Shadow Summoner: Choronzon Chronicles Book One

by Tess Adair

  “I asked. They said no.”

  Logan didn’t bother to repress the sneer that pulled on her upper lip. She mistrusted the Order almost as much as her father. “So how did they find out?”

  “Mr. Atherton informs me their psychics picked up on an unusual uptick in paranormal activity in the area.” She could hear the contempt in his voice; it mirrored her own. Psychics were generally charlatans who knew how to manipulate suggestion magic and passed it off as soothsaying. In other words: Atherton’s explanation was bullshit.

  “Right. And somehow they picked up on me specifically?”

  “Mr. Atherton did not expound on their detection methods. He merely called to let me know that the Order are standing ready, should we require their assistance.”

  “He called you personally?”

  “Indeed.”

  Logan fought to keep the image of smarmy James Atherton out of her head. “Right. So, you require an update in order to know if we require their assistance. Is that right?”

  “Roughly. Yes.”

  Logan was down to the soft, wilted square of cheese pizza. “I don’t require any assistance. If anything, the assistance of the Order would only get in my way. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but getting kids to tell the whole truth is something of a delicate business. It requires a subtle approach. In this case, subtle does not mean a bunch of old bluebloods running around in stupid black capes. You get me?”

  “I surmised as much. Unfortunately for us, Miss Logan, while the Order have thus far only offered their assistance, they may soon insist upon it. Any quantifiable update you can give me would help to keep that inevitability at bay for a few days longer.”

  Logan almost loathed to help him out with this, but she did see his point. “Fine. I have a couple of suspects, and one of them didn’t show up at school today, so I’m going on a field trip tonight. Is that enough of an update for you?”

  “It will do for now.” She disliked the sound of his satisfaction. “Thank you, Logan.”

  “Yeah. Later, Knatt.”

  She clicked off the phone without a second thought. Somehow, the limp pizza slice looked even less appealing than it had before.

  But she did need to force a few more calories into her system. And she needed to put in a call to Mrs. Wendell to ask for Judith Li’s home address.

  If she was lucky, she might have a better update for Knatt by the morning.

  Getting Judith Li’s address was the easy part. Mrs. Wendell gave it to her without a question, and she threw in a paper map of the town as well. Logan had prepared a reason she needed the address—that she’d scheduled a second session with Li and was concerned about her absence, and she hoped to offer her a chance to reschedule. But she need not have bothered; Mrs. Wendell didn’t ask a single follow-up question.

  So she stood now in the front office, staring at the map and trying to figure out her route. She felt a vague sense of dread as she pondered the evening in front of her. Talking to children for the past week had been bad enough; she had no desire to experience any of their parents.

  Nevertheless, she knew what she had to do. Once she had a clear picture in her mind, she swallowed her unease, folded up the map, and marched out to the parking lot.

  She wasn’t sure what she should expect when she got to Judith Li’s house. Would Li even be there? Did she want her to be?

  Maybe Li’s absence would prove to be a coincidence after all. Maybe she had a cold.

  Or maybe not. Logan zipped up her jacket as she swung onto the bike again.

  The route she’d mapped out brought her back into the suburbs to the south. She ended up on a street of identical ranch houses, all a uniform rusty red color with uniformly manicured lawns and SUVs of various neutral colors parked in the driveways. When she saw the sign for Li’s street, she went just past it, deciding it was best to weigh anchor out of sight. She didn’t want to have to explain to anybody’s parents why a high school counselor rode a motorcycle.

  After she’d kicked the stand down and hopped off, she took a chance and slung her jacket over the seat, placing the helmet on top of it. She had a feeling theft wasn’t an overwhelming problem in this town, and she wanted to maintain whatever shot she had at coming off as nonthreatening and harmless. With a quick tug to straighten her tucked-in collared shirt, and a glance to check for sweat stains, she took off down Judith Li’s street, toward her home address.

