by Laura Legend
“Let’s go,” Maya said, leading the way.
Cass and Zach followed her through a side door and into a typical Underside passageway. The Amazons brought up the rear. The long hallway was all concrete with a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling midway down its length. There were no additional doors in this hallway. There were no locked doors, flush with the wall and lacking handles, cold to the touch.
The hallway branched several times. They walked quickly and in silence. In just a couple of minutes, they emerged in the Singapore Underside. It was weird to return to the hub on a normal weekday, long after the tournament’s end. Cass had only ever seen it with a raucous Underside festival in full swing.
Maya, though, wasn’t stopping to see any of the sights.
“There is, unfortunately, only one remaining Underside route to the castle in Romania,” Maya said. “And it runs through the Singapore hub.”
They were only on the street for two blocks before she turned down a side street and they entered another hallway.
They traversed the first leg of this bare hallway but, when they turned the corner to its second stretch, they found a host of Lost stationed at the far end, guarding the exit to the ruins. The whole group perked up and tuned in when Cass and company came into view. On the whole, they looked half-mad and completely hungry.
Every member of the group was wearing a white, button-down shirt and a black leather cape.
Zach grabbed Cass’s elbow, pulling her back in the direction they’d come.
Cass, though, shook him off. At the sight of the host, she felt her cold blood start to pound. And, at the sight of the capes, Cass felt that cold anger spiral wildly, disproportionately upward.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Cass said under her breath. “The fate of the world may hang in the balance, and this is the crap we’ve come to? Fucking capes?!”
There was something about the capes—something that she couldn’t help but see as profoundly insulting given the gravity of her grief—that she could not abide.
Cass was smoking from head to toe like she was made of dry ice. The smoke, though, had a dark, ugly tinge. Time flickered for a moment, then settled back into the present.
Maya signaled for the Amazons to move to the front.
“I’ve got this,” Cass said, waving them off and shrugging past Maya.
Cass drew her sword and took off at a sprint down the hallway. The host snarled and braced themselves. Ten yards out from the front line, Cass took two steps along the right hand wall, followed by three steps along the ceiling, maintaining all her momentum. Then, dismounting with a twist, she took off two heads and kicked a third against the wall.
The front line retreated for a moment, crowding the vampires behind them. But this didn’t last long. In short order, the group as a whole, spring-loaded by their compression, rushed forward and were on her.
Claws and teeth flashed; capes flared dramatically.
Cass cracked a nose with an fist. She shoved her sword through a heart. She kneed a third in the groin.
One grabbed her from behind, arms like a vise, baring her neck for a bite. Cass gave him a sharp elbow in the ribs and then, braced against her attacker, ran up the wall and flipped over his head, wrenching his neck and impaling his heart as he fell backwards.
The cloud of ash was growing. The hallway was getting hazy. If that single bulb got broken, things were going to get interesting fast.
Zach, Maya, and company were in the fray now, but the hallway was narrow enough that it didn’t allow for much of a group engagement.
Maya cracked a pair of heads together and, with her pointed blade, dispatched the pair with two quick stabs to the heart. Zach shouldered a woman with a perm into the wall, cracked her jaw with a blow from the blunt end of his truncheon, and impaled her.
The ash got thicker.
Cass spun, sword at head-level, and connected. One head came off, another came unhinged. She ducked a blow and took a third out at the knees.
There couldn’t be more than a handful left now.
Cass’s anger surged again.
They belonged to her. All of them. Every remaining one of them.
She pushed deeper into the melee, striking blindly in the choking haze, working mostly by feel and instinct, until the hallway grew quiet.
Was that it? Was that all of them already?
She stood still, her body quivering with rage, listening for any other sign of opposition.
A hand reached out from behind and took hold of her shoulder. Cass whirled, sword extended, to find Zach immediately behind her. She stopped just short of taking off his head. The blade had drawn a thin line of blood at this neck.
Cass froze, horrified.
Zach’s eyes were wide.
Her sword clattered to the cement floor and Cass fell to her knees, all the fight instantly drained out of her.
The cloud of ash was settling. A cape fluttered to the ground.
Cass began to retch and found, at her feet, the body of an Amazon. Her head was gone. Blood was everywhere. And she knew, immediately, that this was her work. She knew that, in the chaos, she’d done this.
Cass’s whole body convulsed as she tried to expel the contents of her stomach, as she tried to vomit out the fear and anger that had taken up residence inside of her.
Her body heaved, but nothing came out. Zach knelt next to her, holding her shoulders as if he were trying to keep her from falling apart.
The door at the Romanian end of the hallway banged open. A backup team of half-feral lost began to pour through the door.
“Time to retreat,” Maya said, wiping blood and ash from her face.
When neither Cass nor Zach immediately responded, she cracked her whip.
“Let’s go!”
Zach hurried Cass to her feet, grabbed her sword, and they took off running down the hall, back in the direction they’d come.
I lost, Cass thought with a dull sense of shock as Zach jostled her along. I fought, and I killed, and I lost.
31
CASS WAS SICK with anger.
She’d almost killed Zach. She had killed one of her own allies.
