by Laura Legend
Cass knew that he must be worried sick about her now. She could see him clearly in his cardigan, sitting in his chair in the living room late into the night, nursing a drink, hardly reading a book, worried about her. She knew that the days when he might have had the guts to come look for her were now long past. Life had been cruel to him. It had broken him. But she also knew that he loved her and that, even if he was glued to that chair, he would still be worrying himself sick about her.
At the thought of her father, Cass was hit with another spike of pain. It felt like she was being attacked. She groaned and bucked in bed. She threw aside her blankets. She got tangled in her sheets. She pressed the heels of her hands against both sides of her head.
“Dad—” she whispered.
Cass tried to remember what exactly it was that her dad done to help.
An old image swam up from deep inside her mind.
He would hold her head in his lap. Then he would lightly press his index finger against the bridge of her nose while also pressing his thumb against her temple on the opposite side of her eye. It had always felt like he was attempting some sort of Vulcan mind-meld and Cass always felt silly when he did it. But it did help. And because it was so hard for them to talk to each other, it didn’t feel like a stretch to imagine that he was actually attempting to read her mind, trying to understand some fragment of what she was thinking and what she was going through. But as silly as she’d felt when he’d done this, she couldn’t deny that it had worked. And they felt closer. Whatever he’d done, it had helped her. The pain had receded and, for a few minutes, she would feel less alone.
“Dad—” she whispered again.
Cass tried it herself. She tried to imagine her head in his lap, the sun bright in their living room windows. She pressed her index finger against the bridge of her nose and her thumb against her temple.
Would it work? Could she mind-meld with herself? And if she managed it, would she be able to tell, for once, what she was going on inside her own head?
It was working—at least for the pain. Like the tide, the pain began to recede and she felt some dry mental ground appear beneath her feet.
“For the win, Spock,” she mumbled into her blankets, relaxing. “Live ... long ... and ... prosper.”
She settled back onto her pillow.
A light flickered on in the hallway outside of her room.
Cass stole a look through her splayed fingers. The silhouette of a shadowy figured filled the door.
Then time began to stutter and flicker.
3
CASS COULDN’T SEE the figure clearly. She couldn’t get her eyes to focus. Her head felt fuzzy, like it had been stuffed full of cotton. She could barely resist the urge to try pulling some of it out of her ear.
The figure loomed into view, entering the room.
As the shadow approached, time skipped out of its normal, linear groove. It shivered between past, present, and future like an old TV set flickering between snowy channels filled with white noise.
Cass gritted her teeth, trying to make it stop.
The trouble had begun when she and Miranda had fought deep in the bowels of the Shield monastery’s well. Something had happened to her there. Something had been knocked loose inside of her when Miranda had exposed her to the dark plumbing in the basement of the Underside and then severed the monastery’s connection with that extra dimension.
After that, the problem had grown progressively worse until Cass had found herself increasingly shut out from the urgency of the present moment during the climax of her final confrontation with Miranda on the mountainside.
And now here she was, barely able to see and hardly able to stand.
Cass tried to sit up in bed. Light from the hallway framed the silhouette. The figure itself started to flicker. The room filled with static. The figure split into multiple shadows. One flattened itself against the wall, bending at an odd angle where the wall joined with the floor. A second floated into the air and hovered there, off to the right of the bed. A third pooled on the floor and began to ooze toward Cass. It looked like sticky, sentient tar. It pulled itself along by hooking sharp claws into the hardwood, its nails clacking against the varnish.
Cass felt a scream rising up inside of her, but nothing came out. It caught in her throat. She could barely breathe.
The figure oozing along the floor dug its claws into the cedar chest at the foot of the bed and hauled itself upright. It shimmered. Its profile looked distinctly like Judas, its thin frame mirroring his slender body. Cass would never forget the look of him. Even now, she could recall with perfect clarity a thousand details about what it had been like to see him in person and confront him in his castle.
But Judas’s shade wasn’t alone.
The figure hovering in the air also drew itself up and took on a more definite shape. This shadow was about the same height as the first, but it appeared to be clad in a robe, its profile hidden deep in the folds of the hood that covered its head.
The Heretic.
This second figure was the Heretic. Or—and Cass had to manually force this correction as she still struggled to merge the two separate files—this second figure was Rose. It was her mother. Cass trembled, recalling that revelatory moment when she had lain in her mother’s arms in the snow and, in one stroke, both found and lost her again.
The third figure, the shadow flattened against the far wall, was hanging back. Its form was huge and brooding. A pair of horns clearly extended from its head and, rather than looking like it wanted to take a bite out of her, it looked like it was afraid of her. It looked like it wanted to run away. This figure, Cass knew, was Zach. He’d allowed himself to be swallowed up inside a monster in order to save her. And he had saved her—at least, he’d saved her body. Despite still being alive, Cass’s heart was broken and her mind splintered.
A sinkhole of grief threatened to open up inside of Cass. She teetered on its potential edge, testing out the appeal of letting herself yield to the emotional storm swirling just beneath the surface.
