by Tess Adair
Finally she burst into another clearing, much smaller than the one behind her. Ahead of her a prone figure lay on the ground—a white girl with a long blonde ponytail, still wearing her red-and-white cheerleader’s outfit. Logan couldn’t see her face well enough to tell if she knew her. But she could see the gash along the girl’s arm.
And she could see the beast hovering over her, positioned directly between them.
Logan’s considerable grace chose that moment to fail her; a root in her path escaped her notice and she tripped over it, instantly losing her meager surprise advantage over the beast. It roared and reared back, never once turning to face her, and came down and forward, toward the helpless girl before it. By the time Logan launched herself upward again with dagger in hand, she knew she would be too late.
Fortunately for the girl on the ground, Logan wasn’t the only other person in the clearing with them. Someone else came into her view for the briefest moment—someone she hadn’t even seen the moment before. The unknown person yelled incoherently into the night, and the air around them exploded with a white brilliance. For several seconds, Logan couldn’t see anything at all. Somewhere ahead of her, the beast let out a grunt of pain.
Her brief glimpse of the unknown figure hadn’t told her much, but she had managed to clock a baggy gray sweatshirt and what might have been a backwards baseball cap. One student sprang to mind, but she pushed the speculation away. She had other things to focus on for now.
Whoever the figure was, they had screamed out a spell word as they leapt forward, though she couldn’t make it out. But that couldn’t be right. Logan had never heard of a letha spell that successfully summoned light—as far as she knew, it was impossible. Still, here she was, trying to get her eyes to work again through the haze of some strange, glowing white light. So whatever that spell was, it had certainly done something. Maybe it was eira? she wondered. Maybe the words were superfluous, or random noise…
Even as her thoughts threatened to distract her, Logan rushed forward, straight through the fog of light, toward the spot where the beast had been moments before—but there was nothing there. She kept going, dagger held high before her as she came out of the strange enveloping cloud. On the other side, her head turned to the sound of crunching branches before her, and she saw the beast retreating.
She took after it at full speed, but within moments, she knew it was pointless. The beast could traverse these woods as easily as if it were open ground, while she found herself blocked by rocks and bramble, thickset bushes and trees. She couldn’t explain why it had such an easier time with the terrain than she did; perhaps it was more familiar with it, having spent its last few nights marking its territory and hunting grounds. Or perhaps it simply saw better in the dark.
Soon enough, the beast had gotten so far ahead of her that she knew it was time to admit defeat. She slipped her long dagger back into its sheath and turned back toward the two students she had left behind.
Before she took her first step back toward them, she heard a strange noise—the sound of a flute, floating on the air from likely miles off. She didn’t know what it was, but it struck some chord in her memory. Unearthly and cold, it struck her. She took mental note of the sound.
As she came out of the densest underbrush, she could see that the bright, blinding light from before had already dispersed. And she could make out the two figures now standing before her.
The first was the girl she’d seen on the ground in the cheerleader uniform. She stood upright and cradled her right arm, which was bleeding heavily just above the elbow. Now that Logan had a moment to study her face, she was sure she’d never spoken to her before.
But she recognized the other student immediately. As she watched, Judith Li pulled a blue bandana out of the pocket of her oversized sweatshirt and reached out to wrap it around the other girl’s wound.
“What the fuck was that?” the blond girl whispered to Judith Li, her voice panicked and wild.
Judith began to mumble something in return, but then paused and glanced up as she heard Logan enter the clearing again.
“Hey! Uh, you wouldn’t happen to have a real bandage on you, would you?” She looked Logan over, her eyes lingering on the leather sheath, clearly visible on Logan’s upper thigh. “Alongside your…battle…knife? Uh, that’s not a secret teacher thing, is it?”
Guess I could have tried to hide that. Logan sighed internally, but outwardly she shrugged. The cat was at least partly out of the bag; Logan was morally opposed to all kinds of memory spells, and she was well aware of how often they went wrong, so she hadn’t left herself many options. Besides, Judith Li was her mystery figure. She had proven only moments ago that she knew a little something about casting, even if the spell she had used was one that Logan had never heard before. Logan almost laughed, wondering how many bizarre and unworkable spells she must have made up when she was younger, playing around in her father’s study whenever he wasn’t around.
