by Laura Legend
At the door to the courtyard, Cass found a pair of young guards on duty, so she backtracked, went up a flight of stairs, and out through a window onto the tile roof that, from the exterior, separated the first floor from the second. The night was cloudy, but pale light from the nearly full moon would intermittently break through the haze.
Just as she exited the window, the moon broke free and lit up the courtyard. Withdrawing beneath an overhang, Cass plastered herself against the wall, willing herself to be invisible.
The pair of guards below were in no position to see her, but she didn’t have any trouble hearing them. They were, of course, gossiping. And in a quiet place like this, there really wasn’t much to gossip about but her. Cass rolled her eyes preemptively as she listened and waited for the moon to retreat behind the clouds again.
“Did you hear what she makes him do to her?” one barely post-adolescent voice said.
All Cass heard from the other guard was a dry-mouthed “gulp.”
“She uses her powers to make time slow down, and then, just before they finish, she makes it go on and on and on until he begs her to let them be done for the night.”
Cass could hear the other guard’s helmet creaking, indicating that he must be nodding vigorously in response. He, evidently, must have already heard the same thing from independent sources.
They were silent for a moment, trying to process what had just been revealed. Then the other guard spoke up with some new information.
“Just today,” he began, a little breathless at the fact that he’d forgotten to mention this before now, “she forced Zach into a broom closet and locked the door. They were in there for hours, making an enormous racket. Later, the janitor said that he found a mess in there he couldn’t bring himself to describe, so he just threw the brooms away and ordered new ones so he wouldn’t have to ever touch them again.”
Silence.
Cass could tell they were going to be stuck on the broom handle part of that last story for a long time. When the moon ducked behind another series of clouds, she took advantage of their distraction, tip-toed along the edge of the roof, and swung gracefully to the ground on the far end without making a sound.
Cass adjusted her hood and flattened herself against the wall.
You’re not only one hell of a demanding lover, Jones, she thought to herself, but you make a pretty damn good ninja too.
Cass darted across an alleyway, repositioned herself deep in a bank of shadows, and readied herself to make a run for the well itself. But just as she’d screwed up the courage to break for it, a door banged open behind her in the alley.
Dogen and Grey emerged, thick in the middle of a friendly argument. It had the feel of an argument that they’d been having for decades and that they now felt obliged to carry through to the end, each playing their parts, as a way of sealing and reaffirming their friendship. Grey was gesturing broadly until Dogen interrupted him, pounding his fist into his hand.
Cass held her breath as they passed, squeezing herself against the wall, willing some extra measure of invisibility. They were a couple feet beyond her and she was about to let out a quiet sigh of relief when Dogen stopped abruptly and turned back in her direction. He looked deep into the shadows, right at the place where she was standing. Cass didn’t think there was any way he could actually see her in that darkness, but she felt pinned to the wall by his gaze nonetheless. He waited for a moment, shushing Grey. Then, as abruptly as he’d stopped, he moved on, continuing their conversation as if it had never been interrupted.
Cass finally took another breath. In the end, she wasn’t sure if Dogen had failed to see her or if, having seen her, he’d decided it was none of his business. Cass couldn’t say. The stakes, though, weren’t actually that high. What did it matter really if Dogen caught her lurking around the courtyard late at night? She could just wave hello and go back to bed.
Still, she needed to see what was in that well. And she felt, instinctively, that she didn’t want anyone else to know what she was doing.
Once Dogen and Grey were gone, Cass waited until the guards at the door were laughing again—she didn’t want to know what about—then she sprinted across the courtyard with a blazing quickness that, despite her experiments the past few months, surprised even her. She tucked herself into the shadows cast by the two gnarly trees that anchored the roof of the well and counted to ten. When nothing had changed, she uncoiled the length of rope she’d slung over her shoulder and tied one end of it to a tree branch. The branch was thick and strong and had an almost metallic, petrified feel to it. She tossed the remainder of the rope’s length into the well.
