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  5

  UNDERNEATH THE SUFFOCATING weight of the sedative, Cass gathered herself together, slowly consolidating her sense of self around the questions that haunted her.

  At first, they focused on Rose, and Cass built herself up until she was as strong and sharp as the blade of her katana, smoothly cutting her way through intertwined questions in order to find answers. She could track down Amare and force him to tell her about Rose, and ask him what had led her mother to throw away her life with Cass and her dad.

  And if she could come to understand Rose, then she could come to understand Miranda, and her betrayal, and the reasons she died with the protruding spine and overflowing teeth of a fully feral vampire in her mouth.

  Cass could feel her body gaining strength as she imagined herself finding the answers to her questions. It was like figuring these things out somehow managed to expel the weakness that had plagued her for so long.

  And she would be stronger yet if she knew the truth about Zach—what had happened to the man who had filled her body and soul with the secure knowledge of his love?

  Her heart felt like it was cracking open, and all the strength she’d gathered dissipated into the vanishing strands of the sedation as she rose to the surface of reality.

  Now, Cass felt like she was made of glass.

  The pain had subsided to a dull ache and time seemed, at least for the moment, stable. But Cass couldn’t help feeling like the smallest wrong move could send her spiraling back down that hole. Since she’d woken up this morning to a window full of sun and blue skies, she’d held herself very still and tried not to move more than was absolutely necessary, afraid that her fragile peace might crack down the middle and shatter into a thousand sharp pieces.

  Staying very still, however, turned out to be very hard to do when you were trying to eat soup.

  She felt like she was doing it in slow motion. The bowl of chicken noodle was steaming on the tray in front of her, but by the time she got a spoonful to her mouth it hardly seemed warm.

  Richard sat in a chair at her bedside. He’d brought the soup himself.

  Cass was glad for his company but she felt ridiculous as he tensed up with each spoonful, waiting on pins and needles, until it arrived safely in her mouth.

  Cass looked at him out of the corner of her good eye.

  “Stop it,” she said, dipping her spoon back into the bowl.

  “What?” Richard asked, sitting on the edge of his seat as she slowly drew the spoon from the bowl to her lips.

  “That!” Cass replied, slurping the soup and then whacking his leg with the flat of her spoon.

  Cass worried for a moment that she’d overdone it and upset her own internal balance but, instead, the flash of movement actually felt good. It felt good to forget herself and act without inhibition. It felt good to act as if she weren’t sick.

  Richard leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs, nonchalant. He brushed his pants off at the spot where Cass’s wet spoon had made contact.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, suppressing a smile at his own anxiety. “I’m just a bearer of soup, casually sitting by as you enjoy your American version of a home remedy.”

  “I’m just glad you didn’t bring me some kind of blood pudding—or worse, even—some cold cucumber soup.”

  Richard looked puzzled, as if he had no idea why she wouldn’t actually want either of those things. Was she still joking?

  Cass’s spoon scraped the bottom of the bowl.

  She’d done it. She’d finished a bowl of soup.

  You’re crushing it today, Jones, Cass thought to herself. Really crushing it.

  Richard stood and rolled her tray off to the side.

  Cass licked her spoon and set it on the nightstand. When she put it down, though, she also noticed, for the first time in weeks, that the rings were still there. Zach’s broken gold band and her own wilted grass ring were still in a small dish on the stand. She reached out to touch them. Her fingers hovered in the air above them for a few seconds before she withdrew her hand without making contact.

  Richard was standing at her bedside, waiting to see if she needed anything else.

  Cass knew exactly what she needed.

  She needed to not be in this room anymore. She needed to step outside and away from her sickness and those rings. She needed a little distance and a little air. She needed to feel the sun on her face.

  Cass sat up and moved to swing her legs out of bed.

  “Whoa, there,” Richard said, moving to tuck her back into bed.

  When he reached for her shoulder, Cass instinctively deflected his hand. Her feet were touching the cold floor now.

