The Order of Shadows

by Tess Adair

  “Yeah. That’s the one.”

  “Yeah, I remember her. I remember that whole night pretty well, actually.” Beneath the irritation in Amy’s voice, Jude detected the faintest hint of fear.

  “She brought me here. I’m, uh, I’m kinda at her house.”

  Silence. Finally, Amy clicked her tongue, either in disbelief or disapproval. “You’re at her house? In Seattle?”

  “Well, not in Seattle, but—”

  “Are you insane? What if she’s some kind of rapist? What if she sells you into the—the sex trade—human trafficking, or—or what if she’s into drugs or something?”

  Jude fought the urge to laugh—both at the suggestion that Logan might be a pimp or a human trafficker, and at the idea that drugs would be even worse than that.

  “Hey, Amy, slow down a bit, okay? I’m fine. I promise you, I’m not a dope fiend, and I have not been sold into the sex trade. And if she wanted to rape me, I’m guessing she would have done it while we were—uh—”

  Far too late, Jude realized that her current line of defense was only going to upset Amy.

  “While you were what?”

  “Uh…sleeping in a hotel room together.”

  For a moment, Amy was silent again. Jude no longer imagined her clutching her pearls.

  “Jude, goddamn it, you are such a fucking idiot sometimes.”

  “Yeah. I know. But nothing happened! Nothing’s happened this whole time, in fact. She’s just—she’s letting me live in her house, keeping me fed and clothed, mentoring me. I promise you, I’m completely safe with her.”

  Amy let out a long-suffering sigh. “It doesn’t really matter what I think, does it? You’re your own person. And, anyway, it’s not like I could come and stop you when I don’t really know where you are.”

  Something in Jude’s heart fluttered. “Would you…would you want to come and stop me? If you could, I mean.”

  Another moment of hesitation. When Amy spoke, her voice was soft. “I still care about you, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m not the one who called to say we should take a break, and oh yeah, by the way, I’m leaving town. That was you, remember?”

  The fluttering, fragile thing in Jude’s heart crumpled. She’d forgotten exactly what she’d said on that call, but now that Amy said it out loud, she remembered.

  And she remembered the exact feeling of hurt that had compelled her to say it. She couldn’t not remember it now.

  “No,” she replied, an unfamiliar, harsh edge to her voice, “you’re just the one who threw me out of your house.”

  For a moment, Amy was deathly silent. Jude could feel the weight of her own words hanging between them, dragging them both down.

  “Is that what you think happened?” Amy’s voice sounded strained, like a rubber band stretched too far. “Jude, I didn’t want you to leave. If it were up to me…I would have kept you here forever.”

  Jude had a curious feeling then, as if she’d taken a step without looking and tumbled down an unforeseen downslope.

  A small lump formed in her throat.

  “I would have kept you, too,” she muttered, the words breaking as they fell from her lips.

  They both went quiet after that. For the first time since she’d left, Jude wished she was back there, just so they could be in the same room. Something important seemed to be passing between them, and it pained her to feel how separated they were, even in that moment. Amy might as well have been on the other side of an ocean.

  “Well,” said Amy, her voice now quiet and subdued, like the rubber band had finally broken and shrunk back. “Now that we’ve settled that…you want to tell me a little bit more about the grief counselor you ran off with? Who I still suspect may be some kind of kidnapper, by the way.”

  “She’s not a kidnapper,” said Jude, feeling a small amount of good humor come back to her. “She’s, uh…well, she’s a private detective, actually.” Technically, this was the truth. “And she’s kind of taken me on as, like, her ward. Like an apprenticeship, you know?”

  For a long moment, Amy didn’t respond. Jude only knew she was still there when she made a noise that sounded something like a sigh.

  “An apprenticeship, as in…you want to learn to be a private detective from her, and, like, do that as a job?”

  “Basically, yeah.”

  Amy paused again. Jude imagined her furrowing her brow.

  “Aren’t you going to go to college?”