Cass pulled off her jacket, kicked off her shoes, tightened the ponytail that held her shoulder-length hair in place, and leaned over the side to take a look. She didn’t expect to see anything but darkness. Though the moon was still angled low on the horizon, it was obscured by the clouds. However, as soon as she leaned over the edge, her weak eye snapped into focus and she could see, with perfect clarity, the circumference of the shaft, an outline of the stairs emerging from the wall, and the silvery mirror of the water itself.
The water gave nothing away. Perfectly still, its depth might have been measured in inches or miles.
Now or never, Jones.
Cass gripped the rope and let herself down over the side. She rappelled the length of the shaft—something else she’d never done before—negotiating the uneven stones that lined its surface, until she came to the stairs that gradually emerged from halfway down the wall. Once the stairs were wide enough to safely use, Cass tested her weight on one and let go.
The moment she let go of the rope, the well began to pulse. She could feel the entire shaft beating like a heart—thump-thump, pause, thump-thump, pause—and each pulse filled her with a new measure of light and power. Her skin became translucent, the veins and bones in her hand visibly glowed, and her sense of self began to slip to a point where she was no longer sure exactly where she ended and the well began.
Almost despite herself, Cass found herself descending the stairs to the surface of the water.
When she got to the edge of water, she stopped and stared into its rippling surface. She wasn’t sure how long she stood like that, frozen and entranced. It could have been minutes, it could have been hours.
When she finally lifted her toe to test the water, she was shocked by how cold it was. Immediately, the cold leached up through her toe and into her leg, then through her groin and across her chest, slowing and numbing everything it touched, until the cold bled into her jaw, making her teeth ache, and touched the base of her brain. And once the cold had her by the brainstem, a vision exploded inside of Cass’s head.
She was no longer in the well—or even in the present. She felt time flicker between the past, present, and future, like a record needle skipping. Then time’s needle settled into a groove and Cass returned to the same childhood moment that, in her very first experience as a seer, she’d seen in a vision.
She had been in the street behind the coffeehouse. She’d just defeated her first batch of vampires with a bag of books, the trunk of her Volvo, and a sword. And then she’d had a vision of her mother. Or, rather, she’d had a vision in which she was her mother.
She’d seen, from her mother’s perspective, a bright summer morning when the two of them had sat on ten-year-old Cass’s bed and her mother had squeezed her hand and given her a pendant—the pendant that had ultimately contained a fragment of the One True Cross. Her mother had made her swear—literally, swear with an oath—to care for this pendant with her life. At the time, Cass had been enthralled by the necklace. But, seeing this scene from her mother’s perspective, she’d also felt what she’d taken for granted at the time. She could feel how much her mother loved and trusted her. She could feel the strength in her mother’s hand. And she could feel how deep her mother’s hopes ran for her.
The vision had filled Cass with a sense of purpose and confidence and, the first time she’d
seen it, the vision had ended there.
This time, though, the it continued on.
Now, in addition to feeling how much her mother loved her, Cass saw something more. No, she felt it. The emotion gripped her as tightly as the cold well water: she felt how much her mother feared for her.
In the vision, they were still sitting on the bed together and Cass was struggling with the clasp of the necklace, trying to put it on. Her mother reached over to help and, in a flash, little Cass exploded in anger and frustration. She didn’t need help! She’d do it herself! Why wouldn’t this stupid necklace cooperate! Cass was surprised by her ten year-old self’s reaction, but she was even more struck by the black fear it evoked in her mother.
Cass knew, seeing the scene from her mother’s perspective, that this was only the tip of the iceberg, that it was not uncommon for little Cass to be swamped by her emotions and consumed, in a moment, by some dark rage. She felt how profoundly this scared her mother—not just in the moment, but for what it could mean for Cass’s entire future.
