Book of Night(107)

As though Salt’s house needed to be creepier.

Charlie walked by massive and magnificent stairs carved in the shapes of lions, through an arch into a sitting room. There, two bartenders poured drinks from behind a wooden bar topped in pewter. A small knot of people waited for their drinks. Gangsters stood shoulder to shoulder with academics, performers chatted with mystics. Gloaming was a new science, and its practitioners as hungry as the shadows that fluttered behind them in the shapes of capes, or wrapped around their bodies like snakes. Others drifted a bit behind their wearer, leashed by a single silver cord, moving to peer out the window, or fetch a drink.

One shadow even drifted up to her tray, plucking an endive off of it before she could pause. Startled into stopping, she swallowed a curse as she almost dropped the food.

She heard a bark of laughter from across the room.

A prank. It reminded her that no matter how tense she was, and no matter how terrible her suspicions were, to most of the glooms present, this was a party.

With effort, she swallowed her irritation and glanced into the great room with its towering two-story ceiling and its wall of windows.

She spotted Salt in a tuxedo, standing beside one of his four enormous couches, declaiming to a few older gloamists. Adeline, in an elegant black column of a dress, stood beside the limestone fireplace, in which green and blue flames burned. An enormous painting of a forest hung over the mantel. Only when you looked closely did you notice that it was full of shadows wearing deep red slashes for mouths and that gray body parts had been rendered among the ferns of the forest floor.

Two additional Cabal members were there as well. Bellamy stood in a corner, and Malik looked particularly regal. His locs had been pulled into flat twists on the sides and wrapped in gleaming gold thread, his shadow hanging across his body like a sash.

A trio of musicians in animal masks played classical music. An owl with a violin. A fox with a cello. A bear with a viola. Through the windows, an outdoor garden was lit with low lamps that showed off marble statues of shrouded figures.

What must it have been like to grow up in a place like this? Surrounded by this much wealth? Force-fed untold depravity?

Charlie finished her circuit and ate the remaining hors d’oeuvres so she had an excuse to go back to the kitchen. Setting the silver tray down on the marble island to be wiped and refilled, she took the opportunity to grab her backpack. Then she headed directly for the library.

Charlie’s memories of the house were blurry and indistinct, more nightmare than recollection. A voice close enough for her to have felt breath on her neck. Cavernous rooms linked together in a puzzling maze.

The library, with a secret door leading to a room of treasures, including a safe. With the rug she vomited on, and where she might have died.

When she glanced in, she found two men in the leather chairs, talking in an intense way, one gesturing with a snifter of cognac. An empty glass and a napkin rested beside the other. They looked extremely settled.

Charlie needed to make them move, and quickly.

“Excuse me, sir,” she said, squatting down in front of the one she thought seemed more self-important. “I’m sorry, but there was a woman asking for you in the other room. Tall, with red hair. Very pretty. She described you and told me that if I saw you, I should inform you of her interest.”

He looked smug, and rose. “I’ll just be a second,” he said to his friend, but his friend was rising too.

“Going to refresh my drink,” the man said with a little too obvious relief, and Charlie had the sudden thought that perhaps she’d saved him from being buttonholed for the entire evening.

Charlie picked up the crumpled napkin and began to sweep up imaginary crumbs until she was alone. Then she went to the light switch on the wall, throwing it so that the darkened room would seem off-limits to other guests.

She reached into her backpack and drew on gloves and glasses with tiny lights attached to both sides. Once she switched them on, they would make her face a confusing blur to cameras, as well as provide a way to work in the dark.

Finally, she went to the wall of books. Red and gold. Red and gold. Something with flames, something with a title that started with an I. She couldn’t find the lever. Two pulls of books with red spines and gold type went nowhere. Then she spotted it, a shelf lower than where she’d been looking and a foot to the left. Inferno. She lifted it and the bookshelf door swung jerkily inward, revealing the smaller library, and the painting with the safe behind.

Charlie stepped through into the secret room, its walls covered in shelves packed with older books. Nausea abruptly constricted her throat. The memory of lying on the library carpet rushing back at her as though no time had passed between then and now, as though she were still a terrified kid. The rough texture of the merino wool against her cheek, the wetness from her vomit, the voice coming from the dark.

Don’t look behind you.

The smell of beets still made her gag.

Charlie stepped through onto the onyx tiles of the smaller chamber. Shelves lined the walls there too, with older and more precious books filling them. Memoirs, notebooks, and scientific journals, a hundred at least, all worth stealing. The Mystical Discoveries of Tovilda Gare sat beside Confessions of Nigel Lucy, Magus and Diarios de Juan Pedro Maria Ugarte. There were other books, in Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic, Latin, and Greek, as well as a whole half wall in French. Her fingers itched to choose a few at random and stuff them into her bag.