“It’s not a secret teacher thing, no. It’s a…it’s a secret that’s specific to me, actually.” She gave Judith a piercing look, deciding to study her closely as she got her answer. “Kind of like how you, an ordinary high school girl, somehow knew how to blind a hell beast. Along with anyone else caught in the crossfire.”
Logan watched carefully as Judith scratched her head through the baseball cap, looking sheepish and contrite. Beside her, the blond girl watched her silently, her eyes wide with fear. “Yeah, sorry about that. I, uh, I didn’t really think that would work. I just…I needed to do something.” She looked over at the blond girl. As Logan watched, she tenderly touched the girl’s arm, but only for a moment. “I couldn’t just let it kill her.”
For a moment, Logan kept her silence, still studying Judith Li intently. Every thought she’d had about Judith Li since the moment she’d first seen her raced through her head, begging her to make sense of it all. What are you doing here, Judith Li? Surely if she were the demon’s summoner, she wouldn’t have chased it off from the kill. And even if she’d wanted to, why would she need extraneous magic to do it?
“Of course not,” said Logan finally, turning her attention on the cheerleader. “Are you all right?” She closed some of the distance still between them, hoping to get a better sense of the amount of blood loss.
“I don’t know,” the girl answered vaguely. She met Logan’s eyes, and her own looked lost and confused. “What the hell was that thing?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” said Logan. From a technical perspective, this was an honest answer. She knew it was a demon, yes, but she couldn’t confirm what kind yet. “The important thing is that you’re both okay. Do you feel faint at all?”
The blond girl gave a shake of her head. “No, I don’t think so.” She looked back to Judith Li, and her expression warmed. “You really—you did magic, and it worked. You saved me.”
Judith smiled back at her, before self-consciously glancing down at the ground. The other girl reached out and touched her arm, taking a step closer. With a small start of surprise, Logan realized she was witnessing something of an intimate moment. Then the girls seemed to remember her presence, and they stepped apart again, both trying to look everywhere but at each other, as though they could pretend nothing had happened. Logan coughed. She felt more intrusive and out-of-place by the moment.
“Uh…sorry, what was your name?” she asked, hoping to break the awkward silence.
“Amy,” said Amy. “Amy Williams.”
“Amy,” Logan smiled. “Do you mind if I take a look at your arm, Amy? I’d like to figure out if you need medical attention. May I?”
Amy’s face crumpled into an expression of worry and concern, but she nodded and held out her arm, offering it to Logan. Logan strode forward and gently took hold of the girl’s elbow, loosening the bandana so she could get a good look. While the cut did cross the width of her arm, it was surprisingly shallow. The bleeding had already stopped.
“It’s not too bad,” Logan
reassured her, tying the bandana back up. “We should get you straight home so you can wash it out, but it looks like it will heal on its own. Be careful how much you move the arm, and try not to bump it into things if you can. Can your parents take you to urgent care in the morning to get it checked out?”
Amy looked stricken. “What am I supposed to tell them? I can’t just say a monster tried to eat me.”
Logan nodded, thinking. Internally, she couldn’t help but correct the girl: the monster wouldn’t have eaten her, he would have torn her heart out…probably to eat it. But she understood the folly of relating this sentiment, so instead she said, “Can you just tell them you fell?”
Amy considered this. “I don’t know. They might assume I was at a party…which, I was, so, like…I think they might get mad.”
Logan looked back and forth between the two girls, pondering exactly how severe the consequences might be for either of them if Amy’s parents did get mad. After all, if Judith no longer lived with her parents, Logan had very few guesses about whom she might be staying with instead. “Will you promise me you’ll wash it out very carefully? Use alcohol.”
Amy nodded solemnly. “Yes, I will.”
