Book of Night(5)

The term “pot-valiance” occurred to her, too late.

She passed a darkened bookstore, in the window a fall display of pumpkins with plastic vampire fangs jammed into their carved mouths. They rested toothily beside horror novels and a decorative dusting of candy corn, their orange bodies just beginning to sag with rot.

The whole street was shuttered. Pulling her coat tighter, Charlie wished that Easthampton was like some of the surrounding college towns—Northampton or Amherst—full of enough tipsy students stumbling through the late-night streets to justify at least one pizza place staying open after the bars closed, or a coffeeshop for up-all-night overachievers.

All the quiet gave her too much time to think.

Alone on the dark street, Charlie couldn’t escape Doreen’s words. But all that stuff you did—even back in the day, the stuff people said—you’ve got to be angry at someone.

She kicked a loose chunk of cement.

When she was a kid, Charlie had been a mop of black hair, brown eyes, and bad attitude. She’d gotten into one kind of trouble after another, but along the way, she learned she was good at taking things apart. Puzzles, and people. She liked solving them, liked figuring out how to get at what they were hiding. To become what they wanted to believe in.

Which made her consider the Adam thing again. It couldn’t hurt to play it through. Distract herself from the night.

Charlie fished out her phone and typed: There’s a volume in the Mortimer Rare Book Collection at Smith College that I’m sure contains something important. I can pay you. Or we can work out a trade.

Gloamists were always on the hunt for old books detailing techniques for shadow manipulation. They’d been known to kill one another over them. She was offering Adam an easy job.

It had to be somewhat tempting.

For ten years, she’d stolen things for one gloamist or another. Books and scrolls and occasionally other, worse things. For ten years, she’d kept her identity secret. Kept a low profile, worked off and on in restaurants and bars to give her cover, and used Balthazar as her go-between. A little over a year ago, she’d put down a deposit on a house. Convinced Posey to apply to colleges.

Then she’d blown it all up.

It seemed like there’d been a furnace inside Charlie, always burning. A year ago she’d seen how easily she could turn everything to ash.

Adam wasn’t writing back. Maybe he was asleep. Or high. Or just not interested. She shoved the burner back into her bag.

Out of the corner of her eye, Charlie thought she saw the oily slide of something in the space between one building and the next.

It took her mind off her past, but not in a good way.

People talked about disembodied shadows walking the world the way they talked about Slender Man or the girl with the cheek full of spiders, but Charlie knew Blights were more than a story. They were what was left over when the gloamist died and the shadow didn’t. Quite real, and very dangerous. Onyx worked on them, and fire, but that was about it unless you were a gloamist yourself.

Her real phone chimed, drawing her thoughts back to the present with a start. It was a text from Vince: All okay?

Home soon, she texted back.

She should have called him, back at Rapture. He would have picked her up. He probably would have been nice about it too. But she didn’t like the idea of leaning on him. It would only make things worse when he was gone.

A sound came from down the street, by where Nashawannuck Pond ran into Rubber Thread Pond, across from the abandoned mill buildings. Someone was there.

She walked faster, shoving her hand into her pocket to wrap around the handle of a folding tactical knife attached to her keys. It had kept an edge despite her using it to open cereal boxes and chip putty off old windows. She didn’t have much of an idea how to use it to defend herself, but at least it was sharp and had an onyx handle to weaken shadows.

A flicker of movement drew her gaze down an alley. A light on outside one of the shop doors illuminated a heap of stained clothing, white bone, and a wall spattered with black spots of blood.

Charlie stopped, muscles tensing, her stomach lurching, as her mind tried to catch up. Her brain kept supplying her with alternatives to what she saw—a discarded prop from a haunted house, a mannequin, an animal.

But no, the remains were human. Raw flesh torn open, shredded along with clothing as though whoever did this was desperate to get to the person’s insides. Charlie stepped closer. The cold contained the smell, but there was still a charnel sweetness to the air. The man’s face was turned to one side, eyes glassy and open. His rib cage was broken and partially removed, jagged pale bones rising above the mess of flesh like a circle of silver birch trees.

And against the wall, there was the movement again. His shadow, which ought to have been as still as his corpse, was shredded and wafting in the breeze, as though it was torn laundry on a line. As though a strong gust might blow it free.

The man’s face was so changed by death that it was the clothes she noticed first, tweed, wrinkled and a little dirty, as though he’d been living rough in them. This was the man Balthazar had thrown out of Rapture’s parlor. The guy who’d proposed selling something of Salt’s back to him.

Two hours ago, she’d been setting a Four Roses in front of him. Now—

There was a sound at the opposite end of the alley, and Charlie looked up with a sharp inhalation of breath. A man in a long dark coat and hat, with eyes as dark as bullet holes, was staring at her.