by Laura Legend
The woman with the beer bottle smashed it against the table and threatened them with the jagged neck.
Thomas retreated a step. The woman stabbed at Cass’s face with the broken glass, baring her fangs. Thomas dipped Cass backwards. Cass, present again for just a moment, kicked the woman in the face as Thomas dipped her, clapping the woman’s jaw shut with a horrific crack that shattered her teeth.
As she staggered and dropped the broken bottle, Thomas snatched it out of the air and jammed it into her heart. Ash.
Three left.
The remaining trio looked at each other in disbelief. Was this a fight or a dance class? Were Cass and Thomas for real, or were they just messing with them?
Thomas brought Cass back to her feet and whispered into her ear.
“Cass,” he said, “come back to me. I could use you here, now.”
The white noise receded to the edges of Cass’s vision and, when Thomas stood her on her own two feet, she only wobbled for a moment before regaining her footing.
Her eye throbbed with a sharp pain, but a small curl of black smoke rose from the corner of her eye. It would have to be enough. They needed to finish this quickly before they attracted any attention from the others and reinforcements showed up.
This time, two attacked at once, coming at Cass from opposite sides, hoping to box her in. Cass dropped to one knee and flipped her blade up backward under her arm, so that it was pointing straight up into the air. She let the vampire who’d leapt first impale himself there, then rolled forward as he turned to ash, allowing his momentum to position her blade for the arrival of the second. This time, the blade caught her attacker in the throat and he dropped to the floor in his red silk boxers, gurgling blood.
Cass stood, leveraged her sword free with a foot on the vampire’s chest, and finished the beheading.
Ash.
Only the dealer remained, stationed by the exit.
She seemed even paler than normal. Her eyes flickered between Thomas, Cass, and Cass’s sword.
Cass glared at her, brandishing the katana.
Then time frayed and Cass dropped her sword and collapsed to the floor.
The dealer turned to run.
Thomas caught Cass for a second time and, with one smooth gesture, slipped his foot under the sword, kicked it at the fleeing vampire, and impaled her from behind.
Ash.
Cass looked up into Thomas’s face, her eyes fluttering as she tried to lock back into the present.
“Wow,” she said.
“No trouble,” Thomas returned. “And it was good to see you in action there—if only intermittently.”
Thomas helped Cass toward a seat at the poker table. Cass, though, couldn’t help but stare over his shoulder at the thing that interested her most about this room. In addition to the secret entrance and ornate backdoor, the remaining wall was dominated by a large iron door with an elaborate locking mechanism.
“If I had secret potions and such that people could use to heal seers,” Cass said, steadying herself with a hand on Thomas’s arm, “I would definitely hide them in there.”
25
CASS LEANED AGAINST the poker table, gathering herself. If her experience of time was a snow globe, she felt someone had just given it a good shake. She closed her eyes, stood very still, and let all the flakes swirl back to the ground of her mind.
“When you’re ready,” Thomas said with an eye on the entrance to the lab, “we’ll need to work on that door before anyone else comes back to join the game.”
Cass, eyes still closed, gently nodded her head.
Thomas examined the locking mechanism. It looked formidable.
“This,” Thomas added, “is new. Judas must have installed it after our time together. I’ve never seen it before.”
The ground felt a little firmer now beneath Cass’s feet.
She stood up straight, cracked her neck, and retrieved her sword from the pile of ash by the door. Then she returned to the poker table, embedded the tip of the blade in the table’s soft wood with a strong swing, and took a seat facing Thomas.
“We’ll get to the door in a minute,” Cass said with the blade still quivering, “but we need to talk about something else first.”
Thomas left the door and came back to the table, his expression neutral.
“You want to know about the Heretic,” he said. It was a statement, not a question.
Cass remained silent. She was willing to let him take the lead and see where it went.
Thomas took a seat. He gathered up the cards and began to expertly shuffle them.
“You saw the stack of letters from your mother in my bag,” he said.
Again, not a question.
“I brought them as a gift for you. You are welcome to them—when you feel you’re ready.”
Cass didn’t know if she was ready. But at this point her own feelings were probably irrelevant.
Thomas cut the deck with one hand.
“I knew your mother,” he began. “I had been working for hundreds of years to gather power and resources—the very empire that Richard now sits atop. And, all the while, I had also been working on my theory that it was possible to redeem vampires.”
He paused for effect.
“This was not a popular theory, and I had to keep my purposes largely to myself.”
Thomas dealt them both five cards.
“Your mother sought me out. She had reached the same conclusion: the Lost could be redeemed. Their hearts and minds could be reintegrated into something human—more than human, really. She brought new tools and a fresh perspective to bear. But, most importantly, she brought an urgency to the work that I hadn’t felt for a long time. If she could learn how to save vampires from drowning in the feral flood of their own passions and emotions, then she reasoned, she could apply those same lessons to saving her own daughter who, from a very early age, was already lost on that same sea.”
Thomas flipped one of his five cards.
Cass did the same.
She could, even as Thomas was speaking, feel those now-familiar black waves of emotion lapping at the edge of her mind, eroding her fragile sense of integrity.
