The Order of Shadows

by Tess Adair

“You wouldn’t be the first. Or the last.”

  “Right.” Jude clutched the cold glass, moving it slightly closer to herself but not yet taking a drink. She nodded at Logan’s own glass. “What’d you get?”

  “Whisky,” said Logan, perfectly casual. “Still gotta drive, you know. Wouldn’t want the sugar going to my head.”

  Jude felt her eyebrows raise before she realized Logan was making a joke. Even then, the joke struck her as a little…odd. But then, so much of Logan was still a mystery, why shouldn’t her sense of humor be, too?

  “God, cheer up a little, kid,” said Logan, swirling the dark liquid in your hand. “Why do you look like you just lost a puppy?”

  Jude sighed loudly and pulled her drink an inch closer, but still didn’t take a sip.

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Apparently not,” said Logan, somewhat impatiently. “So why don’t you tell me?”

  She didn’t want to say it out loud. She moved the glass so close she could stare into it from above, but Logan kept looking at her, expecting an answer. Finally, she sighed again. “I suck at this. I suck at all of this. You should probably just get rid of me.”

  For a few spare seconds, Logan was quiet. Then she laughed out loud.

  “Is that all?”

  “What do you mean, is that all?” Jude was scandalized by the other’s nonchalance. “I suck! I’m the worst, I’m totally useless. If you keep me on, I’ll probably get you killed, or I’ll get Knatt killed, or—”

  “Okay, stop.” Logan waved her hand dismissively. “As adorable as this is, you need to stop. First of all, you are incapable of getting me killed, so just banish that thought, here and now. And, second, you mostly interact with Knatt at the house, so unless you start throwing knives at him at random, I don’t see how you’re going to get him killed either.”

  Jude gave a mirthless snort. “You’re right. I’m way too incompetent to ever hurt him. Which means I’m way too incompetent to ever come out on a mission again, so I should probably just get ready for the hermit life right now.”

  Now Logan shook her head, the smile fading on her face. “Kid, you’ve got the wrong idea here. Do you think I was perfectly calm and collected the first time I saw a demon? Or the second? Of course not. I was a fucking mess the first time I went out. It takes time, just like everything else. I brought you out here as a part of your training, not because I thought you were finished with it. Don’t you see? Sucking, or freezing up, or messing up—that’s all a part of the process.” She paused and shook her head again, then fixed Jude with a commanding stare. “This is just the first step. The only way—the absolute only way you could fail now is if you give up.”

  For several long moments, Jude sat quietly, staring at nothing in particular while incredulity crowded her thoughts. She didn’t know what to say to any of that. A part of her was terrified—of everything she’d seen that day, of everything she still didn’t know, and of the still-lingering thought that Logan could change her mind and decide Jude wasn’t up to the task after all. But as she took a few steadying breaths, she realized what Logan was saying.

  Don’t give up.

  It was a simple command, and she’d heard it before. She tried to think back to the first soccer team she’d ever been on—how bad she’d been at first, how slow and imprecise.

  Inevitably, that thought brought her right back to her mother. Her mother. She could see her now, with her disapproving scowl and her muttered warning: We will discuss this at home, Judith.

  Discuss. Jude shook her head, hoping to rid herself of the image of her mother. She stirred the drink in her hand and tried to refocus. Don’t give up. Desperate for any sort of physical action, she took a drink from the glass in front of her and found herself pleasantly surprised by its bubbly sweetness.

  I guess not all alcohol is as gross as beer.

  She took a few breaths and a few small sips, clearing her mind of all the negative images that threatened to overwhelm it: her mother, the dark study and the blindfold, and everything she used to think about, alone in the dark. Monsters and villains. The demon in the woods. The demon in Martin’s basement, squirming for its life.

  Something else, something else. Again, she remembered her first soccer team, and how her mother had wanted her to quit. She could hear her mother’s voice, telling her to quit even now. But she hadn’t done it then. Why not?

