Book of Night(94)

Her mother gave her an impatient look.

Charlie sighed. “You want me to talk to you? Okay, here’s what I want to know. Have you ever met Lionel Salt’s daughter?” They were around the same age, and the area had been even smaller back then. If her mother knew Vince’s, maybe she’d know what happened to her.

“Kiara?” Her mother looked up, blinking like she was trying to refocus her thoughts. “We didn’t run in the same circles.”

“But you know her name,” Charlie insisted. “So you must know something about her.”

Mom shrugged. “She used to buy shrooms off a friend of mine. Partied hard. Told disturbing stories about her father, but people want to believe that the rich are keeping their fingernails in jars like Howard Hughes, and she seemed like the kind of person who’d say whatever got her attention. Fell in with some ex-cons up in Boston, got knocked up. Eventually her father put her in rehab, and that’s the last I heard. She didn’t talk to any of the old crew after that. Why?”

“I heard she died, that’s all,” Charlie said.

“Sad,” said her mother.

Charlie stretched, rolling her shoulders. “I think I am going to go inside and see about the air mattress.”

“Think about what I said,” her mother told her as she stood.

As Charlie walked away, a memory came to her of when she was very little and her parents were still together. She was sitting in the back seat of the car, the window down. Wind whipped her hair. The radio was on, Charlie’s little legs swinging along with the music, and Mom and Dad were laughing together. Golden sunlight had turned the world dazzlingly bright, and it seemed as though night would never come.

As she and Posey took turns pumping up their bed, Bob and Mom moved comfortably around the room. They seemed contented. It was weird, but nice. Like there was no curse, just a casual family inheritance of bad relationships, in a cycle that no one was doomed to repeat.

Charlie and Posey lay down next to one another, trying not to bounce the mattress. Charlie remembered a whole childhood of sharing beds with Posey, whispering to one another, back when they had the same secrets.

Back when they had the same gifts.

Charlie thought of the moment when her consciousness split, when she understood how to be in two places at once. Even now when she closed her eyes, she could feel her shadow. If she concentrated hard enough, she could see herself from its vantage.

As soon as she did, though, panic sent her spiraling back to her own body.

Charlie didn’t have a goldfish or a turtle, because she worried she’d forget to feed anything that couldn’t yowl for its dinner. She forgot to take her birth control pills at least twice every month, sometimes for two days at a time. When she’d downloaded an app to help her remember to drink water, it had come with a pixelated plant you were supposed to tap when you drank a glass. She killed the plant over and over—sometimes she’d drink the water but forget to tap the plant, and sometimes she’d just forget to drink the water. How was she going to remember to give blood to a shadow every day?

How was she going to keep from accidentally letting it drink up all her energy until she withered away? How was she going to keep it from becoming her own personal monster?

Lying on the mattress, the soft susurrations of breath surrounded her as the others succumbed to sleep. But Charlie’s mind couldn’t stop racing, couldn’t stop worrying, wouldn’t stop assembling and reassembling the information she had.

Once Salt realized his grandson had magic, he would have wanted to control him. Kiara’s situation was rife with opportunities for exploitation. Salt could easily get custody of Vince in court. He had the money to feed Kiara’s habit; she might not even contest it.

And for Vince, the promise that his mother would be sent to rehab, that she might get better. And then doling out access to her as a reward for good behavior, the promise of reuniting hanging forever over his head. And the fear of her being punished for his missteps motivating him further.

If Charlie could come up with that plan, she had no doubt that Salt had concocted a worse version.

And so Vince does what Salt tells him, and Red, whatever he was before, becomes a reflection of those things they do together. But controlling an adult is much harder than controlling a child. Especially one with a long education in manipulation and cruelty.

So Vince plans to leave and join his mother, but something goes horribly wrong. Possibly Salt realized that he didn’t need Vince if he had Red, and cut off his grandson’s shadow.

But if he planned to have it sewn to him, that didn’t happen. It became a Blight, the talking kind, so he had to make a deal. He could have been the one who offered the ritual from the Liber Noctem, and Vince the one who stole the book to keep Red from walking the world.

There was no way Salt would mind making a monster, so long as it served his interests. And in the meantime, Red keeps on killing for him. Keeps on doing his bidding. Together, they get him accepted into the Cabal.

But if he’d promised Red his reward by the time of the announcement, then she could see why he needed the book. The problem with monsters is that you need to keep them leashed, or they turn on you.

The Hierophant wanted the book as much as Salt did. Had the Blight tied to him made him some kind of promise, some arrangement to get the same ritual? Or was he working on behalf of the Cabal, trying to keep Red from becoming a new and more terrible form of Blight?