Book of Night(53)

“Did you actually think my shadow was quickening?” Charlie asked her.

Posey shook her head. “Did you?”

“Of course not.” Charlie stuck her hands deep in the pockets of her leather coat. “I would have told you.”

Posey snorted, as though she wasn’t so sure.

“You fit in here,” Charlie said, looking around.

Her sister didn’t reply.

“I’m serious,” she said. “You’re like these people.”

Posey kicked a few wet leaves. “We’re behind on the bills, and as you remind me, we can only afford the house because Vince is paying a chunk of the rent. School is a stupid expense. And besides, everything is going to be different now. You’re one of them. In a year, when you’re a gloom, we can do whatever we want. Even if what you want is for me to have a useless degree.”

Charlie scowled at the ground, at her shadow. She’d never considered a future where she was one of the people with power. It would be nice to believe that meant she could give Posey something that would make her happy. But ever since they were kids, Charlie seemed to get things Posey wanted. Their mother’s attention. Money in her pockets. And now, real magic.

But even if good things might be coming, first she was going to have to deal with Vince, who’d betrayed her, who was a liar with a hidden book, a connection to Salt and to violence. Knowing Vince’s secrets felt like having a belly full of flies. Open her mouth, and she didn’t think she could stop them from flooding out in a disgusting swarm.





15

THE PAST




With Rand gone, Charlie spent a few weeks kicking around. At school, she hung out with her friends. She had more time to go over to their houses and to party on the weekends.

For years she’d told herself that he was the one forcing her to participate in his schemes. But without them, Charlie found herself fidgety. She seemed to need more intensity than the people around her, required a higher dose of adrenaline before she felt anything.

Six months after Rand was buried, Charlie found herself back at the Moose Lodge. Benny laughed when he saw her walk through the door.

“Oh, come on, honey,” he said. “You don’t belong around here. Don’t want to get the truant officer after us.”

She dumped her backpack on one of the tables and walked around to the back of the bar. Checked the ice machine, which produced pellets that fused together and required vigorous use of the pick. She made him a martini just the way he liked it, cold vodka in a glass with the garnish of several olives to take the sting out.

“I want to do a job on my own,” she told him as she pushed his drink toward him. “And I don’t want to work for Knight.”

He frowned at her. “The glooms are the ones that are hiring, these days.”

“Okay,” she said, although her palms had started to sweat. “Just not him.”

He shrugged. “Willie’s nephew, Stephen, got into stealing shadows. Says it’s easy money. Says he can slash off a shadow the way you’d slash the strap of a purse; all you need is one of them onyx knives.”

“So, what, you mug people?” She made a face, having picked up from Rand a dislike of crimes that didn’t require any real talent.

“He’s getting two hundred fifty a pop,” he said. “Twenty times that if it’s one of those magic ones, but that’s dangerous.”

She nodded thoughtfully.

He looked at her skeptically. “But you want a real job.”

She straightened her shoulders. “What is it?”

“The kind of thing one of us might have attempted in our heyday, you know? You know the Arthur Thompson House?”

“Sure,” Charlie told him. She’d gone there with her class, freshman year.

“There’s this group of young gloamists who threw together some money and want someone to break in and steal a single page from one of the notebooks in a locked cabinet. It’s supposed to have something to do with the use of shadows as absorbable energy to alter other shadows blah blah magical crap. You think you can do that?”

Arthur Thompson had invented harvesting electricity from storms and founded the first lightning farm around thirty years ago. That’s what he’d been famous for, before the Boxford Massacre. That’s what he ought to be best remembered for, according to Charlie’s teachers, who wanted to preserve the legacy of a local legend in the face of kids’ interest in the gruesome.

In addition to his interest in lightning, Arthur Thompson was interested in shadow magic. Being a man of science, when he discovered a booth at the county fair run by a group of fundamentalists who believed that gloaming was the work of the devil, he and two of his friends stopped to argue.

Long story short, they all got shot, Arthur died, and his shadow became a Blight who killed over a hundred people. But his house was preserved just the way he left it, including his workshop with all his notes.

“What does it pay?” Charlie asked.

Benny snorted. “Five hundred.”

She eyed him, trying to figure how much his cut was. “That doesn’t sound like much. That’s the price of two stolen shadows.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, you should probably stick to something easier.”

She took the job.