by Ramy Vance
And he, like the rest of them, was refused.
But in all of creation there is no creature more vindictive than a god spurned, and refusing Cassandra’s refusal, he tied her to a sacrificial altar on Mt. Olympus’s Stefani Peak. There he scooped out her eyes and gouged out her tongue.
Cassandra, bloodied and in so much pain that she was near death, screamed in agony, pleading for mercy. Apollo, god of music, truth and prophesy, possessed no mercy in his pierced heart.
He replaced Cassandra’s eyes with two of the all-seeing eyes of the Cyclops, so that she would be cursed with the eyes of foresight, but he made sure that the only future Cassandra could see would be the tragic death of others.
Once that was done, he sewed the vile tongue of Medacius, the spirit of fraud and deception, into her screaming mouth so that no one would believe her prophesies.
Born out of love, reborn out of pain, Cassandra awoke. She was no longer the girl gifted with beauty and song, but rather the woman who saw death and could do nothing about it for she was never to be believed.
Leaving her bleeding body, which because of Apollo’s Frankenstein-esque tampering was no longer wholly hers, he cursed her with these final words: “Cassandra, ye shall walk this Earth never to be heard, never to help a single soul, never to die.”
To be cursed with eyes not her own and magic that could not help those condemned to death—that was her punishment for denying the god Apollo the taste of her love.
If these had been the only tragedies he bestowed upon her that day, she might have found a way to accept these gifts.
But Apollo was a cruel god indeed, for he bestowed upon her one last curse, one last condition that Cassandra would find the most difficult to accept: that of life eternal.
↔
But that was then and this is now. Now Cassandra lives in a world without gods. She walks among the humans, trying to find a way to be. But being is hard, and the one thing that Cassandra hates more than anything is being ignored. It’s not that she hates the feeling you get when someone is not listening—she hates being ignored.
It is akin to not existing, and that is exactly what happens every time she speaks. For Cassandra knows things, sees things, but every time she tries to tell someone what she sees, no one hears her.
Things are different now. Although she is still mostly unheard, she is not unseen. She has found a place among the humans (well, the normal, un-cursed humans), a place of learning, a place of enlightenment. A place that accepts those who are not quite like everyone else.
A place humans call university.
She likes her new life. She is happy to live with these youthful humans as they go about just being.
She has friends, one of whom—a boy named Bogdan, referred to by friends as Boggie—has even renamed her: Cassy. It is a good name that does not hold the burden of who she was.
Cassandra—Cassy—is the happiest she has been in as long as she can remember. But happiness is oft short-lived for most and shorter-lived for those cursed. And her prophetic eyes see death.
And not just anyone’s death. It will come to so many of her friends.
She tries to warn them, but as is her curse, no one hears her.
Desperate but not entirely helpless, she has an idea. If she cannot warn them—cannot save them—then perhaps she can empower them so that they can save themselves.
Behold, It Is I! The Villain!
(Or … Enter Villain, Stage Left)
A fireball shot in my direction. Luckily Mergen had been reading a stack of cardboard crap that was all soaking wet from the snow. I grabbed a pile and used it as a shield. The fireball hit my makeshift shield and it went up in a burst of steam.
Shieldless and annoyed, I looked at the runt in armor. “A crusader? Seriously? Do you have any idea how much death and destruction they caused? Despite any romanticized notions you might have, let me assure you, those guys were anything but good.”
I couldn’t see the kid’s face, so I had no idea if he was smirking or scowling. I did hear a muffled, “You talk too much,” as he summoned another fireball.
So scowling, then.
The fireball grew in his hand and I had exactly two seconds to make my move. Good—two seconds was all I needed.
Most people run away from a guy with a gun. This is almost always a mistake, because running leaves you unguarded, blind and gives your enemy a nice linear target to shoot—let’s say, a fireball—at.
If you’re untrained, the best thing for you to do is make yourself as small a target as possible. Turn sideways, find cover—even if it doesn’t cover your entire body. Standing sideways behind a four-inch-thick birch tree trunk means there’s four fewer inches to hit.
The second best thing to do is to make your movements as unpredictable as possible: zigzag, slide, serpentine … anything to make yourself difficult to track.
But if your enemy has a fireball and you’re in a narrow alleyway with virtually no cover, then you only have one option.
Luckily, that one option is also your best option—if you’re trained, that is … and I had all kinds of training in me.
I somersaulted forward, and as my feet touched the ground, I used my momentum to dive into the crusader.
The result was that he dropped his half-formed fireball, which caused the snow and water around him to erupt into steam.
The crusader and I barreled out of the alleyway and onto the adjacent road. Because he was wearing heavy armor, he crashed into a snow-covered, parked car.
Peeling himself off, he left a weird, standing version of a snow angel on the car’s side.
Allowing myself two seconds I didn’t have, I looked over my shoulder and cried out, “Mergen, Cassy—get Boggie to safety. I’ll deal with Mr. Knight Templar here.”
Cassy and Mergen nodded, each throwing one of Boggie’s arms over a shoulder and trotting down the alleyway.
