Charlie sighed, and deliberately did not look at her shadow, which might or might not be moving. Which might or might not mean something. “I’m fine.”

  “I know.” Vince squatted down next to her and ran his hands lightly over her arms, checking for cuts. His fingers were careful. Careful, like how he kissed. Not the rough, blunt pressure against a jaw.

  “Vince?” she said.

  He took her hand and smiled like any kindly boyfriend, one who didn’t believe he’d been overheard talking about magic. Who hoped she didn’t know, or wouldn’t mind too much about him being a murderer.

  Odette returned with the kit, cell phone tucked against her cheek. “You know that if I had called you from a goddamn Fridays you would have sent someone immediately.” She dumped a lumpy red bag with the caduceus symbol unceremoniously beside Vince. “You think my tax money’s no good because there’s a whip painted on my sign?”

  Vince searched through, took out a length of gauze, and then wetted it with soap and water from the bar sink. “There are a few pieces of glass I want to get out.”

  “You better go,” she whispered to him. “Now.” He had a body in his van. It seemed impossible that the police would overlook that piece of evidence.

  “Just a second.” He wiped off some blood.

  He discovered what Charlie thought were probably eyebrow tweezers in the kit. Charlie wondered if there was emergency eyeliner in there too. Knowing Odette, very possibly.

  The glass came out easily. At the sight of the shard, the gleaming blue of a Bombay Sapphire gin bottle, Charlie felt a bit dizzy. Part of her wished she’d taken a shot of something before he started, but the last thing she needed right then was to be slow-witted.

  “If the police aren’t here in ten minutes, I am going to wake up the mayor,” Odette purred into the phone. “Mark my words.”

  Charlie had no idea if Odette knew the mayor or not; it wasn’t impossible.

  “I’ll see you at home,” Vince said. He didn’t stop bandaging her leg, his hands steady and sure, as though he’d done this before too, not just the murdering.

  Charlie took a breath, let it out. The whole night had felt like one long tumble down a well. And she might still be falling. “Yeah, go. You have to go.”

  Vince rose, put his hand on her shoulder, and then headed for the door in the back.

  “Where’s your fella off to?” Odette asked. She was behind the bar, rummaging in the drawers, pulling out extra napkins and themed drink stirrers.

  “He wants to avoid the local constabulary.” Charlie pushed herself up. “What are you hunting for?”

  Odette raised her tattooed eyebrows, but when it was clear that Charlie wasn’t going to say anything more about Vince, she relented. “An ancient pack of clove cigarettes. I know I put some in here, maybe five years ago? Ten? I need something. My hands are shaking. Maybe I should take a gummy.”

  “Maybe,” Charlie agreed.

  “Would you like one?” Odette asked.

  She was tempted but shook her head. She hadn’t taken a shot, so there seemed like no point in anything less immediately effective.

  Odette got a plastic bottle out of her handbag, opened it, and popped a handful of THC gummies into her mouth. In about a half hour, she was going to be either unconscious or tripping balls.

  “You okay not mentioning Vince?” Charlie asked her.

  “I could be,” Odette said. “But I’d like it if you told me what kind of trouble he’s avoiding.”

  “I don’t know,” Charlie said, inventing a whole backstory as she spoke. “He said it was from when he was a kid. We’ve all got stuff. What’s in the past doesn’t matter now.”

  “Oh, honey.” Odette put her hand on Charlie’s arm, giving her a fond squeeze. “The past is the only thing that matters.”

  The police arrived fifteen minutes later, sirens going as though they’d been in a rush the whole time, rather than moseying up fifty-five minutes after being called. Odette let them in. A detective named Juarez took down Charlie’s statement that a man had pushed his way in and trashed the place. He saved his eye-roll for when Odette explained that there were no cameras because she believed in the privacy of her patrons. No one said anything about shadows or magic.

  Detective Juarez told them he’d write up a report and that a photographer and someone from forensics would come over tomorrow to document the damage. Then he gave Odette his card and said he’d be in touch. Personally, Charlie doubted Odette would ever hear from him again.

