by Laura Legend
She’d awoken that first night after they’d brought her here from the ruins of Judas’s castle and confronted Richard about where Zach and her mother where, but she’d immediately been felled by this same pain. She’d barely gotten to her feet when her eye began to burn and the knife slipped deep into her frontal lobe. Her knees buckled and Richard had caught her just as her head was about to hit the floor. She’d looked up at him for a moment with her good eye, framed as he was by the starlight, and then she’d blacked out for days.
Something was wrong with her. In fact, something was very wrong with her. Time had gotten bent out of joint. And when she was conscious enough to worry about it, she didn’t have the faintest idea of how to fix it.
She lay in bed for a long time, breathing slowly, straining to hold the pain without fighting it. She waited and breathed and waited and eventually the night passed and the edges of the sky, scalloped by mountain peaks, began to shift from black to purple to blue.
The most important thing, she reminded herself, was to keep her head empty. The most important thing was to avoid thinking about anything.
If she gave her mind any rope, it immediately went chasing after thoughts of Zach and her mother. Cass could handle the pain in her eye. But she was in no condition to deal with the ramifications of Zach’s transmutation into some kind of hulking, red-horned monster—was he gone for good? was his transformation permanent? Would she ever see him again?—let alone deal with the fact that her mother was not only alive, but the damn Heretic herself. In this respect at least, the physical pain in her eye intermittently arrived as a welcome distraction from the deeper heartaches she wasn’t yet ready to confront.
Cass rolled over in bed, curled into a ball, and pulled the blankets over her head.
Her eye still burned, but the intensity had waned. Now the burning reminded her of how her eye felt when her powers came online and the light began to flow through her. That burn, though, accompanied by the thrill of the power that it signaled, was largely pleasant. This burn didn’t signal any power; it just hurt.
Cass gently rubbed the corner of her weak eye, massaging it.
She knew now that the “accident” that had given her this milky, wandering eye was no such thing. Before her mother’s death—her undeath?—she had intentionally locked away Cass’s emotions and cast a spell that dampened her powers and emotions. Now her eye functioned like a circuit breaker, preventing her powers and emotions from overwhelming her. For a long time, it had prevented her from knowing that she’d even had any powers. For a long time, it had prevented her from feeling much of anything.
And to be honest, it had, for a long time, also protected her, just as her mother had intended.
But those days were past. Now, everything was unraveling.
Immediately after she’d lost her mother, before she’d acclimated to the spell, Cass would sometimes feel a stabbing pain like this in her weak eye. The doctors couldn’t find any explanation for it, and they’d sent her and her dad home to deal with it on their own. Her father, of course, had refused to let Cass use anything stronger than aspirin. Instead, he’d taken up the task himself. He’d carefully monitored her diet, noting some weak correlations between attacks and certain types of food. But mostly he’d helped her by inventing a method for managing the pain.
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.
Chapter 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 flickered 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 its pointy 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 to its feet. 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 t
o 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.
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 on 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.
Richard 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 rained 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 lust 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 tone of 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.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, incidents, and dialogue are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.
Fearless. Copyright © 2019 by Laura Legend. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be produced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Cover art by Momir Borocki
First edition
EPub Edition April 2019
Print Edition April 2019