Cass cut in.
“And for you, this was about finishing the work of redemption that you think Jesus—by way of Judas—had personally set in motion?”
“In a way,” Thomas granted. “But do not mistake me on this point. I’m no Christian. Jesus is not my God. And, what’s more, we both know that relics don’t have to be real in order to hold real power. The same goes for Jesus. Think what you’d like about him, but neither myself nor your mother have ever thought of him as the Son of God. He may or may not have understood what he set in motion with Judas. And honestly, I don’t think it matters.”
Thomas paused a moment, leaving room for Cass to ask another question. She opted to let him continue.
“Your mother and I worked together for a time. We made enormous progress. And, in the end, she succeeded where I never had. She redeemed a vampire.”
Cass flashed on the image from her last vision of Rose and Thomas beneath the Temple Mount, gathered around a body on a stone slab.
“Amare,” Cass said, holding Thomas’s eyes.
“Very good,” Thomas said. “I’m impressed. You’ll have the whole puzzle assembled in no time.”
He flipped a second card. Cass followed.
“Unfortunately, that success with Amare has never been replicated. Though your mother took that victory as a sign and bet everything on being able to scale that transformation—going so far as to become Lost herself—she never succeeded in isolating the missing variable that allowed the process to transform Amare.”
“And now it’s all catching up with her,” Cass said, “and she’s falling prey to the same madness and ferality that she set out to cure.”
Thomas flipped a third card.
He dipped his head slightly in a gesture that captured both his agreement and his regret.
&nb
sp; “Indeed.”
Cass flipped her third card.
“For his part, Richard never agreed with any of my theories on redeeming vampires. He didn’t know about your mother or Amare. He was disgusted by the Lost, by the free run of their emotions, and in doing the math, he saw them only as a problem to be contained.”
Thomas thumbed the edge of his fourth card, as if he were lost inside some particular memory that was replaying itself in his mind.
“Richard was always like that. So cool and confident. So rational. He didn’t see any cause to believe that the Lost could be more than they were. And he didn’t see any advantage to suffering—as people in general do—the ebb and flow of all those passions and emotions. That kind of cool rationality makes him a great CEO. But it’s not enough to make him a great human being.”
Cass kept quiet but tried to avoid wondering what Thomas would make of Richard’s own reawakening—of the restarted heart that had led him to propose marriage to her not so long ago.
How much of Richard was still the man Thomas was describing?
Thomas flipped his fourth card. Cass followed suite.
“With Maya spearheading the project, Richard has been, for decades, secretly investing billions of dollars in an ‘alternate’ solution to the potentially cataclysmic problem posed by the Lost: a weaponized virus that would wipe them out for good.”
Cass’s eyes narrowed. Part of her would be happy to see that happen, to see the Lost wiped from the face of the earth so that humanity could start again with a clean slate.
But another part of her rebelled at the thought of relinquishing any remaining hope for her mother.
What if Thomas was right? What if Rose could be saved? What if they all could? She thought about the hundreds of vampires she had reduced to ash in her life. Would she have saved any of them if given the chance? What if I could have saved someone who knew Mozart? Would I? Cass wasn’t sure she liked the possibility for guilt these thoughts were opening up.
“As far as I know,” Thomas continued, “Richard and company have not succeeded in finding a solution to the problem of the Lost. Neither side has succeeded—yet—in saving or destroying them.”
Thomas was watching Cass closely. He watched as her expression wobbled between elation and nausea at the thought of destroying the Lost.
Cass felt ashamed that her emotions, tangled as they were, were so transparently visible. She bowed her head and pulled her hair back from her face.
“Is that what you want?” Thomas asked, his voice still resolute even as he flipped his final card. “Do you want to see them destroyed?”
Cass didn’t know what she wanted. She wasn’t sure what she believed.
She pushed back her chair and stood.
She flipped her final card but didn’t look at it.
Thomas had three kings.
Cass had a straight flush—all hearts, two through six.
“What I want right now,” Cass said, “is to open that door.”
26
THOUGH THE DOOR wasn’t much larger than normal, it had the feel of something six inches thick. The fact that it was solid steel and embedded in a stone wall that was itself several feet thick added to that formidable impression.
The locking mechanism—three crossbars connected to a spoked wheel in the center—sealed the deal.
Cass knew right away that if they didn’t figure out how to crack the code, they weren’t going to get through this door before more vampires arrived. And she was pretty sure that, sooner or later, more would arrive. They always did.
The door was painted a flat gray. The metal showed signs of age, but the whole assemblage probably wasn’t more than a hundred years old.
Cass took a step back, trying to take the whole of it in. Thomas stood at her side, hand to his chin. Unconsciously, Cass found herself mimicking his inquisitive posture. But she had no graying beard to stroke. She forced herself to put her hands on her hips instead.
If more vampires walked in and attacked them, at least she wouldn’t look ridiculous when they arrived.
It’s the little things in life, Jones, Cass thought. You have to be grateful for those small, tender mercies, like enjoying a little extra dignity in the eyes of your enemies in those last moments before you die.
