by Laura Legend
Zach looked worried for a moment. But Cass didn’t hesitate to reaffirm her position: “We need him. He’s coming. That’s all there is to it.”
Zach, emboldened by Cass’s support, couldn’t resist a little snark of his own. “Cass, do we really need the international man of mystery, here? As a general rule, shouldn’t we try to limit the number of vampires on any given expedition to, I don’t know, say: zero?”
As Zach was saying this, Miranda sped through the gate and onto the private airstrip they’d been aiming for. She slammed on the brakes and then skidded to a stop near the private jet that was already fueled and waiting for them on the small runway.
The jet had “The York Group” stenciled in bold red letters on its side.
Richard looked at Cass, then out the window at the jet, and then back at Zach. He gave Zach a big shit-eating grin.
“Let’s take my plane,” Richard said. “Unless, of course, you’d prefer, Zach, to take yours?”
Cass and Miranda rolled their eyes.
“Put away the rulers and zip up your pants, boys,” Miranda sniped. “We’ve got a flight to catch.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
The thin man and his colleagues would need to finish quickly and leave before daybreak. They couldn’t afford to be caught in the sun or get trapped inside for the duration of the day.
The thin man’s face was free of worry. He’d calculated how much time this would take and he knew exactly what time the sun would rise.
His two colleagues, however, were not as precise nor meticulous. They tended to be anxious and high strung—their capacity for reason always seemed to get compromised by their transformation and the blinding hunger that came with it—and their trust in him, while firm, only went so far. It seemed to him that each new generation was worse than the last, weaker and hungrier and dumber, more prone to be overwhelmed by their passions and emotions, more likely to turn feral.
Still, even if his calculations were spot on, they’d better hurry.
Things had already taken too long with this last priest. The older these priests got, they more stubborn they became, as if faith were a bad habit they couldn’t kick. This old man had been much worse than the young one in the park. In the end, they hadn’t been able to bend him to their purposes. He’d simply broken rather than yield. What a mess. Regrettable. They had had no choice but to swap in a crude understudy to the play the part of the “helpful priest” instead.
It would be worth it, though.
Now that he’d set Cassandra Jones in motion, he needed to steer her in directions that would be useful to him. He’d recently received reports that, even now, she and Richard York were in the air, winging their way to Spain. But, like a game of chess, he was several moves ahead. She would help him whether she intended to or not.
The thin man planted his present for the priest to offer Cassandra and brushed the dust from the sleeves of his suit.
“You, bring the car around,” the thin man ordered, pointing to one of this colleagues. “And be quick.
“And you,” he said, pointing to the other, “make sure we’ve left no trace.”
Checking the sleeves of his suit one last time, he exited through the rear of the house and cut through the chapel. Sunlight was already streaming through an upper window on the eastern wall. Sticking to the shadows, he slipped out a side exit and into the backseat of his waiting Mercedes—black paint, darkly tinted windows.
He flexed his gloved fingers, absorbed the pain, and straightened his already straight tie. The black skin and dead flesh had spread almost to his shoulder. Time, in general, was growing very short. He could deal with the pain—for now. But he didn’t want to know what would happen when it reached his heart.
“Drive,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Three
It was late afternoon by the time they touched down in Spain.
Zach had snored the whole way. Miranda had nibbled automatically at the snacks, mostly staring out her window, silent, gathering her strength. Richard had spent the whole trip on the phone managing a billion-dollar hedge fund and consulting with his team of archeologists, historians, and scientists. Cass had slept a little but used most of the flight to review her notes, sorting through what material she already had about Meliana. She found some details about the old chapel but she was especially pleased to rediscover a note that, about a year ago, she’d spoken to an old priest attached to that chapel as part of her research. Their conversation had been brief and her notes were sparse, but that prior connection could be enough to open the door for them.
They were winding, now, through a nest of narrow streets in Meliana in a rental BMW. Richard had kept a firm grip on the keys. Everyone—except Miranda—was grateful that he was driving. Miranda had claimed shotgun, though, and as they drove through the town, she constantly tapped her right foot on the car’s floor, as if she could make Richard drive faster by pressing on her own imaginary gas pedal.
Could she? Cass wondered, watching Miranda stomp again when a small opening presented itself in traffic. Could Miranda actually make the car go faster with her imaginary gas pedal? What can witches do, anyway? Does magic have its own set of rules? Are cars fair game? Could Miranda supercharge the engine with green lightning?
Cass and Zach had the backseat.
Cass rapped her knuckle absently against her window, watching people pass on the street.
Her bag and her mother’s sword were stuffed into the backseat with her. She gripped the leather hilt. It couldn’t have fit better in her hand. It felt almost alive in response to her touch.
She splayed her fingers and took a closer look at her hand. Of course the grip fit. Now that she dared think about it for the first time in years, it was obvious to her that her hand was her mother’s hand. Her fingers were long and true, the nails were short and practical, the wrist was strong. She hadn’t seen her mother’s hand in more than a decade, but she would recognize it immediately. And she would never forget what it felt like to hold that hand.
Zach watched her turn over her own hand, examining it, and smiled. He gave her a wink.
