by Laura Legend
Epilogue
The video was grainy and lacked color, but it was good enough. It was obviously shot from long distance through a telephoto lens. There was no audio.
The video showed Cass, at home in Salem, with Zach and a machinist.
Cass was smiling and joking playfully with Zach. Her tight white t-shirt flattered her slim, athletic figure. The sun shone in her black hair.
The machinist was working to incorporate an ancient fragment of wood into the hilt of her mother’s sword. The result would be a kind of “anointed blade.”
When he’d finished, the machinist handed the blade to Cass and, as she hefted it, her smile disappeared. She was all business now. She swung the sword through a series of strokes, leaving an almost visible trail of light in the wake of each stroke.
She was obviously pleased with the sword. But she also looked sad. When she had the sword in her hand, she looked like she was carrying a weight that, alone, she wasn’t sure she could bear.
Richard rewound the video and watched it again.
The hospital-grade monitoring equipment in his private room beeped weakly and irregularly in time with his unsteady heart.
The battered crown of thorns lay on his bedside table.
He was covered from head to toe in a variety of plaster casts. His nose was broken, his eyes black and bloodshot. He could barely move anything but the finger that rested on the video controls.
They’d succeeded in gathering up most of the fragments of the One True Cross, but things hadn’t gone quite to plan. Things had gotten complicated. Cassandra had gotten complicated. Now he would have to decide how to proceed. And what price he was willing to pay.
But—like it or not—he had time to think about it.
Soon enough, their real work could begin.
He rewound the video again and started it from the beginning.
He watched the blade dance in her hand, the sun in her hair.
She was beautiful.
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Here’s an excerpt from Hopeless, book two of A Vision of Vampires. Enjoy!
Hopeless
Book 2 of A Vision of Vampires
By
Laura Legend
Chapter 1
The sun was slow to rise over the ridge of the mountain and flood the valley with light.
An ancient Zen monastery, repurposed centuries ago, was tucked firmly into the deep shadows at the mountain’s base. A single light shone behind a single paper door on the highest floor of the compound’s oldest building. Inside, Kumiko Miyazaki was angry.
“Cassandra Jones,” Kumiko angrily whispered. “Cassandra Jones. Cassandra Jones.” She repeated the name like a mantra. Each time she repeated Cassandra’s name, she said it more quietly and more angrily until her eyes glowed with just a hint of green.
A quiet Kumiko was a dangerous Kumiko.
Kumiko’s lieutenants were gathered in the room at a low, Japanese table. The room was lit by a lantern. Water for tea was near boiling. They sat with their legs crossed, their hands in the laps, and their heads bowed. They occasionally stole a sideways glance at each other but carefully avoided eye contact with Kumiko.
When Kumiko finally trailed off into silence, Dogen, her chief lieutenant, risked a response.
“Master,” Dogen said, hesitating. Dogen shifted his bulk nervously and bumped the low table that, next to him, looked like a tiny, ridiculous toy. The cups rattled in their saucers. He rubbed the bridge of his flat, acne-scarred nose in a gesture of apology. “To be fair, Jones isn’t our real problem at the moment. Our real problem is the Lost. Jones cut off their head when she defeated Judas and, ever since, the Lost have grown more wild and ravenous.” Finished, he bowed his head in deference and his pony tail bobbed.
“No,” Kumiko said, gathering her sleek, modern kimono more tightly around her and drawing herself up to her full height. At 4’10” she could almost look Dogen in the eye when he was seated and cowed. Still, she seemed to tower over him. “Our real problem is that the Lost, rather than being headless, have—with alarming speed—been brought to heel behind a new leader.”
She paused, scanning their faces for reactions. “I need to know,” she said, clipping each word short for emphasis, “who their new leader is. And I need to know now.”
Her voice descended into a whisper again until everyone at the table sat perfectly still. She deftly removed the teapot from the heat and began pouring, with great precision, exactly the same amount of tea into each lieutenant’s cup. Her straight white hair was coiled in a bun and pinned in place with a deadly looking needle. A small, brown fox curled between her legs and disappeared under the table.
“I’ve served as your leader for hundreds of years. I’ve worked tirelessly to gather and conserve the power we would someday need to shield the world from the Lost. And, in all that time, we’ve never faced the kind of deep instability that threatens us now.”
The tea was scalding hot. No one dared touch it.
“Do we have any information about who their new leader is?” Kumiko hissed. “Anything?”
Silence.
Kumiko gently set the teapot back in its place. She turned back to the table, her eyes narrowing.
“Get out,” Kumiko whispered, pointing at the door. “Get out and don’t come back until you have something to report.”
The lieutenants all glanced, simultaneously, at their just poured tea.
“No tea for you, today. Out!”
The whole group stood at once and filed toward the door. Dogen, though, was a touch slow and a touch clumsy. He bumped the table again, rattling more china and spilling tea. He glanced at Kumiko, shrugged, and tried out a tiny, apologetic smile.
“You,” Kumiko said to Dogen, “sit back down. We have something else to discuss.”
