by Laura Legend
This particular tick was relatively new for the thin man. But it had always been true that he could not trust what he could not see. He’d never been big on blind faith. He needed evidence. He only trusted things that were concrete and countable.
That was why he had never been able to bring himself to trust the Nazarene—everything the man said seemed so intangible and counter-intuitive. But the cross the Romans had hung him from, that was a different story. The pieces of the One True Cross were something that could be collected and counted and held. He could feel in his unnatural bones the power of the fragments he’d already managed to collect. He could feel their power to heal him and, more, elevate him. Only a handful of pieces still escaped him.
This was why he needed Cassandra Jones’s help.
He hadn’t expected her to respond positively to his anonymous texts—though it might have been convenient if she had. He was just trying to stir the pot. He was setting her in motion so that she would be of use to him whether she wanted to be or not.
Even now, several other pieces of his plan were already in motion. A handful of his colleagues would soon pay her a visit to make sure she wasn’t tempted to slip back into the numb routine of her normal life.
Though, truth be told, there was nothing normal or ordinary about Cassandra Jones. Whatever it cost her, he would at least make sure her life was never ordinary again.
The thin man sat down at the room’s desk, sleepless. He scrolled through the list of sites, blogs, and discussion boards he used to keep track of any news that might aid his search for the remaining relics. This, for instance, was how he had learned about the holy relic that had recently—and only momentarily—passed through Father Marquand’s hands.
Backlists and reddits dedicated to discussing archeology and Christian relics were sometimes useful but generally wacky places. He used a bunch of different names and handles on these lists, sometimes using several different names in the same discussion.
When the lists weren’t giving him any useful information, though, he took a kind of wry pleasure in trolling the true-believers who also followed this kind of news. He was excellent at manipulation and he’d had thousands of years to hone his arguments against God’s existence, Christ’s divinity, and the virgin birth. It wasn’t really fair how easily he could dismantle their arguments and send Christian after Christian retreating from the light of reason back into the superstitious darkness of a weak faith.
Still, when it came to these kinds of arguments, he was like a dog with an old bone: there wasn’t any meat left to eat on these bones but he couldn’t quite stop himself from gnawing at them anyway. No matter how tight his proofs, something always seemed unfinished about them.
When he’d made his rounds on the blogs and backlists, he switched to Twitter. He was just sinking his teeth into a new conversation with a desk clerk from the Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY, when his phone buzzed.
“Yes,” he said simply. Small talk was beyond him.
He listened silently for several minutes, patiently gathering the facts without interruption.
When his subordinate had finished, he simply and icily said, “Text me details about the location.”
He ended the call, stood up, tightened the knot in his tie, and looked out the window facing east. One of the final missing pieces of the Cross may have just been located in Valencia, Spain.
It was time to gather his things.
He had work to do before the sun rose.
Chapter Five
Cass was home before nine. She lived alone in an old studio apartment on top of a Thai noodle place not far from the university. After living here for two years, even the thought of green curry turned her stomach—though she figured she’d probably have to live her another thirty years before she’d get sick of the mango sticky rice. The trade-offs were worth it, though. The loft’s ceilings were high, its unfinished brick walls were set wide, and there were no neighbors to complain about her playing music too loud, keeping odd hours, or yelling “hi-yah!” at the top of her lungs.
She tossed her keys in a basket on the kitchen counter and doffed her jacket. Her mail was all garbage and went straight into the recycling bin. She put some food in the cat’s dish and called for him.
“Atlantis. Here kitty-kitty,” she said.
But the cat was no where to be found. Even if she locked all the windows and doors, the cat came and went as he pleased. He would disappear for days at a time, lost. That’s why Cass had named him Atlantis in the first place.
“Stupid cat. Where are you when I need you?”
She slumped into the soft arms of an overstuffed yellow leather couch that had already been curb-worthy when she’d inherited forever ago.
I love you, couch, she thought. You’re my longest, most successful relationship.You never judge me or yell at me. You never disappear like my cat. You just let me sink into your old leathery arms and hold me tight. We understand each other.
She patted the couch arm and affectionately traced a crack in the leather with her finger, then reached between two cushions looking for the remote control. Instead of finding the remote, she pulled out thirty-seven cents and a small, black bra she couldn’t swear was actually hers.
What the …? Whose … ? She shuddered and stuffed the money and underwear back into the darkness she’d fished them from. Maybe she and the couch didn’t know each other as well as she’d thought.
She was tired but her crazy day had left her wired rather than sleepy. Maybe she could fix that with some exercise.
Tracking down some clean gym clothes seemed like a lot of trouble, so Cass just kicked off her shoes and jeans. She lifted a wooden practice sword off the hook where it hung on the wall and spun the sword through the opening moves of her practice routine. She had studied sword fighting and martial arts for more than a decade, with both Eastern and Western styles and weapons. Over time, she’d fused a bunch of different styles into her own crazy brand of fighting. Opponents had no idea what to do with her in tournaments.