“Will you also promise me that you’ll go see the school nurse on Monday? You can tell her you fell on your way into school or something.”
“I will.”
Finally, Logan nodded too. “Okay. Let’s get you home.”
Relief washed over Amy’s face like a wave, and she took a few steps forward, back toward the clearing and out of the woods. Judith, on the other hand, stood still and stared at Logan in confusion and disbelief.
“I don’t get it—why are you being so nice to us? Don’t you want to…I don’t know, make sure we get in trouble or something? I mean, we’re at a party, and there’s drinking and stuff. And we were…well, you had to save us from some fucked-up thing.” Her gaze slid off to the side. Logan had a feeling that she had sidestepped mentioning something about why she and cheerleader were away from the rest of the crowd in the first place.
She remained silent for a moment, mulling her answer. Earlier that day, she had considered Judith Li her number one suspect—and yet it was almost impossible for Judith to know that, and therefor improbable that she should have any reason to try to prove her own innocence. Even if she had summoned the beast, surely she would have had a better way of running it off than throwing up a wall of light? And if she was the summoner, why had Logan heard that unearthly flute playing as the beast fled? Logan acknowledged the outside possibility that Judith Li did know she was a suspect and had arranged all of this to throw her off the scent, but she deemed it unlikely.
A far simpler explanation for it all lay at her feet.
“You two are dating, yes?” She motioned between the two of them. Amy had turned around by now, and her pretty face grew worried once more as she looked to Judith. Judith nodded slowly, cautiously. “And when I went to check on you at your house yesterday, your mother behaved the way she did because she discovered you and doesn’t approve, and she kicked you out. Yes?” Judith nodded again. “And if I force Amy to admit to her parents that you were at this party, they might kick you out, too. Yes?” A nod. “Well, there we are then. How are we getting you two home?”
Amy raised her hand, as if she were in class. Then she looked at it, startled, and put it down again. “We came in my car,” she said.
“Good. I’ll walk you back to it. Lead the way.”
Amy turned and started up the path again, and this time, Logan and Judith followed suit. Logan kept abreast of Judith for a moment, hoping to probe her backstory a little more.
“Tell me,” she said, so quietly that Amy, a few feet ahead of them now, wouldn’t be able to make it out. “Where did you learn that spell?”
“Oh, uh, I—well, I found this book on the internet that claimed it could teach you magic,” Judith answered. She still sounded sheepish and embarrassed, possibly still unaware how impressive her earlier act had been. “I didn’t think it was real, you know? But I bought it as a joke, and I’ve been messing around with it. I, uh, I haven’t been able to do much—before today, I mean. I’m sorry if it fucked you up. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone, I’ve just never tried it around anyone else before. Anyway, sorry.”
I’m supposed to be sorry she’d dead. Out of everything Judith had said in her interview, that was the line that had stuck with her.
“Do you always apologize when you save someone’s life?”
Judith froze in place, so Logan followed suit. Amy got a few more feet ahead of them before Judith shook herself, and they started walking again.
“I didn’t save anybody,” Judith insisted, shaking her head. “You were already there when I said it. You probably could have killed that thing if I hadn’t been so stupid. I just got in your way.”
“Not at all,” said Logan, now shaking her own head. “I wasn’t going to get there on time. If you hadn’t done what you did, Amy would probably be dead. You saved her life today. Don’t apologize for that.”
Judith didn’t say anything in response. After a moment, Logan risked a glance over at her and found a faint bemused smile settled on her face.
“So, you just bought a spell book on the internet one day? You never had any reason to believe that magic might be real before that?”
Judith paused again, this time taking care to catch Logan’s eye and examining her face for a moment before she answered. Logan guessed she was looking for signs that Logan might turn on her if she told the truth. “Well, not exactly,” she said. “I’ve never told anyone before. Most people wouldn’t believe me, so why bother, you know?”
Logan nodded. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. All I can do is promise you that I won’t tell anyone. And I will believe you.”
Judith nodded and kept walking. Logan could see her thoughts working her way over her face while she debated whether or not to divulge herself. As she considered it, they stumbled to a halt—they had reached Amy’s vehicle. Logan sighed.
“Well, I suppose I’ll let you two get going,” she said, trying not to shoot Judith a hinting sidelong look.
“Wait,” said Judith immediately. She turned to Amy. “Can you give me a second? You can get in and turn the car on, I won’t be long.”
Amy looked like she was about to open her mouth and question her, but instead she nodded silently and climbed into the SUV, shutting herself in as she turned the ignition.
Judith turned back to Logan and looked her straight in the eye as she spoke.
“I can’t prove it, but when I was five years old, I set a girl on fire in my class just by wishing it.” She paused, blatant terror on her face, like she expected Logan to punish her on the spot.
“Keep going,” said Logan.
“I didn’t mean to do it. I mean, I did want her to catch on fire, but I didn’t know that wanting it would make it happen. She pushed me down at recess and then made fun of me, and the teacher wouldn’t believe me. So when she got up to answer a question, I just wished that she would catch on fire…and she did. The teacher grabbed her sweater and beat the fire out immediately, and she wasn’t badly hurt. I don’t think she even has a scar.” She shook her head. “Obviously, I’ve never wished something like that again. I mean, sometimes I still hate people, but I make sure that I never think anything specific about them. I’ve tried setting other stuff on fire, just to see if I could. Like pieces of paper and stuff, nothing big. But it’s never worked. I don’t think I can do it if I’m not mad.” She looked back at the car for a second, probably checking to see if Amy was trying to listen to them. Her face remained in profile, perfectly blank as far as they could see, and music emanated faintly from inside. Judith continued. “I have made other stuff happen. One time, I tripped over something in the woods, but somehow my body magically slowed down before I hit the ground. And…and…not always, but sometimes…I think I can hear what other people are thinking. Just a little bit. I can�
��t control when it happens, so it’s mostly just annoying. Like, I know that Amy gets embarrassed by how I dress sometimes, even though she’s never said anything or even looked at me weird. And I always know when we’re having a pop quiz.” Her eyes narrowed as she fixed Logan with a penetrating stare. “And I know that when you first saw me, you thought I looked like I wanted to be invisible. You recognized it because you remembered what it felt like to know that nobody sees you.”
Logan didn’t have to think back to that moment to know that Judith was absolutely right. She thought the same thing every time she looked at her. Judith’s discomfort with herself was painfully obvious, and Logan’s recognition of those feelings was painfully strong.
“But you can’t hear every thought?” Logan kept her mind as blank as possible as she watched Judith for an answer.
“Nope,” Judith shrugged in return. “I usually just get a flash when I first meet someone, or if they feel a really strong emotion or something.”
The possibility remained that Judith may have known she was a suspect before. But if she did, why give Logan the one piece of information that could hint at her foreknowledge?
“So, at some point, you decided to find out more?” asked Logan.
“I read a few library books that were mostly theoretical,” Judith answered. “Then I did a lot of internet research. The book I bought—it seemed the more legitimate than most of the things I’d seen.” She shrugged. “It talks about summoning the elements, and it says you have to be in tune with nature and, like, in a meditative state and stuff. I’ve tried summoning light a bunch of times, mainly just in my room with the lights off. But for the most part, I haven’t been able to do much. I’ve thought a couple of times that it was working, but it was so faint I couldn’t really say if it was actually magic or not. What you saw in there was the biggest thing I’ve ever done.”
Eira, then. Definitely.
“That’s more impressive than you seem to think it is,” said Logan. A part of her wanted to stay right where they were and keeping talking until she felt sure she’d gotten all the information she could out of Judith, but she knew that wasn’t safe. Her only other option was to drag her back to her dingy motel room, which posed its own problems. So instead, she had to cut it short. “Well, I think you should probably get going now. But feel free to seek me out at school if you’d like to talk about it a little more. Oh, and make sure that when you two get home, you get inside immediately and don’t go out again until dawn. Understand?”
