by Tess Adair
The roof was massive, far larger than she had been expecting, and a twenty-foot wall of solid green hedge ran the entire length of it. Directly in the center of the wall stood an open archway, giving way to the darkened green interior of a maze. On each side of the doorway, a red robe held out a platter carrying thirty or more tiny glass phials of an unknown substance. Between them, under the archway, stood an unmoving dark figure, blocking the path inside.
“Jude! Over here!”
Jude whipped around at the sound of her name and hoped against hope that the flush had finally gone from her cheeks. Her eyes alighted on Eliana, waving her down and jogging in their direction.
“Told you,” Sasha whispered into Jude’s ear, before giving her a playful push toward the other girl.
As Jude glanced back at Eliana, she realized that she wasn’t alone: behind her stood a boy about their age, wearing a maroon beanie and thick, square-cut glasses, his arms crossed over his chest.
Even from this distance, Jude could guess that he was about as happy to see her as she was to see him. Eliana waved her on again, so she pushed back her anxiety and closed the rest of the distance between them.
“Hey,” Eliana beamed as she approached, her eyes shining with an almost unnatural brightness, as they had been all night. She reached out her arm and touched Jude lightly on the shoulder. Jude felt a tiny shiver run through her entire body, but she tried not to show it. “I was just about to send a search party after you.”
“Yeah, uh, I guess I need to start incorporating squats into my routine,” said Jude, attempting a self-deprecating smile. “Who’s your friend?”
“Oh, yeah.” Eliana turned back toward the boy standing a few feet behind her. Taking Jude’s hand and grasping it tightly, she pulled her back over with her.
Jude felt her heart fly right out of her chest. There was something off about Eliana right now—she was being a little too enthusiastic, not quite as smooth and collected as she’d been so far. And her eyes looked like they were more open than they normally were, whatever that meant.
Still, Jude wasn’t about to complain. The feel of Eliana’s hand grasping her own prevented her from seeing anything to complain about.
Then they reached the sullen-looking boy, and Eliana’s hand disappeared. Jude couldn’t help but feel a funny sense of loss.
“Jude, this is my best friend, Ian Fisher. Fisher, this is Jude. The one I told you about.”
She told someone about me? Jude’s stomach fluttered, though she was hard-pressed to say if it was a good flutter or a bad one.
“Sure,” said Ian, his arms still crossed tight over his chest. “You’re the one who came with the shadow summoner, right? Her plus-one, as it were?”
“Uh, yeah. But not as, like, her date or something. I’m, uh, more like an apprentice.” Jude instinctively glanced back toward the doors where Logan still stood, Sasha now whispering in her ear. Without trying to, Jude caught her eye and received a big, unexpected wave from her in return. Was it Jude’s imagination, or did Logan’s gaze seem to lock and linger on Eliana?
Ian turned his attention away from Jude almost immediately, switching back to Eliana with an accusatory look.
“I don’t know, Blake. Do you honestly think she’ll be able to keep up with us?”
Jude felt her heart freeze, the intoxicating mixture of excitement and nervousness temporarily blocked from her system. Suddenly she was in high school again, opening her locker to find that, somehow, all her clothes had vanished. She was empty, already defeated.
Then Eliana laughed.
“Fisher, what exactly makes you think you can keep up with me tonight?” Turning back to Jude, Eliana offered a softer smile. “I was hoping you might want to join our group, Jude. I mean, if you don’t mind that my supposed best friend is a huge douchebag, obviously. Oh, and it does sort of mean you’d have to leave your other friends behind. They only let us go in groups of two to four.”
The ice cracked and broke away as Eliana spoke, and Jude felt herself floating back to the present moment. High school was over, and she was right here, on an artificially grassy rooftop in an impossible bubble of magic, hidden inside an abandoned warehouse in Brooklyn, New York.