Which left me alone with the crusader.
↔
I had a problem, and it wasn’t just this LARPing nightmare trying to fry me with magic he shouldn’t possess. My problem was that I was living in the modern age.
There were cameras everywhere and if I, a supposedly normal girl, did stuff I shouldn’t be able to do … that might cause some people to ask questions.
Questions like, who was I and how did I know how to do all that stuff? I might be human now, but I knew more about handling myself than any human should. And given that I wasn’t ready to let the world know I was an ex-three-hundred-year-old vampire, I had to hold myself back.
That, and the small detail of this kid probably just doing whatever the cursed magic that had enchanted on him told him to do.
Still, he was different than the other heroes. He’d hurt Underdawg in a way that the superhero battle of earlier today hadn’t. He had aged the poor guy to the point of near death like some sort of soul-sucking wizard, and—
Wizard Crusader, finally on his feet, swung an angry fist at me. Using my aikido training, I tried to defect the blow so it would fly harmlessly away from me and, if I was lucky (I was beginning to think I had used all my luck up), the momentum would throw him off balance.
But neither happened. Instead, when I grabbed his forearm to deflect the blow, it just kept going. I ended up flying to the side and through the window of the McGill Bookstore.
I crashed through along with a thunderstorm of McGill-branded colanders, notebooks, sweaters and t-shirts that came tumbling after me. I had just managed to get a crescent-branded flag off my face when Wizard Crusader flew through the window, landing right next to me.
“Super strength and flying ability? I could get used to this,” he said, removing a glove and hoisting me up with his now naked hand. “And as for you, Katrina Darling …”
And as he held me, I felt the strangest sensation flow over me.
It started with the tips of his fingers. I’d been hoisted off the ground by super strong creatures before. I’d felt fingertips clasp my throat.
They gripped so tight that I could feel the flats of their fingers on my neck. That was what I felt at first.
Then I felt the flats open up, holes appearing where skin should be, and if that sensation wasn’t enough, sharp spikes came out of them and stabbed into my neck.
Let’s just say that one hurt. It hurt a lot.
He held me there for a long moment, the pincers digging deeper into my neck. After what felt like an eternity, the pincers retracted and the flats of his fingers returned. “Interesting,” he said. “Perhaps that weird guy was right about you, Kat: You’re not a superhero or an Other. You are a human girl who knows and can do more that she should be able to do.”
“What ‘weird guy?’ ” I said with gritted teeth, grabbing at his hand. My blood made his fingers too slippery for me to get a good grip.
“Some weirdo who told me some interesting things about you and your long, long past. I didn’t believe him at first, but now I’m starting to.” Wizard Crusader let out a long sigh. “Not that it matters. I’m not going to make the classic villain mistake. You know, reveal my plan, devise some complicated way to kill you, only to give you time to escape. I hate it when they do that, don’t you?”
“I used to, but given the position I’m in, I’m kind of hoping you’ll do it just this once.”
He laughed, shaking his head. “In another life I would have enjoyed debating you. But alas, some things are not meant to be. How would you like to die? Broken neck? I could rip you in two. Perhaps punch a hole through your chest.”
He paused and I suddenly got that his questions weren’t rhetorical. He really wanted to know how I would like to die. If I had a chance to get away, it was this … but I didn’t have much time to think this through. Another second or two and he’d make the decision for me.
I thought back to what I knew about the superpowers and those pincers and in a flash of divine inspiration, I had the inkling of a plan.
A terrible plan that would probably get me killed regardless of whether I managed to escape Wizard Crusader, but a plan nonetheless.
Up, Up and Get Away?
“I want you to drop me.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your powers, the ones you stole from Underdawg—”
“Earned. Not stole. I do not steal what is not mine.”
“Fine,” I said, rolling my eyes—a feat not easily accomplished with someone crushing your larynx. “Whatever. But if these are my last moments, I want to spend them soaring through the air.”
“Interesting,” he said, amused. He giggled at the thought.
“And one more thing. Because this university has caused me nothing but misery, I want you to drop me onto The Three Bares statue. You know what I’m talking about, right?”
“You mean that piece of concretized porn on campus? The fountain with three naked men holding a shell?”
“That’s the one. I want to die plummeting into three naked guys as my final fu—”
“Language,” he said, tightening his grip.
“Sorry. My final f-you to this place.”
“Milady,” he said in a mocking tone, “your wish is my command.” And without another word, he took to the sky.
↔
Wizard Crusader flew out of the smashed window and up above the campus until we were hovering right above the statue. From that high, I could see it was not a shell at all, but rather a rock with a concave basin where the fountain’s inner workings popped out.
Once he was above the damn statue, he flew straight up. “You know,” he said, “I don’t know if you’ll fall straight down. Wind and all that. But I guess we must do the best we can with what we have. All of which is to say, if you miss the statue, I do apologize.”
“Don’t worry about it. You’ll have done your best.”
He chuckled. “I will have, won’t I?”