As soon as they were above ground in the Singapore Underside, she shrugged free of Zach and broke away from Maya.
Time flickered. The record in her head skipped.
“Cass!” Zach called.
Maya took action. She went after Cass and, with a hand on her shoulder, spun her around.
“We need you,” Maya said. “You cannot leave now. You are the only one who can find the relic in the ruins.”
Cass stared back. Astonished.
“Did you see what just happened back there?” Cass asked. “Did you see what I did? Did you see what I became?”
A whiff of dark smoke still drifted from Cass’s weak eye.
Maya’s eyes narrowed. She tightened her grip on Cass’s shoulder. “There were casualties. You are a very sharp blade, Cassandra Jones. It is no surprise if, in addition to cutting down our enemies, there is also a cost to those who wield you as a weapon.”
Maya’s coolly rational evaluation wasn’t going to carry the day. It was a poor fit for the moment. Cass could hardly believe what she was hearing.
“There are acceptable levels of loss?” Cass spat back. “How many? How do the numbers cash out? What’s the cost-benefit analysis look like? One or two of your women? All of the Shield? Zach?”
“Stop acting like a child,” Maya said, contempt in her voice. “This is not a game. Nothing comes for free. You may be young enough to still believe otherwise, but the truth is clear to me. The truth is that everyone dies.”
Everyone dies, Cass thought. True enough, everyone dies. But they don’t all have to die today.
“Look,” Cass continued, circling around to what Maya had implied a moment ago, “I’m not some ‘blade’ to be wielded by you or anyone else. I’m not some tool in your toolkit. I’m sick of your schemes. I can hardly tell half the time if w
e’re even on the same side.”
Cass slapped Maya’s hand away and turned to go.
Maya pursed her lips and bit her tongue. There was nothing she could say here, not right now. She wasn’t going to persuade Cass.
She signaled for the remaining Amazons to form up and, to Cass’s surprise, she led them back in the direction of the London hub.
Zach watched Maya go, obviously pained to lose her help. Then he turned and caught up with Cass.
Cass was walking so fast she was practically running. She wasn’t headed anywhere in particular. But she was, clearly, headed away. Zach had to work to keep up with her.
Cass was so tired of feeling this way. She was so tired of being cold. She needed to be rid of this anger. She need to be free of this fear. She needed a world where she and Zach could step away from this madness and be alone and start again.
She needed to end this, once and for all.
“Cass,” Zach said, taking her by the hand, slowing their pace. “Where are we going?”
In response to Zach’s question, Cass felt her resolve harden. A decision came into focus and she found herself repeating out loud what she’d just been telling herself in her head.
“We’re going to end this, Zach,” she said, her voice raw and gravelly. “We’re going to end it once and for all.”
Cass faced him and took his head in her hands, pulling him close. She looked him dead in the eye. Her voice was eerily calm.
“Without Maya’s complicated schemes getting in the way, we’re going to the ruins of the castle. We’re going to recover the relic. We’re going to lure Miranda and the Heretic into the open. And we’re going to end this.”
Zach, his head still in her hands, swallowed hard. Cass knew he wasn’t going to leave her now. The best objection he could muster was a practical one.
“But Cass, you saw that tunnel, stuffed with vampires. We don’t have any way to get to the castle. We’ll never fight through them all.”
Cass bowed her head, considering this. When she looked up again, she knew what to do.
She kissed him.
“I know another way,” she said.
32
THEY TOOK THE same overnight train from Istanbul to Bucharest that Cass and Richard had taken.
For Cass, the déjà vu was very strong and very weird. The last time she’d taken this trip to Judas’s castle, she’d barely known anything about herself or this new world, they’d been racing to save Zach and Miranda, and her feminine charms had, apparently, literally restarted Richard’s undead heart.
Sitting now in the dark of that same private cabin with Zach instead, knowing more about this world than she wanted to, and racing to stop Miranda rather than save her, Cass had to pop a pair of aspirin just to calm the dissonance in her head. Everywhere she looked she was seeing double and none of the images matched.
Life is weird, Jones, she thought, and then you die.
Zach was leaning against the train car window, his head against a small pillow. Cass was leaning against him, his arm around her. The rhythm of the train—clackety-clack, clackety-clack—as it gently swayed had put Zach to sleep. His face was covered in scratchy stubble. His thick, dark hair needed to be cut. In the pallid light that intermittently flashed through the window, his dark complexion was pale and the deep creases in his checks—etched there by his persistent, slightly goofy smile—contrasted sharply.
“God, I love you,” she whispered and pulled his arm tighter around her.
Cass was walking a knife’s edge between passing out from exhaustion and being so wrung out that she wouldn’t sleep for a week. Poised between the two, she teetered on the edge for a time, tip-toeing up to oblivion, only to have the fire in her mind reignited by some worry or fear that fanned the flames of her smoldering anger.
It didn’t take much to fan those flans. She was tortured by the idea of all they had already lost. And she felt she might be driven mad by the itching fear that she could also lose Zach.
Now she was wide awake again, her body flooded with useless, restless energy.
She slipped out from under Zach’s arm, careful not to wake him, and stepped out into the narrow passageway. The space was dimly light by a single bulb in the center of the hall.