Cass moved within an arm’s length of the spoked wheel that locked the door in place. One of the spokes had a darker hue, singling it out as the pointer. There were, however, no numbers on either the spokes or the door. Instead, engraved in the metal of the door itself, Cass found stylized versions of twenty-two letters.
“The Hebrew alphabet,” Cass said, thinking out loud.
“Yes,” Thomas said as he looked over her shoulder. “It could be that, by spinning the wheel, we’re meant to spell something out. Or, it could be that the lock requires a number combination, given that Hebrews letters also have numerical values.”
“Also,” Cass said, adding a further wrinkle, “we don’t even know how many letters or numbers the combination would require. Six? Eight? Ten?”
Cass felt the futility of guessing settle in her empty stomach, making the juices churn.
Without some clues, they were never going to get this thing open.
“Fuuuuck,” Cass groaned to herself, resting her forehead against the cool metal and gently pounding her fist against the door.
But as soon as she made contact, she flashed on an image of this same door in the future. It was open. The room inside had been hollowed out with fire, and it was filled with ash. The walls were scorched black. There was nothing left but the stone table in the center of the room.
The image, though, disappeared as abruptly as it had arrived. When Cass reconnected with the present, she found that she’d instinctively grabbed the spoked wheel to keep her balance. Now, however, the wheel had been turned clockwise and the dark spoke was pointed directly at the aleph.
Cass waved Thomas off.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Just busy seeing seer-type stuff.”
“Anything helpful?”
“Not really. But,” Cass added as an idea occurred to her, “maybe we could venture a guess, here, if we took this letter, aleph, as a clue. In Hebrew, the initial letter of ‘Iscariot’ is an aleph.”
Cass spun the spoked wheel through the Hebrew consonants that spelled the name. When she stopped, the door made a loud thunk, like something heavy had fallen inside the wall. Cass glanced upward, looking for the source of the sound, when an enormous blade swung down from the ceiling. It would have taken her head off if she hadn’t ducked. And it would have taken off Thomas’s head if Cass hadn’t instinctively swept his leg and knocked him to the floor.
Cass helped him up. They were both breathing heavily.
“Many thanks,” Thomas said, brushing himself off.
“No trouble. Next time, maybe I’ll even save your life on purpose.”
That clearly hadn’t been the correct code. And if they messed up again, Cass wasn’t super confident that they would have another chance to quip about it.
She didn’t dare try a second time without another clue.
Hoping to replicate what happened the first time she’d touched the door, Cass took hold of the spokes and closed her eyes, willing herself to see something other than the present, trying to consciously get the channels to flip.
She’d never tried anything like this before. To this point, she’d been using all of her energy to not slip free of the present moment.
To her surprise, it actually worked.
This time, Cass flashed on an image from the past. Judas himself was standing in front of the door, basically in the same position she was now. He was dressed in a slim suit from the 1950s and, as he reached for the spokes of the door, Cass heard him whisper one word to himself: “Alukah.”
When she’d tuned back into the present, Cass found herself flat on her back, staring up at the cave’s rough stone ceiling. Thomas hadn’t swooped in to catch her that time. Her tailbone was sore
, but she did at least have a clue of what to try next.
Hebrew wasn’t Cass’s specialty—her doctoral training had centered on Christian relics, and thus had emphasized proficiency in Latin and Greek—but she could read it well enough. This word, the handful of times she’d come across it, had always stood out to her.
“Alukah” was the Hebrew word for leech ... or vampire.
Cass dusted herself off and rubbed her bruised bottom.
Alright, Jones, let’s give this another try. You don’t want to live forever, anyway.
She carefully turned the wheel through the letters of the word, but when she reached the end, another heavy, ominous, mechanical clunk sounded from within the wall.
The exit doors sealed and a smoky gas began to hiss into the room.
Thomas looked at Cass, skeptical.
“Shit. I don’t understand,” Cass said, “I’m sure that was the right passcode. I don’t know why—”
Then, as she and Thomas both began to cough and their lungs started to burn, Cass realized what she’d done wrong.
You’re such an idiot, Jones! Hebrew reads from right to left!
Cass began to frantically reenter the code, turning the wheel counterclockwise this time.
Her vision was growing cloudy and her head felt like a balloon about to permanently detach from her body. Thomas was bent over, leaning against the wall. She covered her mouth, ground her teeth together, and finished the code.
This time the door tripled clunked, the locks disengaged, and all the doors in the room unsealed.
Cass hauled the lab door open. She grabbed Thomas by the collar, pulled him through the threshold, and heaved the heavy door shut behind them.
The room was dark, but the air in the lab was mercifully clear.
Cass clicked her flashlight on and swept the beam across the room. The space looked much as it had in her vision. Some of the lab equipment was different, but nearly all of it still looked medieval and threatening—though she was also willing to grant that practically everything appeared weird and threatening when you looked at it with a flashlight in an underground cave after a near-death experience.
The same stone table still dominated the center the room. It was covered in a white sheet, but appeared empty.