  Because of her coach, and one small promise. Her coach had sat her down one day, at the end of her third practice, and asked her to make a promise—that she wouldn’t quit until she’d completed the whole season. That’s not so hard, is it?

  As it turned out, it was hard—Jude had wanted to quit almost every single day. But she didn’t. She had made a promise. So she kept going, day after day. And day after day, it became just a tiny bit easier. She couldn’t remember now the exact moment she’d realized she no longer dreaded going to soccer practice, but ever so slowly, that moment had come.

  And it could come again. Maybe. It could come if she didn’t quit. Small comfort, perhaps, but comfort nonetheless.

  Slowly, Jude nodded her head.

  “Okay,” she said, though her voice was quiet. She took another sip of her drink, pondering the question she really wanted to ask. “But, tell me the truth—were you really bad your first time out? Or are you just saying that to make me feel better?”

  A smile spread slowly over Logan’s face.

  “Oh, yes, I was bad.”

  Jude waited several beats to see if Logan would elaborate beyond that. She didn’t seem inclined to do so. Jude sighed.

  “I’m not sure I believe that,” said Jude, ducking her head to avoid Logan’s gaze. She took another sip from the tempting beverage in front of her.

  “Well, I don’t exactly have any footage,” said Logan.

  “It just seems—I don’t know, you’re just so…perfect, every time we step out into the field. You never falter or flinch. It’s almost like…it’s almost like you know, somehow, that whatever it is, it can’t hurt you.” Jude shrugged helplessly. “I don’t think I’ll ever know that.”

  Logan nodded silently, contemplating the drink she swirled in her right hand. Jude wasn’t sure she’d actually seen Logan take a drink yet.

  Suddenly Logan put her drink down and fixed Jude with a hard stare. It looked like she was making a decision about something. After a long moment, she sighed.

  “Do you assume that everyone you ever meet is exactly the same as they’ve always been—that every adult person simply popped into the world as they are now, perfectly formed?”

  “Well, no, but—”

  “Everyone has secrets, Jude,” Logan continued carefully. “Everyone you meet has an entire secret world inside of them. Everyone has…private thoughts, private pains that you’ll never be privy to.” She picked up the glass again, and this time, Jude watched her take a decided swig before setting it back down. She couldn’t say why, but something about the action felt performative. “And everyone has a past—the journey they went on to become the person you get to see. Even me.”

  Jude suddenly got the impression that she was treading on thin ice, but she pushed forward anyway.

  “I just wish—” she managed, her voice barely above a whisper, “I wish I knew a little bit more about your journey, I guess.”

  “Would that make you feel better?” Logan cocked an eyebrow at her.

  “It might.”

  Logan took another drink.

  “I grew up around all this, you know,” she said, waving her hand vaguely in the air. “I don’t mean that I literally grew up with demons, but…I did know they existed. My father and Knatt, they became partners before I was born. And I knew what their work was, for the most part.” She placed her hand on the glass but didn’t pick it up. Instead, she tapped against it with her forefinger. “Would it help if I just listed all the times I nearly died? I probably don’t remember them all, but I could certainly list a few.”

  Jude
considered this and slowly shook her head.

  “I don’t know. What if you just…what if you just tell me…something personal?”

  “Something personal.”

  For another long and silent moment, Logan looked at her. She almost began to wonder if Logan didn’t understand what the word “personal” meant.

  “All right,” she said at last. “For several years, I was homeless.”

  Jude felt an inappropriate smile stretch compulsively over her face.

  “You? But, the apartment, and the estate—”

  “The apartment is relatively new,” said Logan. “And the estate…well, for a very long time, I couldn’t live there. Because my father lived there, you see.”

  “Your…father?”

  “Yep. Charles Logan.” She took another small sip of her drink and grimaced. “I couldn’t live with him then. Hell, I still wouldn’t choose it. But, lucky for me, we keep him locked away in a lovely, state-of-the-art facility upstate.”

