First they hung jackets on the automaton and strapped watches onto the arms of chairs. Then, when Charlie had mastered that, Ms. Presto would walk around her house so that Charlie could pretend to bump into her, or be walking up to her in a crowd.

  Finally, they were ready to go out.

  One afternoon, Rand drove her to the Holyoke Mall instead of Ms. Presto’s house.

  “We going shopping?” Charlie asked.

  Rand didn’t even seem to mind her tone. He grinned like the joke was on her. “Your lesson is here today.”

  Ms. Presto met her in Macy’s, where she was buying a pair of sneakers. “Never hurts to have a bag on you,” she told Charlie. Then she smiled. “Or an old woman with you.”

  They walked out into the main mall.

  “Am I going to watch you first?” Charlie asked hopefully.

  Ms. Presto shook her head. “No point delaying the inevitable. Let’s go toward the Starbucks. There’s always a crowd there.”

  And so Charlie started the first day of on-the-job training. She slid past people in narrow aisles with an “excuse me” and a touch on the arm. It worked in Sephora, and the Apple Store. Easier than she would have thought too, but not particularly precise. She did manage to lift a wallet from a guy, but all the forays into handbags resulted in her getting random things. A key ring. A lipstick. And once, a balled-up tissue.

  After five lifts, Ms. Presto bought her a Frappuccino.

  “Two things,” she said. “Once you got the thing, you put it in your pocket. What did you do after that?”

  Charlie shrugged. “Walked away?”

  “In the future,” Ms. Presto said, eyeing her seriously, “you’re going to take out a candy. Or some money. Whatever it is you want people to think you put your hand into your pocket for. Always keep something in there to pull out. Always. Otherwise, you’re giving them two things to notice. The lift itself and the hand coming out of the pocket empty.”

  Even though no one had said anything to Charlie, her palms started to sweat at the thought that she’d made such an obvious mistake.

  “Oh, and you don’t strike me as much of a hugger,” Ms. Presto said.

  Charlie shrugged again. No one in her family was a hugger, except her grandmother, who she didn’t get to see much. Not even she and Posey hugged.

  “Get used to touching people while you talk. Hand on their arm. Hand on their shoulder. Embrace them when you see them, and again when you leave. That way when you have to do it, you know how to make it seem natural.”

  “Okay,” Charlie agreed, and took a long sip of her Frappuccino. This was the one piece of advice, no matter how wise, she knew she was not going to follow.

  “Good, good.” Ms. Presto stood up. “I will wait for you in the Macy’s. I need to return those sneakers.”

  “What am I going to be doing?” Charlie asked, already knowing she was going to hate the answer.

  “You’re going to find the people you stole from and put their things back.” Ms. Presto gave her that rabbit-out-of-the-hat smile of hers and sauntered off, bag in hand, looking a lot heavier than it had at the beginning of their trip.

  An hour later, Charlie had returned the keys and the wallet and had given up looking for anyone else. Rand was waiting for her outside Macy’s.

  “I heard you were good,” he said when she got in. “Really good.”

  “Yeah?” she asked.

  He laughed. “Don’t let it go to your head, kid.” But he took her to the hamburger place where you could eat as many peanuts as you wanted and let her order whatever, so she knew Ms. Presto had given her high marks.

  Charlie couldn’t help being pleased at the idea that she had a natural talent for pickpocketing, but what she loved best was burglary.

  She loved being in spaces that belonged to other people. Walking across their carpets. Trying on their lives the way you could try on their clothes.

  And it was easy, mostly. People in big, expensive houses had lots of doors, and most of the time she could find one that was open. Sometimes there was a key under the mat. Failing that, an unlatched window. She’d shimmy inside when there were no cars around. Very few people had alarm systems, and even fewer bothered to turn them on.

  When Rand sent her into houses, he was usually looking for something specific. A huge sapphire ring. Antique napkin holders shaped like tiny filigree cobwebs. A signed first edition of The Maltese Falcon rumored to go for upward of a hundred grand. He fancied himself one of those heroic criminals in movies, the ones who never lowered themselves to stealing televisions.

  But sometimes Charlie would bike across town and break into houses on her own.

  When she was little, her dad had worked for a company that installed pools and hot tubs. Sometimes he’d bring her with him on those construction projects and she’d stare at the giant houses with their manicured lawns and their glistening pools, the bright blue of tropical seas in calendars.

  Nowadays, when their father saw Posey and Charlie, it was to take them out for ice cream and act as though everything was fine, even though he was married again, his new wife was pregnant, and she clearly didn’t want anything to do with two daughters from his first marriage.

  And her father wanted his smiling, happy daughters. Wanted roses in their cheeks and for them to giggle and chorus after a while, crocodile to his see you later, alligator, the way they had when they were little and certain they would always be loved. They had to play along, or he would get stiff and mean. If they were fussy or cranky, he’d ignore them completely.

  So when Charlie tried to complain about Travis or tell her father any of her worries or fears, he got annoyed and transferred his attention to her sister. And if Posey chimed in, he took them both straight home.

  Their father’s affection was entirely conditional, and he made no secret of it.

  Those houses he’d brought her to way back when, though? Those were the houses she broke into when she was alone.

  Charlie’d look through their refrigerators, making sandwiches out of whatever was there. Tuna and pickle. Kimchi and leftover pork loin. Tofu and Brie. She’d try on the clothes from their closets, lie down in their beds, and sometimes, when she was sure the people who lived there were away on vacations, she’d swim in those crystalline pools her father built, staring up at the clouds.