Cass saw, in a blink, that her mother would risk anything to save her from that future. Even if it meant locking away Cass’s emotions and hamstringing her powers. Even if it cost her mother her own life.
In the vision, Cass’s mother calmed her and gently walked her back from the edge of rage. Together, they unhooked the clasp and hung the pendant around Cass’s neck. Then her mother pulled Cass onto her lap, held her tight, and whispered into her ear.
“Anger always comes from fear, sweetheart. But as long as we’re together, you’ll never need to be afraid.”
Then, for a second time, the vision ended.
When Cass came to, she found herself deep beneath the surface of the well’s water, chilled to the bone, and desperate for oxygen.
6
CASS WASN’T EVEN sure which direction was up. The water pulsed and swirled around her, disorienting her. Her arms and legs felt stiff and numb from the cold. It took an incredible effort just to stop spinning. Even then, the darkness was thick and overwhelming. She felt like her lungs were going to burst.
She stretched out her arms, feeling for the walls of the well. When she finally found something, she pulled her hand back in alarm. Where she’d expected to find cold, hard stone, she found instead a surface that, in the darkness, felt vaguely organic and that seemed to recoil at her touch of its own accord.
Though Cass tried to be still, gather her strength and calming her mind, she couldn’t resist the impression that she was, in fact, sinking like a rock toward some fathomless bottom.
Her lungs were screaming now.
Looking for any sign about which direction to go, Cass caught sight of a pale shaft of moonlight, slanting between the well’s roof and wall, glinting off the surface of the water.
There.
She shot herself upward, desperate to break the surface. She kicked and strained, forcing life back into her frozen arms and legs. Just as she felt she could go no farther, her head broke the surface. Gasping, she drew in an enormous lungful of air. She’d never in her life been so grateful for air. How had she walked around all day, every day, forgetting the air?
But the well wasn’t done with her yet.
The water tugged at her arms and legs, pulling her down, down toward some orphaned fragment of eternity that time would never be able to assimilate.
As she tried to take a second breath, the water pulsed—thump-thump; pause; thump-thump—and sucked her downward, plunging her head back beneath the surface and filling her lungs with water.
The water wanted her. It was hungry for her. It was alive. The water felt less like matter than mind.
No, dammit! Cass thought to herself. Not now. Not like this.
She gathered herself, drew in her arms and legs, and waited for the lull between pulses when the water felt more like water. Then, with one fierce kick, she launched herself upward, breaking the surface and grabbing onto the lowest stair above the waterline.
Though she was still coughing up a lungful of water, Cass didn’t waste any time. She wasn’t going to get a third chance at escaping. She forced herself to stumble up the stairs, out of the water’s throbbing reach, until she came to the last upward step still wide enough to safely hold her.
On her knees, Cass clung to the wall, coughed, and spat out the last bit of well water. Once the coughing had passed, her body continued to be wracked with icy shudders.
As she knelt there, Cass tried to clear her head. Rather than thinking of the icy water, she focused on what she’d seen of her mother. She focused her attention, too, on what she’d learned—about herself, about her mother’s love, and about why her mother had done what she’d done to her. As her attention narrowed to just that last image of her mother’s face, Cass felt her breathing slow. More, she felt a spark of warmth kindle behind her wandering eye and the warmth begin to spread through the rest of her body, rolling back the cold.
When some of this warmth finally pushed its way out into her fingers and toes, Cass stood, grabbed the end of her rope, and hauled herself back up the side of the well.
With the last of her strength, she dumped her body over the lip of the wall and landed with a thud on the courtyard’s cobblestones.
“Ow,” she said quietly to herself.
Time continued to subtly flicker in and out of focus, interlacing blurry frames from the past and future with the present. She lay there for a few minutes, wet and weak, until the wind picked up and the cold started to set in again. She’d better take action sooner rather than later.
She rolled to her feet, squeegeed herself from top to bottom, and gathered her shoes, jacket, and rope.