  Each lawn on the street had a mailbox at the end, and each mailbox had been helpfully printed with the address of the accompanying house. Judith Li’s house was halfway down: 5914 Acorn Street. Logan stopped right in front of the box and gave the house a quick once-over.

  She wasn’t sure exactly what she’d expected, but the house hardly looked like it held a murderous mastermind. It didn’t even have a garage; it had a carport. As she glanced around behind into the yard beyond, she could tell that it backed up not to the plentiful forests all around them, but to another row of cookie-cutter suburb street—not exactly ideal for hiding a monster. A small window set into the side of the house, so low its ledge rested in direct contact with the earth, told her that the house at least boasted a basement, but she saw no indication that the basement held any exit to the outside world larger than that cat-sized opening. In short: if Judith Li had a monster for a pet, Logan doubted she was keeping it in this house.

  With a deep breath, she put on her best client face and made her way up the sidewalk to the front door. The door was white with a white-based screen over it. A shining gold doorknocker rested under the peephole, but Logan pegged it as decorative only and opted for the deep gray doorbell to the right instead. The hollow ring echoed through the rooms beyond.

  After a moment, the door cracked open an inch, then inched onward at a turtle’s pace until it finally held wide. A well-dressed Asian woman in her fifties, wearing pale peach, stood behind it, hesitating briefly in shadow as she gave Logan a once-over. Finally, she stepped forward, meeting Logan behind the screen door with an expression of pure suspicion on her face. As far as Logan could tell, she looked to be in her late forties; her frame appeared light and fit, and her perfectly black hair hung straight to her shoulders before ending in an abrupt line, meaning that the only available indicator of her age lay in the fine lines crackling just around her eyes, displaying an as-yet-unearned air of character and critical thinking. She cocked her head sharply to the left as she spoke.

  “Who are you?” Her voice was crisp and sharp.

  “My name is Miss Logan,” Logan answered immediately. Something about this woman’s voice demanded promptness. “I work up at the high school, where Judith Li attends. Is this her residence?”

  “Is Judith in trouble?” One of the woman’s eyebrows shot up, clicking into a perfect upside-down checkmark above her eye. “Are you a teacher? Did Judith do something bad at the school?”

  “No, that’s not why I’m here,” said Logan, in what she hoped was a reassuring tone. “I’m actually—I’m a counselor at the school. One of Judith’s classmates died very recently, and I’ve been offering grief counseling sessions to the students. Judith was scheduled for a session with me today, so I wanted to come by and see if she’d like to reschedule. May I speak to her?”

  “No,” said the woman abruptly, shaking her head with stern force. “Judith does not need that. You may leave now.”

  Her voice was commanding, but she didn’t shut the door right away. Logan let a broad smile spread across her face.

  “Tell me, are you Judith’s mother, by any chance?”

  “Yes, I am Mrs. Li,” the woman answered with a nod. Her hand rested on the edge of the door, but she still didn’t close it.

  “It’s so nice to meet you, Mrs. Li. I must admit, I was a little worried to hear that Judith called in sick. I hope she managed to get some rest at home today?”

  The woman stared at her silently with no answer, suspicion blossoming anew across her features. Just then, a child’s voice sounded s
omewhere in the room beyond her.

  “Mom! I finished the worksheet.”

  Without a word, Mrs. Li turned around and walked a few paces into the house. Logan leaned furtively forward, glancing inside as her eyes adjusted. She could see a dining room table with two children seated behind it—they looked like they were no older than six and eight, respectively. Each child slumped over a pile of papers, with more piles of books beside them. Logan did the easy math—these kids, likely Judith’s siblings, though close in age to each other, looked nearly a decade younger than Judith was. Logan couldn’t help but wonder what that might imply about the potential for loneliness in Judith Li’s life.

  “If you’re finished, you put it in the stack by the end of the table and start on the next one. I’ll check the work in a few minutes to make sure. If it’s good, we will take a snack break when your sister finishes hers. Now start the next one.”

