by Laura Legend
Contents
Title
Dedication
Other books by Laura Legend
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
Epilogue
Thank You!
Copyright
TIMELESS
Book 5
of
A Vision of Vampires
By Laura Legend
For Buffy and Faith, my favorite badass vampire slayers
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When you sign up for the monthly Legendaries newsletter, you’ll receive Lost on Fire, an exclusive novella set in the Vision of Vampires universe. This novella will not be published anywhere else, and is exclusively available to the Legendaries.
Other books by Laura Legend
Faithless: A Vision of Vampires 1
Hopeless: A Vision of Vampires 2
Blameless: A Vision of Vampires 3
Fearless: A Vision of Vampires 4
1
LONG AFTER MIDNIGHT, Gary Jones was still awake. He felt dead tired—worn out like a ragged sock with holes in both ends—but his mind wouldn’t let him rest.
He hadn’t heard from Cass in weeks, and he feared the worst.
Was she trapped? Was she hurt? Was she dead?
As strained as their relationship had been at times, she’d never gone this long without checking in. Even when they were fighting, she would ping him every week or so to say she was okay.
Thunder rumbled in the distance.
Gary was alone in Cass’s childhood home, sitting in his armchair in the living room. The chair was fraying but, over the decades, it had molded itself to his body and now he couldn’t imagine sitting anywhere else. Gary loved the comfort of routine and this chair was like an old friend, welcoming him, inviting him to sit down and rest his bones.
The house was dark except for the lamp glowing faintly at his side. Good for reading, it cast a small yellow circle that didn’t extend much beyond his chair.
He was still dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt, topped off with the cardigan sweater that Cass loved to tease him about. Whenever he had come home from work, slipped out of his sport coat, and put it on, she would say that he looked like some kind of short, Japanese Mr. Rogers. She meant it as a light jab, but he’d always taken it as a compliment. Who wouldn’t want to be like Mr. Rogers?
The storm crept closer. Rain began to fall, scattered at first, then quickening. The patter on the roof filled the silent house, blanketing everything thing with its soft but insistent reminder that the weather had taken a turn for the worse as night got underway.
Gary sighed and swirled his drink in its tumbler. He was getting old. What had happened to him? Where had his life gone? Had he wasted it searching through dusty books no one cared about, hiding away in a library?
The book in his lap was also dusty: a family album that he hadn’t looked at in years. He’d had it in his lap for a good twenty minutes now, afraid to open it, yes, but more afraid to open old wounds along with the album. He closed his eyes and squeezed the worn spine of the book.
Have some guts before you really are a pathetic old man sighing with regret in the middle of the night, he thought to himself. Find some courage and just open the damn thing.
Before he could second guess himself, he flipped to the middle of the volume, letting it fall open at random. Inside, he saw familiar photos of himself, Rose, and Cass in Japan. The cherry blossoms were in full bloom. The sun was bright. He was squinting into the camera while Rose laughed. Cass looked poised to run off exploring. He and Rose were holding hands.
After all these years, it still hurt to look at pictures like this. His stomach still ached, his toes still curled in his shoes, and his breath still caught in his throat. Loving Rose was the truest thing he’d ever done and losing her had been like losing an arm—except that, most of the time, he’d felt more like the lost arm than the maimed body.
Lord, how he still missed her.
He looked more closely at the picture, focusing on the wedding ring he’d given Rose: a blood red sapphire in a pale, platinum setting. She’d squealed with delight when he’d slipped it on her finger. She had loved the thought of anything unconventional. The last thing she’d wanted was a diamond like everyone else.
The ring, though, also reminded him of the last time he’d seen Cass, when she and Zach sought shelter with him after the Heretic had destroyed the Shield monastery. When he’d seen them, Zach had been wearing Cass’s grandfather’s—his own father’s—wedding band. And Cass had been wearing a ring made of woven blades of grass. That part had worried him—a ring made of grass?—but, even subdued by the loss of the monastery, their love had shone through.
Still, he couldn’t help but worry. Just when he’d dared to think that Cass had found the kind of happiness he’d always hoped she would, he feared she was already on the brink of losing it.
Impermanence, he reminded himself, is the first mark of existence.
Gary fanned the album pages, flipping back to a point earlier in the book. It opened to a set of pictures of him around the time that he and Rose had first met. He looked young and strong and naïve, full of hope and confidence. He looked like a boy bent on seeing and taming the world. He barely recognized himself. He rubbed his chin, feeling the white stubble growing there, recognizing the way his skin had grown loose and begun to sag. How had he become so different? When had he grown old? He was in his fifties now—was his life already over? Would he spend the rest of it sitting in this chair, looking through dusty albums when, occasionally, he managed to screw up that minimal amount of courage? After Rose’s death, he’d sworn off any connection to the world of magic. He’d parted ways with the business of vampires and hidden worlds. That world had cost him too much.