But she couldn’t let that happen. If she fell down that hole, she’d never climb out again.
Time stuttered and the Judas-like shadow scuttled closer, creeping across the bed now, looming over her.
The pain in Cass’s eye flared. She was tempted to push back against the pain, to fight it, but decided instead to let it in. Anything was better than succumbing to grief. Any feeling was better than that one. She welcomed it in and the pain flooded her whole body. She was afraid she’d made a mistake until, in response to the pain, she felt a dark anger well up inside of her.
The pain fueled her anger. And anger was something she could work with.
The sticky Judas-shadow was close now. She could feel the heat from its fetid breath. Its claws were reaching for her.
Cass felt her weak eye begin to burn like a cracked red flare, black smoke trailing from it. She waited a moment, trying to draw the shadow closer, then scissor kicked it in the jaw. Black spittle flew from its mouth, painting the wall with spatter, and it fell backward, sprawling onto the floor.
Cass didn’t waste any time. She jumped from the bed, pinning it beneath her.
She screamed and began to tear at the figure, clawing at it and pulling it apart, one fistful of shadow at a time.
Curiously, the figure didn’t fight back. It didn’t hook its claws into her. It didn’t take a bite. Instead, it just raised its arms defensively and tried to roll out from under Cass’s assault.
Cass took another fistful of shadow, ripped it away, and heard a spray of buttons pop and fly across the room.
“Cassandra,” the shadow softly called.
Time flickered. Cass shook her head trying to clear it.
“Cassandra,” the voice repeated, more urgently this time, “come back to me.”
This time, Cass recognized the voice. It was Richard’s.
Cass blinked hard and wiped away the tears that clouded her vision.
Rich
ard gently but firmly squeezed her upper arms, holding them by her side.
The white noise that had filled her field of vision retreated to the margins and Richard’s face came into view. His lip was split and his eye was black. Blood ran down his chin. He looked straight at her, clearly more worried about her than himself. Cass leaned back onto her heels, taking her weight off his chest. His black shirt was torn clean off and sections of his pants were shredded.
And he looked ... super hot?
Despite herself, Cass felt a wave of longing rise inside of her, both displacing and feeding off her anger. Her cheeks flushed red with desire and shame. Her emotions were all over the map, and she was hardly in control of any of them.
Richard’s face wavered between compassion and confusion. He wasn’t sure what to make of this new turn of events.
Cass pushed herself away from him and stumbled backward, collapsing on the floor.
Richard slowly stood, checking to make sure that his torn pants weren’t going to end up around his ankles. When he was sure—about that, at least—he scooped Cass up in his arms as if she didn’t weight anything and placed her back in bed.
Cass, though, couldn’t bring herself to let go of him. With her arms around his neck, she clung to him for dear life and, for just a moment, waffled wildly between kissing his neck and biting it.
“Cassandra—” Richard said, trying to peel her off and tuck her back into the blankets at the same time.
“Move out of the way, already,” an irritated voice said from behind him.
Maya loomed into view behind Richard, brandishing an enormous needle. Her long black hair curtained her face. With minimal effort, she pinned Cass back against the mattress with one hand and plunged the needle into Cass’s shoulder with the other.
The needle burned as Maya shot the sedative into Cass’s arm, and then a warm, calm feeling spread from the site of the injection through the rest of her body.
When that warm, salty feeling finally reached Cass’s head, she welcomed it and floated off into oblivion.
4
“DAMN IT, MAYA,” Richard swore. “That wasn’t necessary. Why couldn’t you just give me a minute to calm her down?”
“Was that the direction things were going?” Maya shot back, her eyebrow arched at Richard’s state of undress.
Richard strode out of the room, still shirtless and still keeping one hand hooked in the waistband of his tattered pants. He was already at the end of his patience just dealing with Cass’s condition. Since they’d retrieved her limp body from the frozen ground near the ruins of Judas’s castle, he’d worked night and day to determine the cause of her illness and discover a cure. Days, though, had stretched into weeks and they hadn’t even managed to pinpoint the problem. He was exhausted and his taut nerves were unraveling. The last thing he needed was to take on Maya in this state, even though her obvious preference for finding solutions that effectively removed Cass from the present equation was something that deeply troubled him.
As she observed him, the corner of Maya’s mouth twitched toward a smile. Richard could see from the look on her face that she was officially noting his anger as yet another example of how, since getting tangled up with Cass, he’d lost touch with the clinical rationality that had made him the CEO of a shadowy, multi-billion dollar empire.
Richard would have to check himself and be more careful. Maya always had some machination in the works—strategic wheels turning inside of strategic wheels—and he didn’t have time for that now. He just needed to placate her until Cass got back on her feet. Then they could decide what the future of York Enterprises would look like.
Maya kept pace with him as they descended the stairs from the chalet’s loft and entered the kitchen. Kumiko was waiting there. One of Maya’s elite Amazonian-esque warriors was there as well. At 6’6,” she towered over Kumiko’s tiny kimonoed form and her flame-red hair contrasted sharply with Kumiko’s white bun.
