Book of Night(29)

“I never met Paul before that night,” Charlie insisted, knowing it was futile as she saw Hermes’s expression. He didn’t want her to be unconnected.

She didn’t think she could make it to the doors in the back, but she might have to try anyway. She wished for the stupid onyx-handled knife in her purse. Wished for anything.

“Stop trying to play me,” he growled at her. His shadow seemed to be flickering at the edges, as though it was made from some dark fire. “You’re in this somehow. The next time you open your mouth, you better be very careful what comes out.”

He’d already decided what he wanted to hear, and he wasn’t willing to listen to anything else. Either she was going to have to make a doomed run for it, or she was going to have to make him believe a good story.

Hermes wanted the Liber Noctem for his boss and believed that he had more than just the pages he wanted to sell, pages that she assumed Ecco’s murderer had acquired. Charlie could talk about how he’d been asking Balthazar to fence the part he had, but she suspected that he’d already spoken with Balthazar, and that he’d thrown her at least halfway under the bus. After all, Hermes had seemed very certain she was the caller.

Charlie pushed the beer across the bar and made a show of sighing. “When Paul came into Rapture, he wasn’t alone,” she lied. “There was another man, and I heard him say something about ‘a whole book.’ Does that help?”

Hermes hadn’t mentioned the book directly, so maybe that would convince him. That could have happened, if he really was moving the book for Adam.

“Are you sure the thing with him was a man?” Hermes asked.

“I think so,” she hedged, wondering if there was someone else he was expecting to find involved. Had anyone actually talked to Ecco that night?

“Edmund Carver,” Hermes said. “Was that what Paul called him?”

Charlie hesitated. If she said yes, she could tell he’d be pleased. But she had no idea who that person was, and she’d have to supply details that she didn’t have. She shook her head again. “I didn’t hear a name, and his shadow didn’t seem—”

His shade struck Charlie in the face, hard enough to knock her off balance. Her hip hit the sink and her feet went out from under her. She fell to her hands and knees on the tile.

“Don’t lie to me,” Hermes said.

Charlie was conscious of many things at once—the stickiness of the floor; the overripe stink of spoiled liquor; the pins-and-needles feeling of her slapped cheek; her horror of what was happening; the baseball bat that Odette insisted they keep behind the bar, under the ice maker, just out of her reach.

Time seemed to slow and speed at once as Charlie crawled to the bat.

The bearded man’s shade flickered above her, an etheric hand striking the shelf of bottles and sending them down in a rain of shattering glass.

Charlie covered her head automatically. A half-full bottle smacked her shoulder as more bottles smashed around her. Little chips of splintered glass flew up from each crash, lodging on her clothes and stinging her skin. Spilled liquor flowed over her knees in a torrent.

Charlie’s fingers closed around the bat and she pushed herself to her feet, shaking with adrenaline and fear and rage.

With no good ideas, she was going to go for the bad one.

They better carve that on her tomb. The Charlie Hall credo.

She swung hard at the shade. The bat passed straight through, as though it were a ghost. The momentum made her stagger forward. She almost fell right on her ass.

Hermes cackled. He had stepped back from the bar, as though he were a spectator in what was happening and not its architect. “You’re a real firecracker, aren’t you? Last chance. The truth this time. Who gave Ecco the pages from that book?”

The air seemed to thicken around her.

“You wouldn’t know the truth if it stuck its tongue up your ass,” she told him with the best sneer she could summon up.

This time the shade went right down her throat.

She felt as though she were drowning. As though her lungs were filled with something heavier than air, something she couldn’t cough up.

Panicked, she scratched at her throat, choking on shadow, her screams soundless.

Wisps of it blew from her mouth and nose, from behind her eyes. Darkness was crowding in the edges of her vision and she wasn’t sure if it was the lack of air or the shadow.

For a moment, she felt as though she were standing outside herself, noting the way the edges of her lips were turning blue. Watching as she gasped, tipping her chin up as though drowning and seeking the top of the wave.

When Charlie opened her eyes, she found herself on the tiles. She could breathe again, although inhaling hurt.

Charlie looked up at the mirrored ball on the ceiling and saw a figure standing behind Hermes, arm pressed to his throat. But from their blurred shape, she couldn’t identify the new person. Their arrival must have been what made Hermes call his shadow back.

She began crawling slowly over the glass-covered floor, telling herself that when she made it to the open area of the lounge, she was going to run for the back doors, hit them hard with her shoulder, and not look back.

“You’ve let your shadow feed for too long tonight.” Impossibly, it was Vince’s voice she heard. But it had gone all wrong. Soft and menacing. As oblivious to Hermes’s squirming as if it were irrelevant. “There’s not much of you left. Can you feel the strain, like something spooling out of you?”