Charlie’s heart hammered. He had never spoken to her like that. She didn’t think anyone had spoken to her like that. “Vince?”

  “When I saw you tonight—what he’d done, what he was doing, I wanted to kill him. I was furious and I haven’t stopped being furious. I don’t feel guilty. I wish he was alive so I could kill him again.”

  Astonishment robbed her of breath. Vince didn’t get angry. He didn’t talk about his feelings. He didn’t sit alone in the dark, talking about shadows and stars.

  He turned to her. “Pretend I didn’t say any of that. If you can, pretend tonight never happened, Charlie.”

  She smiled a little, trying to regain her equanimity. “Then what are we doing together out in the cold?”

  “Whatever you want,” he said, and kissed her. A desperate kiss, his mouth bruisingly hard. Nothing like the way he’d kissed her before. Charlie’s body reacted, the sharp shock of her desire unexpected. His lips moved along her cheekbone to her throat and she swallowed a moan. Her nails sank into the muscle of his arms.

  She wanted him, right then, against the concrete steps. Despite everything that had happened that night. Maybe, horribly, some part of her even wanted him because of it.

  Nothing about him was careful as his body bent in a cage over hers. All she had on was a robe, easy to part.

  “I need to…” he began, hesitating. “You must be…”

  Hurt. Tired. Uncomfortable.

  She kissed him before he could finish the thought.

  One of his hands stroked along her rib cage, his finger skimming the edge of the old bullet wound before moving to her thigh. Parting her legs. His desire was raw-edged, vulnerable. As though he’d shown her something true about himself for the first time.

  She dug her fingers into his hair. Bit his lip.

  Anger confused her body, making her desire burn brighter, making everything faster and sharper and hotter. Better. His hunger answered her ferocity. Blotting out the night and the fear and the cold and everything.

  As her thoughts spiraled away, her gaze fell on the aluminum siding of the house. She watched as her shadow-self arched her back and rose up off the stairs at an impossible angle. Without Vince’s shadow, it was like being in the grips of a demon lover. Possessed. Reaching for someone who wasn’t there.

  12

  THE PAST

  Hall Pass, they called her in junior high, as in “Did you get your Hall Pass?” Asked to the boys by one another, snickered about by the girls. There was some glory in it, to be thought of as the girl with all the experience, especially when in fact Charlie had absolutely none. But it was mostly humiliating, her body drawing boys to her and repulsing them at once. It made group assignments fraught. Push your desks together and Matt Panchak spent most of his time sliding one sneakered foot up your leg, taking your lack of complaint for desire.

  Never mind that you’d gone to kindergarten with him.

  Never mind that once, during PE, he’d gotten a soccer ball kicked into his stomach so hard that he threw up, and you were the one who walked him to the nurse’s office.

  No, now you were a pair of legs with boobs on top, with the ability to banish all his insecurities. Venus on the half shell.

  In gym class, while she was changing, Doreen Kowalski asked Charlie all kinds of questions about when she’d gotten her period and whether she shaved her underarms and what size bra she wore. At first, she wondered if Doreen wanted to be friends, but once Charlie answered, Doreen rushed back to her knot of buddies, giggling.

  They didn’t understand how her bra straps cut into her shoulders and underwires cut into her ribs, and that the bras that fit looked like ones a matronly nurse would wear in an old war movie. There was no way to make them understand.

  Charlie put on darker eyeliner and wore baggier clothes and stompier boots.

  Rand didn’t seem to know what to do with her either. When he’d recruited her at twelve, she’d already looked older than her age. By the time she was starting high school, her body let her pass for a grown woman.

  It didn’t help that Charlie got a little too good at all the wrong things. She had a nose for where an unlocked window or door might be when she approached houses. Her pickpocketing was deft enough that Rand didn’t let her get close to him. And when she played a role, she disappeared into it.

  He liked the idea of passing on his knowledge to a kid with some natural talent, but he didn’t want her to be better than him. And he definitely didn’t want her as competition.

