by Tess Adair
As she settled herself into a high stool near the marble-topped island in the center of the surprisingly modern kitchen, her mind immediately found its way to the last time she’d spoken to Amy in person.
Jude had been staying on her couch under false pretenses for the previous six nights, with no break, and she’d wondered once or twice when Amy’s parents might get wise.
“I’m not sure how long they’re going to buy it,” Amy had said quietly, a little after third period. “Can you stay with someone else for at least, like, a night or two? Just so it looks like you went home for a while, you know? And then you can come back, and my parents won’t realize—”
“That I’m actually homeless?” Jude had spat back at her, the venom building in her voice faster than she could fight it.
“No, that’s not what I—”
“It’s fine, you don’t have to lie,” Jude had said, her face and her will turning swiftly to stone. “I’m not delusional. And yeah, whatever, I’ll get out of your hair. I know you don’t want me there anyway.”
She’d stormed off before Amy could respond. Amy had called after her, but she’d ignored it. Later that day, she’d gone to see Logan in her office, and that evening, she’d ended up helping a fellow classmate escape a demon. She’d stayed with the girl through the night, just to make sure she was safe, and she’d picked up her bags from Amy’s house the next morning. It was Amy’s mother who let her in, so she managed to slip in and out without coming face-to-face with Amy herself.
And then she’d decided to leave town with Logan. She’d called Amy to let her know, but she’d kept the conversation brief, even though she knew she was leaving Amy with a million unanswered questions. In fact, the thought of leaving Amy with lingering questions satisfied her. She knew it wasn’t really her fault, but that didn’t stop her from retaining her anger at Amy for the mere suggestion of kicking her out on the street. The thought that Amy might wonder, might worry about her, might feel bad for betraying her, even when she really hadn’t—it satisfied Jude.
Until she heard that sad, confused voicemail on her phone. Then she felt like an ass.
She’d listened to it the first night she’d stayed in her new room.
“Hey, Jude. Uh, man, I really wish you would just call me back already.” Amy’s small, sad laugh punctuated her speech. “I’m just worried, okay? I mean, I know we left things kinda weird, but I didn’t think you were just gonna take off like that, you know? I—when you called me, I didn’t—I didn’t think you were serious, or I would have said something. Something more, I guess. Look, we don’t have to—to talk, or whatever, but can you just call me? You didn’t even tell me where you were going. Can you just let me know you’re okay? That’s all, I guess. Bye.”
“We left things kinda weird.” You mean how I accused you of never wanting me around and then ran away? Yeah, I guess that’s weird.
What Amy hadn’t known when she’d asked Jude if she had anywhere else to stay for a night or two was that the answer was no. Jude had no one else. Her only friend at school had been Suzanne Grubb, and Suzanne had moved away a year before. They hadn’t kept in touch. Jude assumed Suzanne, like her, wanted to forget all about Wolf Creek as soon as she could.
Amy also hadn’t known that after her own parents had kicked her out, Jude had spent a night sleeping in the girls’ locker room at school. It was only the humiliation of that night that compelled her to ask Amy if she could stay with her in the first place. Even now, nobody but Jude knew about that night.
Now, of course, there was a whole universe of things that Amy didn’t know about her life.
“Ready for your quiz?” said a voice from somewhere behind her.
Yanked from her reverie, she startled and glanced around, her eyes eventually falling on Knatt’s serene, smiling face.
She remembered the mild sense of surprise she’d felt the first time she’d seen him. This guy was Logan’s partner? He dressed like a college professor, with the primness and poise of a royal. For a moment that first night, when she’d heard a male voice from the other end of the entry hall, she’d expected to see Logan’s father standing there. She quickly surmised, however, that he was most likely someone else, as she assumed that Logan’s biological father was neither British nor black.
She had, of course, completely forgotten about the test he’d prepared for her this afternoon. Her meditation-heavy morning had wiped it from her mind.
“Just about,” she said, clutching at the remains of her sandwich.
“Fantastic. Well, I’ll head over to the library, then, to get it all set up for you. Join me when you can.”
She nodded with feigned enthusiasm as he turned and walked out of the room.
Was I supposed to study for this? She couldn’t remember.
In far too short a time, the rest of her food disappeared. She took her time washing her plate, then reluctantly plodded toward the east wing, where the library was located.
As she walked, she wondered for the hundredth time what it must have been like to grow up in a house like this. To reach the east wing, the quickest route was through the great room, located at the center of the building, just beyond the entry hall if one came in through the front door. The great room, like its name suggested, was enormous, boasting floor-to-ceiling windows latticed with wrought iron, and furniture so ornate and stately that Jude would have bet money they came from a different century. The top row of window panels featured one long pictographic scene in stained glass, and the eastern wall of the room featured a tall fireplace with an impressive mantel decorated in sculptures of various pagan gods.
Jude crossed the room via the south side, nearest the entrance, which meant walking beneath the massive overhang that supported a kind of viewing balcony and thruway on the second floor.