  “Maybe,” said Jude, though this was a little bit further from the truth. “Somewhere down the line, I mean, but not right now.”

  “I thought you wanted to go.”

  “My parents wanted me to go,” she said, trying to keep her tone neutral as her mother flashed in her mind. “I just wanted to get out of town, and when they were going to pay for it, I figured it was as good a way to go as any.”

  “And now you are out of town,” said Amy, realization weighing heavy on her voice. “So you don’t need that anymore.”

  “I don’t know,” Jude answered, shrugging even though she knew Amy couldn’t see her. “I’m just not thinking about it right now, I guess.”

  “Okay,” said Amy. “I guess that’s…your call. I just…I mean, do private detectives make a lot of money? I mean, not that that’s important, but—how can she afford to just take on a…you said you’re her ward?”

  “Yeah, kinda.”

  “So how can she just afford a ward like that?”

  “She has some pretty wealthy clients,” Jude answered vaguely.

  In truth, she wasn’t totally sure what Logan’s overall financial situation was, but it was pretty safe to say she had a lot of family money. That answer, of course, was likely to make Amy more suspicious, not less.

  “So, wait—she’s a grief counselor, and she’s a private detective?”

  Ah, there it was. Logan’s charade, come back to bite her in the ass.

  “She’s actually…just a private detective,” said Jude carefully. “The counselor thing…well, that was kind of her cover.”

  “Her cover.”

  “So she could interview the students.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, she was investigating. Uh, she was investigating Violet Buchanan’s death.”

  “Wasn’t Violet killed by that bear?”

  “Yeah,” said Jude, thinking as fast as she could. “But it was, uh…it escaped from a private zoo. And, uh, it was, like, not a normal bear attack or something, so there were…questions. And Logan specializes in…exotic animals.”

  “It was an…exotic bear?”

  “Yep.”

  Amy didn’t immediately respond, but Jude waited, forcibly keeping herself from offering more explanation than that. She couldn’t really think what else she could add, anyway.

  Finally, Amy broke the silence.

  “Well, it did look kinda different,” she said cautiously, as if she were merely trying the words out. “I guess…that kinda makes sense.”

  “Yep,” said Jude, picking up steam again. “So, yeah, she was just there to investigate.”

  “Okay,” said Amy. “Wait, so does that mean you’re going around investigating crazy animal attacks or something?”

  “Well, no,” said Jude, a little sheepishly. “She doesn’t want me to go out in the field until I’m done with my training.”

  She decided it was best not to mention the assignment she was about to go on.

  “Well, that’s good, I guess.”

  Silence fell between them again, and this time, it felt distinctly awkward. Unable to stand it much longer, Jude forced herself to speak.

  “Well, uh, I think it’s getting late,” she said, though she was sure she had hours left before dinner. “Uh, maybe I can call you…tomorrow, or something?”

  “Sure,” said Amy, and Jude honestly could not tell how sincere she was. “I’d like that. I was thinking—well—”

  Jude felt herself tense.

  “What were you thinking?”

/>   “Well, maybe we could talk about…me coming to visit you, in Seattle?”

  She relaxed, but not completely.

  “Sure,” she said. “I’d like to see you.”

  “Me, too. Well, I guess I’ll talk to you later, then.”

  “Yeah. Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  With a click, Amy was gone. Jude stared blankly at the phone for a moment, feeling the weight of the empty room around her.

  All of a sudden, she felt like she had more energy to burn after all. Without another thought, she located her running shoes, put them on, and headed for the back door.

  Maybe, if she ran long and hard enough, she could shake the strangely hollow feeling Amy had left in her wake.

  Chapter Three

  The Working Week

  Jude stood paralyzed in front of her closet. For the first time in living memory, she didn’t know what she wanted to wear. She was going out in public today—maybe not for very long, but for long enough. For the first time in a few weeks, she’d be going farther than the nearest grocery store. In fact, Knatt had said she would, at least briefly, be traveling through Seattle to get to their client’s house. Millions of strangers might be able to see her.