  Then she turned around again and walked back to Logan. Her face bore the exact same expression as before, almost as though they had experienced no interruption.

  “What do you want with Judith?” asked Mrs. Li.

  “I was just wondering if I could talk to her for a moment. I’ll be very quick, I promise. I certainly wouldn’t want to interfere with her convalescence. I’m only concerned for her emotional well-being, Mrs. Li.”

  Like a pot collapsing in slow-motion, Mrs. Li’s expression melted from suspicion into resignation. Then she sighed.

  “Judith is not here.” Her lips pursed into a hard line as she continued to survey Logan with something less than warmth.

  “She’s not here? Does that mean she’s not sick?”

  “That girl is not sick. Her body is not sick. She is wrong. Something is wrong with that girl.”

  “Wrong with her?” Logan allowed surprise to flood her voice but kept it neutral apart from that, devoid of judgment in any direction. “What do you mean?”

  “She’s not right. I don’t know how it happened. Something is not right with that girl. I did what I can, but I have two children in this house. I can’t spend all my time correcting that girl.”

  Two other children, Logan thought, but she didn’t say it.

  “Are you saying Judith is not here because she no longer lives here?” As she spoke, she found that her voice sounded just as crisp as Mrs. Li’s.

  “Yes, she is gone now.” Mrs. Li gave a small shake of her head. “I don’t know where she went. I have to take care of my children. It’s not good to keep her in the house with them. They don’t understand.”

  “Mrs. Li…in what way is Judith wrong?”

  Mrs. Li stared at her, a new emotion that Logan couldn’t immediately identify spreading across her face. Logan tried again. “Earlier, you asked me if Judith was in trouble. Has she been in trouble before?”

  Mrs. Li’s new expression solidified; she looked…afraid. That was it.

  “That girl is trouble.” Mrs. Li shook her head resolutely; she bore the expression of one who had been through fire, or at the very least, wanted their audience to believe so. “We fight all the time, in front of her siblings. I tell her not to bring this rottenness into my house, in front of young children. But she does it all the same. She does not stop.” She fixed Logan with a stare like a lamplight. “She goes against God. If she wants the devil to take her, then let him have her.” Her voice wavered slightly, and she cut off her stare. “I thought maybe—at the school—someone could have seen her—but, no. No, I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Thank you for coming, but we don’t need any help from you. You may go now. No, wait.” She turned away and walked out of sight briefly. When she came back, she held a small piece of cardstock in her hands. For the first time, she opened the door and reached out, in order to pass the little postcard-sized piece through. “Take a coupon. Everybody needs to eat.”

  Logan glanced down at the paper in astonishment. In bright yellow letters, she read: Little Italy Palace. When she looked up again, Mrs. Li was staring her down with intention once more.

  “It’s a family business. You should eat, we make very good food. Best food in town, I guarantee. Everybody needs to eat. Okay?”

  Logan blinked.

  “Okay. Thank you, Mrs. Li. I appreciate it.”

  She turned away without another word. As she walked back down the path through Mrs. Li’s front yard, she stared down at the cardstock in mild disbelief. Weird business strategy, she thought. As a matter of fact, the whole conversation had left her feeling strangely unsettled.

  Judith Li had been kicked out of her home. Mrs. Li had tiptoed around spelling out a reason, but perhaps it wasn’t unreasonable to think Judith may have done something violent.

  As Logan made her way back to her bike, she realized that she didn’t have the faintest idea where she could start looking for Judith. Despite conducting an entire counseling session with her, Logan hadn’t gathered enough information to have any real idea where the girl would go if she needed to leave home. Maybe she had gone out to some secret hideout in the woods, where she was keeping her monster hidden. Or maybe she had an accomplice—a friend, perhaps another victim of Violet’s childish cruelty—and they kept the monster housed on their property. But Logan had no idea who that accomplice was likely to be, or what section of woods Judith would have chosen for a lair, if she had done any such thing at all.

  There had to be something she could track. Surely.