  “Cassandra,” Richard said, impatient.

  When he reached again to help her back into bed, this time with both hands, Cass ducked under his arm and, with a bit of Jiujitsu, hooked his foot, bent his hand behind his back, and used his own momentum to plant him face-first on the bed.

  “Ow,” Richard deadpanned, his voice muffled by the blankets. “That escalated fast.”

  Cass let go of his hand, a little embarrassed. She hadn’t intended to do that. But now that she was on her feet, she didn’t regret it, either.

  “I need to get out of this room for a minute, Richard. I need to get outside.”

  Richard sat up on the bed.

  Cass’s eyes snapped to the rings on the nightstand and then back to Richard. Without warning, the dam broke. Her eyes filled with tears and she began to sob. Her tears were hot and angry. Richard stood and took her in his arms. She pounded her fists against his solid chest, tears streaming freely.

  “What happened to him, Richard? Where is he? Is he gone forever? Is he dead?”

  Richard’s only response was to tighten his arms as he held her close.

  Cass was desperate to know the truth. And she was almost as desperate to never learn it.

  Richard’s voice was almost a whisper.

  “We don’t know. We just don’t know. We’ve been looking but haven’t been able to find him anywhere.” Richard paused for a moment. “He may be dead. Or, if past transformations are any indication, he may be sunk inside of that monster permanently. In either case ... it doesn’t look good.”

  Cass pushed back, breaking free of his embrace. She wiped her nose on her sleeve and blotted tears from her eyes with the back of her hands. If she needed to get outside a minute ago, she needed it ten times more now. Before Richard could withhold his permission, Cass slid across the bed, sending blankets sprawling to the floor, grabbed the handle to the balcony door, and threw it open.

  A strong, cold, high altitude wind blew through the open door. Cass stepped outside. She closed her eyes and let the wind wash over her. She stretched out her arms. The slack in her oversized silk pajamas fluttered in the wind. Her skin puckered from the cold. The sun, though, was high in the sky and warm on her face and hands.

  Cass welcomed the cold air into her lungs, wishing it would also freeze her heart into place so that it couldn’t break anymore.

  Richard stepped out onto the deck. He had a blanket in hand. He tested to see if she would allow it, and then draped it over her shoulders.

  Cass accepted the gift. She wasn’t done yet with the pain. She wasn’t ready to move past the work of mourning. She just needed some space to breathe in relation to it.

  She looked down at her toes. Her feet were already blue. She wrapped the blanket tight around her, took a deep breath, and turned toward Richard.

  “I can’t give up on him,” Cass said. “I can’t give up on him.”

  Richard nodded.

  “No one’s asking you to surrender,” he said gently.

  Cass reached out from under the blanket and took his hand.

  “Good,” she said, squinting up at him in the light, “because I’m terrible at surrendering.”

  “Still,” he said, his voice more serious than Cass would have liked, “if the time for surrendering ever comes, you may be s
urprised to find that you are good at that, too.”

  Cass bowed her head.

  Maybe.

  Maybe such a time would come. But she was sure that time wasn’t now.

  “In the meanwhile,” Richard continued, “not surrendering is hard work. You’re going to need your strength. You won’t be much good to anyone unless you get some rest and heal.”

  Hanging on to her hand, Richard led her back inside. Cass, with a backward glance at the sun, let him.

  Richard tucked her back into bed and, as Cass’s head hit the pillow, she already felt exhausted from her little adventure.

  Sleep was coming for her.

  But as her eyes were closing, Cass couldn’t help but notice the distinctive click of a locking door as Richard left the room.

  6

  TWENTY-FOUR HOURS later, Cass still felt relatively stable.

  Last night, instead of lying awake or blacking out, she’d actually slept, and when she’d woken up this morning, she’d felt like a real human being.

  Not long after her eyes opened, Richard had stopped in to see her, dressed for traveling. His black tie was striking against his crisp white shirt. He’d kissed her on the forehead and promised to be back soon.