When she reached the far side of the room, she passed through the doorway into the east wing. A majority of the doors on this side of the house had remained closed to her, but she headed straight for one that had not: the giant double oak doors on the south side of the hall, carved with a large, ornate image of a tree, its roots and branches reaching up and outward, until they came together to form a perfect circle, as the demarcated perimeter of the symbol.
She pushed through the doors. Behind them stood a now-familiar sight: the vast, perfectly circular, two-story chamber that made up the library. The walls were lined with shelves—including the second floor, which also boasted a slim balcony all along the perimeter, allowing potential readers to reach the higher-up books by way of a series of rickety ladders. Shelves also cluttered the interior of the room in a strangely ominous artificial pattern, arranged like a splay of sunbeams radiating out from the round oak table at the center.
As she looked, Jude could see that Knatt had arranged a number of items on the table—her test, of course. He stood just behind the table, giving her that irritatingly peaceful smile. Jude grunted when she saw it. Then she reluctantly made her way forward.
As she approached the table, she realized that the items were various letha accoutrements, each made out of a different material. A paper card sat before every item with three lines for her to fill out: what the item was, its most common uses, and its particular specialty, if it had one.
Okay, that’s not so bad. I can do this, I think.
So she got to work.
About twenty minutes in, she’d finished about half of the table. The next card she picked up belonged to a black blade resting atop a small square of silk. She was sure she remembered that blade; if she was right, it was made of obsidian. The special property of obsidian is—
At that moment, she heard a noise behind her, near the entrance to the room. Knatt’s head jerked in that direction, and her own followed suit.
Logan.
“Got a sec?” she said, her head tilting as her eyes locked with Knatt’s.
“Certainly.” He stood and began to cross to her, but he paused as he passed Jude. “I can trust you not to cheat, ca
n’t I?”
“Scout’s honor,” said Jude, holding back an eye-roll.
With that, they walked out. Jude watched them go. Then she gave herself a small shake and turned back to the table, trying to remember that she was nearly halfway done.
The special property of obsidian is disruption, she wrote. A perfect blade can be difficult to create, and far more difficult to maintain, but it is generally considered the optimal shape for its use. When wielded correctly, a skilled caster can use it to disrupt or redirect another caster’s ritual.
She scribbled a little bit more until she’d filled out the card, then moved on to the next. It hardly seemed to take her any time at all to complete the second half of the table, so by the time Knatt finally returned, she was already putting the finishing touches on her last answer.
Logan wasn’t with him. Apparently, she’d only stayed long enough to impart her information before dissipating on the wind once more.
“Done so soon?” asked Knatt, gazing down at the table with approval in his eyes.
“Yes, sir,” she said with a nod.
“Lovely.”
Without another word, he picked up the card nearest to him and read it straight through. He nodded curtly and decisively before moving on to the next one. Again he nodded, again he pushed on. Soon enough he’d rounded the whole table this way. After the very last one, another calm and collected smile spread over his features.
“You seem to be a quick study, Miss Li. High marks all around.”
A breath she hadn’t known she was holding slowly hissed out of Jude’s pursed lips.
“Cool,” she said, with a relief more obvious than she would have liked. “Thank you.”
“Tell me,” he said, rotating on one heel to face her, “how would you like to accompany Logan out on a job tomorrow?”
Jude’s heart threatened to soar.
“Really? You mean it?”
“Oh, yes. It’s a simple enough job, and I—well, Logan believes it might benefit you to experience field work, as it were. And I concur. I take it you’re interested?”
“Very much, yes, please.”
“Very good.” He clapped his hands together and smiled. “Well, I’d say you’ve earned a bit of a break today. Why don’t you take the afternoon back? You can practice in here, if you’d like, or find something a little more recreational to do, if you’d prefer that. I should have dinner ready around seven.”
As Jude nodded her head in response, Knatt was already on his way out the door. She almost wondered if he were blowing her off, eager to move along to some other activity that didn’t involve a teenage ward.
So, not for the first time, she found herself left to her own devices, alone once again inside this endless, empty house.
She had the entire estate at her disposal: the obstacle training course on the lawn, the paths winding through the property and the woods beyond, the massive library, the main room decorated for another century, the well-stocked and modernized kitchen, the game room and home theater in the basement, and any number of other rooms she hadn’t explored yet.
So, where did she want to go?
She thought about it for a minute, hovering anxiously beside the circular table. Then she headed back upstairs, to the bedroom she now called her own.
Once she was safely hidden behind her door, Jude breathed a small sigh of relief. While the rest of the house still felt alien to her, this room, at least, was home.
She immediately collapsed onto the bed and picked up her phone. Though she saw the missed message flashing in the corner, she ignored it, clicking over to her downloaded music instead.
Logan had bought her the phone, of course. Jude’s parents switched off her old phone within days of kicking her out, but in a fortunate flash of genius, Jude had already copied her important numbers into a burner phone—the one Logan had slipped into her pocket during their search for Kurt Redmond and his monster. When her old phone stopped working, Jude let Logan know, and the next day, she woke up to a brand new smartphone sitting on her desk, with detailed instructions for how to switch the burner’s number over to it.