  So she pulled down a pair of cargo pants in XXL and stared at them. Back in Wolf Creek, she would have had no doubt; she would have picked the pants that swamped her and paired them with a gray hoodie, and that would be that. But now?

  She’d seen the way Logan moved, and she’d seen the way Logan dressed for movement. And when they trained, she knew that picking the better-fitting clothing was the more practical choice. Jude could just imagine her pants slipping down past her waist, the leg getting caught under her shoe and tripping her up. In the past month, it had happened twice.

  So instead, she picked the pair’s twin: cargo pants in her actual size. Once they were on her body, she could tell that they were still loose enough to allow movement, and the huge pockets gave her options as well. Knatt had let her take a few sachets of powder back to her room, and she picked out a parcel of sage and ague root, which she’d successfully used to catalyze a number of casts now. Then she selected a canary-yellow T-shirt, also in the smaller size, and slipped it on.

  Before heading downstairs to meet Logan, she walked into the bathroom to look at herself. In the mirror, she saw a nervous girl with a messy braid and twitchy hands—not exactly the powerful letha caster she was hoping she’d see.

  Still, it could have been worse. She set her jaw and met her own gaze with defiance. If she wasn’t going to look powerful, then at least she’d look determined.

  With that, she made her way down to the kitchen. Logan was waiting for her already, leaning against the counter as she gazed about the room. When Jude entered, she popped back up and glanced briefly at her phone screen.

  “Good…ah, afternoon, apparently. You ready to go? Do you need to eat?”

  Jude shook her head. She’d managed to get breakfast down earlier, but her nerves had formed an invisible band around her stomach since then, and it tightened with every moment that passed. She couldn’t have eaten even if she’d wanted to.

  “All right, then. Follow me.”

  With that, Logan was off. Jude hurried to keep up, assuming that they were headed toward Logan’s neon green motorcycle, probably parked right out front. She followed Logan through the great room and down the hall through the west wing, striding right past the lab and a few other doors she hadn’t yet opened. At the very end of the hallway stood one of those unopened doors, this one heavy and wooden.

  This must be the garage, or maybe a mudroom.

  As they approached, she could see the door was covered in an endless, intricate pattern, lines and images swirling all around the oak in some kind of dark ink. That’s a little odd.

  Logan turned the handle and pushed the door open. The room on the other side was not either of the things Jude expected it to be.

  It took her breath away with its magnitude: large and marble, it was perfectly circular, just like the library, with an arched ceiling high above them. Unlike the library, this room was completely empty and windowless. The round wall was lined with torches, all of them already lit, and in between each torch sconce stood another door. How had she never noticed this room before? Could it be seen from the outside?

  And where do all the doors lead to? As Jude stepped inside, slowly turning around so she could take it all in, she tried to reconstruct her memory of the outside of the building. The house was huge, yes, but she thought she might have noticed if the western wing ended in a giant circular turret, like the east wing did.

  “Where are we?” she asked breathlessly. Behind her, Logan shut the door they’d come in through.

  “We call it the traveling room,” said Logan. “Pretty different, isn’t it? As a matter of fact, it’s nearly unique.”

  A handful of pillars stood dispersed throughout the room, making a circle inside the circle. Jude drifted over to the nearest one, and as she closed in, she could see that it was covered in the same swirling, twisting markings that had emblazoned the door to the room.

  One of the doors to the room, Jude corrected herself, clocking all the other doors set into the walls around them. Did each door lead to another room in the house? How is that possible?

  “We’ll be going this way,” said Logan, turning toward the door just to the left of the one they’d entered through. “You coming?”

  “Yeah,” said Jude, her voice sounding as dazed as she felt, “after you.”

  Logan chuckled as she turned away, then pulled a set of keys from the pocket of her jacket. She picked out a skeleton key and slid it into the lock, then opened the door and stepped through.