If Zach held her hand, Cass wondered, would he be able to feel what it had felt like to hold her mother’s? Cass winked back. She let her hand fall and rest again on the sword’s hilt.
Her thoughts were drifting again when Richard stomped on the brakes and Miranda yelled, “Watch out!” Cass’s seatbelt bit into her shoulder and, as the car jerked to a stop, she caught just a glimpse of an orange tabby streak into the nearest alley. The cat reminded her of Atlantis. Are orange tabby cats common in Spain? Who knew.
Richard and Miranda argued for a moment about his driving, until Richard got them underway again.
“Do you need me to drive, pretty boy?” Miranda asked gruffly, a green glint in her eye.
The glint was playful but it still sent a shiver down Cass’s spine. Even such a small reminder of Miranda’s powers scared her a little, mostly, she suspected, because if Miranda’s powers were, in fact, batshit crazy, then what did that say about Cass’s own? Cass had to admit that weird stuff wasn’t just happening to her. A lot of the the weird stuff going on was her. This was both thrilling and terrifying.
Who the hell am I? She asked herself. Or, better, what the hell am I?
She didn’t know how to frame the question, let alone answer it. She gripped the sword’s pommel more tightly.
Just hang in there, Jones. Hang on tight. Trust yourself. Trust the people you’re with. And for Christ’s sake: don’t forget to tell the truth.
This was a good reminder. She should probably get it tattooed on her forearm—“Tell. The. Truth.”—in big block letters, stretching from her elbow to her wrist. To be honest, the less she was going to need her powers, the better. But if push came to shove, she wanted to be able to call on them.
As the Spanish city streaked by, Cass closed her eyes and tried to feel around inside her own head. Could she tap into her powers, right now, at will? She
wasn’t sure what to do or what to look for. She tried thinking the words: Power on! But she just felt ridiculous and nothing happened. She thought that maybe she had to say something out loud, but she couldn’t do that now, in the backseat. Plus, she was pretty sure that “Power on!” was not the magic phrase.
Cass took a deep breath, settled back into her seat, and tried to let her breathing sweep her mind free of distraction. But the emptier her mind became and the further away her emotions felt, the less powerful she felt. Then, just as she was about to give up, she felt her weak eye twitch. And deep behind the eye, deep in the heart of that emptiness, she felt a hint of warmth.
Bingo, she thought. Of course.
She centered her attention on the hint of warmth and when she did, she could feel her vision clearing a little and everything seemed to slow just a bit. She felt a kind of … readiness creep into her bones.
She opened her eyes and looked out the window. A woman and child passed by, hand in hand, in slow motion. She felt like she could read them almost without effort, as if the truth about them had risen from deep inside of them to the surface, visible now to everyone. The woman was frustrated, the child was angry. This woman was not the child’s birth mother.
She saw a middle-aged man walk quickly the other way. He presented as a mix of shame and satisfaction, returning home from an afternoon with his mistress.
She turned to look out Zach’s window but saw, instead, Zach looking right back at her, with a curious expression on his face.
She immediately saw the truth of him, plain as day, like a door had opened for her into his mind: he loved her.
She didn’t know what to do with this—did she want him to love her?—and then felt ashamed of herself, as if she’d just been caught looking through a stranger’s underwear drawer. Her attention broke and she blushed furiously.
Zach raised a finger and gestured toward her eye. “Cass,” he started, “what’s going on with your eye? It’s … not like it normally is.”
But even as he said this, with her attention broken, her eye clouded and shifted out of focus. The thread had broken.
“Oh,” Zach said, watching her eye, confused, “never mind. It must have just been the light.”
And then Zach, too, just looked like normal Zach.
“We’re here,” Richard said. Unnoticed by Zach and Cass, he’d already stopped the car in front of the old chapel and had turned to look at them.
When neither Zach nor Cass moved to get out, Richard tried again: “Hello? Anyone home? We’re here.”
Cass pulled herself together.
“Right, let’s go.” She said. “Richard, you stay here. Keep the car ready in case we have to leave in a rush. Zach and Miranda, with me.”
Cass popped the car door, but hesitated for a moment before exiting.
Should I bring the sword? Her hand itched to hold it. Probably not the best ice breaker, Jones. Let’s pretend you’re a normal human being and try talking first. Then, later, you can dice things up if you need to.
Miranda and Zach hung back. Cass approached and knocked on the door of the small residence adjoined to the chapel. She tried to retrieve some of the focus she’d lost just a minute ago.
A very old, very sick looking man in a priest’s collar opened the door.
“Yes?” he asked. “Who are you? What do you want?”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Cass looked Father Vizzini up and down. His clothes were worn and ill-fitting, his hair wild, his face unshaved. He pulled uncomfortably at his clerical collar with one finger like he’d never worn one before. He wasn’t what she’d expected. But, then again, Cass had met enough priests to know that, outside of a cathedral, they were rarely what people expected. Priests were people, too.
He looked a little unsteady on his feet and Cass had to resist the temptation to reach out and prop him up. She glanced over her shoulder, checking to see what Zach and Miranda thought. Miranda looked skeptical. Zach just winked, smiled his crooked smile, and shrugged. Five minutes ago that wink would have just made her roll her eyes but now it seemed to mean something more.