He’d hidden it all from himself. And perhaps more importantly, he’d tried his best to hide it from Cass.
On that latter score, he had failed completely.
Disgusted with himself, he snapped the book shut. At the same moment, a crack of lightning split the sky in two. For a heartbeat, he thought he’d caused the thunder himself. But when the whole house shook, he knew that the lightning strike must have been right on top of the house. And when he looked out the window, he saw the old pear tree in the front yard broken in two and burning. The flames quickly flickered out in the now heavy rain, but the tree was already a total loss. He groaned at the sight of it. He and Cass had planted that tree together when she was just five years old. He could still picture the day clearly. Cass had been covered in mud and Rose had brought them lemonade.
Gary choked back a sob.
Impermanence, he reminded himself again, this time with a note of bitterness, is the first mark of existence.
A second crack of lightning shook the house, causing him to reach out for the wall to steady himself. This new crack, though, was accompanied by the sound of breaking glass. He’d never heard of lightning bre
aking a window. The hair on the back of his neck stood on end. A strong wind whistled through the house. He could feel, on his cheek, the mist of water that went with it.
The wind was blowing from the back of the house.
He was scared.
He was an old man, standing in his living room, wrapped in a cardigan, shaking like a leaf.
He shuffled toward the hall closet and rooted around inside, looking for something—anything—he might brandish as a weapon. He pushed through the coats and brushed past his old brown leather jacket. He hadn’t worn it in years. As far he knew, he hadn’t worn it since Rose had died. The smell of the rich leather reminded him of her.
In the back of the closet, he found what he was looking for: a baseball bat. He gripped the taped handle of the wooden bat with both shaking hands. His arms felt rubbery. If he was being honest with himself, he wasn’t just old, he was also a bit drunk. He squeezed the grip tightly, willing some strength into his arms.
Have some guts, old man, he urged himself again. Find some courage.
He tiptoed down the hall toward the back of the house, past the bathroom and the door to his own bedroom. The wind rattled the door to Cass’s bedroom, sucking it open and then, as he approached, slamming it shut.
The sound of it sent a jolt of nervous energy down his spine, and he felt the blood pumping through his veins shift from fear into a mix of nerves and frustration. Slamming doors was one of the few house rules he’d never permitted Cass to break. And he wasn’t going to start allowing such nonsense into his home at this late date. He stepped decisively to the door and threw it open. But before he could even get a look inside, the whistling wind slammed it shut again.
This was too much.
“Enough!” Gary shouted.
All of his pent-up fear and grief and frustration came to the fore, focused for the moment on a clear, bite-sized problem. He felt the alcohol burn off in the flame of his anger. His grip on the bat tightened. Blood rushed to fill the muscles in his arms.
“There will be no door slamming around here! And no one—absolutely no one—is going to mess with my daughter’s room!”
With that, Gary kicked open the door and let loose a primal “YAWP!”—a raw, guttural heart-cry that welled up from deep inside him. Despite himself, his eyes burned with a hint of green.
Rain was sheeting through the broken window. Broken glass lay shattered on the floor. Curtains billowed.
But the room was empty.
Cass wasn’t here.
And neither was anyone else.
He was—as usual—alone.
Gary’s grip loosened and he dropped the bat near the door. It was no use. Who was he kidding?
He would need a staple gun and some plastic sheeting to cover the window. He would need a broom to clean up the glass.
He turned to go, actually disappointed now that some enemy hadn’t materialized, when he heard a small meow from the blankets on Cass’s bed.
He spun around.
Another meow.
Gary flipped on the light. Atlantis, Cass’s cat, was nestled into a mound of blankets on Cass’s bed, purring. The cat looked right at him with eyes that cut him to the quick.
Atlantis’s presence felt like a message. It felt like a little piece of Cass had been broken off and left here for him to find.
He couldn’t look away. He felt his heart fill with a renewed sense of purpose and direction.
Cass needed him.
She needed him now.
He couldn’t stay in this house one more minute. He couldn’t just sit here feeling sorry for himself. He couldn’t just bury himself in books and alcohol and hope that someone else would bring news that Cass was okay, that someone else had been there for her, that someone else had saved her.
He was going to find Cass, and he was going to bring her home.
Gary scooped up Atlantis and walked quickly back to the living room. He pulled off his cardigan, so impatient to be free of it that he popped the buttons. He tossed the ruined sweater onto his old chair. He went back to the closet and grabbed his dusty leather jacket from its heavy metal hanger. The hanger clanged dully against the back of the closet. He slipped his arms into the sleeves and zipped it up.
It still fit.
Mostly. Maybe it bulged a bit around his waist. He unzipped it.
It looked better unzipped anyway.
From a hook in the back of the closet, he lifted a satchel filled with some of his old travel gear. He looked at himself in the hall mirror.
Screw Mr. Rogers, he thought to himself, you’re goddam Indiana Jones.