  She smiled, but there was no warmth in it.

  “He’s locked up?”

  “Not in prison,” she clarified. “His, uh, his faculties aren’t altogether there anymore. At some point, he became a bit of a danger to himself. He started to get…incoherent. He’d forget where he was. Once he did that on a job, Knatt basically pressured him into early retirement. And a few months after that, he walked in on my father…repeatedly cutting his own arm open, trying to start some crazy cast that made no sense. That’s when we brought him upstate. And that’s when I came home for good.” She let out a slow breath. “When he was gone. That’s when I came back.”

  For a moment, Jude was quiet, letting this information sink in. She supposed it did explain a few things. Then she blurted out her next question before she could think to stop herself.

  “What did he do to you?”

  Logan’s grip tightened on the glass.

  “He…lied to me,” she said through gritted teeth. “And he manipulated me. He manipulated my whole life.” She let out another breath, and Jude found herself reminded of some of the meditative breathing techniques Adele had taught her. “I don’t think he saw me as a daughter, so much as…as a science experiment, really.” Another breath, in and out. “See, you chose your training. I wasn’t given a choice.”

  “He forced you to train?”

  Logan nodded.

  “It’s a long story, but, yeah.” She took another drink; her glass was almost empty. “There’s a room in the basement we don’t open. I suppose you could check it out if you like. In my early teens, Charles would summon a demon—he’s always claimed he only summoned small ones, of course—and he’d lock it in that room. And then he’d lock me in, too.”

  “Oh my god.”

  “He didn’t tell Knatt.” Logan’s voice was hollow, empty. “And, uh, he did the only thing that could have kept me from telling him.” She sighed a threadbare sigh. “Memory spells are incredibly advanced; only a handful of people on the planet can perform them successfully. Charles Logan is one of them.”

  “You mean…?”

  “He wiped my memories away. Apparently, he used to do that a lot. I don’t actually know how much I don’t remember.”

  Jude felt the weight of this new knowledge sink through her like a stone. She thought about her mother and the blindfold, and sitting alone in the dark.

  This whole time, even knowing about monsters and demons, Jude had been thinking that magic was some great, wonderful thing—like the best toy in the world. But what might her mother have been able to do to her, if she’d known about magic? How could Jude ever have gotten away?

  Realizing that the silence had stretched between them for longer than she’d intended, Jude cleared her throat. She asked the first question that sprang to mind.

  “How…how did you…survive?”

  Logan’s mirthless smile returned.

  “No idea,” she said. “Eventually Knatt started to notice all the cuts and bruises, and when he asked me about them, I honestly couldn’t explain it. He asked my father a few pointed questions until he figured it out. A little while after that, I ran away.”

  Jude nodded and took another sip from her mojito. It was nearing empty, too.

  “There’s still something I don’t understand,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, just…why? Why would he do any of that? To his own kid, no less.”

  “Like I said. I wasn’t a kid to him. I was an experiment.”

  “Yeah, but…why?” She shook her head slowly from side to side, completely dismayed. “It seems like he’d be as likely to kill you as anything else.”

  Logan said nothing to that. Her gaze fell to the table. Jude couldn’t even begin to guess what she was thinking.

  And yet, somehow…she got the impression that she was still holding something back. As personal as this story was, Jude couldn’t help but think that she was missing some part of it.

  What kind of maniac locks a child in a room with a demon?

  She glanced up at the woman across the table from her, taking her in.

  And what kind of person can survive that?

  Something else occurred to her, too. She cleared her throat again.

  “So, when someone like Martin summons a demon,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “does that…I mean, doesn’t it kinda remind you of that? What your dad used to do?”

  Logan shrugged.

  “Intellectually, I suppose.” Her affect was blank. “It’s difficult to be reminded of something you don’t actually remember.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  A number of thoughts chased themselves around her brain. She wanted to know more about letha, and the history of casting, but she wasn’t sure how much Logan was willing to tell her. She still felt like Logan was holding back somehow, and she wasn’t sure why. Eventually she settled on a topic and pushed forward.