  It was likely only a matter of time before someone else was attacked. The presence of the coyote carcass told her that much. She glanced at the time—well past 5:00pm, so Mrs. Wendell was probably home for the night. In the morning, she would have to ask her everything she knew about Suzanne Grubb and how to find her now, on the off-chance that Suzanne was Judith’s accomplice.

  In the meantime, she couldn’t be sure that the beast in the woods would restrict itself to wild animals for long. As she pondered what options she might have to track it, or pick up on any sign of it, she felt an itch developing in the center of her back. The itch seemed to burn in a small circle, dead center between her shoulder blades. It was almost as though the Choronzon Key wanted to remind her of its presence.

  Almost as though…Logan bent her arm behind her back to touch the lower edge of the Key where it now lay tattooed on her hidden skin. She should have expected as much—the Key felt hot to the touch.

  She hated anthropomorphizing the body art she’d never chosen, but the truth was that sometimes the Key wanted things, and it let her know when it did. Like right now—she knew it wanted something from her, though she couldn’t immediately say what. So with a small sigh of resignation, she closed her eyes and opened her mind to whatever suggestion it wanted to place.

  She imagined nothing. Instead, she cleared away all her lingering thoughts and focused on empty space. Her breath came in and out. The hot almost-summer air pressed down on her, and her temple formed a thin line of sweat.

  An urge to move came over her. She pulled on her helmet and swung onto the bike, then revved it forward at a much lower pace than normal. Turning her Ninja down streets that seemed to come to her like whims, she headed out of Judith’s subdivision and rode a little further south.

  After a few minutes, she found herself slipping down a lonelier, emptier road. A simple playground with a small gravel lot stood at the end; when she met it, she came to a stop.

  If someone had asked her, she couldn’t have explained why, but she felt like now was the time to leave the bike behind. She parked it in the gravel and left the helmet and the jacket sitting on top of it, knowing somehow that she’d need to move a little more freely than either would allow her.

  As she gazed on at the woods before her, she got the sense that she’d been here before. Her feet propelled her forward, along the short stretch of grass and straight into the line of trees.

  When she found a path no more than a few feet into the woods, she wasn’t surprised. She’d known it would be there—or, rather, the Key had. She followed it deepe
r into the dark, ducking around branches and high-stepping over bramble. Though the sun had not yet faded from the sky, the woods here were dense enough to block out most of the remaining illumination, leaving her in an ersatz night.

  She knew she had arrived before she saw any signs of what she might be looking for. With a burn so brief it barely hurt, the Chorozon Key released its hold on her, and with it the urgent physical need to move dropped away. As she hesitated with her foot in midair, suddenly uncertain, she met a low-hanging branch and stumbled. Righting herself again, she took a few surer steps forward and found herself facing a small circle of empty space within the trees.

  Across from her stood a tall stone, possibly positioned purposely, covered in stains and deliberate marks, the melted stubs of burned-down candles littering the top edge. The floor of the hollow looked burned out, almost like someone had cleared away the debris with fire—or something else. She had seen the after-effects of letha summoning before. She took a step into the clearing, past the arbitrary boundary created by the line of trees, but despite all the clear evidence of magic, she felt no involuntary shiver down her spine. Instead, when she looked at this empty burned-out husk in the middle of the woods, she felt nothing. It didn’t tell her much, but it suggested that since the beast had been summoned, its summoner had not used the site for any further casting. She doubted Judith or anyone else had come by here at all. It had that unused feeling to it.

  Glancing around the site, she took note of all the various signs of spell work, from the minor singe marks along the ground to the last vestiges of blue powder in the visible crevices. Once she’d gotten a good look around, she walked over to the rock on the far side—tall and thin, almost like a naturally occurring gravestone.

  For the most part, the stains and markings on the stone were too faded for her to make anything out from them. But in the very center of its face, there was one clear image she could still interpret.

  It was some kind of rune—a rune displaying a wolf’s head.