Book of Night(32)

Vince—her Vince, so even-keeled that he didn’t react even when he got shoved—had murdered someone.

And he didn’t realize she’d seen him.

If she sank back down to the floor, lying in the wet and the glass, she could pretend she’d been unconscious the whole time. Only when he touched her would she blink up at him like Snow White, the chunk of apple dislodged from her throat. Then he could make up any lie he liked about what had happened and she could nod along. Oh, that dead guy? He must have slipped on a banana peel.

Charlie pulled herself to her feet instead, holding on to the bar top. Made herself appear surprised he was there. “Vince? How did you get…”

The light turned his features hard-edged and she remembered how she’d found him frightening that first night in the bar, before he’d spoken.

He watched her gaze go from him to the dead man, take in the way Hermes’s neck was at the wrong angle. Vince’s face seemed horribly washed of expression.

Keep looking surprised, she told herself. Everything is very surprising.

“He’s gone,” Vince said, crossing the floor to her. “You’re bleeding.”

Funny that he could kill Hermes but wasn’t going to call him dead. Went for the polite euphemism. Gone.

Very, very far gone.

“I’m fine,” Charlie insisted, although she wasn’t at all sure. Her body hurt from being struck with bottles. She could feel the sharp sting of shallow cuts and there was very probably glass in her bra. Her thoughts were absurd.

Also, there was a corpse in the middle of the floor.

A corpse whose shadow was still moving, squirming and pulling against the connection to the bearded man as if it wanted to be free.

Charlie shuddered, a visceral horror moving through her. “What … is that?”

“It’ll settle after a couple of minutes,” he said after a pause where they both stared at the struggling shadow.

“Is it a Blight?”

Charlie didn’t understand the details of how energy exchange worked for gloamists, but she understood enough to know that the more of themselves they put into their shadow, the more it could do. A gloamist could let their shadow draw their energy directly, but they could also put pieces of themselves—memories they no longer wanted, desires that shamed them, emotions that stood in their way—into their shadow. Upon a gloamist’s death, that could become a Blight. Detached shadows, cut off not just from a human, but from their own humanity. Most were little better than animals, and the gloamists made it their business to hunt them down. Others could think and reason. Charlie had seen very few, and never expected to witness the birth of one.

Vince didn’t meet her gaze. “It might be.”

Charlie thought of Paul Ecco’s shadow, of the way that it had been shredded, as though his shadow had been destroyed separately from whatever killed him. And she considered Vince, who seemed to know a lot more about gloaming than she’d thought.

“Is it dying?” she asked, hush-voiced.

He nodded. “Unless it’s cut free or it tears free, it’ll die.”

She remembered breathing the shadow into her lungs. Remembered the blow from its hand. It might be pitiful to watch the thing struggle, but she was glad it couldn’t get to her. And glad it would soon be gone.

Vince shook his head. “Is anyone here but you?”

Charlie glanced toward the back room. Odette and the others had gone in the direction of the exit behind the stage, but it was possible that one or more of them had locked themselves in her office instead of leaving. “Maybe.”

He nodded. “I’ve got to move the body into my van. You going to be okay by yourself?”

“I said I was fine.” Charlie put both hands on the bar top. She felt a little light-headed, but that was all.

He nodded, like he didn’t believe her but didn’t have time to argue either.

Charlie went out from behind the bar, slowly and carefully stepping around the glass. Chunks of it were already embedded in the bottoms of her Crocs; it gave them an uneven fall on the floor and caused them to make a harsh sound, like tap shoes.

Glass slippers.

Gingerly, she navigated her way over to a table. There was still a tea candle burning on it, the wax gone liquid and the glass burned dark.

That was when the Blight ripped free and came at Charlie directly.

Onyx was useful in two ways for stopping quickened shadows. It weakened them and forced them to become solid, so that a knife with onyx in it could cut them no matter how translucent they appeared. But Charlie didn’t have any onyx, and what hurt shadows the most was the brightest light—fire.

Charlie grabbed the candle, not caring how the hot wax splashed her wrist or the glass scorched her fingers. She swept it down toward the Blight, tossing the flame right at it. The shadow caught, and flared bright as dry brush.

For a moment, she just stared at the broken tea light, the spill of wax. Her burnt fingers.

And Vince stared at her. “Quick thinking,” he said.

Charlie sat heavily in a nearby chair. Nodded.

Vince heaved up the body over his shoulder, like it was a dead deer or something. He headed for the double doors of Rapture.

Was he the first person you’ve killed? The words sat on Charlie’s tongue. She swallowed them. His job was cleaning up crime scenes. She’d like to believe that gave him some perspective when it came to handling the dead, a reason to be so calm. But murdering someone, that was a whole other thing.