  Since then, Cass had been cared for by a newly arrived pair of “health care professionals”—though, from the moment she’d laid eyes on them, it was obvious that any reference to them as health care professionals deserved scare quotes.

  The woman who brought her lunch was exhibit A. Even without her ill-fitting nurses’ smock and forced bedside manner, it would have been clear that she was no nurse. With her broken nose, heavy mascara, marbled forearms, and tree-trunk thighs, she looked more like a professional boxer dressed as a nurse for Halloween.

  The nail in the coffin, though, was that the nurse, like Richard, had also locked the door behind her as she left the room. When Cass saw this, she knew she needed to take a closer look around the chalet. She wasn’t sure if these “health care professionals” were here to protect her from danger or to keep her from being a danger, but either way, it was clear she needed a more accurate picture of her current situation. There were all kinds of things she couldn’t find answers for right now in her life, but figuring out the present—that was something she could do right now.

  With Richard gone, now seemed like as good a time as any.

  Cass stayed in bed the rest of the afternoon.

  When they brought her dinner, she met her other “health care professional.” The woman was 6’6,” with flaming red hair. She struck Cass as a cross between a supermodel and an industrial grade wood chipper. The nurse’s sweater she’d pulled on over her tactical gear was more like a joke than a disguise. Apparently, they weren’t especially concerned about what Cass thought. From their conversations downstairs, Cass gleaned that the boxer’s name was Gertrude and the wood chipper’s name was Red.

  When Red slid Cass’s dinner onto the bedside tray, she stopped for a minute and looked down her nose. She weighed Cass in her eyes—5’4”, slight, bedridden—and shook her head in disbelief, a slight sneer curling her upper lip. Cass could see the whole internal monologue playing out in the woman’s head: “This is the champion fighter? This is who we’re supposed to be on guard against? This puking cumbubble is the Seer? I’d like to put her in her place …”

  Cass lay still and didn’t meet her gaze. To be fair, she didn’t feel like a prize fighter right now, either. And Cass had no intention of revealing what little bit of strength she had banked over the past day, particularly to this woman, who looked like she’d enjoy the task of putting Cass back in her place a little too much.

  Taking a key from her pocket, Red double-checked that the balcony door was still locked. Then, after leaving room, she used the key to lock the bedroom door from the outside.

  Cass lay still and listened carefully. As she ate her soup, she paired Red’s combat boots with the sounds she heard from the rooms below, then worked out by process of elimination which footsteps belonged to the boxer. Because the bedroom was a loft and, apart from a waist-high wall, opened onto the chalet’s living room below, she didn’t have any trouble hearing what they were doing. She finished her meal and spent the rest of the evening listening and tracking their movements.

  Gertrude and Red had clearly worked together before. If Red was the leader in Maya’s Amazonian army that she appeared to be—then Gertrude was her second in command. Their conversation consisted of fragmentary observations and inside jokes in the casual, partial communication of people long used to depending on each other. When they took a break to spar in the kitchen, Cass heard Red push the table aside without any effort; during the match, it sounded like Gertrude was living up to her potential as the boxer, raining down hits on Red until she swore. The women laughed—quietly—and Cass felt a quick pang of longing for her own sparring companions and the comfort of close friends. Time to focus, Jones, and figure things out, she thought, swallowing down the lump that was forming in her throat.

  Cass waited until long after the sky had gone dark and both Red and Gertrude had been quiet for some time. Unless she was mistaken, they were both settled in the kitchen beneath her bedroom.

  Cass slipped out of bed and tip-toed to the door. It was, just as she’d seen, locked. She returned to her bed and arranged the pillows under the blankets to make it look like a snoozing figure. The results did not look anything like a person her size sleeping in a bed.

  Screw it, she thought. Who’s going to check? And even if they catch me, what are they going to do to me? Send the soup without crackers tomorrow? She wished she fully believed her pep talk. The underlying cruelty of Red’s gaze she’d seen earlier hinted that capture by Maya’s Amazonian leader would not be a gentle experience.