Could Zach tell something was different? Did he know that she knew? Or, perhaps even more to the point, did she know what she thought she knew? Did she know anything? Could she trust her powers?
Focus, Jones!
She turned her attention back to Vizzini, held out her hand, and introduced herself. He looked at her hand nervously for a moment but took it. Then, before she’d had a chance to offer any real explanation of why they were there, he was already inviting them, as if he’d been expecting them. Cass found this odd, but brushed it off.
They crowded into the sitting room of the small house and the three of them all squeezed, hip to hip, onto a tiny, low slung sofa. With her knees higher than eye-level, Cass felt like a giant doll sitting on a toy couch. Zach looked even more ridiculous. She doubted he was going to be able to stand back up. Vizzini took an old rocking chair opposite them and immediately started rocking back and forth, creaking loudly with every pass.
“What can I help you with,” the priest repeated, making a little bridge with his fingers and smiling with his yellow teeth through his thin lips.
Cass decided to stick to the academic version of her story: she was just doing research. It would surely go down easier than trying to sell the whole “race to stop the vampires” version.
“I’m doing my doctoral dissertation on relics related to the One True Cross,” Cass began. “We’ve actually spoken before. A year ago we talked on the phone about some details related to the Chalice of Valencia.”
A fat fly buzzed through the open window and spun in leisurely circles around Zach’s head. Zach took a couple of swipes at it but missed every time.
Cass gave him an elbow and Miranda shot him a look.
Zach blushed and sat on his hands.
The priest nodded, “Yes, of course. Right. I’m glad you’ve come. I believe I can help. In fact, I think I’ve got something that you’ll want to see.”
Vizzini slowly got to his feet, creaking and groaning. Cass couldn’t tell which noises were made by his bones and which were made by the chair.
How old is this guy? He’s not going to make it back from the other room.
“Give me just a moment,” Vizzini asked as he tottered from the room.
Even though Cass didn’t have a great feeling about this, nothing Vizzini had said so far felt like a lie. But she was having a hard time focusing, probably because Miranda was practically sitting in her lap—and she in Zach’s. The house was too small to talk privately about anything while Vizzini was out of the room, even if he was hard of hearing. So Cass settled for cocking an eyebrow and sending another questioning glance at Miranda and then Zach. Miranda still looked skeptical. But Cass had a feeling that the bookish research aspect of their adventure wasn’t really Miranda’s cup of tea anyway. When she gave Zach the same questioning look, he pulled his hands out from between the couch cushions and shrugged.
Right, Cass thought, you guys are so damn helpful. If I ever need skeptical looks and noncommittal shrugs, I know where to go.
Zach, though, couldn’t keep from smiling.
“Hey,” he whispered, “look what I found.” He held out a hand and opened it, palm up. He had excavated thirty-seven cents from between the cushions.
What the hell? Cass wondered, adding up the coins in her head.
“And I found this,” Zach continued, as he stuffed his other hand back between the cushions to retrieve whatever else he’d discovered.
Cass grabbed his hand before he could pull anything else out of the couch and shot him an angry look.
“No,” she whispered fiercely. “Whatever it is, just—no.”
Zach let go of whatever he’d found and raised his hands in surrender.
Cass tried to scoot forward onto the edge of the couch and put Zach out of her line of vision.
Vizzini returned and settled back into his creaking chair.
He had a small box in his lap. The box was ornate and obviously old.
“This,” Vizzini began, “is part of what you’re looking for. It only recently came into my possession. Providence, I suppose.”
He leaned forward and handed the box to Cass, his hand shaking. Cass accepted it, handling it gently. She examined the sides of the box, noting the array of late medieval iconography that adorned it. She unfastened the delicate clasp that held the box closed and carefully lifted the lid. A puff of stale air escaped from the interior. Inside, nestled in a scarlet red cloth, she found a fragment of wood. Without touching the wood itself, she used the cloth to lift it out of the box and hold it up in the light.
At a glance she could tell that it was the right kind of wood and, potentially, the right age. It was exactly the kind of thing she was looking for. But even with Zach squirming next to her, trying to get a look, she could tell that it was a fake.
This fragment of wood was a lie.
Her weak eye twitched and focused. Holding the fragment out in front of her, she met the priest’s eyes. With the relic as a focal point, it wasn’t hard to see what had been cloudy before.
Shit, Cass realized, he’s lying. He knows this is a fake. He’s playing us. But why?
Cass decidedly immediately, instinctively, to not let on that she knew.
“This is … amazing,” Cass offered, careful not to lie, and returned the fragment to its box. She handed the box back to Vizzini. “Does it harbor any clues that might help us track down additional fragments of the One True Cross? Does its presence here in Meliana indicate that there is some truth to the old stories about the Chalice of Valencia?”
The priest smiled his yellow smile again, obviously pleased that Cass seemed to have bought his story. But when she mentioned the Chalice of Valencia, his smile disappeared.
“No, no, not Valencia,” he said, a little too quickly. “There’s nothing there. The Chalice is not authentic. Don’t waste your time with it.”