on.

  And more than anything else, she’d been successfully hanging on to Zach.

  Cass pictured Zach’s goofy grin and casually athletic build and suppressed a smile of her own. There would be time for him later. For now, she needed to focus on not dying. If she came home dead, she would hurt Zach’s feelings for sure.

  In less than a minute, Cass climbed the remaining ten meters swiftly and surely. When she rolled over the lip of the cliff and onto solid ground, she lay there on her back, staring up at the sky, feeling the burn in her limbs, the sun on her face, and her heart pounding in her chest.

  She stared into space, her eyes blurry and unfocused.

  There was so much she hadn’t been told. So much she didn’t understand. So little she could control.

  She rolled forward and hugged her knees to her chest, looking out over the valley and toward the Shield monastery.

  Her warm breath clouded the cold mountain air.

  A fox appeared on the ridge behind her, padding out from the tree line on his white feet. He lifted his black nose in the air, gathering what information he needed, then brushed against Cass’s thigh, nuzzling her hand.

  The fox was a message from Kumiko.

  Cass was needed back at the monastery.

  Chapter 3

  Cass was afraid that the meeting would be over by the time she got down from the mountain, cleaned up, and made her way to Kumiko’s war room. She was relieved when, on the way there, she found that she wasn’t the only one running late.

  In the hallway outside Kumiko’s tea room, Cass bumped into Grey, one of Kumiko’s top lieutenants. As a pair, Dogen and Grey were Kumiko’s right hands and though both Dogen and Grey shared a deep, intelligent devotion to Kumiko and the Shield, their appearances and demeanors pointed in sharply different directions. Where Dogen was effectively a deadly teddy bear the size of a house, Grey was short, stocky, and gruff. While the hair on his head was short and balding, his eyebrows were long and bushy, his beard was full and wild, and his arms were covered in what was pretty much a thick rug of fur. Also—and this was Cass’s favorite thing about him—he had an eyepatch that, though it had originally been a deep crimson red, had faded enough over the past hundred years that Cass couldn’t help but think of it as pink.

  “I see that you’re late for Kumiko’s meeting,” Grey offered in his deep, gravelly voice.

  “Do you, now?” Cass shot back, smiling. “I’m not sure how you can see much of anything with that pink eyepatch on.”

  Grey harrumphed and rolled his one good eye.

  “This patch used to be white—until I bathed it in the blood of my enemies,” he said, pretending to accidentally bump into Cass as they rounded a corner. His mass, though, was such that even a friendly bump bounced Cass into the wall of Kumiko’s tea room. When Cass reached out to steady herself, she accidentally punched her hand right through the thin sheet of paper that framed part of the room’s outer wall.

  Cass froze, her eyes wide and alarmed. With her hand still poking through the hole in the paper wall, she shot Grey an accusing look.

  “We are in big trouble,” she silently mouthed in his direction.

  Grey looked at Cass, then at the hole her hand had punched through the wall, and then back to Cass.

  “We?” Grey whispered, as he hurried down the hall, throwing one last look over his shoulder and cracking half a smile.

  “Traitor! Chicken!” Cass stage-whispered after him as he ducked into the tea room, leaving her alone.

  “Cassandra?” Kumiko’s soft voice came with precise and frightening control from the other side of wall.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Cass answered.

  “Is that your fist poking through the wall of my tea room?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Cass answered again, withdrawing her hand from the hole.

  The hole was big enough that Cass had no trouble seeing straight into the tea room, but it was high enough that she had to lean forward a little to find an angle that would bring Kumiko’s tiny body into view. The look on Kumiko’s face was hard but, at the low table behind her, Zach and Dogen were trying desperately to keep straight faces. Grey tried to look both concerned and nonchalant as he quietly slid into his own seat.

  Cass shrugged her shoulders, scrunched her nose, and gave a little, apologetic wave through the wall’s new “window.” The gesture had Zach almost in tears.

  Kumiko rounded on Zach and Dogen and they both buried their faces in their hands.

  “This is no laughing matter,” Kumiko said slowly and deliberately. “The punishment will be severe . . . Grey, I expect you’ll have this repaired before lunch. And I expect you’ll personally see to manning a post at the watchtower all night tonight.”

  Grey groaned a little but nodded in agreement. He hadn’t gotten away with anything.

  “And Cassandra,” Kumiko continued, “why don’t you join us inside the room for today’s meeting.”

  “Oh, right,” Cass blurted out, relieved she was off the hook. She hurried into the room and took her seat next to Zach who, after he’d finished wiping the tears from his eyes, put on
a serious face and squeezed her hand under the table.

  Cass squeezed back and settled onto her cushion.

  The ragged hole in the wall stared at them like a malevolent eye.

  “If we could get started now,” Kumiko said, “we have urgent business to discuss. Our sources have informed me that the Heretic is close to acquiring the ‘holy coat,’ a powerful relic connected with Jesus’s crucifixion. We’ve got the Lost on their heels at the moment and cannot afford to allow them to tap into this power and regain their balance.”

  Cass had sensed the same thing. The Lost were off balance at the moment. But Cass also sensed that the Lost were, as a group, teetering on the brink of something much worse than the status quo. Now might not be the best time to give them a friendly push over the edge and into the abyss.

  “I haven’t been around hundreds of years to track this situation,” Cass said, “but it seems to me that something has changed recently—that with Judas’s death the Lost are about to pass a dangerous tipping point, growing more and more dangerous as they grow more and more desperate. This doesn’t feel to me like a ‘business as usual’ moment.”

  Zach bobbed his head in agreement. Dogen tilted his head sympathetically. Grey stared hard into the bottom of his empty tea cup.

  Kumiko weighed Cass’s words as she poured tea for each of them.

  Cass took advantage of the pause to add something more.

  “Perhaps there is some other approach we could take. I know how dangerous the Lost are and my blood boils when I think about what they’ve done to Miranda, but perhaps there is something we can do that doesn’t amount to just fighting them. Perhaps we could undercut the threat they pose by ‘helping’ them somehow?”

  Cass’s voice trailed off. The room was totally silent. Kumiko had stopped pouring tea and locked eyes with Cass.

  “Are they truly beyond any hope of saving?” Cass asked.