by Tess Adair
A familiar guitar riff floated through the room, and despite herself, Jude felt her body relax, immediately and automatically. This was the album that had gotten her through middle school. It felt like home to her, no matter the circumstances.
It was possible, she supposed, that the alcohol had started to relax her, too. She glanced at Logan again, and she did her best to muster a little courage. She cleared her throat.
“Can I ask you something?” she asked. Happily, she didn’t sound too drunk to her own ears—yet, anyway.
“You just did.” Logan stared out into the gathering night, her profile stark in the ill-lit apartment.
“Something personal, I mean.”
“Ah. Well, I can’t really know if I’m going to object to a question until you actually ask it.”
“Oh. Right.”
“So, go ahead, then.”
“Go ahead?”
“Ask the question.”
“Oh.” Jude felt her own uncertainty crash down on her like a collapsing wave. Nevertheless, she took a breath and asked. “It’s just—well, what is your relationship with Alexei, exactly? You guy are friends, or…I don’t know, something else?”
Logan kept her gaze trained on the balcony.
“I do have friends,” she said. “Not a lot of them, maybe. But some.”
“So, that’s—Alexei’s your friend, then?”
“Yes. Or, at least, he was.”
For a moment, neither of them said anything. In the background, Jude could hear a new song starting to play.
“And you claim you’ve made other friends, too, huh?”
At long last, Logan honored her with a sidelong glance. After an extended moment, she smiled.
“Just a few. Well, a few that are still alive, anyway.” Logan sighed deeply. “I was going to tell him eventually. That was the plan.”
“Alexei?”
“Yes. I was going to tell him…and then somehow eventually came and went, and I still hadn’t said a word.” She stared down into her drink and gave it a swirl. “I knew I should have done…well, something else. Anything else. It’s not much of an excuse, but…I’m used to keeping things to myself. It’s what I’ve always done.”
Jude took a breath, giving herself a moment to take in Logan’s words. She hadn’t been expecting this particular kind of confession. Slowly, she pressed her voice to speak.
“You think he’s angry.”
“I know he’s angry.”
“And you’re afraid he won’t forgive you.”
“In a nutshell.”
Jude nodded. “Have you tried calling him?”
Logan pressed her lips into a line. “He knows how to reach me. If that’s what he wants.”
Jude still couldn’t help but wonder at the extent of Logan’s relationship with Alexei. They didn’t seem like natural friends; where Logan was serious and determined, Alexei was flirtatious and flippant. What had compelled them to work together before? What about that experience had inspired a friendship? Jude tried to imagine a younger Logan, bonding with Alexei over the corpse of some freshly slain demon, and she nearly laughed out loud.
“I’m sure he’ll come around eventually,” she said, in what she hoped was a helpful tone. “If he knows what’s good for him.”
“Right,” said Logan, leaning back in her chair and gazing out over the balcony. “Of course. Just have to wait.”
For a moment, Jude got the sense that there was something else going on with Logan, something she could access if she only knew what to ask. Then the moment faded away.
Outside, right in front of them, it finally began to rain.
Logan had been sitting at her desk for so long, she was starting to think she might meld to it. She’d tried to pick a comfortable position, but she needed to be able to make notes as she went along. With her left hand, she wrote. With her right hand, she kept her place as she forced herself on a glacial slog through the personal journal of Todd Phillips.
Todd Phillips had not been a terribly good writer, and apart from the last few months of it, he had not led a terribly interesting life. He had enjoyed recounting the many international trips his father had taken him on, while waxing poetic about how impressive and philanthropic the elder Phillips was, and all the life lessons he imparted on a regular basis.
Logan wanted to hate him. She was aware of her bias before she began.
The lessons were all gems, of course. Phillips warned of the dangers of excessive government, and guided Todd to keep a handwritten journal rather than “one of those internet ones,” in order to “keep the online spies out of your damn business.”
He had advice for Todd on multiculturalism, too. “Let the Jews count your money,” Todd had him saying, “they’re the best at it, and it’ll keep them distracted.”
Distracted from what, Logan could not say.
Some of the most boring stretches of the journal included his descriptions of attending classes and his opinions of his fellow students. When Todd received low grades, he believed that some kind of cabal or conspiracy was holding him back. When others succeeded around him, he believed that the teacher had deliberately favored them, particularly if they were female. He attributed this to “female privilege.”
His opinion of his mother seemed mixed. She comes from good stock, he wrote as if he were appraising a horse. Good features, and as intelligent as she needs to be. She’s done a decant job preserving her figure, too. I can almost see why father never traded her in, har har har. He liked to be cost effective at all times.
A voice sounded in Logan’s head, unbidden:
He might have grown out of all of this, if he’d lived. You’ll never know now.
Logan shook herself and kept going.