Dogen sighed loudly and sat back down, trying not to show that he was secretly pleased to stay.
Kumiko could read him like open book. She glanced at her strong but wrinkled hands, then smoothed an errant strand of white hair back behind her elegant ear. She didn’t look a day over eighty. Now, though, was not the time. She would continue to ignore the fact that Dogen had (with little success at concealing his unspoken feelings) pined after her for years. Sometimes this was flattering. Sometimes this was inconvenient. But sometimes it was useful.
“Dogen,” she said, trying out his name and a softer tone of voice. “I fear that we’ve been betrayed. I fear that those we’ve trusted most have proven themselves . . . unworthy of that trust.” She reached out as if to touch his hair, but stopped short and let her hand fall back to her side.
Dogen bowed his head and cocked it to one side in a gesture that signaled both curiosity and a willingness to agree. His arms were the size of most people’s thighs. His stomach rumbled. He glanced at his tea.
Kumiko followed his eyes to the tea.
She snapped her fingers to get his attention. “Dogen,” she said, “I need you to find out if our worst fears are well founded. I need you to bring home our wayward sister—by force if necessary—so that we can determine how desperate our current situation is. She may be the only one who knows for sure who is now leading the Lost. And, worse, she may well be implicated.”
Dogen gulped but nodded his head. Then his eyes again settled longingly on his tea.
“Fine,” Kumiko sighed, “drink it already.”
Dogen pinched the handle of the tiny teacup between his massive fingers and lifted it to his lips. The tea was still scalding hot. He hesitated and glanced up at Kumiko.
“Go on,” she said, waiting. “Drink it already.” Kumiko’s fox slipped out from under the table and darted for the door.
The whole cup of tea disappeared in Dogen’s mouth in a single
sip. His mouth burned and his face turned red. Kumiko cocked an eyebrow when he looked like he might spit it out, so he swallowed the mouthful in one go.
“Now gather a handful of soldiers that you trust and be off. Be back as quick as you can. And do not let her slip through your fingers. Do whatever is necessary.”
Dogen swallowed again. “Yes, master,” he said, his answer slightly slurred by his burned tongue.
“Whatever you do,” Kumiko whispered, “don’t come back without her.”
Chapter 2
Cass felt hopeless.
Or, at least, she felt herself feeling hopeless.
She felt hopeless in that frustrating way that, since her mother’s death, she’d tended to feel all her emotions: one step removed, as if she were watching herself in a movie. She could sense her emotions knocking around inside of her, locked up behind a heavy wooden door, but she couldn’t quite feel the emotions themselves. This made her own life feel distant and alien and, often, it made her feel powerless. Recently, though, since she’d met Richard, the lock on that door seemed to be weakening.
At the moment she could sense the approach of that same swelling hopelessness that, for months now, had been sneaking into her apartment each night to squat like an anvil on her chest, squeezing the air out of her until she could hardly breathe.
She was stretched out on the old leather couch in her studio apartment in Salem, Oregon. It was after two in the morning. She was exhausted but couldn’t sleep. She rubbed her temples with her thumbs. Her breathing was shallow and thin. She wondered where Atlantis, her orange tabby, was. She hadn’t seen him in weeks.
She tried to think about something else, anything else—work tomorrow, Zach, Miranda, her dad—but, this time of night, like water circling a drain, her thoughts always came back to the same thing. Her thoughts always circled back to those last few, climactic minutes in Judas’s castle. Again and again, she would find herself stuck in a loop, running through the events of that night in her mind, over and over, looking for things she might have done different—until finally sleep would claim her for a few hours before dawn.
But it didn’t matter how many times she resurrected the events of that night, it didn’t matter how many time she relived that nightmare, things still ended the same way.
She still lost Richard.
Tonight was worse than normal. A deep headache was growing in the back of her head, throbbing up from behind her weak eye, pulsing with a regular rhythm that made her head feel like it was going to split open. She clapped her hands against the sides of her head as if to keep it from coming apart. She willed herself to contract her attention to the tight, tiny circle of her shallow breath, in and out, here and now. She willed herself to treat the thought of anything beyond her next breath as if it belonged to another life in another world.
It started to work. Her breathing slowed, deepened slightly, and she slipped toward something like sleep as the hopeless pressure in her chest eased.
Then, suddenly, the weight and pressure returned, worse than before. It planted itself on her solar plexus and grew heavier and heavier. She tried to open her eyes, but couldn’t. Everything was black. She felt herself being sucked down into the cushions of the couch, pressed down under the growing weight of her pain. She felt a black void opening up beneath her. Her hands scrabbled for something to hold on to, clinging to the edges of the couch frame. But it was too late. She lost her grip and was swallowed by darkness.
She fell.
She fell slowly for a long time, watching herself fall, watching the faint light from her apartment recede into a small square framed from the inside by the edges of her couch, watching until even that light disappeared altogether. Then, in total darkness, she felt only the weight on her chest carrying her downward, faster and faster, together with the sensation of falling.