She felt a little disoriented as she looked at the people milling around, giggling with each other in their fantastic finery, drinking brightly colored liquids from tiny phials in their gloved hands. I’ve never even been to New York before, she thought to herself, suddenly struck by the absurdity of it all. And now I’m here, inside the secret headquarters of an ancient society dedicated to the research and study of magic, and…killing demons, I guess? What the fuck else do they do here?
She looked around again, and her eyes fell on a couple several feet away, grasping onto each other for support. Giggling and stumbling, they approached the large archway in the center of the hedge wall. A man stood in front of them—or, at least, Jude thought it was a man. He was wearing black from head-to-toe—including the hood that had been pulled over his head, obscuring his features.
Despite no obvious openings for eye holes, he seemed to see just fine. He gave the couple a quick once-over, then bowed and stepped out of their way. Giggling some more, they stumbled forward.
As soon as they stepped under the arch, they disappeared completely. Jude’s heart skipped a beat.
“Go where, exactly?”
“Into the maze, of course.”
“Uh, right.”
Jude looked at the looming hedge wall again, straight up to where it met with the deep black of the nighttime sky. When Eliana had first mentioned the afterparty to her, Jude had wondered what could possibly top the binding ceremony and the Gauntlet Ball. Now she wondered again, with a bit more dire urgency.
But it was just a party, after all. How bad could it be?
“Seriously, this is who you invited?” Fisher sneered at her. “If I’d known you wanted a puppy so bad, I would have gotten you one.”
“Yeah, I’ll go with you.” Jude’s words tumbled out of her, louder and tenser than she’d meant them. “I wouldn’t miss it.”
Fisher scoffed.
“Fantastic,” said Eliana, giving her friend a disapproving shove. “Ian, why don’t you go grab us our party favors, hm?”
Somehow finding a way to cross his arms even harder over his chest, the bespectacled boy let out an impatient huff as he began to move off.
“Whatever. Always happy to serve the Champion.”
Eliana watched him move safely out of earshot before turning back to Jude, bearing a look of contrition and concern.
“I’m sorry he’s being such an ass,” she said hurriedly. “He’s had kind of a rough day, and—well, to be honest, I should have given him more warning than I did that I was going to invite you.”
Jude blinked, remembering what Sasha had said about this party and wondering if perhaps she shouldn’t have come.
“Why—why does he care so much?”
Eliana gave her an incredulous smile.
“You really don’t know what you’re getting yourself into, do you?”
“Well, no. I’d never heard of this party until you told me about it.”
“Oh.” This time it was Eliana’s turn to blink. For the first time in hours, her eyes narrowed. “In that case, I should tell you…the afterparty can get a little…intense. It’s kind of…well, revealing. And intimate. Some people prefer to go through it with only their closest friends.”
“But…not you?”
“I don’t know. I just thought it might be a fun way to get to know you.” She cast her shining eyes at the floor, looking embarrassed. “I mean…look, it’s not too late if you still want to join up with Logan and your other friends. If that’s what you want, I mean.”
Jude flashed to Sasha’s words, comparing it to the burden release. If someone were to describe that as intense, she wouldn’t disagree. Still, Sasha’s assertion that the eira ritual was by far the harder of the two helped to put her at ease.
Jude shook her head.
“No, I—I think you’re right. It sounds like it might be a good way to get to know each other.”
Her uncertainty flared up as soon as the words formed, but there was little she could do about that now. Besides, the look of relief and excitement on Eliana’s face made it worth it.
“I’m back.”
Jude and Eliana jumped at the same time, turning to see brown-haired, beanie-wearing Ian Fisher staring at them, carrying an entire full tray of tiny phials. He let out an exaggerated sigh as the two of them gaped at the tray.
“Are we doing this, or what?”
Eliana laughed and picked up a phial.
“We’re supposed to toast, right?” She held her phial aloft. “I hate toasts. Uh, okay, okay. To—uh—to the struck hour!”
Fisher chuckled as he grabbed his own.
“You can stop sucking up to the elders, Blake, you already won.” He rolled his eyes and held his glass up next to hers. “To my own personal youth—and beauty.”