  11

  SOME BRIGHTER STAR

  Charlie got into the Corolla and turned it on, letting the warm air from the heater wash over her. Resting on the passenger seat was a bag with the sparkly dress and wig that she’d brought to get in and out of the casino hotel. So much for her easy shot at Adam and the manuscript.

  The time on her dash read two thirty. Her burner phone had a cracked case and three angry texts on it, culminating in a disturbing one that warned her if she was playing him, he was going to bash her head in. She tapped out an excuse about a car breaking down, but there was no confirmation of delivery. He’d probably blocked her number.

  Meanwhile, Vince was waiting for her at the house.

  Charlie put her head down on the steering wheel and took a shuddering breath.

  At least her car had started. She drove the few blocks home, taking the long way that avoided passing the alley where she’d seen Paul Ecco’s corpse two nights ago.

  Vince’s van wasn’t there when Charlie pulled into the driveway.

  Of course it wasn’t. He was disposing of the body, and who knew how long that took or what it entailed. Charlie’s unhelpful brain supplied images from movies—concrete blocks tied to feet, acid baths, wood chippers.

  As she got out of her car, stiff-limbed and shaking, she was reminded of how it had felt to come home from a job. She’d return from some carefully planned and frenetically executed heist to a world which she no longer seemed to belong. Like then, it felt surreal to walk through the same tiny front yard in need of mowing, across the same porch with an unplugged and dirty ghost lantern from Target lying on its side.

  As she opened the door, exhaustion settled over her as adrenaline ebbed away.

  Posey was standing at the stove, frying chopped meat and onions. She looked over as the screen door banged behind Charlie and gasped. “What happened to you?”

  “Someone came into Rapture looking for a guy. The one I told you about, with the shredded shadow. I got knocked around a little.”

  Posey put her hand on her hip. “A little?”

  Charlie made herself shrug. “Could have been worse. What are you making?”

  “Spaghetti Bolognese. Who cares? You want to tell me what’s really going on?”

  She had to say something. And she needed a minute or two to figure out how to jump-start her brain. “After a shower. I’m soaked with liquor; it’s disgusting and stinging the hell out of the cuts.”

  Posey pushed the metal spatula violently through the meat. “Where’s Vince? I thought he was going to get you.”

  “I sent him to pick something up. Band-Aids.” A wobbly lie, given the hour, but they had become something of a nocturnal family. Bats, with their night work and their night feasts and their night-mart shopping. By the time he came back empty-handed, Posey would have the pressing matter of magic to worry about.

  Posey was clearly restraining herself from another speech about how there was something wrong with Vince in the soul department when Charlie escaped into their bathroom.

  Her sister knew about her past as a thief. Charlie had brought a few books home for her, digital copies that were slightly suspect but still interesting, and once, a slim volume of shadow magic notes of a basic sort from the beginning of the industrial age. What Charlie had avoided, though, was telling Posey about the scary stuff. The times she’d almost been caught. The cons that had gone pear-shaped. The ways magic had been used by gloamists against one another, and against people without quickened shadows.

  It had been easier to portray her whole career as a lark. A series of adventures. And if Charlie could just get herself together, she was sure she could make this sound just as unserious.

  Their small shared bathroom contained a single sink and a tub shower. A dollar-store curtain, waxy with dried soap, hung from plastic hooks around it. Charlie turned the tap as hot as it would go.

  As the room began to fill with steam, Charlie carefully removed her clothes. Even having done her best to dust off her hair and skirt, she found tiny shards of glass visible on her skin. Wadding up the fabric of her bike shorts and wetting it, she tried to blot off the last of the splinters. When she was done, she rolled up all her clothes and shoved them into the small metal trash can, mashing down a bunch of crumpled tissues. She never wanted to wear any of it again.

