Book of Night(76)

Charlie ran her finger through the blackened crumbs. “Look, Rand wasn’t the best guy. He was vain, and irritable, and conned me into working for him in the first place. But he taught me a lot. And he didn’t deserve to die, and definitely not like he did. No one deserves to die like that.”

“You always told Mom you wanted to go with him.” Posey bit a cookie, then made a face and put it back. “I thought that he was buying you stuff, and back then I was envious, but then later I didn’t know what to think. You always had money. And, well, he was a creep.”

When she put it like that, it did sound bad. Charlie wondered more than ever what their mother had thought she was doing with Rand, and why she’d been okay with it.

Charlie chewed her good-for-you cereal, frowning.

Her past problems might be unsolvable, but Vince was the key to fixing her current problems. He either had the Liber Noctem, or could tell her its whereabouts. And if he was really attempting to make his evil shadow into an evil person, maybe he’d be done by Saturday and she could take the book back to Salt.

And if it felt like a relief to have a reason to contact him, she refused to dwell on that. Pulling out her phone, she sucked in a breath as she tapped his name, waiting for it to ring.

A moment later an automated voice told her that the number had been disconnected. Of course it had.

Well, she’d spent the better part of a decade finding things. She could find one tall guy with no working credit cards and a fake ID.

Charlie looked across the kitchen to her sister. “Do you think you could be friends with your shadow?” she asked. “Like, come to really care about it?”

Posey frowned consideringly for a moment. “There’s a lady who married the Berlin Wall. She was super devastated when they knocked him down. Carried around a brick for a while.”

Posey had a point, but that wasn’t what Charlie had meant. “Yeah, okay, but could you reasonably be friends with it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “Me neither.”

“If it could talk, maybe,” Posey said, still chewing over the question. “But then aren’t you just talking to yourself?”

Charlie frowned at the floor. She hadn’t been talking about her own shadow, but perhaps she should have been. It was as unresponsive as ever. Definitely not friendly. “You hate me a little, don’t you?”

Posey gave her a look. “You mean because it’s unfair that it’s your shadow that’s quickening when becoming a gloamist is the thing I want most in the world?”

Charlie nodded.

“I’m angry,” Posey said. “At the universe. And at you, I guess, even though I know it’s not your fault. I’ll get over it. But if you fuck this up, I will hate you.”

Charlie sighed, half sure she was fucking it up already, and entirely sure she’d fuck it up somewhere down the line. That was just her nature. Charlie Hall, Maker of Mistakes. Patron Saint of Disaster.

The only things she’d ever been good at were trickery and deception, so she better stick to those. Paul Ecco had gotten a page of the Liber Noctem somehow. If Vince sold it to him, there’d be some record of the transaction. Maybe Vince had left Ecco with a phone number that worked, or even better, an address.

Curiosity Books, that was the name of Ecco’s shop. Well, Charlie was feeling curiouser and curiouser.

“I’m going back out,” she said, heading to her bedroom for a change of clothes.

Posey gave her a sideways look. “You coming home tonight? I’m going to order lo mein.”

“Get me some,” Charlie called back. “I can always eat it for breakfast.”



* * *



Curiosity Books was on the third floor of a slightly shabby converted mill building, just above a concrete artisan and across the hall from a circus school where small children were taught how to juggle and spin plates. The locks on the doors were a joke. Charlie didn’t even need to pick it; she just slid her Big Y points card into the gap between the frame and the door, then brought it up hard enough to depress the latch bolt. Turning the knob, she nudged the door with her hip. It opened.

The walls were lined with bookshelves that seemed to have been scavenged from every library closeout sale and Craigslist giveaway in the neighboring towns. The volumes were so tightly packed that Charlie wondered how any of them could possibly be removed. Cardboard boxes had been stacked in small towers, some with their sides ripped, others containing more folded boxes inside, presumably for shipping. High on the back wall, above a bank of windows, an unattributed quote had been painted: “The universe belongs to the curious.”

An old 1950s-style metal desk rested in middle of the floor, with a computer humming away on top, an ancient-looking landline phone, and a label printer. Loose paper carpeted the floor, as though recently pawed through.

Charlie walked from one end to the other, inhaling the powdery dust of old books. A locked glass cabinet had been smashed and the shelves inside emptied. A single bookshelf rested on the floor, books seeping out from underneath.

She went back to the desk, sat down, and moved around the mouse in a circle. After a moment, the computer monitor sprang to life, showing a ridiculously cluttered screen. She opened a search window and typed in “name:Noctem.” Nothing came up. She replaced it with “name:Blight,” and that got nothing too.