Gary flushed reflexively at the light profanity, even though it had been silent. Then he shook his head and tightened his grip on his satchel. He’d meant it and he wasn’t going to take it back.
Atlantis was sitting on his cardigan in the old chair. The cat cocked his head, fixing Gary with a quizzical look, as if he were trying to process the effect of Gary’s dramatic transformation.
“You’re right,” Gary said to the cat. “I’m forgetting something.”
He went back to the closet and pulled his hat from a box on the top shelf. It, too, still fit.
He clenched his fists, squeezing the knuckles white.
“If I’m going to find Cass, I’m going to need some help. The first order of business is to find Dogen.”
Atlantis, purring, rubbed against his leg approvingly.
A gust of wind blew the front door open. It crashed into the wall, leaving a dent in the drywall. Lightning cracked and thunder rumbled.
Atlantis bolted out the door and into the darkness.
Without turning off any of the lights or even locking the door, Gary followed the cat into the night, his head bowed against the storm.
2
CASS WOKE WITH a stabbing pain in her weak eye. After hours of tossing and turning, she’d just barely drifted off into something resembling sleep. Now she was bolt upright in bed, her palm pressed against the orbit of her eye, trying not to scream. It felt like someone had slipped a red-hot knife through her pupil. It burned. And the more pressure she applied, the more Cass felt like she was pushing the blade in deeper, back through her eye and into her brain.
She forced herself to take deep breaths. She let up on the pressure. She tried to stop fighting the pain and give it room to dissolve into something less intense.
The room was dark. She was still in the loft bedroom in Richard’s chalet in the Alps. Though time had grown fuzzy and unreliable, she knew that she’d been here for at least a few weeks. She was barely holding herself together.
She’d awoken that first night after they’d brought her here from the ruins of Judas’s castle and confronted Richard about where Zach and her mother where, but she’d immediately been felled by this same pain. She’d barely gotten to her feet when her eye began to burn and the knife slipped deep into her frontal lobe. Her knees buckled and Richard had caught her just as her head was about to hit the floor. She’d looked up at him for a moment with her good eye, framed as he was by the starlight, and then she’d blacked out for days.
Something was wrong with her. In fact, something was very wrong with her. Time had gotten bent out of joint. And when she was conscious enough to worry about it, she didn’t have the faintest idea of how to fix it.
She lay in bed for a long time, breathing slowly, straining to hold the pain without fighting it. She waited and breathed and waited and eventually the night passed and the edges of the sky, scalloped by mountain peaks, began to shift from black to purple to blue.
The most important thing, she reminded herself, was to keep her head empty. The most important thing was to avoid thinking about anything.
If she gave her mind any rope, it immediately went chasing after thoughts of Zach, and Miranda, and most especially, her mother. Cass could handle the pain in her eye. But she was in no condition to deal with the ramifications of Zach’s transmutation into some kind of hulking, red-horned monster—was he gone for
good? was his transformation permanent? Would she ever see him again?—let alone deal with the fact that her mother was not only alive, but the damn Heretic herself. Cass could not imagine the narrative in which this revelation made sense, and her need for answers was visceral. And Miranda—the wave of simultaneous guilt, relief, and despair that she felt as she thought of Miranda knocked the breath from her lungs. Cass gasped. In this respect at least, the physical pain in her eye intermittently arrived as a welcome distraction from the deeper heartaches she wasn’t yet ready to confront.
Cass rolled over in bed, curled into a ball, and pulled the blankets over her head.
Her eye still burned, but the intensity had waned. Now the burning reminded her of how her eye felt when her powers came online and the light began to flow through her. That burn, though, accompanied by the thrill of the power that it signaled, was largely pleasant. This burn didn’t signal any power; it just hurt.
Cass gently rubbed the outside corner of her weak eye, massaging it in the vain hope that a simple physical solution might cut through the complex, insistent pain.
She knew now that the “accident” that had given her this milky, wandering eye was no such thing. Before her mother’s death—her undeath?—she had intentionally locked away Cass’s emotions and cast a spell that dampened her powers and emotions. Now her eye functioned like a circuit breaker, preventing her powers and emotions from overwhelming her. For a long time, it had prevented her from knowing that she’d even had any powers. For a long time, it had prevented her from feeling much of anything at all.
And to be honest, it had, for a long time, also protected her, just as her mother had intended.
But those days were past. Now, everything was unraveling.
Immediately after she’d lost her mother, before she’d acclimated to the spell, Cass would sometimes feel a stabbing pain like this in her weak eye. The doctors couldn’t find any explanation for it, and they’d sent her and her dad home to deal with it on their own. Her father, of course, had refused to let Cass use anything stronger than aspirin. Instead, he’d taken up the task himself. He’d carefully monitored her diet, noting some weak correlations between attacks and certain types of food. But mostly he’d helped her by inventing a method for managing the pain.