Had it looked like that when they’d boarded?
Cass wobbled to the end of the car, swaying with the train, looking for some relief in the dining car. If she remembered right, it was two cars back in this direction. She passed between the cars and paused for a moment in the cold night air as it rushed through her hair. The air temperature matched how she felt inside. The skies were clear. The countryside rushed by.
Cass saw her reflection in the car window. Her head hovered there, bodiless. The headless image prompted to replay that moment when, flooded with rage, she’d blindly lopped off that Amazon’s head and, then, had almost taken off Zach’s.
If she’d been a split second slower to recognize what she was doing—
Cass rapped on her forehead with her knuckles, trying to dislodge the image. Fresh air wasn’t helping. She stepped into the adjoining car, fixed now on finding a strong drink at the bar in the dining car.
This second car was also filled with private cabins. And, too, its narrow passageway was also lit by a single, bare bulb, halfway down its length.
Even though she was inside now, the air still felt cold. Halfway down the hall, the train swayed violently and Cass was thrown against a cabin door. Bracing herself, her hand pressed against the door’s lock.
The lock was ice cold.
Cass took a closer look at the door. Unlike the other cabin doors, it was perfectly flush with the wall and had no external handle.
This wasn’t a door, she knew.
This was a mind.
Cass tested the door. It didn’t pop open when she applied pressure.
She lightly knocked. Nothing happened.
She curled her fingers into a smoking fist and punched a hole through the door, popping out the lock. The door swung open. A dim light shone from inside.
She fingered her grass ring. It was still intact. She took a deep breath, afraid of what she might find, and stepped across the threshold.
Inside, the cabin was not a cabin. It was the basement room in her father’s house.
However, instead of being a workout space filled with mats and weights, the room looked like it had when Cass was little. It was filled with her mother’s things: her sewing machine, the chair in which Cass had found St. Jude’s medallion, a bookshelf full of old books stuffed with marginalia and Post-It notes, and a wall covered in clippings, hand-written notes, spells, and diagrams of the human body.
Cass had forgotten about this wall. Taking it down was the first thing her father had done after Rose’s death. But as soon as she saw it, the memory came rushing back.
Why was she in this room? Was this her father’s mind? Was it her own?
Cass circled the room, taking stock, but she was afraid to touch anything.
As she circled, she noticed details she’d missed at first. An ugly water stain stretched across the ceiling and down one wall, discoloring and buckling the wood paneling. The carpet was frayed and stained. The room’s sole window, high in the wall on one end, was filthy and nearly blacked out. The room smelled strongly of mold with a slight hint of something dead.
Cass couldn’t remember the room ever being in this state of disrepair.
She stopped at the desk and thumbed a pencil, rolling its octagonal barrel back and forth across the desk’s laminated top, and a memory bloomed in her mind.
However, unlike her previous experiences in Zach’s and Kumiko’s mind, Cass didn’t experience this memory in the first person. It remained, stubbornly, at a distance, as if the memory, or the mind it belonged to, were actively resisting her.
In the memory, Cass, her mother, and her father were in the kitchen upstairs. Cass was seated at the table, holding this same pencil. Her father was preparing dinner. Her mother
was sitting next to her. Her perfume smelled amazing—how had Cass forgotten the smell of that perfume? Cass was bent over a worksheet, trying to wrap her head around fractions. Rose pointed something out to Cass, Gary cracked a joke as he added vegetables to the pan, and Cass saw her own face light up as she finally understood. She scribbled down the answer and flew through the rest of the worksheet. Rose kissed the top of Cass’s head, winked at Gary, and smiled.
Cass let go of the pencil. The moment was almost unbearable in its simplicity. It hurt to see her family all together like that, on an ordinary Tuesday with ordinary work and ordinary troubles, happy.
Cass wiped away cold tears.
She took a closer look at the materials pinned to the wall, but couldn’t make any sense of them. If there was a deeper logic organizing them, she couldn’t see it yet.
She turned to the bookshelf and scanned the titles. Most of the books were old with titles in Latin, Greek, or Japanese.
Cass moved to the table with scraps of fabric and the sewing machine.
She thumbed through the stack of fabric and pulled out a scrap of black material. Her mother had made a dress from this material. She’d worn it on her and Gary’s tenth anniversary. Cass saw the two of them upstairs in their bedroom, getting ready to go out for the night. Rose was standing in front of the mirror, putting on her earrings. Gary was standing behind her, tying his tie for the third time—he liked to get the length exactly right. He pulled the knot tight, then put his hands on Rose’s hips, rolling the silky black fabric between the tips of his thumb and index finger. Rose smiled and said that she didn’t have to wear this dress—or anything at all—if Gary preferred to just stay in tonight. Gary laughed his modest laugh and pulled her closer.
Cass let go.
The memories were making her feel dizzy.
They were more like salt in a wound than any kind of comfort. How was any of this going to help her do what needed to be done when she finally arrived at the ruins of Judas’s castle?
The dizziness increased and Cass stepped backward, feeling for the basement’s armchair, and tried to sit herself down gently, hoping a moment’s rest would give the vertigo a chance to pass.