“Oh yes,” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “You’ll do your best and I’m not going to miss. I’ve skydived before. I’ll hit that statue if it’s the last thing I do. I will destroy those damn three bares.”
“Quite loud, aren’t you?”
“Just psyching myself up. I’m going to destroy that statue. I’m going to kill The Three Bares,” I sang as loud as I could.
Wizard Crusader tilted his head at me. “What are you doing?”
“Singing a song.”
“A song?” he said, his voice distant.
“Yeah, a song. It’s my ‘Destroying The Three Bares’ song. I’m going to destroy that statue. I’m going to kill The Three Bares,” I sang to the tune of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” “I’m going to destroy that statue. I’m going to kill The Three Bares.”
Wizard Crusader nodded his head to my tune as he continued his ascent. Then he started singing along until the two of us were belting out “I’m going to destroy that statue. I’m going to kill The Three Bares” at the top of our lungs.
He kept going up as he sang, and for a moment, he seemed to have forgotten what he was doing. Then he suddenly stopped singing, instead muttering to himself, “Oh, yeah. That’s right …” before looking down and giggling to himself.
We were way up high. High enough that The Three Bares statue was practically a dot below.
He started giggling uncontrollably. “You know,” he said between chortles, “your song was so catchy that I would have flown straight to the moon. Luckily, I got me a solid brain.” He tapped the top of his helmet with his free hand. Then in a chivalrous tone, he gave me an awkward bow—given he still held me by the neck—and said, “I fear, milady, that I must bid thee adieu.”
And before I could utter a word in protest, he dropped me.
↔
The only time I have ever been truly terrified as a vampire was the night a valkyrie took issue with me eating a human traveler she had taken to. Apparently, I had eaten the descendent of some great viking warrior whom the valkyrie had not only fought with, but whose family she had vowed to protect for all time.
Whoops. Silly me for not knowing that.
The avian warrior had grabbed me and taken me straight up to the sky, dropping me from a height of at least a mile.
As I fell, I’d had no idea if my vampiric body could withstand such a fall. I felt that this was truly it, and I was terrified. In in the end I survived that fall, although my healing ability—which normally healed any wound in a matter of hours—took three weeks to make me whole again.
Now that I was human I knew this fall would kill me, but for some reason I was less terrified of dying. There was a part of me that knew this was how I was meant to die. Not being dropped by a maniac crusader onto a statue of three naked men, but as a human trying her darndest to make up for the shit-ton of wrong she’d done.
Dying would suck, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
So I spread my arms and enjoyed the rush of wind on my face as the ground came closer and closer.
I gambled and lost, and somehow that’s OK, I thought to myself, knowing those words to be true because I had uttered them out loud. I only ever speak the truth; my lies tend to stay in my head.
The Three Bares came rushing toward me. I had seconds left.
But as is true with all best-laid plans, sometimes they don’t pay off, and sometimes they do.
There was a whoosh as a powerful hand grabbed me, and before I could say “kamehameha,” I was whisked away in a golden comet of whatever is the opposite of irony.
↔
The Dragon Ball Z-obsessed superhero flew me to the top of the Faculty of Engineering building, where he gently put me down. “Are you OK?”
He looked right at me and, because I wasn’t wearing the cherub mask, he didn’t recognize me as the girl he had been trying to kill only this morning. “I am. Thank you,” I said.
Comet Boy looked up at Wizard Crusader, still hovering above us, and muttered, “He tried to hurt the campus using your body.”
“Ahh, I would think the more pertinent point would be, ‘He tried to kill me.’
”
“That, too,” he said with a dismissive wave. “Whoever he is, he’s going to pay.” Then the kid’s golden halo surged around his body as he prepared to take off again.
“Wait, wait!” I cried out. “That guy up there, with the armor—he’s got weird powers. I wouldn’t go up there. The last superhero he fought—”
But before I could finish my warning, the kid let a ridiculous, anime-esque war cry and shot up into the sky.
↔
I watched helplessly as the golden comet zipped up and met the silver streaks of the crusader. The two zigzagged in the sky, Comet Boy’s streaks of light linear and purposeful. Wizard Crusader, on the other hand, bobbed back and forth like a drunk trying to walk the white line.
For a moment I thought Comet Boy would take this guy down without a problem, but as he flew by Wizard Crusader, the poor excuse for a knight reached out a hand and grabbed Comet Boy.
They floated there for a long moment, hand in hand, before Comet Boy’s glow fizzled out and he started to fall to the ground. Wizard Crusader’s body became enflamed in gold as the other boy fell.
↔
Watching someone fall is as terrifying as falling yourself. All I could do was point and scream as the kid plummeted to the earth. I had braced myself for the ugly thud of a body hitting concrete when a girl dressed in black leapt into the sky and caught the boy, gently bringing him down to the ground.
I looked down from my perch on the engineering building’s roof and spotted several more heroes showing up. They were all staring up at Wizard Crusader with growing anger.
For a second I thought there would be an epic showdown, but Wizard Crusader did the smart thing: he took off, leaving a golden streak in his wake.