  A powerful shudder rippled over her as the hot water hit her skin. The stink of alcohol wafted up in a cloud. Images of the night washed over her—the rain of bottles, the feeling of lightning crackling over her skin as the shade struck her, Vince reflected in the shining mirrors, holding the bearded man against his chest, the thick dark rolling toward her, the electric flavor of the shadow against her tongue. She thought of the constellation of names—Paul Ecco, the Hierophant, Hermes, Edmund Carver, Lionel Salt. Thought of ragged shadow and white jutting bones.

  Charlie forced herself to squirt some Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap into her hands and scrub herself, rinsing her hair twice and rubbing a washcloth over her skin with such vigor that it turned pink and raw. The soap stung. A few of the bandages Vince had applied were already coming off, swirling through the tub water to be caught against the drain.

  Vince, who had been hiding plenty. A spike of anger went through her at the thought that he’d been conning her, of all people.

  She should have noticed. He’d been entirely too free of strings, even for someone who abandoned an old life. No one is a blank slate, a tabula rasa, without enemies or friends. No one meets you and likes you so much right off the bat that they’re willing to move in with you and your kooky sister, willing to pay half the rent even though they take up a third of the space.

  He’d said he wanted his name off the lease because of some bad credit. The same reason why he had a prepaid phone. He worked off the books for his employer. But wasn’t it better that way, since he brought his whole paycheck home? All of it had made sense separately, but now it added up to a cold pit in her stomach.

  He saved your life.

  Whatever secrets he’d kept, she couldn’t deny what he’d done. She was glad Hermes was dead and that she was alive.

  Had Vince been a gloamist? There were two usual ways to tell. If you shone a light from two different directions at a regular person, their shadow split. But a quickened shadow remained whole. The second way was the split tongue that most glooms had.

  Vince’s tongue was whole, and there was no way to test if his shadow split now that it was gone. But if he wasn’t a gloamist, then who was he? What had he left behind?

  Wrapping a towel around herself, she padded out barefoot, dripping on the tiles.

  As she was pulling on a robe, headlights splashed across the room and then away. Vince was pulling into the drive. But when she came back to the table, he wasn’t there, although the food was, spaghetti steaming on the plate.

  She filled a bowl and sat down, spinning her fork in the noodles and red sauce.

  “Charlie,” Posey said.

  “Yeah?” There was something in her sister’s voice that made her look up in alarm. Posey’s gaze was on the linoleum.

  “There’s something wrong with your shadow,” Posey said in a hushed voice.

  Charlie looked down. There was no ripple, but it had acquired a slight delay between her actions and its response. In all other ways, her shadow followed her movements exactly, yet Charlie had the disturbing feeling it was mimicking them.

  “Do you know what’s going on with it?” Charlie asked, thinking of an article she’d seen. Ten Ways to Wake Your Shadow, according to BuzzFeed. Put a bag over your head. Hold your breath underwater. Hit your hand with a hammer. One thing that hadn’t come up: being attacked by another shadow.

  Posey frowned as though this was the beginning of a particularly unkind joke. And it would be, for Charlie to get what Posey most wanted. No one knew why some shadows quickened while others never would. Trauma seemed to be a component, but not a surefire method. But if Charlie had magic, well, it was hard to think past the idea that her sister would hate her.

  “Are you going to tell me what happened?” Posey asked, effectively changing the subject.

  Charlie sighed. “The guy made his shadow change shape. It became solid. Knocked things over. Knocked me over.”

  “From one of the gangs?” Posey asked.

  Charlie thought of Salt and shook her head. “I think he was working for someone independent.”

  Her sister looked skeptical. “You take something from him?”

  “Not yet.” Charlie stood, walking her half-empty plate over to the sink. As she did, she saw that the white van was in the driveway, parked, lights off. No one seemed to be sitting inside. She remembered the splash of headlights. “Did Vince come back?”

  Posey shrugged as though nothing could interest her less. “I don’t know. Did he?”

  “I’m going to go see if he’s okay.” Charlie stuck her bare feet into a pair of work boots that Vince had abandoned near the door, the soles encrusted with dirt. They were much too big and her feet slid around in them, but she thought she could manage a slow stagger.