Eliana shook her head at him, then glanced over at Jude, expectantly. Catching on, Jude picked up a third phial—or was it a shot glass?—and held it next to theirs.
“To—uh—to making new friends!”
She glanced over at Eliana, who met her gaze with a shy smile. Ian Fisher sneered at them, then pushed his hand toward theirs, brusquely completing the toasting motion. They each tossed back their tinctures.
Jude’s head felt funny almost immediately. She’d barely righted herself again before she felt an unfamiliar wobbliness, somewhere in the vicinity of her ears. Shaking her head, she gave a little cough, even though the liquid hadn’t exactly burned its way down her throat. In fact, she’d barely felt it go down at all.
Ian and Eliana both tossed their empty phials over their shoulders as soon as they were finished with them, so Jude followed suit. When she didn’t hear the tell-tale sound of glass crashing to the floor, she glanced behind her—but there was nothing there. In fact, there was no debris around any of them. It was as if the phials had simply popped out of existence.
Strangeness was the order of the day, then.
“Shall we do another?” asked Ian, his eyes shining behind his thick, black glasses. Jude glanced at his face again; this close, she thought his glasses looked wrong somehow, but she couldn’t say why.
Eliana glanced over at Jude, looking uncertain.
“Jude,” she said gently, “when it comes to tonight…I don’t think you should try to keep up with us. Letha enhancers can be overwhelming the first time, you know?”
“Letha what, now?” Jude heard her voice come out of her mouth, but she was only partly certain she controlled it.
“Letha enhancers. You just took one, in that glass. Like I said, they’re powerful. You might feel a little disoriented.”
Fisher made another quiet sound of disgust.
“Seriously, if we’re doing this with a newbie, then I’m invoking my right to get trashed.” He grabbed a second phial. “What you might not know, young outsider, is that Blake and I were bound tonight. Which means for the next twenty-four hours, we’re basically superheroes.” He pushed the tray towards Eliana. “Come on, Blake. I’m gonna burn right through that first one, and so are you.”
Eliana glanced uncertainly at Jude, and even in her swiftly spiraling state, Jude recognized concern in her eyes.
“Come on, Blake,” said Ian, more insistently this time. “Don’t you want to make it an even playing field for your new friend?”
She touched Jude lightly on the arm, and it was all Jude could do not to stare in amazement at the place where they touched.
“Are you gonna be all right?”
Jude nodded tightly and swallowed hard, preparing herself for forming new words.
“I think I can hold it together.” She sounded surprisingly clear and confident, though a part of her realized that she might only seem that way to herself. What if she’d actually shouted those words, and she just couldn’t tell anymore?
Eliana, however, seemed to think she sounded fine.
“Okay,” she said carefully, her gaze—and touch—lingering a moment longer than it needed to. Then she finally turned back to Fisher and took another shot from the tray.
“Yes!” said Fisher, raising his own shot with gusto. “To getting fucked up!”
Eliana smiled.
“To the underappreciated virtues of sobriety,” she said, her voice pleasantly serene.
They both tossed back their liquids and threw the containers over their shoulders. Jude watched them do it this time, and to her eyes, it looked like the tiny glasses slowly faded into nothingness as they fell. She might have chalked it up to the increasing fuzziness of her head, if it weren’t for the pristine condition of the grass all around them.
In the end, Fisher and Eliana shared a third round, and Fisher soldiered on alone to a fourth. Jude found herself taking notice of the sky above her and wondering if it had always been as beautiful as it was right at that moment, and how it was possible that she had never realized it.
Eliana reached out a hand and touched Jude’s wrist, then with a move so quick and smooth Jude hardly felt it, slipped her hand into hers.
“Let’s go in, shall we?”
Jude thrilled at her touch, and for just a moment, her excitement completely overrode her apprehension. Then Eliana gave a pull, and they were just like everyone else: giggling, tumbling their way toward the gaping entrance to the darkened labyrinth, where the hooded man stood and waited.
