The Order of Shadows

by Tess Adair

  So instead of any training with either Logan or Adele, Jude’s routine consisted of letha lessons from Knatt and Knatt’s newest hobby: forced GED study sessions. Once they returned from San Francisco, he’d informed her with no preamble that he’d signed her up to take the GED in early September, so she’d better make sure she was ready for it. Fortunately for her, it looked like the end of her high school education had already prepped her for the test, and studying for it entailed only simple review.

  Though summer at the estate seemed a bit cooler than summers in Montana had been, even the estate eventually fell victim to August. On one particularly hot, hazy afternoon, Jude found herself struggling to concentrate on social studies, when Knatt suddenly snapped his book shut.

  “I don’t believe we’re getting anywhere today,” he said, heaving out a defeated sigh. “Do you?”

  Though the library had no less than three air conditioning units set up, it still managed to dance just outside of the comfort zone, so instead, they had set up shop on the back patio, underneath a shade umbrella. Knatt looked about as casual as Jude had ever seen him, with no vest or sweater, and his sleeves rolled up past his elbows.

  Jude wiped a bead of sweat from her forehead.

  “It does kinda feel like my reading skills are suffering at the moment,” she said, and tugged her long, heavy braid over her shoulder to get it off of her back.

  He glanced at his watch.

  “Let’s break for tea, shall we?”

  Jude broke into a smile at the sheer Britishness of his suggestion; nevertheless, she wholeheartedly accepted it.

  “Tea sounds great,” she said, and meant it.

  “After that, perhaps we can work on some cool air summoning, hm?”

  Jude blinked, momentarily taken out of the moment. Wasn’t air summoning how Logan…?

  She shook herself, focusing back on Knatt’s exact phrasing: cool air summoning. That sounded more like letha AC than anything else. That wouldn’t be too bad on a day like this. She followed him back inside, into the kitchen, carrying her barely used study guide with her.

  Tea, in this instance, turned out to mean homemade lemonade and cucumber-and-cream-cheese sandwiches. Jude helped him put together a platter for the two of them, which they then took into the basement, into what had turned out to be the coolest room in the estate: the home theater. The set up a collapsible table in the front of the room, angling some of the cushiony chairs around it so they would have a nice place to sit. Though the lighting in the room seemed a little dim for the middle of the afternoon, Jude quickly realized she was the most comfortable she had been all day.

  The sandwiches and lemonade proved delicious.

  She was refilling her glass when it occurred to her that now was as good a time as any to have a conversation.

  “Hey, Knatt?”

  “Yes, Jude?”

  “Can I…ask you a question?”

  “Certainly.”

  “It’s about Logan.”

  “Please continue.”

  “It’s about…it’s about what we talked about in San Francisco. About—you know—her secrets, and stuff.”

  “The visions and her lineage, you mean?”

  “Yeah, that.” Jude took a deep breath. “I don’t think I understand why Logan felt such a need to keep her demon half a secret. I mean, I’ve seen her—she’s such a powerful fighter, it’s hard for me to imagine her needing to be afraid of anyone, or anything.”

  Knatt studied her for a moment, taking a bite of finger sandwich and chewing it slowly. Eventually, he swallowed and spoke.

  “There are any number of things a powerful fighter might need to fear. A particularly single-minded institution, for instance.”

  Jude nodded.

  “You mean the Order of Shadows, right?”

  “Indeed.”

  “But…I mean, I know Logan doesn’t like them, but she described them like they’re supposed to be peacekeepers. So why is she afraid of them?”

  “The Order of Shadows are peacekeepers of a sort, yes,” Knatt said, nodding. “But they have their own motives as well.” He paused, considering her again. “What has Logan told you about her father?”

  Jude thought back to their conversation in the bar, when she had begged her to tell her something personal, something that might help Jude feel more at ease.

  “She told me he manipulated her memory. She said…not very many people can do a letha memory cast, but Charles Logan is one.”