About fifty pages in, she stumbled into a description of one of his sexual fantasies. She found nothing particularly new or interesting there. Predictably, he described a docile and submissive white girl who would initially refuse him for the sake of preserving her own purity, until he was left with “no choice” but to tie her down and take what he wanted by force. Towards the end of his fantasy, the girl he’s imagined makes it clear that she’s glad he took what he wanted. All along, all she’d wanted was for him to man up, and he finally had.
She sighed. A mild headache was beginning to form behind her right temple.
He was groomed all of his life for this. Old Herb left him ripe for the picking. She sighed again. But the question is when did the Wolf pick him?
Logan wiped a weary hand across her brow. She’d never been particularly skilled at speed-reading, and Todd’s handwriting was difficult, at best, to decipher. She felt like she’d been plowing through this damn journal forever, and she still didn’t know how Todd had come into contact with the Wolf in the first place.
She had reached another dry description of one of the courses he’d taken at the university, though he spiced this one up with a long rant about how his mother wouldn’t let him drop any of his classes that semester, briefly glossing over the implied fact that she’d let him drop quite a number in previous years. He was furious at her arrogance: how dare she tell him what to do? Didn’t she know he was a full-grown man, with a right to act as men act?
For a passing moment, Logan wondered why he didn’t simply disobey her, before she remembered that he likely relied on her purse strings for economic survival.
Halfway through his 20s but still ultimately a child. A child that I ki—
Logan jumped up so abruptly from her chair that it fell over. With a sigh, she righted it again, and made sure to stick a bookmark in her place before setting the diary and her accompanying notes down in a neat row on the desk.
Before she stepped out of her office, she glanced down at what she’d written so far.
Todd Phillips was an asshole, it read.
She didn’t want to have the next thought, but it happened anyway.
Does that make it right?
As she stepped out into the hallway, sh
e felt a slight drop in temperature and remembered that she’d left the balcony door open. She considered going to close it, but at the last moment, her eyes alighted on a small wooden box sitting on a shelf on the wall, right at eye level. With one hand, she flipped back the lid, and with the other, she popped out the shallow top layer, displaying a single dried sprig of rosemary. Beneath lay two items: one joint, and one cigarette. She studied each for a moment, before finally settling on the one that might actually help.
With the joint stuck between two fingers, she skipped outside, onto the balcony and into the brisk air of 3:17 in the morning. The right course of action would have been to give up for the night and go to sleep. She knew that.
She also knew that no matter how hard she tried, she wouldn’t fall asleep yet. Not while her mind still buzzed like this.
Against her will, her mind turned on its internal calendar, reminding her that September was more than halfway gone.
Which means it’s been two months since I last spoke to Alexei.
Two months since I killed someone.
She placed the joint delicately between her lips and lit it. The smell of it enveloped her, permeating the air like a sweet perfume. Even before the actual effect hit her, she could feel some of the tension going out of her shoulders—the power of sense memory. She leaned back against the wall, letting her eyes close and her head fall gently against the staccato paint.
I wonder what they told his mother. I wonder if Alexei had to talk to her, too.
The thought raced through her mind before she could forcibly cut it short. She took in a slow, clear breath and pressed it deliberately from her lungs, hoping to let the thought pass on by without objection. She took a small hit and let it linger.
After a moment, she opened her eyes and stepped forward, closer to the metal railing. The city stretched before her, a dark canvas of electric light pointillism. She wished she could revel in it.
But what does reveling mean for a demon?
Sometimes she wondered if her father had had the right idea, in a way. He’d chosen the wrong method, of course: memory manipulation was a poor choice if one’s goal was to inhibit a demon. Another form of control might have yielded better results, though she was hard-pressed to say what that form may have been. Some kind of binding cast, perhaps? The obvious downside being that every known binding cast made its recipient more powerful, not less.
But maybe that’s only because no one’s ever tried it the other way around, she thought. Maybe if he’d given it a shot—
As soon as that thought formed, she paused. The idea of being bound to her father—of being subject, in any way, to his will for the rest of her life—made her blood run cold. In fact, if she had anything at all to be grateful for when it came to her father, it might only be that a binding cast had never occurred to him.
She could feel a fuzzy warmth starting to spread through her brain. She took another drag off the joint.
On a fairly regular basis, questions about her demon half plagued her. The bulk of her demon abilities were simple enough to pinpoint: her strength and accelerated healing, her preternatural senses, her hardening skin, her spikes. But what else about her was ultimately rooted in the demonic?
The first eira skill she had ever conquered was her ability to summon shadows, an unusual power to begin with. To this day, it still came more naturally to her than anything else. She felt at ease with literal darkness.
And her second eira power allowed her to steal the literal breath from a man’s lungs. It wouldn’t be difficult to spin that kind of power as innately demonic, would it? Wasn’t there at least a chance that these powers came from the arcane half of her parental heritage?
Her own voice pushed back at her in an instant.
So what if it does? You don’t know what that means. None of us knows what that means.
She took another drag.
It was true, of course, though she tried not to think about it much. No one really knew what a demon was—no one in the Order of Shadows, no one at Other Side, no one in the world. As far as I know, anyway.