Wobbling back toward her room, she didn’t have any energy for subterfuge. With her hair still dripping and her clothes plastered to her body, she made for the main doors. As she reentered the building, she wearily waved her length of rope at the guards in a gesture of greeting. Their jaws dropped and they looked at each other in astonishment. She’d just given them an excellent gift. Armed with this new story about a wet Cass and her length of rope, they would surely be kings for a day.
Cass was too wrung out to care.
Trailing a beaded line of water, she returned to her tiny room, pulled off her all her damp clothes, and flopped naked into bed. She was covered in gooseflesh from head to toe. She wrapped herself in the bed’s white sheet and curled into a ball, still shivering.
She lay that way the rest of the night, locked in a kind of gray, dormant state, flickering. Though she occasionally drifted toward real sleep when she thought of her mother, she was always drawn back toward consciousness when she remembered those icy waters tugging at her clothes and pulling her downward.
My mother was trying to protect me, Cass thought over and over. She was trying to protect me.
When morning finally came, Cass woke to discover that, sometime during the night, Zach had found her. He’d wrapped her in another blanket and, then, wrapped himself around her. Her joints creaked and her muscles were sore but, in his arms, she actually felt warm again. Time had stabilized.
Lord, Zach, I need you.
Cass rolled over and took his head in her hands, peppering kisses up his neck and across the line of his jaw.
Zach smiled.
When Cass stood up, stretched, and slipped free of her sheet, she finally remembered that, in her extremity, she hadn’t stopped for pajamas last night. Zach whistled, mostly covered his eyes with his hands, and handed her back the sheet.
“Thanks,” Cass said, still too tired to care. “Hold that gentlemanly pose for just a minute.”
She rooted in her dresser for an old pair of jeans and a fresh t-shirt, pulled them on, and promised herself she’d worry about a shower and underwear later. Besides Zach and Dogen, who was going to see her this morning anyway?
“Breakfast?” Zach asked, continuing to cover his eyes.
“Please,” Cass said, her hunger roaring to life at the suggestion.
As th
ey crossed the courtyard to find some breakfast, Cass couldn’t bring herself to look at the well. She just stared at the ground, leaned hard into Zach, and let him lead the way.
When Dogen crossed their path, she couldn’t convince herself to look him in the eye either. Running her fingers through her tangle of wild hair, she assumed, though, that she must look like she’d been stuffed in bag, beaten with whiffle ball bat, and then thrown overboard before being saved by a troop of wild monkeys.
“What’s that noise?” Zach asked.
Dogen shrugged, but his nonchalance didn’t last. In moments, the courtyard was filled with a buffeting wind.
Collectively, the three of them turned to look.
A York Enterprises helicopter swept in and put down on the far side of the courtyard. The door opened, Richard York hopped out, and the helicopter immediately took off again.
It was a dramatic entrance and, windblown, Richard looked fabulous—tie-less in a gray, sharply tailored suit—as he dashed across the courtyard toward them.
Cass couldn’t help but smile. Despite herself, her heart leapt a bit at the sight of him.
Right, Cass thought to herself, rubbing a bit of dirt off her cheek. Of course. Good call, Jones, skipping the shower (and underwear) this morning.
7
THOUGH SHE HADN’T seen him in months, Richard still had the attractively whittled-down bearing of a man who’d been crushed by a castle and then spent half the previous year learning how to walk again. His blonde hair was longer than when she’d seen him last, tucked now behind his ears, and he’d kept his beard. On someone else, the slim suit might have seemed out of place, but he wore it like it was the most natural thing in the world to roll out of bed in the morning and, with the help of his butler, slip into it.
Did he have a butler?
Cass assumed so but, actually, she wasn’t sure. She tried to imagine Richard putting on his own pants, then decided—not for the first time—that this probably wasn’t a productive line of thought.
“I’m sorry for the surprise,” Richard said, approaching them, “but I was already in Japan on business.”