The Order of Shadows

by Tess Adair

  Still no response. Jude hurried to pull her pants back up and flush, then came out of her stall.

  When she turned toward the sink, an unusual scene greeted her: Logan appeared to have fallen to her knees, her upper body slumped over the counter, with the sink still running.

  “Uh, Logan? What’s—are you—”

  Before she could finish the thought, Logan’s shoulders gave a shake, and she raised her head, glancing around the sterile brightness of the room. Then she sprang back to her feet and resumed washing her hands, as though nothing had happened.

  “Are you okay?”

  Logan met Jude’s eyes in the mirror, and for a moment, it looked like she had no idea who she was at all. Then she cracked a smile and shut off the sink.

  “Yeah, I’m good. Bit tired, I guess. Here, sink’s all yours.” She stepped back, grabbing a paper towel as she did so.

  And then she walked away, as if it had never happened.

  Lying in her bed now, Jude still wondered what that moment meant. Maybe Logan really had been tired. After all, it was a long day.

  But adding to the mystery was what happened next. When they left the taco place, Logan curtly informed Jude that they’d be backtracking on the highway so they could stay in some town to the east. She’d offered no further explanation than that, and Jude hadn’t been sure how to ask. They’d ended up at a town even smaller than Wolf Creek, and they’d pulled over at the first motel they saw.

  This was where Jude experienced her last moment of pause.

  While Jude settled in for bed, Logan kept her boots on. She slipped into the bathroom for a few minutes with her bag, but when she came back out, she looked exactly the same. Jude was already having trouble remaining conscious, but she kept her eyes on Logan as she passed by her bed and sat on the edge of her own, looking down at her phone screen.

  “You going to sleep?” Jude asked.

  Logan glanced over at her, then back at her phone.

  “I’ll get to bed soon enough. Go ahead and get some sleep. Don’t worry about me.”

  Jude found little satisfaction in this answer, but words were already difficult to form, and the lure of the first real bed she’d slept on in days was strong. She groped the bed beside her until her hand connected with her phone, and a part of her wondered if she should try calling Amy back.

  Maybe I’ll do it in the morning.

  Within seconds, she felt herself fading entirely. Just before she drifted off to sleep, she could have sworn she heard the room’s door open and quietly shut.

  The next morning, when Jude struggled her way awake, Logan wasn’t there. Seeing the empty room around her, she got up and checked the bathroom. Also empty. She even peeked her head outside—no Logan, and, more worryingly, no motorcycle either.

  For a brief moment, Jude had wondered if she’d been left alone after all. Perhaps Logan’s offer had been a trick from the start, and now Jude would be stranded—with no way back to her hometown and no future waiting for her there, anyway.

  Her mind flashed to her parents, but it didn’t remain there long. Her parents probably didn’t even know she’d left town, and they wouldn’t care either way. Panic threatened to rise in her throat.

  Until she remembered Amy. Maybe Amy didn’t know exactly where she was, but she would care. Jude plucked her phone off the nightstand and clicked it on, finding Amy’s name reassuringly resting at the top of her recent calls. A sigh of relief rolled out of her.

  As her relief settled in, her eyes fell on Logan’s bed: a laptop and a messenger bag, neither of which belonged to Jude, were sitting right on top of it. Jude could have slapped herself.

  What are you even doing right now? she’d thought. Logan will be back any minute. Cool your fucking jets, Judith.

  As her heart rate had returned to normal, she’d decided to switch on the television. She clicked around for a few minutes, finding primarily commercials on every channel, until she finally settled on a local news broadcast.

  “—and patients’ families have demanded immediate action in response to the rising number of confirmed infections. The state has threatened to revoke accreditation if official standards are not met. In other news, the family of a slain girl from the town of Wolf Creek may finally have some answers about their daughter’s gruesome and untimely death.”

  As Jude stared in shock, a picture of Violet Buchanan flashed across the screen in front of her.