So what did it mean that she was part demon? What part of her was it? Which pieces of her found their root in her own inhumanness?
Is he mad because I lied, or does he hate me for what I am? For what I did?
She’d brushed it aside when Knatt had said it, but as the weeks dripped by, his suggestion had wormed its way into her subconscious. Maybe Alexei was simply disgusted by her.
Who wouldn’t be?
It was natural, utterly human, to fear the things one couldn’t understand. Demons had been studied, yes: their abilities, their limits, their weaknesses. But their sentience? Or how they came into existence in the first place? She remembered the first time she had ever asked Knatt why demons existed, and what made them different from what he had always termed “natural animals,” like lions and bears.
“We don’t know where they came from,” he’d told her. She was about 14 at the time. “But there is reason to believe that they did not originate on this planet. The primary evidence is the fact that no known species of demon exists in the fossil record prior to human beings—and fairly advanced human beings at that. No ancestors that any demon species may have evolved from have ever been identified. Most who study the matter believe that demons did not originate in our world, but instead came into it around 3,000 BCE.”
“But how?” she’d asked.
He had looked down at her with a curious expression on his face. As an adult, she wondered if it might have been regret.
“We brought them,” he said. “People. With magic, of course.”
To this day, that was the bulk of what she knew. For the most part, demons were considered unknowable, innately mysterious. If they didn’t originate here, then they could never be fully understood. The only thing that anyone needed to know was that they were a threat.
Logan had been hunting and killing demons for more than a decade by now. She was an expert, by earth standards. And yet…what did she really know about them?
What do I really know about me?
She took another hit.
Next to nothing.
A sudden wave of exhaustion passed through her, at first creeping in slowly, then enveloping her all at once. The joint was almost gone, and she knew she didn’t need any more help from it, so she let it burn out, tapping it lightly against the wall to make sure it was done. After that, she stepped back inside, slid the glass shut, and deposited the charred remains in a small ceramic bowl on the shelf. Her feet pressed onward, carrying her deeper into the apartment.
As she drifted back toward her bedroom, her thoughts found their way to Jude and her training. Adele had been called back to Other Side more than a month ago, and they hadn’t heard from her since. Logan, of course, knew to expect long lapses of communication from her aunt, though explaining it to Jude would have required a whole course in Other Side and its various rules and issues, and Logan hadn’t had the patience for that yet.
Jude had been under their tutelage for over three months now, and though she had certainly learned quite a lot of theory, her practical progress remained debatable. Logan told herself that she was going for a naturalistic style, guiding her gently instead of throwing her in the deep end. This was not precisely the truth.
Logan was afraid to teach her eira. The night she’d found her in the forest outside her hometown, Jude had shown incredible potential, nearly driving the beast off with her cast all on her own. But the trouble with eira was that it couldn’t be taught through theory, nor even through simple practice. Teaching someone eira was like teaching someone how to order their mind and reach enlightenment. The master could talk until she was blue in the face, but if the pupil could not clear her mind, the effort would be wasted.
And should she really learn something like that…from a killer?
As Logan stepped past the threshold into her room, an image of Kostya, her own teacher, swam up to meet her. Kostya was a bu
rly Russian man in his 60s with a neatly trimmed blond beard and a crew cut. He carried with him a walking cane that had been imbued with a power all its own.
She remembered his teaching quite well.
How much truth do you have for me today, little soldier?
That strange old man was a true master, as empathetic as he was enigmatic. If sending Jude off to him were an option, she’d take it—but no one at Other Side had seen him in over a year. In itself, that wasn’t unusual: Kostya was known to disappear on walkabouts for months on end on a fairly regular basis.
But it did mean that he wasn’t available to help her now, and neither was Adele, which meant that if she wanted to get Jude trained in eira, her best shot was to start training her herself. Even the thought of it filled her with a dread she couldn’t fully articulate.
Kostya’s voice came to her again.
What kind of fighter are you, spending your time sneaking about, and hiding?
Perhaps this had all been a mistake. Perhaps she should have sent Jude to stay with Adele at Other Side, even if she didn’t agree with all of their teachings. If Adele didn’t have time for her herself, she might have at least assigned Jude a different master, someone with the faintest clue what they were doing.
With no finesse whatsoever, Logan stripped off her clothes and tossed them aside. Her unmade bed loomed before her, its rumpled pile of sheets calling to her like a siren. She sighed one last time.
As she slipped into bed, no epiphanies occurred to her. She imagined a perfect answer blossoming in her mind, illuminating everything, making it oh-so-obvious. But it never came. Eventually her frustration and weariness simply gave way to blank unconsciousness.
Predictably, she dreamed of wolves.
Chapter Fifteen
Into the Woods
Jude didn’t quite know what to expect when Knatt asked her if she had a good pair of hiking boots, though in retrospect, she should have guessed the very first thing that would happen, at least.
The next day, several pairs of hiking boots, different styles and brands, all in her size, appeared without warning on her desk, along with a note: