Book of Night(103)

There seem to be various ways to cut a dormant shadow away from a living person. Remy is able to make Red pick up the shadow of a knife and wield it. (Interestingly, the knife does permanently lose its shadow, and the next morning, I perceived spots of rust on the blade, which warrants further investigation.) Remy, as a gloamist, can use his fingers and, while making a snipping motion, use those “scissors” to sever the bond between person and shadow. It was also possible for me to cut away a shadow using an onyx knife.

All those means can also be used to remove a shadow from a corpse, but this shadow has a discernable difference in texture and weight. This also warrants further investigation.

That had to have been written by Salt. It wasn’t quite a confession, but it was damning nonetheless.

The next page was worse.

I cut her wrist several times, thinking that perhaps that would be enough trauma to quicken her shadow, but she died like all the rest, despite the alterations done to her.

Yeah, that was bad. Charlie wasn’t sure if any of this would be admissible in court, but it would lead investigators to look for evidence, which was almost certainly out there.

And it would ruin him in the court of public opinion. Not to mention what the Cabal would be forced to do, since it was other gloamists he’d been targeting.

The third page was about Red.

Remy has been doing experiments of his own, ones he’s been hiding from me. He has been setting his shadow free. I have no idea how he’s managed this, and have it return to him, but it does.

Does he feed it excess blood? And if so, how much? How long has he been doing this? Now I will be paying close attention.

Another thing I must know—is he controlling it? And if not, does that mean Red is self-aware? Cogito, ergo sum? And if so, what has it stolen from Remy to become that way?

And then a final page.

I have made a mistake, one I hope I will be able to correct.

If I can’t have Red, then I will have to kill him.

If Salt knew that Knight Singh had those papers, then he would certainly have wanted Knight dead. Salt had to have been the client paying Adam, the one he’d hidden from Balthazar.

Now she had the leverage, if she could figure out what to do with it. If she could solve the puzzle in time.

A con, after all, was about uncovering the truth. Warping it, sure, but uncovering it first. It was the closest thing Charlie had to Posey’s tarot, a belief in something larger than herself. Just like Posey could put down cards in neat little rows, Charlie could plan out her schemes. But eventually she had to surrender to improvisation and trust her instincts.

Charlie recalled lying on the rug of Salt’s house, with a hidden room and a safe only steps away. Where all his most valuable possessions would be kept, including ones that were never supposed to be found. That was what she needed to get into.

Just in case Vince came back, Charlie ripped a piece of paper from the back of his notebook and used her pencil to write him a message.

I found the letter you didn’t send me. Call me if you find this. And don’t do anything stupid.

Love, Char

She left the note on the mattress. Then she flipped off the lights and carefully closed the hotel room door, keeping her head down as she crossed the parking lot.





29

THE PAST




Vince sat at the bar, every part of him alert to the crush of people around him, to the smell of sweat and the sweet rot of syrupy drinks sunk down into the grooves of the floor. The music was turned up loud enough to discourage much in the way of conversation, but to the right of him, a guy was trying, shouting at another guy about a video game where you built a house underwater.

That’s the whole point, the guy was yelling. To survive. Build your base. You’ve got to get ready for when they launch the update and the sharks come.

It had been a month and a half since he’d left Salt’s house, and every day he was away from the place he simultaneously hated it more and missed it. He felt homesick for what had never been his home. And for the one person who had mattered to him most, and was gone.

The hardest part was having so much time to think. To have to make his own decisions. To wrestle with the guilt of being alive when by all rights he shouldn’t have been. Vince was used to measuring out his life in small moments, never letting himself look much ahead, and never daring to look behind.

Here we are, on a boat.

Here we are, with a knife.

Here we are, in the bedroom of a CFO in the middle of the night.

And now Vince had to make plans if he was going to survive. He had something he could use to bring down the old man, but he couldn’t use it on his own. Better to pass it off to Knight Singh, with his web of connections and his dislike of Salt. The item was in the messenger bag slung across Vince’s shoulder, and he wanted nothing more than to be rid of it.

Maybe Vince could have a future where he wasn’t constantly looking over his shoulder. That thought brought a rush of guilt with it.

The problem was that Vince wasn’t used to the setting-things-up part. He’d been all about the execution.

“Another?” the bartender asked.

Vince had allowed himself to be talked into a pumpkin beer, having no idea what to order in a place like this. Adeline would have had champagne with vodka to “wake it up.” Salt would have had a single malt from a place that Vince was certain he’d butcher the pronunciation of, and which was likely to dig deeply into his cash reserves.