  “Yes, he is. It was never innocent, but at first, he said he was doing it for her own good. And I think, or at least I thought, that he believed that. Until I realized he’d begun to experiment on her, of course.”

  “You mean, like, making her fight demons and stuff.”

  “Precisely.” Knatt sighed again, and suddenly, he seemed so much older to Jude than he ever had before. “You see, when Charles initially began to wipe away her memories, he did so in order to hide her demon parentage from her. Then, as she got older, he began to think it a good idea to test her, her capabilities and her limits. Naturally, he took those memories from her as well.”

  “Why? Why would he do any of that?”

  “He wanted to know…what use she could be to him.”

  Jude was quiet for a moment as she let the full implication of that sink in.

  “Kind of like…like a weapon?”

  “You could say that, yes.”

  “So, Logan thinks an institution like the Order of Shadows…”

  “Might also try to use her, if they ever found out.”

  It suddenly seemed like a very strange thing, indeed, that they were talking about this over an elegant platter of cucumber sandwiches. Still, in the silence that followed Knatt’s words, Jude could think of little else to do but take another one and eat it, slowly and thoughtfully.

  How strange it was to think about Charles Logan now. When she’d met him, even with what she’d already known, he’d seemed so harmless. Just a frail, funny old man.

  She couldn’t help but wonder…when Logan looked at him, what did she see?

  The air was crisp and clean as she brushed her hair out of her eyes and pulled her helmet on over it. September had announced itself with a cold wind, carrying in autumn clouds. Logan did her best to focus on that, on the clear, cold feeling, instead of the voicemail on her cell phone, and the second task that waited for her. She’d get to that eventually. For now, she had the road ahead, and the indifferent gray sky above.

  And she had her Kawasaki Ninja, of course.

  With one last tug at the zipper on her motorcycle jacket, she swung onto the bike, spun it awake, and kicked off. The engine roared to life as she zoomed out of the driveway of the estate, headed northward, and a little east.

  Demons in the woods were her original specialty. Years of city living had led her down a different path, but growing up on the estate, the woods had been her primary training ground. Ever since the incident in Wolf Creek, which had proven to her just how alien the wilderness had become, how dulled her senses were to its nuances, she had heard a voice in the back of her head, telling her to do better. In compliance with that voice, she’d begun training regularly in the woods around the estate once more. All her old paths and rituals had come back to her like they were second nature.

  She wondered if the voice belonged to her father. She often wondered how much of her had formed atop the vestiges of his parenting.

  Still, as she sped along the freeway now, on this perfectly cool fall morning, she relished the thought of a hunt in the woods. The hunt was simple, easy, clear-cut. She knew how to begin, and she knew how it ended. How it always ended.

  Until she died, of course. That was the only alternate ending available.

  For someone who faced it as often as she did, Logan didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about death. It was always there, but it had never given her pause. Perhaps a part of her didn’t believe she could die. It was also possible that she simply didn’t car
e, but that seemed less likely.

  Unbidden, the images of Alexei’s predicted death surfaced in her mind. What if she had gone about it all differently? What if, when she’d gone down to San Francisco, she’d confessed right off the bat that the vision had been her own? Would he still have been angry with her for the years of deceit in between? What if she’d told him when they first met?

  Would I still have killed Todd Phillips?

  But she would never have told him sooner. There was no version of her that would have. When she first met him, she found him engaging, charismatic, attractive—but not trustworthy. He was a rich party boy, interested in paranormal investigation for the thrill of it…and the exclusiveness, of course. By the time she realized that she could count him as a friend, they’d already known each other for years. The time for bare-all disclosures had passed.

  Maybe that was part of the problem. Maybe he had considered her a friend immediately, while she had held back, reluctant to let him in. Maybe she’d only told herself that the time had passed to let herself off the hook.

  I’m letting myself off the hook even now.

  She gripped her handlebars, careful not to snag the clutch, and refocused on the road ahead of her, the gray sky above. It wasn’t a good idea to ride in the rain, but a part of her wished for rain anyway. Anything that required her full attention counted as a distraction, and she would take any distraction she could get.

  As if on cue, the Choronzon Key flared, reminding her of her original purpose out here.

  There was a demon in the woods. And she was getting close.

  A few minutes later, she saw a turn off that suited her course, and she took it. She let the Ninja slow down, feeling the Key’s guidance as she pressed on. This particular exit didn’t seem to lead to an actual town so much as a junction with a single old, wooden building that appeared to have stopped functioning as anything a long time ago.

  A few minutes after that, she took another turn down a single-lane street, and then another down a beaten dirt road, surrounded by trees. Eventually she brought the bike to a complete stop, resting it beside a particularly large and gnarled trunk.

  As she hopped down, she pulled off her helmet and popped the seat open, revealing the surprisingly deep hidden compartment beneath it.

  Her sword was in there, and the harness to hold it. For a brief moment, she imagined the sword was covered in blood, as if she hadn’t wiped it off from her last kill.

  But you didn’t use a sword on your last kill.

  She blinked, and the sword returned to normal. She pulled it out, along with the harness, and strapped it to her back. Then she closed the compartment up once more and left her helmet hanging off the back.

  The Key blazed again, urging her to hurry. So, she struck out into the trees, away from the dirt road. For several minutes, there was too much damp underbrush for her to move with any speed: fat elephant ears slick with moisture, bushes so thick with branches they would not yield. But eventually the earth beneath her boots began to curve upward, and the smaller plants grew sparser. As soon as she could, she broke out into a run.

  The Key forged her path, tugging her a little westward here, a little northward there. The ground was uneven, sometimes sloping up steeply, sometimes flattening out. No matter what it threw at her, she never lost her breath.

  What does it feel like, when I steal away a person’s breath? It must be terrifying.

  Distracted for a moment, she stumbled. Then, with a frustrated grunt at distraction’s loose grip, she redoubled her efforts, pushing her inhuman speed to its limit.

  After running flat-out for nearly 20 minutes, the Key suddenly went out—all the burning and nudging disappeared, as if it had never been.

  Logan came to a stop. Automatically, she looked all around her, searching for some hint as to why the Key had abandoned her. At first, she didn’t see anything. Then the smell hit her—fresh, wild, and metallic.

  Blood. Should be used to that smell by now.

  She looked to her right, drawn by the smell. Several feet away, a swath of blood stained the bark of an old-growth tree.

  She’d found its hunting ground.

  The Choronzon Key screamed to life once more, searing the flesh of her back with new inspiration. Her muscles surging with energy and adrenaline, she broke into another run.

  A few swift steps later, she could smell the beast itself. Her spikes slid out automatically, her defenses fully raised.

  There, turning a corner, she spotted it, and it spotted her.

  The fight began. And for several blissful minutes, she ceased to exist. There was only the end, and its slow encroach.

  When the end came, she delivered it without hesitation. As she brought her sword down, she saw an image of Todd Phillips, his nose broken, his face covered in blood. Had she gotten carried away, or had she done exactly what she was meant to do?

  She came back to herself.

  It started to rain.

  By the time she got back to her bike, reality had settled back in. She pulled her phone out of her jacket and clicked over to the voicemail she’d already heard twice. With a sigh of acceptance, she let it play one more time.

  “Ah, Miss Logan, hello! This is Mara, from St. Mary’s, calling about your father. He—well, he caused a bit of a scene in the cafeteria today, and I—well, we were hoping you might be able to come down sometime to talk to Dr. Burroughs about the incident, if possible. You can call us back at—”

  Logan shut off the phone; she’d already given them a call and arranged the time. All that was left now was to do it.

  At that moment, the second-to-last thing in the world that she wanted to do was visit her father, let alone have a talk with the nursing home staff.

  The last thing she wanted to do was spend another minute thinking about Todd Philips. So, she put her weapons away, kicked her bike into gear again, and pulled out into the road.

  Knatt better be fucking happy with me today.