Her goal, now, was to beat the crap out of her Wing Chun practice dummy. At one point, she’d taken a magic marker and drawn a smiley face on the wooden post at the center of its many waving wooden arms. Today, the smile seemed to mock her.
Fine, if that’s how you’re going to be, she thought, and delivered a handful of blows.
The dummy had seen it all over the years—sometimes playing the part of an almost-boyfriend, sometimes a bedazzled customer, sometimes a coffeehouse manager, sometimes a dissertation director, sometimes her own dad—and had taken everything she could dish out without blinking.
It took her about forty-five minutes to run through the whole routine. By the time she was done she ached with exhaustion and her t-shirt and underwear were soaked through with sweat. She tossed them in the hamper, took a cold shower, pulled on an over-sized shirt she’d slept in for years, and then collapsed on a mattress that, over time, had been crowded into the corner of her apartment by swordplay.
Finally in bed, she flicked on a small fan, wrapped herself in a sheet, closed her eyes, and expected to pass out.
But she still couldn’t sleep.
Instead, she found herself thinking about the weird text message she’d gotten in the alley. Apparently her worries about the text had just been waiting for her to relax so they could ambush her. Before she knew it, she was caught in a loop thinking about the text and her dissertation and, in a matter of minutes, she was wide awake again.
“Shit,” she groaned out loud.
She rolled out of bed and sorted through the piles of research stacked on her desk until she found what she was looking for: the latest, but still unfinished, draft of her dissertation. She grabbed a spoon and a yogurt from the fridge and sat down at the kitchen table with the manuscript. Sucking on the spoon, she started flipping through its pages.
Though she knew most of the material by heart, she was still fascinated by it. Despite what her dissertation committee had d
ecided, the argument felt right. It felt true. The pieces snapped together with a satisfying click and, in the end, they added up to something substantial and surprising: a template, a method, for finding real relics of the One True Cross and sifting them from the fakes.
But as much as she was still gripped by her work, it was painful to revisit. She felt humiliated whenever she thought about washing out of her doctoral program.
And, more, the work’s associations made her feel sad and lost. She’d done most of the project’s research and writing while staffing the Hatfield Library help desk at Willamette University in Salem. Re-reading her work now, she could almost smell the books that filled the library’s stacks. She could almost hear that weird mix of sounds that mark a library—pages turning, pencils scratching, an occasional cough, the scrape of a wooden chair on a marble floor. She missed it. She missed her job there. She missed being a scholar.
She crumpled up her yogurt cup and tossed it into the recycling bin, then gave her spoon one last lick before slinging it into the sink. She stretched her arms high over her head and tilted her chair onto its back two legs, staring at the pipes criss-crossing the studio’s open ceiling.
She didn’t like to think about the library. Budget cuts plus her poor people skills got her fired from that job—Lord, am I about to be fired again? From a coffeehouse this time!—and until Zach had gotten past her defenses, she hadn’t known what to do with herself.
She’d languished for weeks. To her dad’s great displeasure, her Aunt Miranda had shown up in the aftermath of her firing and tried to pump some life back into her. Miranda had grabbed her by the arm, tossed her sorry ass into the shower, pulled the tags off some new little red number that was supposed to be a dress, and took her drinking and dancing. They had found some exclusive club and the bouncer had waved them right through.
How does Miranda even knew about these places? Cass wondered. She doesn’t even live in this state!
The lights in the club had been dim and Cass had been able to feel the bass in her bones. A huge, ironic disco ball had presided over the dance floor. Miranda had ordered them a couple of drinks—nothing with umbrellas, just Scotch on the rocks. She had downed the first in one pull and asked for another. Cass had done the same.
The drinking part Cass was good at. The dancing part she was okay at. But the people part had been a disaster like always. Even half drunk, most guys had been too scared to talk to her. Or, if they had enough courage to try, they would get confused and disappointed once they had bought her a drink and tried to look deep into her wandering, milky eye. Then they would make an excuse, step away, and never come back in her direction. Cass hadn’t even been left with the consolation of thinking their excuses might not be lies.
“Whatever,” she had slurred to her drink. “Screw them.”
Still, she loved her aunt for trying. And, despite the blinding hangovers, a couple of nights out with Miranda had done her some good. What’s more, Miranda’s arrival fit a larger pattern. Ever since her mom had died, Miranda had shown a kind of sixth sense for knowing when Cass needed her most. Cass didn’t doubt this would always be true.
Tonight, though—late at night, alone in her loft—she was on her own. She closed her dissertation, flipped it over, and slapped it down onto the table.
Enough! she thought.
She wanted to be done with this. She wanted to forget her failures. She wanted to move on with her life. But she couldn’t. In all her worrying tonight, she hadn’t even touched the part that stung the most.
Her dad.
She missed her dad even more than she missed her work. She used to see him at the library almost every day. He would carve some time out of his schedule as head librarian and they would have lunch together in the university cafeteria while she shared the highlights from her latest research.
But in the months since she’d been fired from the library—since her own dad had fired her from her job at the library—she’d barely seen him at all.
How were they supposed to talk after that?
She felt like crying but didn’t.
