Book of Night(15)

Back then she was working at Bar Ten, and after her shift, she’d lie in bed until she had to work again, too exhausted to move. Eventually, she lost her job. Started burning through her savings. A couple months later, Mark and his brother shot up her car while it was stopped at a light. Only one bullet hit her, but that was plenty. Two hit the guy in the passenger seat, a hookup, who died immediately.

It haunted her that Posey could have been sitting in his place.

Mark and his brother went straight to prison, where they were rotting to this day.

All of it because Charlie had needed to show off. To exact revenge. Charlie Hall, at her best when doing her worst. Whenever she tried to create something, it broke apart in her hands. But blowing something up? There, Charlie had an unerring instinct for greatness.

No more stealing magic, she told herself as she recovered. No more gloamists. No more cons. No more living her life with the volume turned up to eleven. No more putting the people she loved in danger. She’d lost her nerve.

Not long after the bandages came off, she hooked up with Vince. When she’d noticed him next to her at the bar, her first impulse had been to move as far away as possible. He had a hard jaw, big hands, and angry eyebrows. He was hunched over his drink like he wanted to punch it. She’d had a bad day in a bad month in a worse year and was exhausted by the idea of getting hassled.

But he waved down the bartender when she was being ignored and interposed himself between her and the press of the evening crowd. When he spoke, it was to ask her the sort of questions that didn’t demand much.

She liked his deep voice and the strangeness of his eyes, so pale a gray that they seemed barely a color at all. She appreciated that he hadn’t hit on her. And he wasn’t bad looking. Objectively, he was far hotter than the guys to whom she was usually attracted—pretty, sad, skinny, whippet-faced fast-talkers. Objectively, he looked like he could snap them in half.

Maybe she needed something different. A nicotine patch of a man. Something to draw off her worst impulses, at least for one night.

Outside the bar, he’d traced the tattoo of roses and winged beetles along her throat, his fingers gentle. But when she’d twined her arms around his neck and kissed him, he’d pressed her against the rough bricks with all the fervor she could want, his height and the strength of his arms suddenly a real and previously unknown advantage.

She took him home, and in the morning, he was still there. He made coffee and brought it to her on the mattress, along with toast that was only slightly burnt at the edges. Maybe she loved him a little right then, although she would have never admitted it to herself. He was looking for a place, he said. Did she know anyone with a room to rent?

But Charlie never let herself forget that Vince’s life with her was a kind of exile. He kept a picture of himself with another woman, one he never talked about, in his wallet. That first night she’d looked through it and found ten dollars, a driver’s license from Minnesota, and the photo, worn thin from the touch of his fingers.

Every now and again she’d pickpocket him again, to check. It was always there.





5

INSIDE OUT




Although they managed to drive the Corolla home—slowly—it made an alarming clunking noise, and Vince thought he needed a part that it was too late to get. He offered to drop her back at Rapture for her shift, but he wasn’t likely to be back from his cleaning job in time to pick her up.

Charlie arranged for her friend Barb to give her a lift home, not wanting to be alone on the street again. Barb was a line cook at a vegan restaurant in Northampton that stopped seating at eleven on Fridays; by the time they got the last table turned over, the kitchen clean, and the next day’s food prepped, it was close enough to one in the morning for the timing to work out.

Standing outside, huddled in her coat, Charlie watched Balthazar leave with Joey Aspirins. She couldn’t help thinking of the nameless murdered man and his tattered shadow. Couldn’t help wondering if Balthazar had ratted the guy out to Salt. She hoped not. She wanted to keep on liking Balthazar.

When she was a kid, she’d imagined making Salt pay for what he’d done to her. But the idea of revenge was childish, and it died with her childhood. Charlie was pragmatic. People like her didn’t get back at people like Salt.

Still, she couldn’t help wondering about the Liber Noctem, this book he was apparently desperate to get back. Wondered what it would be like to have something he wanted. To have the power to take something from him.

Then Charlie reminded herself that she didn’t want to wind up a corpse in an alley, and definitely not the alley just around the corner from her rental house. If she was going to get murdered, she’d like to do it in Paris. Or Tokyo.

What she did want was her sister in college and her debts paid.

Well, that was what she wanted to want.

You can’t quit, Balthazar had told her when she informed him she wasn’t taking jobs. You’re too good. This is the only thing you’re good at. Sometimes Charlie worried he was right about that second part.

Idly, she took out her phone and tapped out “Liber Noctem” into the search window. An auction notice from Sotheby’s came up:

LIBER NOCTEM. Colloquially called The Book of Blights, each letter individually stamped into pages comprised of a nickel alloy. Created in 1831 in Scotland by its anonymous author, the book is one of the most significant documents related to the phenomenon of disembodied shadow manifestations. Rumors of an actual Blight being involved in the writing of the book are unconfirmed but add to its historical significance.