Richard didn’t stop to talk with either of them. He marched straight past and into the study where he’d been sleeping on the sofa and where his spare clothes were hanging on an impromptu rack. The study was all leather, book shelves, and wood paneling. It shared an enormous fireplace with the living room on the opposite side of the wall.
Maya followed him into the room, gathering both Kumiko and the Amazon in her wake.
Richard, though, hadn’t realized that this conversation was now a full-fledged committee meeting. When he dropped what was left of his pants and grabbed another pair from the rack, he heard a small gasp from Kumiko that alerted him to the fact that he and Maya were no longer alone. He looked over his shoulder, expecting to find Kumiko blushing and looking away. Instead, he found Kumiko, Maya, and the Amazon all staring admiringly, unabashed.
The last few weeks of worry and care had, if anything, whittled his body further down into something powerfully essential. There was nothing left of him but skin stretched tight over a lean frame of sinew, bone, and muscle. Cass’s bloody fingernail marks trailed across his chest and arms. The marks complemented his split lip and black eye.
Richard sighed and ignored the three of them. However benign they might seem from a distance, all three of the women were sharks. They knew when they smelled the blood in the water.
Richard turned his back to them, pulled on a pair of gray athletic pants, and cinched the bow at this waist. He pulled a black t-shirt over his head. Now that the show was over, an audible note of disappointment rose from the gallery behind him.
“It has been weeks now,” Maya said, getting down to business, “and Cass still shows no signs of improvement.”
Kumiko nodded gravely, her eyes on the floor, arms folded in front of her.
“No one is more aware of that than I am,” Richard replied. He stepped toward the fire and warmed his hands, his back still to the women.
Maya went to the desk at the far end of the study, overflowing now with documents, materials, and equipment in a space asked to simultaneously serve as bedchamber, medical lab, and conference room.
Kumiko broke in: “And as Cass’s condition fails to improve, we also have no word regarding Zach. There is no sign of him. Whatever he has become, wherever he has gone, he has dropped off the grid entirely.”
Maya pulled three syringes from a box and laid them out on the desk. She set the bottle containing the sedative next to them.
“We cannot even be sure that he is alive,” Maya added. “The transformation Zach suffered has been known to kill many of the people who have tried it. His monstrous red corpse is probably decomposing right now in the mountains of Romania. And if that is the case, then we will never find the body.”
Richard flinched at Maya’s matter-of-fact description of Zach’s corpse. Of course he knew how much Zach had meant to Cass (and, as a result, to him), but even beyond from this, Richard had come on his own to value Zach personally as a friend and ally. Richard had lived long enough to know how rare such people were. If Zach was gone, he deserved to be mourned.
Richard, though, wasn’t so convinced that he was already dead.
Maya held up the bottle and a syringe. In the light from the window, she drew the plunger from the syringe and filled it with sedative. When she was done, she adjusted her sleeveless turtleneck and started on a second.
“Regardless,” Kumiko said, “after weeks of searching, Dogen has nothing to report. But to be fair, it has also been several days since Dogen himself has checked in either. That is itself unusual. If we don’t hear from Dogen soon, we may have to go looking for him, too.”
A worried look creased Kumiko’s brow. Richard couldn’t help but notice that this look only appeared when the conversation turned to Dogen. Neither Cass nor Zach had worried her in this same deeply personal way. Richard was sympathetic, but also glad not to have Dogen present to deal with right now, glowering at him every time he came anywhere near Kumiko.
Maya finished filling the final syringe. She replaced the caps on each of them, sli
pped one into her pocket, handed one to the Amazon, and left the other on the desk.
“Regardless of what is happening with Zach or Dogen, Cass is the problem at hand.” Maya met Richard’s eyes and held them before continuing. “Cass is a danger not only to herself and to each of us”—Maya gestured toward Richard’s black eye—“but she is also a seer, and thus of global strategic importance. She needs to be kept here, far from trouble, and her condition needs to be managed under proper ‘care’ until we can decide exactly how best to help her.”
Maya’s eyes darted to the sedative on the desk.
Every other pair of eyes in the room followed.
Richard was at a loss. He didn’t have a clear counterargument. Cass really was crucial. And they really didn’t, at present, have any idea how to help her.
Instead of disagreeing, he settled for needling.
“How well-armed do you imagine your nurses need to be?”
The heels on Maya’s boots clicked on the hardwood floor as she approached Richard and placed a hand on his chest. She glanced over at the Amazon and winked.
“Red here,” Maya said, “has already hand-picked a team of ‘health care professionals’ who will look after Cass and make sure everyone stays healthy and safe.”
“It’s already done, ma’am,” Red replied, cracking her Amazonian knuckles. “The team is on their way.”
Richard looked to Kumiko for help, but she had nothing to offer. He would have to do what he could to care for Cass while working around Maya’s precautions.
Maya smiled, pleased that he had relented.
“Now,” she said, “let us address another pressing issue. How much longer is the rest of the world likely to survive now that the Lost have secured the Holy Coat and the Heretic has successfully consolidated power?”