  Well, that wasn’t exactly how I was planning to wake up this morning.

  The broadcast went on to say that the carcass of a giant animal, believed to be a grizzly bear, had been discovered in the woods surrounding the town. Officials were unable to confirm the identity of the creature because somehow its remains had been mutilated to such a degree that a specialist needed to be called in to identify it.

  Jude unconsciously glanced toward the front door, wondering where Logan was now. She couldn’t help but wonder how many demons Logan had hunted like that before, and how many different ways the truth had been obscured from public discourse.

  While she sat contemplating in silence, the news report continued.

  “As luck would have it, Wolf Creek is not the only Montana town currently under threat from its local wildlife. An area cattle farmer was found dead outside the town of Drummond this week, in an attack that bears many similarities to the tragedy in Wolf Creek. Local law enforcement officials are teaming up with park rangers and animal control, on the hunt for another possible grizzly gone wild. Area residents are being encouraged to remain indoors after nightfall, and to postpone any hiking or camping trips they may have planned for the foreseeable future, until more information has been gathered on what exactly killed this man. In other news, an opportunity to help alleviate part of our unemployment—”

  Jude clicked the television off, finding she couldn’t quite listen to it anymore.

  Another attack? What does that mean? Was there another demon roaming around Montana right at this very moment? Where had they said it was?

  And where was Logan?

  Drummond. Something had flashed through Jude’s mind, almost too quick for her to catch it—a road sign. Before they turned off the road last night, had she seen a road sign? Had it said Drummond?

  At that moment, Logan had walked in the front door, carrying a disposable coffee cup and a paper bag bulging with something that smelled like food.

  “Breakfast?” she said with a smile, offering the bag over to Jude. Jude accepted it gladly, trying her best to return Logan’s smile while her mind raced.

  No way are we in Drummond right now. That makes no sense. Sure, Logan is cool, but how could she possibly know that something was happening here? Maybe it really was a wild bear attack, and it’s just a coincidence that it happened right after Kurt summoned a demon. That has to be the simplest explanation, right?

  Something about the situation didn’t sit right with her, but Jude decided to set it aside. It didn’t matter anyway. Right?

  “I don’t want to rush you,” said Logan, “but the faster you eat, the sooner we can get on the road. We’ve got about a seven-hour ride ahead of us, give or take.” She’d checked her phone. “And I don’t know about you, but I might need to stop and eat again in, like, an hour. We’ll see.”

  Jude nodded numbly and opened up the paper bag. As she tore into her breakfast, Logan walked around to the other side of her bed, picked up her laptop, and opened her bag to slip it inside.

  And Jude blinked. Had she seen what she thought she’d seen? She thought she’d seen Logan’s shirt inside the bag, covered in blood.

  Stop being ridiculous, she told herself, taking a deep breath. She finished her breakfast in record time, then stood up and turned around to dress herself, facing back toward her own bed and away from Logan. As she did so, her eyes had rested for a moment on the little plastic sign sitting next to the remote on the table.

  It read: The Sleepy Inn at Drummond.

  Drummond. They were in the town o
n the news; there was no denying that.

  At the time, she hadn’t made the further connection, but now, lying in her bed at the Logan estate, she could. Logan had been unusually ravenous that morning, just as she had the day before—just as she often was, right after a kill.

  But there was another question behind that, one that Jude had been circling around for weeks now, but over and over again, she’d chosen not to ask it. Now, as the last vestiges of adrenaline left her body and exhaustion settled in fully, she pondered it again. It was a simple question, really.

  How had Logan ever known to come to Wolf Creek in the first place?

  Chapter Two

  Down on the Estate

  When Jude woke in the morning, she had one hand closed around Mortimer the moose’s neck, as tight and unmovable as rigor mortis. She forced herself to relax and took a breath, then used her other hand to reach for the alarm going off on her phone.