  “You and me, we’re the same,” he’d remind her again and again, in case she forgot. “We pretend, so that other people will like us. But they wouldn’t like us if they knew us, would they? That’s why we’ve got to stick together.”

  Sometimes after she’d done particularly well on a job, he’d be in a spiteful mood. He’d condescendingly call her “Little Miss Charlatan,” go over every mistake she made, and give her less of the take than she deserved.

  But if Charlie’s growing skill frustrated him, he also clearly enjoyed having someone to whom he could complain, or brag, or rant. The natural consequence of criminality was that he had to be discreet about it, and Rand wasn’t a discreet person by nature.

  Sometimes he could be fun. He took her with him to the Moose Lodge in Chicopee, where a bunch of old racketeers drank, and let her sit around drinking burnt coffee with lots of cream while they regaled her with stories. She rubbed elbows with fences and forgers. Learned how to count cards from Willie Lead, who told her about Leticia, his late wife and, according to him, the greatest stickup artist ever to knock over a liquor store.

  “It was the throat cancer that got her in the end,” he said mournfully. “The cops never even came close.”

  The Moose Lodge was where Charlie got her start as a bartender, at fourteen, pouring shots when no one else wanted to do it, making cocktails according to highly idiosyncratic instructions.

  “Just wave the vermouth bottle over the gin,” Benny would say. “That’s how to make a martini right.” His game was angling after rich widows, and he always looked sharp doing it, even if his breath was often perfumed with booze.

  Willie would disagree vehemently, shouting that vermouth ought to be a full fourth of the drink, and that Benny was a drunk who’d burned away his good taste, if he’d ever had any in the first place.

  “So I’m a drunk!” Benny would shout back. “If you can’t trust a drunk about liquor, who can you trust?”

  Charlie liked them. She told them about her grandmother and the shotgun, and the detail that her grandfather was sitting in his BarcaLounger when he got executed made them howl with laughter. Willie promised they’d take Charlie up to the North Central Correctional Institute in Gardner to visit the grand dame one day, although they never did.

  Hanging around them made Charlie feel like maybe there wasn’t anything wrong with her. It didn’t matter if she didn’t fit in at school, or that her body kept changing on her. It was okay when her best friend’s parents took one look at Charlie and clocked her for trouble. When even Laura herself, who’d known her since she was eight, started acting weird. It was fine that she’d given up hoping her mother would notice there was something strange about Rand taking her on trips all the time. All those people who judged her or couldn’t be bothered with her were marks. She’d have the last laugh.

  “You gotta be like a shark in this business,” Benny told her, with his soft voice and his slicked-back hair. “Sniff around for the blood in the water. Greet life teeth first. And no matter what, never stop swimming.”

  Charlie took that advice and the money from her last job with Rand and got a tattoo. She’d wanted one, and she’d also wanted to know if she could con a shop into giving her the ink, even though she was three years away from eighteen.

  It involved some fast talking and swiping a notary sigil, but she got it done. Her first tattoo. It was still a little bit sore when she moved. Along her inner arm was the word “fearless” in looping cursive letters, except the tattooist had spaced them oddly so that it looked as though it said “fear less.”

  It reminded her of what she wanted to be, and that her body belonged to her. She could write all over it if she wanted.

  * * *

  Over the years, as gloaming emerged into the general consciousness of the world at large, Rand became increasingly fascinated with it. He’d been pulling cons based around the occult for years—like the one where Charlie had to pretend to be a ghost child. While he’d particularly liked how a little sleight of hand could really impress wealthy old ladies, with real magic, he sensed larger opportunities.

  Willie wasn’t impressed and let everyone at the Moose Lodge know. “When I was a kid, there was that guy, Uri Geller, who could bend spoons with his mind. Guess what came of that? Nothing. Who needs a bent spoon?”