  She’d pretend that those families were her families. That soon someone would call her inside to do her homework, scold her for not wearing sunscreen and dripping on the carpet.

  It was in one of those places she watched a television program that had a gloamist on as a guest. She was explaining about shadow magic, with three models to show off her alterations. One had the shadow of a bird. The second shadow had a heart cut out of its chest. And the third wore a crown, the points rising high off the shadowed head.

  When the host asked about other uses for magic, the gloom laughed. “Isn’t this enough?”

  “Why were you hidden from the world for so long?” the man on the television asked.

  Charlie, stolen ice cream on her lap, soup spoon in her hand, listened as the woman explained how early gloamists weren’t aware of one another. Each one discovered the discipline anew and lost those discoveries with their deaths. A few letters existed as proof that some found one another, and stray telegrams were exchanged in the 1940s. But things didn’t truly change until the BBSs of the 1980s. Much of the contemporary practice of gloaming was developed on message boards and locked forums, when finally people all over the world with quickened shadows realized they weren’t alone.

  Charlie had stared at the model whose shadow had a heart-shaped hole in the chest. She wondered how it felt to be him.

  When she left those houses she broke into alone, she didn’t take anything at all.

  10

  FULL-TILT BOOGIE

  Looking at the dead man on the floor of Rapture, Charlie knew she had to do something, but the shock of violence rooted her in place.

  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.

  Her ex-boyfriend’s brother—the one who eventually shot her—had been in prison for knocking over a liquor store. He’d told her about how after their first kill, people’s minds don’t work right. They go full-tilt boogie, bubble-brained. That’s why, even if they’re normally meticulous, even if they planned the whole thing, they start screwing up. They do stuff that doesn’t make sense, like calmly letting in the police when their whole bedroom is covered in blood. Or renting a getaway car under their own name.

  Vince wasn’t acting like that. He’d done this before.

  And a history with murder wasn’t the only secret he’d been keeping, given the way he’d spoken about that gloamist’s shadow. He knew much more about that world than he’d ever let on. As much as she’d been keeping from him, he’d been keeping a lot more from her.

  She looked down at the stupid bike shorts she was wearing, at her stretchy dress, soaked with spilled booze. Beads of blood were blooming along her calves where shards of glass struck her, and when she looked at the backs of her hands, she was surprised to find they were bleeding too.

  It was hard to fault Vince, though. Whatever his secrets were, she could still count on him. He was currently getting rid of a dead body for her. You couldn’t get more dependable than that.

  A little laugh escaped her mouth, a weird giggle.

  Her gaze fell on the floorboards and her own shadow. She blinked at it twice, waiting for her vision to clear. It seemed to ripple. Had Hermes done something to it?

  Puzzled, she leaned down and touched her hand to its shadow on the floor. It met her, as usual. When she pulled back, she left a small smear of blood from the cuts on her fingers behind.

  Just then the landline behind the bar began to ring, making her jump.

  Charlie staggered back to the bar. “Yes?”

  “Darling,” said Odette, sounding for all the world like a starlet from the past. “I heard a terrible crash and then everything went quiet.”

  “Are you still in your office?” Charlie asked, ashamed of the way her voice didn’t come out as evenly as she’d intended. “He’s gone, but he left a real mess. You shouldn’t have stayed.”

  The line disconnected. A moment later, she heard the turning of tumblers. Odette sauntered back into the room just as Vince came through the double doors.

  “Did the police finally come? I called them ages ago.” She regarded them and the room, taking in the destruction of her club and the presence of Vincent with a somewhat stunned expression.

  “No one here but us.” Charlie realized abruptly that she wasn’t okay after all. Her hands were shaking. She thought she might have to sit down. She thought she might not make it to a chair before she did.

  Odette was talking. “Did you know that man? I tried to get the gun out of the safe in the back, but I couldn’t remember the combination.”

  Charlie knelt down on the floor, forcing herself to take a few deep, even breaths. That was what she did when she was having a panic attack. And she suspected this was going to be a monster of a panic attack. “What?”

  “That man.” Odette frowned at her. “He seemed to think he knew you. And perhaps you should move off the floor. A chair would probably be more comfortable. Cleaner, I’m sure.”

  “He thought I knew someone else, but I don’t. I didn’t.” Maybe Charlie was the one whose mind had gone full-tilt boogie. “I’m good right here.”

  Odette sat down on a barstool. She looked at the smashed wall of liquor and gave a long sigh. “I don’t understand the world anymore. I think I’m getting old.”

  Charlie shook her head. “Never.”

  “Did you see what that man did? With his…” Odette looked toward the double doors, the way she’d been looking when the magic rolled toward her. “With Balthazar’s shadow parlor, I saw the wondrous part of gloaming, but not the awful side.”

  “Yeah,” Charlie said quietly.

  “It was horrible.” Odette glanced toward Vince, then back at Charlie. “Do you think this has something to do with Balthazar?”

  “The man was looking for a guy they tossed out the other night,” she said after a moment.

  “But why ask you?” Odette said, which was an entirely reasonable point.

  Charlie opened her mouth, trying to find some explanation that could make sense when Vince interrupted her. “Is there a first aid kit somewhere? She’s bleeding.”

  “Oh, of course. In my office,” Odette said, rising from her barstool.

  “Just tell me where—” Charlie began, but Odette cut her off.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Stay.” She headed into the back again.