  Chapter Thirteen

  A Brief Interlude

  The drive to St. Mary’s was far shorter than she would have liked. The rain picked up as she went, so by the time she got there, her thick pants were soaked through and leaking into her socks, and the edges of hair that stuck out under her helmet were now pasted to her semi-exposed neck. At least her torso was dry, thanks to her leather jacket, though of course her forearms weren’t so lucky. That was the price of customizing a jacket to allow four bone spikes to poke through every once in a while.

  The wide parking lot had a single, four-spots-wide area covered by an awning, so she went there, sliding her bike in next to a poorly parked truck. She took her helmet off and shook out her head, rain droplets flying everywhere.

  A swell of anxiety rose up in her chest, and she answered it the only way she could think to: with the pack of cigarettes stuffed in her inner jacket pocket. A part of her recognized that this was a bad idea and, worse, that it wouldn’t really help her feel any calmer. But most of her didn’t care.

  As she puffed away at one slightly crumpled cigarette, she gazed out at the grounds surrounding St. Mary’s. Even in the rain, it was a beautiful place: rolling lawns ending in towering evergreens, and blue-gray mountains far in the distance. She had never questioned why Knatt had chosen this place, though she’d never offered him her opinion, either.

  The cigarette burned out too quickly. She didn’t have any other kind of hood with her, so she put her helmet back on to go inside.

  The rain was starting to pull back, but it wasn’t quite gone yet.

  She reached the glass front doors and waved to the woman inside, narrowing her eyes to try to determine if it was Mara. The woman looked up at her and smiled, brushing her deep red bangs out of her face, and buzzed her in. It was Mara, after all.

  Logan took her helmet off again as she stepped through the automatic doors, and she did her best to sweep her half-wet hair out of her face in something resembling a pleasing manner. Mara, of course, looked as e
ffortlessly pretty as she had the first time Logan had seen her, even in her formless green scrubs.

  Her inviting half-smile warmed her whole face, and for a moment, Logan let herself hope that Mara had made up the incident with her father in some kind of flirtatious gambit. But then she remembered who her father was, and her hope immediately died.

  “Miss Logan,” Mara said as she approached the desk, “you’re right on time!”

  Logan didn’t need to look at the clock to know that this was a polite lie. She’d arrived 15 minutes late, and her cigarette had rounded that out to 20.

  “You can just call me Logan,” she said, shifting her helmet around awkwardly. “Do you need me to sign in?”

  “That would be good,” said Mara. As she pushed over the sign-in sheet, she noticed what Logan was carrying. “Ooh, did you come here on a motorcycle?”

  “I did,” said Logan sheepishly. “It seemed like a good idea when I started out this morning.”

  “That’s so cool,” said Mara, her tone dreamy and wistful. “I’ve always wanted to ride one. Hey, if you want, I can keep your helmet back here while you’re visiting.”

  Despite the fact that the nursing home’s incessant air conditioning seemed to be turning her pants into giant ice cubes, Logan did her best to put on a rakishly charming smile.

  “I’d like that,” she said. “Thank you, Mara.”

  Mara’s smile widened.

  “You remember me.”

  “Of course, I do.”

  Logan let her own smile linger as her eyes rested on Mara’s face. Mara flushed slightly in return, but she didn’t look away.

  “Oh,” said Mara suddenly, giving herself a little shake. “I should let Dr. Burroughs know you’re here.”

  “Ah, yes.” Logan nodded, keeping her voice neutral. She didn’t want to come on too strong, and she did need to hear what the doctor had to say, after all.

  Within a few short minutes, she’d handed over her still-wet helmet and was marching down a hallway to a back office, led by a short, balding man with a pinched face.

  Logan sat impassively in his office and paid exactly as much attention as she needed to the doctor. He described the incident with her father, and he explained that that sort of behavior simply wasn’t acceptable at an institution like St. Mary’s. Every single one of their patients paid a premium to stay there, and they expected a certain level of care in return: a level that didn’t include putting up with her father’s outbursts in public spaces.