Just when she thought she might fall forever, she smacked into the surface of a hard, stone floor. And the lights came back up. She knew immediately where she was. In fact, she knew immediately when she was. She was back in Judas’s castle in Romania. She was going to relive that night again.
She tried to move, to take action, but her feet were blocks of cement.
Her aunt and best friend were tied up and unconscious in the corner of the room. She tried to call their names, to wake them and warn them—“Miranda! Zach!”—but no sound came out.
Cass could see that, as always, she and Richard were chained to chairs in the center of the room. An enormous fire raged in the fireplace at one end of the space and Judas was assembling his “crown” from fragments of the One True Cross at the other.
Judas was giving his monologue again, droning on about how the crown would empower shadows like him to wander freely in the light, their darkness spreading across the world like a drop of black ink in a glass of clear water, until the whole world became a shadow of itself.
From across the room, Cass watched her former self struggle uselessly against the chains that bound her. She watched Judas, enraged by the fact that one crucial fragment of the Cross was still missing, attack Richard with crackling tongues of white-hot lightning. She watched herself scream for Judas to stop. And then, finally, she watched Judas discover the missing fragment of the Cross hidden in the amulet that her mother had given her years before, just before her death.
With the missing fragment in hand, Judas rose from the castle floor in a swirling cloud of power and light. Richard lay on the floor, his broken body smoking.
No, Cass thought to herself, just offstage. Not this time. Not again, you piece of shit.
She gathered her strength and broke free of the inertia that, for months now, had cemented her in the corner of the room as a tortured observer. She stepped into the light of the still unfolding scene. She saw Judas drawing the power of the Cross into himself. She saw herself still chained to the chair and Richard still sprawled on the floor. And she saw Zach and Miranda still bound in the corner.
But when Cass tried to step entirely into the light, the shadows themselves came to life and reached for her. A hundred shadow hands with razor-sharp shadow claws emerged from the darkness and snagged her arms and pinned her legs. Cass stumbled to her knees. The hands multiplied and their claws hooked into the flesh of her arms and legs and dragged her back toward the darkness.
No, no, no, Cass thought.
She closed eyes and set her jaw.
I . . . said . . . no!
Deep behind her weak eye, a small flame flickered to life and, like a match to gasoline, her whole body was abruptly engulfed in white flames, burning the shadows away.
“Not this time,” she said, finding her voice, speaking aloud. “Not again.”
Cass sprinted for her katana on the workbench behind Judas, dodging debris from the roof that had already begun to collapse around them.
Judas turned and looked at straight at her, surprised. He looked at the other Cass, still in chains in the chair. And then he looked back at her, sword now in her hand, and cocked an eyebrow at her.
“This is a surprising turn of events,” he said. “But you’re still too late.”
He was right. The castle was already coming apart. The roof was still collapsing.
“Screw you, Judas,” Cass spat as she turned her back on him, letting him go, and—this time—she ran instead for Richard. Giant blocks of granite rained down around her. She slide under one, dodged another, and with a running swing split a third clean in half with her sword as it was about to crush Richard.
She dropped her sword and it clanged to the ground. She gathered Richard in her arms, his tattered shirt still smoking, but he was too heavy to lift. His eyes fluttered open and met hers.
She kissed him on the forehead.
“Cassandra Jones,” he rasped.
“I’m sorry, Richard,” she said, kissing him again. “So sorry.” And it was true. She was sorry. She knew she was. She was, perhaps, more sorry than she’d ever been about anything—even if she couldn’t quite feel i
t.
Just then, the remaining crush of the roof collapsed, coming to bury them . . . and Cass woke up with a start, back on her couch. She felt like someone had just used a defibrillator on her. Her face was wet with beads of cold sweat and streams of hot tears. She wiped them both away with the back of her hand and sat up on the couch.
She tried to gather herself. She pulled her straight black hair back into a ponytail. She leaned forward, her head in her hands. Her eyes were ringed by deep black circles.
That was different this time, she thought. At least it was different. For once, we were together at the end.
Cass shivered, goosebumps running up and down her thin, strong arms. She was only wearing shorts and a camisole. She stood up and looked around the room for something warmer to put on. She usually kept a blanket on the back of the couch.
Looking back at the couch, she didn’t find a blanket. But she did see a piece of black fabric poking out from the corner of a couch cushion. She leaned in, studying it, and pulled it free.
A silky pair of men’s underwear. She’d never seen them before in her life. But they did look really expensive. She couldn’t help but think of Richard. She couldn’t help but imagine that he had a whole drawer full of bespoke underwear just like this, each of them monogrammed with his initials.
That wasn’t helpful. She needed to stop this. She needed to let him go.
She neatly folded the boxers into a small square and tucked them back into the cushions of the couch. She strongly suspected that she’d never see them again. As she did, the sun peeked over the eastern horizon and slanted weakly through her bay of windows.
She stared at the cushions on her couch for a long time in the morning light. She stared for so long that she started to feel like she was falling again.
That couch was weird. There was no denying it. And it always had been.