  “He’s fine. Why wouldn’t he be?” Posey asked, standing. “I’m going to go check in with some friends. We have a chat tonight.”

  “You can’t tell anyone what I told you,” Charlie cautioned.

  “I don’t need to say it happened to my sister,” Posey said, exasperated, as though the idea of not telling people was ridiculous.

  “No one,” Charlie insisted.

  “Whatever,” Posey said, lifting her phone to take a video of Charlie’s shadow. At Charlie’s expression, she sighed dramatically. “I’m just trying to figure out what’s wrong with your shadow.”

  Charlie had been waiting for Posey to at least float the possibility that it had quickened. That she hadn’t was a relief, and if Charlie felt some small measure of disappointment, it was easily ignored.

  Charlie headed outside, the slam of the screen cutting off her thoughts on the subject. Her feet sloshed around in Vince’s too-large boots as she walked around to the side of the house, and she tightened her robe against the icy breeze.

  She found Vince on the back steps, staring up at the stars.

  He seemed to have lost his jacket. He had his arms folded over his knees, forehead resting on his wrists, t-shirt pulled tight across his shoulders. The motion-sensing lamp over the back door gave off a faint golden glow, gilding him. Moths circled, sending little shadows over his shadowless body. He must have been sitting there for a while.

  When he turned, his face was carefully blank, as though he’d made it that way for her.

  Charlie rested her hand on the chilled skin of his arm, and he sucked in his breath.

  “You okay?” she asked, and he nodded.

  It occurred to her with a sinking heart just how much she liked him. She should have realized at Barb’s house, when she’d been so angry with Suzie. Or when she continued to check for the photo in his wallet. Or at any moment before this one, when she’d discovered how little she knew about him.

  He tipped his head up. “Do you think that stars have shadows?”

  She followed his gaze. They were close enough to Springfield for light pollution to dull the night skies, but galaxies still spangled above them. The moon had marched nearly to the end of her night, ready to stagger to her own bed at dawn.

  “I guess if there’s some brighter star,” she said, thinking of lying on the couch months ago, a deep-voiced man explaining the universe on her television while she tried to convince herself to apply for a new job. “Like the kind that’s about to become a black hole. Don’t they flare first?”

  Vince nodded. “Quasars. They flare as they’re dying. I guess that would give any other star nearby a shadow.”

  She thought about the struggling, squirming thing attached to the bearded man. She thought about just how sideways Vince’s night had gone—from attempted good deed to body disposal. Just because he’d lied to her, it didn’t mean she wasn’t sympathetic to how terrible the last few hours must have been. Even if he’d seemed calm, even if he’d killed before, that didn’t mean he was okay. Maybe she wasn’t the only person pretending to be fine. Reaching over, she took his hand.

  He flinched a little, as though she’d surprised him.

  “That guy could have killed me.” It was hard for Charlie to judge how long she’d been unconscious, but it had been long enough. “So, if you’re feeling guilty, you should stop.”

  “That’s not what I’m feeling,” Vince said.

  She looked over, trying to read his expression. It bothered her that she couldn’t.

  “You should come inside,” she said. “It’s cold and Posey made spaghetti.”

  He gave her a sideways glance, and she was tempted to push for answers, to tell him she’d heard what he’d said to Hermes back in Rapture. To demand he tell her all his secrets.

  You’ve let your shadow feed for too long tonight. There’s not much of you left.

  He turned his hollow gray eyes on her. “I’m angry,” he said. “I am still so angry.”

  Surprised, Charlie started to open her mouth and then closed it again.

  “Last night, after you fell asleep, I couldn’t stop looking at the swell of your cheek. The snarl of your dark hair. The chipped black nail polish on your toes, curled up against whatever dream you were having. The way you pulled loose the bottom sheet with the violence of sleeping. I looked at you and had a feeling so intense that it made me dizzy and a little sick.” His gaze was on the silvery grass of the lawn. “It’s no good to feel that way.”