  Beyond the door, Jude could see some kind of hallway, though it looked different from the other halls in the house. While most of the house was dark-paneled and shadowy, with thick dark rugs covering the floors, this wall was plain white, the floor an unadorned wood. Jude approached with curiosity.

  When she stepped through the door, her brain did a somersault. The short hallway let out into a broad living room with floor-to-ceiling windows, and through those windows, Jude could make out—

  The outline of a city set against the sky.

  “What the fuck?” she muttered. Logan closed the door behind them, and when Jude took in the rest of the hallway, she could see that from this side, the door looked like it belonged to a coat closet.

  “Like I said,” Logan said, nonchalantly, “we call it the traveling room. You use it to travel.”

  Jude blinked several times. At the other end of the hall stood a black door, complete with peephole and locking chain. Across from the magical passageway, a doorway into a long, narrow kitchen, and beyond that, a dining room.

  She turned back around to the gigantic living room. She took a few halting steps toward it, still not believing her eyes.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  “My apartment,” answered Logan. “Geographically, Seattle. Pioneer Square, to be specific, but don’t let that color your view of it.”

  Jude had never heard of Pioneer Square, so she didn’t know what that meant. Unlike the estate, everything about this apartment screamed modern living. The furniture consisted of a gray couch and divan set, and a few high-backed chairs upholstered in black. The hardwood floor boasted a white area rug that looked like some sort of shiny fur, and the low coffee table was clear glass, decorated by a few pieces of uncut crystal and a small statue of a giraffe, made of silver metal. Beyond that, right in the middle of the wall of windows, stood a narrow fireplace, its black metal chimney creating a stark contrast line right in the middle of the view.

  Drifting forward like a magnet drew her, Jude made her way over to the windows. A slim balcony stood on the other side of the glass, and the view before her consisted of bustling city streets, tall gray buildings, a stormy, quickly darkening sky, and a wide expanse of silver water far below.

  “Wow,” said Jude. �
�You sleep here?”

  “Staying at the estate makes me antsy,” said Logan. “Never know when you might need to find a diner at 3:00 a.m., you know?”

  Jude turned back around slowly, now taking in the giant painting on the far wall. An abstract image roiling with blues and greens and a hint of yellow, it supplied the majority of the color in the room.

  “But if you can just walk through a door to get here, then technically couldn’t you still do that if you stayed at the estate?”

  “Yeah, I could,” said Logan with a shrug, before she turned on her heel and walked back into the hallway. “Come on, we’ve got to get going. Don’t want to miss the ferry.”

  Jude blinked, mildly taken aback by Logan’s sidestep of her own implication. Then she remembered they’d come for a purpose. She spared one last look at the magnificent view before joining Logan across the room.

  To her surprise, Logan had opened up the door they’d come through again, but this time, it opened into an actual coat closet.

  “Wha—how—?”

  Logan had been perusing the items inside the closet, but she paused as Jude stammered at her. For a moment, she gazed at Jude with a vaguely questioning expression, before comprehension dawned on her face.

  “Oh, you have to use the key if you want it to take you back,” she said by way of explanation. “Otherwise, it’s just a regular closet.” She turned back to the coats hanging inside, then fished out a bulky black jacket and handed it over to Jude. “Motorcycle jacket. Wear it when we ride. I’ve also got boots for you.”

  Jude slipped the jacket over her shoulders; it wasn’t leather, but she suspected it was waterproof. It fit her well enough. Logan passed her a pair of heavy boots as well, and Jude slipped them on. Finally, she got a helmet almost identical to the one she’d worn before.

  After that, Logan led the way out the front door and into a spacious elevator. She pressed the button labeled G, and the elevator hummed to life.

  They came out into a basement garage, and Logan led the way over to her motorcycle, parked in a slim corner spot next to somebody else’s bike. Jude made sure to secure her helmet as tightly as she could before climbing up behind Logan onto the bike.