  “So, what Martin wants to do…use demons for good, I mean…could that ever be done? I mean, by someone more competent than he is.”

  “That’s a topic for debate, to be honest. He certainly wouldn’t be the first to try it, but to my knowledge, no one has ever succeeded. Not long-term, anyway.”

  “So, why do they always fail?”

  “Most summoners rely on an artifact to control whatever they summon,” said Logan. “Just like Kurt Redmond did. And just like Kurt, if they lose contact with that artifact, they lose control. And once lost, it cannot be regained.”

  “Is that the only way to do it, then?”

  “Technically, no.” Logan sighed heavily, as if she weren’t sure she wanted to say the next part. “As far as I know, there is at least one summoning you can do that will grant you near perfect control of the demon you reach. But the cost is far too great to be worth doing.”

  “What is it?”

  “Human sacrifice.”

  A chill ran up Jude’s spine.

  “It’s illegal, of course,” Logan assured her. “I haven’t seen anyone try it in a very long time. Certainly not someone as harmless as Martin. No, most summoners try other methods. Some try to maintain control with a binding cast, but it’s much harder to bind a demon than it is to bind a person, and the few who succeed are incapable of maintaining it indefinitely. In theory, it would also be possible with an influence cast, but it’s been more than a century since a letha caster has pulled that off.”

  “An influence cast? What’s that?” Jude stirred her drink with her straw, though it was nearly empty now.

  An unexpectedly genuine grin spread over Logan’s face. It looked almost mischievous.

  “Mind control, of course,” she said cheerfully, then nodded toward Jude’s empty glass. “Did you want another?”

  Jude glanced down at her drink, uncertain. She didn’t quite feel drunk, but then she wasn’t sure she knew what drunk felt like. “Uh, sure. Thanks.”

  “Coming right up.”

  Logan immediately hopped down from her chair and w
eaved her way back through the interspersed tables behind them.

  As Jude watched her cozy up to the bar, she wondered what she’d been like when she was younger, closer to Jude’s own age. But then, what was anyone like with half their memories missing? Maybe she’d gone around feeling like only half a person, or maybe she’d gone around feeling completely normal, right up until the moment she found out. It seemed too rude a question to ask.

  She wasn’t quite sure what to make about Logan’s apparent excitement over the subject of mind control, either, considering her personal history. But that also seemed like a rude thing to say out loud.

  Maybe I am drunk. Or maybe she is.

  She cast her gaze around the rest of the room, surreptitiously taking in the small crowd inside. Suddenly her eyes locked with a girl across the room—blue eyes and blonde hair, pulled into an impossibly high ponytail. She smiled when their eyes met, and her smile seemed to light up her whole face.

  Sheepishly, Jude returned her smile, though she felt awkward doing it. As their eye contact held a moment longer, she started to feel warm and inexplicably happy, as if this girl were an old friend, unexpectedly met. Then, almost immediately after that, she felt an unaccountable melancholy take over, followed shortly by the sudden realization of a deep and abiding loneliness—not as though she had, in that moment, begun to feel lonely, but rather as if she had felt so for a long time, and only now did she remember it.

  And then she realized what was happening.

  She looks like Amy.

  It was Amy, not this girl herself, who set off the cascade of emotion. As she settled into that idea, loneliness took the lead, and she dropped her gaze.

  “I saw that,” said Logan when she came back over. She handed Jude a new drink, just as effervescent as the last. “You should go talk to her. I don’t mind.”

  But Jude vigorously shook her head. “I can’t—I’m not—I’m not good at—at—”

  “Sentence formation?”

  “Well—yeah.”

  “Hm. Tell me, why are you so convinced that you have to be good at something before you ever try it?”

  Jude blinked several times, her mouth hanging open as she scrambled for a response.