  Benny knew a guy, though. Rand returned from the meeting excited. He told Charlie that this person promised them big money if they’d acquire something for him. “The guy probably doesn’t even know how valuable the book he’s got is. He’s a rich old coot, not a gloamist. We just need the right angle.”

  “If the guy who’s hiring us is a real gloamist and the mark isn’t, why doesn’t the gloamist steal it himself?” Charlie asked. “Why doesn’t he send his shadow to get it?”

  “Because of the onyx,” Rand said, as though that ought to have been obvious. “It makes the shadows solid, so they can’t slip through cracks or whatever.”

  Charlie was skeptical. “If the old coot knows that, he probably knows his book is valuable.”

  “We can do this,” Rand told her. “If we do, he says he’s got more work for us. If we’re bold, we’re going to get rich, I know it.”

  Charlie rolled her eyes. Rand dreamed of the one big score the way that Charlie’s mother dreamed of love. It was the thing that would allow him to live the life of ease to which he thought he was entitled, and of which he was always on the very cusp. Always a mirage, always just over the next dune.

  “Our client’s name is Knight, but that’s all I’m going to tell you,” Rand said. “And so long as we bring him his book, he says we’re free to bilk Moneybags for anything else we can get.”

  Charlie didn’t like it. They usually worked for themselves. A client could be trouble.

  “I’ve finagled us into a meeting in the house of this guy, Lionel Salt. Family wealth in medical manufacturing. That’s where the big money is—making the widgety doodad that fits into a surgical thingamajig. I’ve informed him that I and my young daughter are occultists who communicate with the unseen world, which includes demons. And those demons are going to help him quicken his shadow.” Rand sounded calm, but he kept twisting the end of his mustache.

  “Lionel Salt?” she asked. “The guy with the car?” Even then, she’d been aware of his matte black Phantom, discussed in loving detail by half the boys in her class.

  “Yeah, him,” Rand said dismissively.

  Charlie frowned. “This guy is going to think we’re ridiculous. Demons?”

  But Rand wouldn’t be swayed. “Believers want to believe. He wants to quicken his shadow, right? They all do. We can give him hope.”

  And that was how Charlie found herself in the passenger seat of his car, practicing rolling her eyes up hard enough that only the whites were showing. It wasn’t an easy technique to do without closing your eyes first—but it was creepier.

  If she’d known how to do this back when she was “channeling” Alonso, she was almost certain her mother would have left Travis after the first visitation. It looked that good.

  Charlie was hoping the job would go well enough (or that while she was in the house she could grab something worth enough) to buy a leather coat she had her eye on. She’d seen it at a thrift store for a hundred seventy-five dollars, and while she thought she might be able to convince the owner to give it to her for less, it was still going to be a lot.

  “You remember the plan?” Rand asked her for the millionth time on their drive over.

  She did. Rand was going to pose as her father and explain that Charlie (who would, of course, be using a different name) had begun speaking to unseen beings a few years back. People wanted to treat her for mental illness, but he realized she had a talent to speak with the supernatural world, including the infernal one. And so he had cultivated her talents.

  Rand wanted the man to be a little disgusted with him. People trust that when someone is doing something terrible, the reward must be real.

  All Charlie had to do was provide the special effect. She just had to be an intimidated, quiet girl until her eyes rolled up and she vomited beet juice all over everything. Finally, she was going to give them “the gift of the devil.”

  The rich believed they were lucky, and that any good fortune they didn’t already have could be bought. They had so much already, disappointment became inconceivable.

  “You should teach me how to drive,” she said, looking out at the highway and the lights glittering across the Connecticut River.

  Rand snorted. “You’re not old enough.”

  “You mean it’s illegal?” She shrugged. “Oh no.”

  He made an annoyed, huffing noise. “I guess I could. I’ve got time next week. You never know when it might come in handy.”

  They pulled off the exit, heading from city into suburbs and then stretches of woods beyond, where mansions had been nestled back when Springfield was a production hub.

  Charlie bit her nail, looking out the window. Feeling a little sick to her stomach from a combination of beet juice and nerves.