She flopped back onto her mattress and stuffed her head under her pillow instead.
She dreamed the rest of the night about books and relics.
Chapter Six
Cass had a double shift the next day, from noon to closing. The sun was actually out for once—surprise!—so there weren’t many customers. Business always slowed to a crawl when people weren’t stuck inside, huddled around hot cups of coffee for warmth. But for Cass, all this really meant was that she had too much time on her hands to think about things she didn’t want to think about. And after yesterday’s episode with the manager, she didn’t dare distract herself with her phone.
She tried to keep busy changing filters and straightening cups and wiping down tables and counters. She didn’t mind the cleaning part of the job, it was definitely more her speed than the people part. But there was only so much to do on this front and, after a couple of hours, she was reduced to just leaning against the counter and staring out the front window, trying to guess the astrological signs of each person that walked by.
Her mom had taught her this game. They used to play at the bus stop while they waited.
“There are twelve signs of the Zodiac,” her mom had said. “Each of the signs is ruled by a planet and each planet is associated with certain traits and characteristics.”
Her mom seemed to know a lot about this kind of thing, and whenever she talked about anything “magical” there was always a glint in her eye that Cass didn’t see otherwise. Her dad, though, wasn’t a fan, so she and her mom only played these games when he wasn’t around.
Cass had always been good at the game. She had a knack. Sometimes, as a party trick, she would guess people’s signs. She would go around the table as fast as she could, pointing and naming everyone’s signs until the whole table had dissolved in laughter, delighted by the fact that she wasn’t just bluffing; she was right.
In the end, though, she felt more like her dad. She believed in history and scholarship and reason. She believed that life was short and filled with loss. She didn’t believe in magic or monsters or gods. She didn’t believe in things that went bump in the night.
Still, it was a fun game to play. Thinking about her mom, Cass tried to focus and zero-in on the people walking by.
A professional looking women in her early fifties: Gemini.
A dad in a hoodie with a baby in a stroller: Pisces and Taurus (the baby was a Taurus).
A homeless man: Scorpio.
An elderly lady in a velvet track suit: Aquarius.
She played for half an hour without a single customer coming in. She leaned against the counter and buried her head in her arms. This day is never going to end. She wiped the counter again, wishing Zach would show up already for his evening shift.
She needed to see a friendly face.
Just as she was thinking this, a man in his late twenties pushed through the door, letting in a gust of wind. He was tall with sandy hair and was dressed for Wall Street, not Oregon. He took a commanding look around the room and seemed pleased to find Java’s Palace basically empty.
He smiled, unsurprised that things were going, as usual, just as he’d hoped.
Clearly a Leo, Cass thought to herself. A banker? A hedge fund manager?
“Can I help you?” she asked in her friendliest barista voice.
“Yes,” he said. “And only you can. I didn’t come for the coffee. I’ve come for you.”
As he said it, the lines around his pale blue eyes crinkled in a way that almost succeeded in making that line not sound ridiculous. Still, Cass couldn’t help but feel a little wave of electricity travel up her spine as she blushed.
“Uhhh, okay,” she said, trying to keep her eyes down and her hands busy. “That’s kind of weird. How do you even know who I am?”
“I need to speak with you about your dissertation,” he continued in a hard-to-place accent. Briti
sh? “And, believe it or not, the matter is quite urgent.”
Case didn’t know what to say. She specialized in history and archeology, both fields where the term “urgent” meant something like “get back to me within a month.” He wasn’t putting her on, though. He wasn’t lying. She was sure about that. He really did need to talk to her about her dissertation. But this made her more reluctant, not less, to actually talk to him.
What the hell is going on, Cass wondered. I bomb out of my doctoral program and now I’m some kind of b-grade academic celebrity for nut jobs? Great.
The man could tell she was skeptical.
“Please, Ms. Jones. I’m quite serious. I do need your help. And it is rather urgent.”
As he said this, he reached out to take her hand and bobbed his head to meet her downcast eyes. His hand was strong and he wore a Harvard Business School ring. She was annoyed when he touched her hand, but she felt a little shock of connection when she met his eyes. Rather than getting flustered by her lazy eye or settling, eventually, on her strong eye as his point of reference, this man immediately, without missing a beat, looked directly into her weak eye.
“Please,” he repeated.
She felt the pull of his request—to be valued, to talk about her work again, to talk about her work with him—but this was all too much. She knew he was telling the truth, but she didn’t know why. And that why, always so opaque for her, worried her.
She decided to be firm.
“I already told you I’m not interested. I don’t know who you are or what you want. But my work has been officially classified a disaster by the university and I don’t take well to being badgered by anonymous texts from strangers.”
Cass heard Zach bang through the door behind her, still tying his apron.
“Everything all right here, Cass?” Zach asked.
Mr. Harvard was confused by Cass’s response and flustered by Zach’s sudden appearance and protective posture. He withdrew his hand and stood up straight, more than a foot taller than Cass. She could tell he was not used to bumping into any kind of objections or road blocks. He was used to just getting what he wanted. Immediately.