  Self-defense training today, she thought to herself, trying not to feel disappointed. If someone had told her two months ago that she’d be starting out her day with a self-defense class, she would have been elated. Now, of course, she knew for sure that magic existed, and it seemed to make the rest of the world lose some luster.

  Still, staying in bed wasn’t going to change her schedule or Logan’s mind. If she was ever going to get to go out in the field and face a real demon, instead of that creepy, translucent ghost Logan used for training, then she needed to get up and do as she was told—and she needed to kick ass at it. So, with a sigh and a grit of her teeth, she climbed out from under her covers. Propping Mortimer up on a pillow, she tucked a blanket edge around him and hoped he would forgive her for strangling him in her sleep.

  Then she walked across the room to the heavy black curtains and pulled them wide. She couldn’t help but let out a small sigh at the sight that greeted her.

  The first time Jude had laid eyes on the estate, she didn’t believe what she was seeing. As Logan’s motorcycle had flown down the lane leading up to the monolithic building before them, the sun had already begun to set, and Jude had had to blink several times to make sure she wasn’t imagining it.

  It’s a fucking mansion, she’d thought. Thanks to the sheer size of the thing, she’d felt automatically uninvited, an unwanted intruder, even before she’d ever set foot inside. Its large stone façade was forbidding and stern, promising dark ritual and danger within. Even after sleeping in one of its rooms for a month, it still made Jude uneasy to look at it from afar.

  Looking out from within it, however, was a different story. In every direction she looked, all she could see was natural beauty: tall evergreen trees lined the property, giving way to the thick forest in which they trained, and in the distance, Jude could see white-capped mountains sheathed in swirling clouds. Though it was June, the sky was gray, and a fog threatened to roll in from the east. By her estimate, the temperature here was anywhere between ten and twenty degrees cooler than Wolf Creek, though she knew they weren’t much farther north; they were simply closer to the coast.

  Finally, she turned away from the window again and walked back to her enormous closet, where she picked out a cheerful green T-shirt and a pair of loose running shorts. She was about to slip on her running shoes and join Knatt downstairs when she decided to give her phone a quick check. As soon as she clicked on the screen, she saw a message from Amy.

  I miss you. Call me soon?

  Jude’s heart did a backflip in her chest. Amy. If she had a single regret about leaving Wolf Creek behind, that regret would be Amy-shaped.

  Before Logan showed up, Jude would have said that the biggest change her life had ever undergone was the first time Amy had ever talked to her. In a roundabout way, magic had brought that into her life, too.

  The first time Jude had ever been alone with an internet connection, she had used it to look up magic, and she’d been using it for that ever since. Over time, she’d accumulated a list of possible spells, casting ingredients, and magical symbols, and assembled them together in a handwritten notebook that she kept secret from her parents, moving it between a few different hiding spots throughout the house. Sometimes, when she was bored, she would doodle copies of some of the symbols, scrawling them over and over on the backs of scratch paper or the margins of other notebooks.

  That was the only reason Amy had ever talked to her in the first place. One day in class, Amy looked over and saw Jude scribbling out a swirling, loopy symbol on the side of her notes. She tapped her on the shoulder and smiled.

  “What are you drawing there?”

  “Huh?”

  “What are you drawing? There, that thing on your paper. What’s that?”

  “Oh, uh, it’s just this thing—this, uh, this picture I found online. It’s uh, it’s an occult thing, I guess.”

  Amy’s smile lit up her entire face, like she’d never heard of anything so exciting.

  “Oh my god, that’s so cool! Where’d you find it? Can you draw me one?”

  And just like that, a bridge formed between the two of them. Even now, Jude didn’t quite get it. What had Amy seen in her? Why had she ever bothered?

  And what could she possibly see in her now?

  I miss you. Call me soon?

  Jude stared down at her phone a moment longer. She wanted to talk to Amy, didn’t she? Yes. Despite a looming but vague sense of dread, she did. So she tapped out a response.

  Yeah, call you tonight.

  With that, she put her phone away and marched out of the room.