  She saw the mansion coming into view as Rand took the turn onto the drive. She’d never seen a place like it. It was like a museum, or a place out of a fairy tale where cursed princesses slept.

  “This is a bad idea,” she muttered, but Rand ignored her.

  He got out and opened the door for her. “Stage fright,” he said. “You want a swig of whiskey?”

  “I’m fifteen,” she reminded him.

  “Oh?” he said, mimicking her voice. “Is it illegal?”

  The front door opened. A small red-haired man stood there, squinting at them. Charlie realized she had no idea what Lionel Salt looked like.

  “Is there anything I can help you bring inside, sir?” he asked, making it clear he was a butler or something.

  “We don’t have props,” Rand told him, as though the very idea offended.

  Charlie had her game face on, and so didn’t roll her eyes.

  Inside, several old men were sitting around on green leather chairs in a large library. The real Lionel Salt was an old man with a shock of white hair. A silver-tipped cane rested beside him. One of his friends appeared to be close in age, while the other was maybe twenty years younger. Rand introduced himself to them all, and then indicated Charlie, as though she were some kind of trained lemur instead of a person. She tried to surreptitiously read off the titles of the books.

  The one they were supposed to get had a red spine and was titled The Book of Amor Pettit. But from a glance at the shelves, she didn’t see it. She did spot an interesting section that had a few books with “Grimoire” in the title. That seemed promising.

  The plan was supposed to go like this: Rand set things up. Charlie gave her performance. If the book was in the room, Rand took it. If it wasn’t, he used her to distract them and made some excuse to search the other rooms on the first level. The person who’d hired him had assured them that he’d seen it there.

  Charlie acted her part. Shy. Reserved. When she got possessed, she planned to really let go.

  They were invited to sit down. The red-haired man took drink orders. Rand talked over several different magical theories, a glass of whiskey in his hand, while Charlie sipped her water.

  “Have you heard the saying ‘no man can jump over his own shadow’?” Salt asked.

  Rand had not.

  “It’s a German saying. It means everyone has their limits.”

  “But you don’t believe that,” Rand said.

  “No,” said Lionel. “I’ve always believed there was a secret to the universe. A path by which man can acquire godhood. And that path is through shadows. You claim you can wake mine.”

  Sensing this was the moment, Rand stood. “Shall we begin, then?”

  “Ah, yes, indeed,” said one of the other men. He smiled in a way that Charlie didn’t like.

  “As you gentlemen are aware,” Rand began, “the world is full of nearly limitless strangeness for the seeker. We are not just believers. We are not the faithful, taking the work for granted. We are adventurers, explorers of the darkness. And so, you will understand when I tell you how surprised I was to realize the talents of my own child. She can make herself an empty vessel and allow in all manner of beings of great wisdom and power to speak through her.”

  Two of the men exchanged a glance.

  Charlie bit the inside of her cheek. There was an undercurrent to the conversation that gnawed at her instincts. She wished she could find some way to catch Rand’s eye, but the whiskey and conversation seemed to have gone to his head.

  “That’s fascinating,” said one of them, in a bored tone that belied his words. “What sort of thing does she usually reveal? The location of buried treasure? Stock trades?”

  A few of them laughed. Rand frowned, finally noticing that he’d lost them. But he didn’t seem alarmed, didn’t seem to sense the same danger that Charlie felt. “I can never tell what will come through, but I assure you it will be to a higher purpose. If you seek a quickened shadow, then we will guide it toward revealing that. But perhaps I am mistaken in you. Perhaps you are mere dabblers after all.”

  “Bring forth a devil,” said one. “How about that? I want to talk to a being from hell.”

  “Are you certain?” Rand asked.

  The others went quiet, smiling at one another.

  Charlie’s gaze went to a corner of the room where a shadow lengthened across the carpet. She hadn’t noticed it before, but now that she had, she couldn’t seem to look away. There was nothing that could be casting it.