  Cass’s plan was to go over the side of the loft and swing herself silently to the floor in the hallway out of sight of the kitchen. She was just leaning over the wall and assessing the layout of the living room below when she heard a kitchen chair push back from the table, followed by the sound of Red’s boots as the Amazon left the kitchen and started up the stairs to Cass’s room.

  Before Cass had time to react, Red was already at the door, inserting her key. The door swung open and a bar of light from the hallway fell across the bed.

  Cass jumped over the side of the loft and clung to the side of the wall, her legs curled up to her chest so that the boxer wouldn’t see them hanging from the kitchen ceiling.

  Cass listened as Red stepped into the room. Maybe she hadn’t found the pillows very convincing?

  The muscles in Cass’s arms and core were already quivering from the effort of hanging. Cass pulled herself up a little higher to peek over the edge.

  Red was staring at the bed with its pillow person.

  Cass, at a loss about what to do, made a very quiet snoring sound and hoped that Red wouldn’t be able to tell exactly where the sound was coming from.

  In response, Red cocked her head and smiled. She locked the door behind her and tromped back down the stairs.

  Cass let out a little sigh of relief, though her arms were shaking now and her hold on the lip of the wall was beginning to slip.

  Red passed right beneath her as she returned to kitchen. She exchanged a few words with the boxer, then locked herself in the bathroom.

  Cass figured Red would be in there for a while. She could only imagine that it took a lot of plucking for Red to keep those eyebrows so beautifully arched.

  She shimmied along the edge of the wall as far as she could go and swung herself off to the side, out of sight of the kitchen, landing silently on the wood floor in her bare feet. Cass could hardly believe she’d managed it. Her whole body was trembling with exertion. She was sticky with cold sweat.

  Cass took a look in the direction of the living room, then down the hallway. A fire was crackling in the enormous fireplace. The room she wanted to see was Richard’s study. If there was information laying around for her to gather, she would find i
t there.

  However, before she could slip down the hall into the study, Cass heard Gertrude’s chair screech along the kitchen floor. With just a couple steps, she would be out here in the hallway with Cass. There was no time for Cass to make it into the study.

  Cass panicked. Instead of bolting for the study, she stepped back into the living room and hid herself behind a floor lamp. The lamp shade did a great job of concealing her entire head but, as thin as she was, she was not as thin as a lamp stand.

  Nice one, Jones, she thought. No wonder you were always “it” when it came time to play hide and seek.

  The boxer, though, walked right past, oblivious. She went into the study, retrieved some papers, and passed Cass again on her way back to the kitchen table.

  Cass stayed absolutely still, trying not to think any thoughts that a lamp wouldn’t think.

  Once Gertrude was back in the kitchen, Cass breathed a second sigh of relief and wiped the clammy sweat from her forehead. Her pajamas were soaked through at the armpits. Before anything else could go wrong, she slipped down the hall, into the study, and quietly closed the door behind her.

  There were no lights on in the study, but because it shared the fireplace with the living room, the darkness was mitigated by the dim, crackling light of the fire. Cass let her eyes adjust and then began a circuit of the room.

  She noted the couch where Richard had been sleeping. A rack of his clothes and winter gear stood in the corner. He’d folded the blankets and sheets and stacked them neatly on the end table before departing. She caught a faint whiff of his expensive cologne clinging to the sheets.

  He’d barely left and she already missed him.

  Cass worked her way around to the desk. The desk was covered in stacks of paper. They were hard to read in this light, and the first few reports simply confirmed things she already knew: they weren’t sure what was wrong with Cass or how to heal her, they’d been unable to locate Zach, and, all things being equal, they weren’t likely to. The only difference between the written reports and what Richard had relayed to her was that, on paper, the pessimism of the reports wasn’t softened by the stubbornly hopeful tone that had marked Richard’s voice.