Jude was never sure what happened to the tray, though she supposed it must have disappeared just like its contents. In any case, Fisher was right behind them when they finally reached the gate.
As they approached the hulking sentinel at the entrance, Jude started to worry that he would turn them away. Surely she wasn’t allowed, surely they knew that she was underage, and now they weren’t just going to throw her out of the party, but probably right out of the Order—
“Hello, there!” said Eliana cheerily, letting go of Jude’s hand as she stepped forward. “And a good evening to you!”
“Tell him you’re the Great Chosen Champion,” teased Fisher, smirking at his own half-joke.
“Please ignore our idiot,” said Eliana, pulling her spine straight and looking for all the world like she was about to salute. “The hour is struck!”
The apparent guardian of the maze bowed his head and stepped silently out of their way.
“How charming,” muttered Fisher vaguely. Puffing up his chest, he stepped out in front of the other two and marched straight into the archway.
Somehow, unlike the couple Jude had seen earlier, he didn’t disappear. Instead, he turned back toward them with a flourish and bowed theatrically, then glanced up at the other two.
“What’s the matter, comrades? You’re not afraid of a little bush, are you?”
Beside her, Eliana gave a stiff cough.
“I really wish you’d learn to think before you speak,” she said with a sigh. “Especially when we have company present.”
Fisher straightened back up and laughed.
“She’s gonna get to know me one way or another tonight, Blake. So what’s the point of hiding?”
With a shake of his head, he turned away from them and began moving away from the entrance, into the shadows. Eliana gave her an apologetic look and a shrug, then followed after him.
Jude glanced over her shoulder one last time, and as it happened, she locked eyes with Logan, standing on the far side of the roof. She must have looked more freaked out than she realized, because Logan gave her a reassuring smile before mouthing two comforting words at her.
You’re safe.
Relief broke immediately through Jude’s entire body. Surely, if there was danger here, Logan would know. Logan would warn her.
With that thought holding her steady, she gazed into the darkness and stepped inside.
Nothing seemed to change. The air withi
n the maze was the same as the air outside of it, if not a touch warmer. The corridors were lined with pretty twinkling lights and glowing orbs, and the aroma of flowers floated up to greet her.
She spun back around, thinking she’d mouth a thank you back at Logan—only Logan was no longer there.
In the span of an instant, everyone else on the roof had vanished.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Into the Long Grass
Jude blinked twice, and then a third time. As she stared out from the other side of the archway, she could still see the rooftop outside, covered in tile walkways and fake grass, illuminated by a star-filled sky. But, to her vision, the rooftop no longer held a single occupant. Even the sounds of the night had disappeared.
Jude did her best not to break into a panic. She took a breath, then turned to her right, where Eliana and Fisher stood several feet into the maze already.
“Where did everyone else go?” she asked. She hoped she didn’t sound as lost and childlike as she felt like she did.
“They’ll all get their turn,” said Eliana easily, clearly untroubled. Jude gaped at her.
“But they’re—they’re just gone.”
Eliana gave a small smile and shook her head.
“They’re not gone. Their journey into the maze will just be separate from ours, that’s all. Don’t worry, Logan will be fine—in fact, she’ll probably beat us to the end if we don’t get moving.”
It’s magic, Jude told herself as she started to walk toward the others. It’s magic you’ve never seen before, but it’s still just magic. Everything will be fine.
“Right, sorry,” said Jude, accelerating her pace. “I didn’t mean to hold us up.”
Eliana’s smile broadened.
“Not to worry,” she said. “I like to take my time.”
Jude wasn’t entirely sure why, but she felt herself blush again as warmth pooled in her abdomen.
“Hey, comrades! Are you coming, or what?” Fisher called from about twenty feet ahead of them, reminding them both of his presence.
Eliana sighed and shook her head.
“I suppose we’ve kept the little prince waiting long enough,” she said, mirth in her voice. To Jude’s immense surprise, she felt Eliana grab her hand again. “Come on!”