Naturally, a few days after that, she woke to a set of brand new speakers sitting on the same desk, this time with instructions for how to sync them to the new cell phone. The cell phone had made a certain amount of logistical sense, but the speakers left her somewhat at a loss. Did Logan think that expensive gadgets were simply the most appropriate housewarming gift for a teenage outcast?
For one surreal moment, Jude had looked at those brand new speakers and wondered if the apparently wealthy adult woman who had picked her out of her small town high school and whisked her away to a mansion in another state might somehow turn out to have ulterior motives.
Then she had gone downstairs to another one of Knatt’s full breakfast spreads and a long day of training, and she had forgotten all about it.
Because Logan had left both the phone and the speaker set in such a strangely anonymous fashion, Jude was at a loss for how to bring them up later, even to say thanks. So there they lay, unquestioned and unmentioned. And when Jude hit play on her favorite album, it blasted out from a bright yellow-and-silver cube reverberating on the desk near the far wall.
The desk itself had come to her in a slightly more reasonable manner. Knatt had insisted she have a place to study, and he and Logan had found an unused desk in some far corner of the house and moved it in. Of course, it was as old as most of the other furniture in the house, so Jude accepted the possibility that it was an antique worth thousands, if not more, but at least she knew that Logan hadn’t actively paid money for it. That was something.
Just as she had a million times in her old bedroom in Montana, Jude closed her eyes when the first few chords spread through the room, and a wave of calm spread accordingly through her body. The record was called Cold as Stone, Layla Stone’s second studio release. Jude had been about 13 when it came out, and she’d fallen completely in love with it the moment she’d heard the eponymous single on the radio. She didn’t figure out until a few years later that it was a breakup album.
Unwillingly but inevitably, her thoughts turned to Amy.
Call me soon?
She knew she should just do it, but her feelings on the subject were complicated. Though she still held a perfect, pristine image of Amy in her mind, and she still felt about her exactly as she always had, they had barely spoken since she’d left town. In fact, they’d spoken exactly once, right after Jude had gotten that pitiful message from her, and on that call, she’d told her that she was safe, and almost nothing else. Then she’d claimed she had to go and hung up.
There had been messages since then, all from Amy.
Are you still okay?
I ran into Bianca Graves today, and she asked about you. What’s that about?
My parents are thinking about getting a new dog. Pretty sure they’re trying to replace me, but I also kinda want the dog. What do you think?
Can you tell me where you are?
She hadn’t answered a single one, even though she’d wanted to. Every time she glanced at them, her twin senses of guilt and shame threatened to engulf her.
And yet…a part of her was still a little angry. She knew it wasn’t fair, but it was true. Amy had kicked her out, more or less. Perhaps worse than that, Amy knew that she’d been summarily kicked out of not one, but two houses. Jude felt embarrassed just thinking about her.
She should call her. She knew that. But her fingers hovered, resisting.
Then the choice was taken out of her hands. A shrill ring interrupted the music in her speakers, and Amy’s name showed up on the screen.
Fair enough, she thought, though she still hesitated.
Finally, on reckless impulse, she clicked the answer button. She regretted it immediately, and it took her several seconds to bring herself to speak.
“Hi,” she said at last, her voice quieter than she’d hoped. More vulnerable.
“Jude? Is that r
eally you?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Hi.”
She heard a sigh of relief on the other end.
“Finally.”
Jude felt the weight of accusation in the word.
“I was going to call you tonight.”
“Sure you were.”
“I was.”
“It’s been weeks, Jude.” Amy let out an exasperated huff. “I’ve called you, I’ve sent you messages. And you just…you’ve just ignored me.”
“I’ve been kinda…busy.”
Amy scoffed. “Okay, great. Your brand new life keeps you just so busy that you can’t return a single text message. Must be rough, not having the one or two minutes it would take to respond. Sounds like a hard life.”
Jude bristled and clenched her hands, but for the moment, she said nothing. She knew she deserved this.
“I’m sorry,” she finally managed. “I…I didn’t know what to say to you. I’m sorry.”
Amy let out a long, slow breath. “I just wanted to know you were okay.”
“I know. I’m really, really sorry. It’s been…I don’t know, these last few weeks have been kind of a blur, you know?”
“No, I don’t, actually. You haven’t told me anything about it. Where are you, anyway?”
And here, she ran into a wall. Most of the reasons she’d avoided answering any of Amy’s attempts to reach out were emotional, but at least one was logistical: she didn’t know how much she was allowed to say. Logan had told her that, while not strictly a secret, magic wasn’t known to most people, and if she told anyone about it, she might be putting them in danger.
Maybe it’s best to keep things vague.
“Oh, yeah. Uh…I’m a little bit outside of Seattle.”
“Seattle? How’d you get to Seattle?”
Where do I begin?
“Well, I came here with—uh, you remember the grief counselor? With the motorcycle?”
“The grief counselor? You mean that woman who rescued us from that—that thing—that bear—in the woods?”
So she remembered the demon, in a way. But she thought it was a bear. Or at least she’d convinced herself it was a bear.