  The self-defense trainer turned out to be a short, curvy woman in her 40s, with thick, curly black hair falling nearly to her waist, wearing what could only be described as yoga-chic. Knatt introduced her as Adele Pendello and left them to it.

  They stepped out onto the back patio to begin, and to Jude’s surprise and pleasure, Adele immediately demonstrated a baseline knowledge of casting.

  “Let’s start with a quick centering meditation,” she said as she passed Jude a yoga mat to stand on. “Henri tells me you’ve been studying both fencing and letha casting, but that your knowledge of eira would be…limited. Tell me, have you ever read any of the Teirahan guided scripts?”

  “Have I read—what?” Jude stopped halfway through laying out her mat, nonplussed.

  Adele gave her an inquisitive look.

  “The guided scripts…from Teirahan? The living refuge for Adherents of the Moon Temple?”

  Jude stared at her blankly for a moment before she realized she was expected to respond.

  “Uh, the Adherents of…um, what?”

  Adele placed her hands on her hips and frowned.

  “You do know what eira is, don’t you?”

  Jude felt a wave of self-consciousness come over her. “Uh, I mean, I know it’s another form of casting, and—and Mr. Knatt said it doesn’t require all the catalysts that letha does.”

  “That’s all?”

  Jude took a breath and thought about what she knew. “Eira can summon the elements. And—well, you have to reach inner peace or something to be able to do it, right?”

  A rueful smile broke over Adele’s face.

  “Not quite—you don’t have to achieve complete inner peace just to summon eira. That’s only if you aim to become a true Master. But yes, eira casters tend to have a spiritual focus; many call themselves Adherents of the Moon Temple. They consider their true home to be a place called Teirahan, though it has a few other names. There’s no lone prescribed dogma, but the Masters at Teirahan do have a number of scripts to guide students through meditative subjects. Go ahead and sit where you are. We’ll start off easy.”

  Jude felt her interest rising with every word that Adele said. By the time she got into Adele’s preferred seated position, she had forgotten all her misgivings about self-defense training.

  Their training that morning traded between the physical tasks Jude had been expecting, and lengthy pauses to meditate. They trained for most of the morning: three hours in total. Tho
ugh she did well enough with the cardio Adele set, as well as the forms and stances she put her through, Jude found meditation harder than she ever could have anticipated. As long as Adele was speaking, repeating the scripts she’d mentioned, Jude could focus on her words and the sound of her voice. But as soon as she stopped, everything went to hell.

  Jude couldn’t focus, couldn’t clear her mind. If she had nothing external to focus on, her mind wandered to lunch, or her failure the night before, or whether that dusty television in the gigantic main room might actually work.

  Every once in a while, she’d catch herself, force a deep breath, and try to walk it back. She refocused on her breathing, counting in and counting out. Four seconds passed, then five.

  And then she remembered the message from Amy.

  I wonder what Amy’s doing right now, one part of her brain thought, while another part continued to count out her breaths. She wondered what Logan was doing, too, and where she went on each of her frequent disappearances. She felt a pang of guilt that her mind strayed so quickly from Amy, and another pang over how suddenly she’d left town—

  I wanted her to feel bad, she thought. I wanted her to feel like she drove me away. Why in the world would she want to be with somebody like that?

  She caught herself again. With no resolution to the thought, she tried her best to let it go. Another pause, another self-shake. Another round of counting her breath.

  And so it went. Every few minutes, her mind went around the exact same loop, never really landing in a new place before she brought it back and tried again. By the time they were done, Jude felt like her mind had gotten more of a workout than her body.

  Knatt came out to greet them when their time was up, and then he escorted Adele to her car at the front of the house. Jude immediately made a beeline for the kitchen, her stomach growling like a maniac. There, she discovered that he’d already made her a sandwich, with a side of pear slices, and left it out on the counter for her.

  She wondered if his conscientiousness would ever cease to amaze her.