Rand had told her that the world of heists and lies and lifts were what certain people were born for, and that Charlie was one of them. Her hands became steady, her fingers quick, and her mouth ready to talk a raft of shit. She had been good. And she’d liked it. That was the problem.

  “I saw Paul’s body that night, on my way home,” she said. “It looked as though it had been ripped open. So, okay, I wanted to know who could have done something like that. Then some heavy comes in and acts like I know where Paul got the page. So then I was really curious, especially about who snitched on me.”

  “You wrong me,” Balthazar said, all mock-innocence. “It’s not my fault if you’re a truffle pig for trouble. All I did was answer a few questions for an interested party.”

  Balthazar turned away to get down a can of condensed milk, but not before she saw the way his mouth had gone pinched. Among criminals, and the crime-adjacent, there might be a flexible sense of morality, but there was one thing every ne’er-do-well was firm on: no rats.

  “Omitting the part where Paul tried to sell you the page?” Charlie reminded him. She wondered how long it was going to be before word got around that Hermes was missing. It was worth reminding him that if she went down, she could take him with her. “What is so important about this particular book?”

  “It’s called the Liber Noctem,” he told her in a bored voice. “Colloquially, The Book of Blights because it’s supposed to contain rituals specifically to do with them. Some gloamists think that’s the key to immortality, to be able to live on as your Blight. But whatever’s in there, it’s a truly magnificent object. Metal pages, stamped instead of printed on. Bought at auction by that particularly wicked old gentleman, Lionel Salt. Rich as a Medici, and with the same set of interests.”

  Charlie’s lip curled.

  “Do you know him?” Balthazar asked.

  “Of course not,” said Charlie. “But he’s the one who sent Hermes.”

  Balthazar set down two large mugs, generously filling the bottoms of each with gooey condensed milk. He poured coffee on top of both and brought one to her, then sat, smoothing out his dressing gown. “Salt’s grandson is supposed to have stolen the Liber Noctem and run off. Ed Carter, I think his name was. Carver? Anyway, the grandson gets involved in some kind of murder-suicide, but must have sold the book on beforehand, because it doesn’t turn up with the rest of his stuff. Salt’s so keen on getting the book back that he has a standing offer of fifty grand to anyone who returns it, no questions asked.”

  Edmund Carver. That was the name Hermes had asked her about. But he hadn’t sounded as though the kid was dead.

  “Sold it on to Paul Ecco?” Charlie asked.

  Balthazar shook his head. “More likely to someone else, who then sold a single page to Paul Ecco.”

  “Why not the whole thing, then?” Charlie asked. “Fifty grand’s nothing to sneeze at.”

  Balthazar opened his expressive hands, granting her point. “Maybe someone who wanted to get Salt’s attention. Chum the water.”

  Charlie sipped the coffee. It was sweet enough to make her wince and strong enough that she was glad it was so sweet. “To make him pay more?”

  “When the Liber Noctem first went missing,” Balthazar said, “he hired one of my people. The new guy.”

  Charlie raised both eyebrows. “Adam?”

  “Yeah, him. But my guy didn’t work out. Found nothing. The old man didn’t seem too surprised, either.” Balthazar shrugged and took a long drink from his mug.

  “Huh.” It bothered her that anyone knew Paul Ecco was trying to fence the page so soon after he’d been thrown out of Rapture; that seemed too fast for a rumor to spread. And not only the presence of the Hierophant, but the brutality of the murder made her think it was something other than a human who’d done it. A Blight would have reason to tear a shadow to tatters when it killed. The strength to rip open a rib cage.

  Why would a Blight be looking for the Liber Noctem?

  And who the hell had it?

  If Salt had hired Adam to look for the book, was it possible he’d found Edmund Carver’s hiding spot and had been sitting on the thing?

  Of course, it was asking questions like those that got Odette’s place trashed and herself almost killed. She thought she’d let the dream of revenge against Salt go years before, and she ought to let it go now. It was impossible, and childish.

  “You could take the job,” Balthazar said. “You want to quit the game for good? Go out in style. Come on, Charlatan, you could steal breath from a body, hate from a heart, the moon from the sky.”

  “Flattery is so unlike you.” Fifty thousand dollars was a lot of money, but it wasn’t a fraction of what Salt deserved to pay. “I’ll think about it.”

  Balthazar smiled, as though she’d already agreed. “There we are. I knew you’d come around.”

  * * *

  As Charlie crossed the asphalt to her car, she noticed a man on the other side of the street. She might not have taken a second look if he were moving, or even had a phone out, like anyone would. But this guy was standing stock-still, staring at the firehouse with his hands—arms, even—tucked deep into the pockets of his coat.

  In the daylight, she could see that the Hierophant was a young man, and yet his eyes burned with something ancient.

  If he was hunting Blights, then what was he doing at Balthazar’s place? She couldn’t forget the way he’d walked toward her in the alley, with what had seemed like sinister purpose.

  Charlie shuddered, got in the Corolla, and hit the gas. As she pulled out, she saw his head turn slowly and his gaze follow her car. Then his shadow became vast wings behind him, lifting him up into the air. He hovered against the blue sky, an impossible angel, coat flapping around him.

  She almost veered into a ditch, heart hammering. At the first stop sign, she looked back again; he didn’t appear to have followed her.

  * * *

  Back home, Charlie was full of nervous energy, and a lot of caffeine. She washed the dishes in the sink left over from the Bolognese. Wiped down the counters. And when that wasn’t enough, she started to clean out the whole refrigerator. Not just her usual sweep, dumping out the most offensive things—a forgotten cucumber that had caved in on one side and become colonized with mold, a tiny piece of cheese that had turned white and hard and no one was going to eat, a sealed container full of grayish noodles that bulged alarmingly. This time she took out everything, condiments included, and wiped the shelves down with towels soaked in diluted bleach.

  “You need help?” Vince asked, coming in from the bedroom and reaching for the coffeepot.

  She startled at his voice.

  He appeared to be the same man she’d lived with for months. Blond hair mussed from sleep. Stubble along his jaw. As he moved around the kitchen with no mention of the night before, it seemed impossible to believe he’d snapped a guy’s neck and then fucked her on some broken steps in the moonlight.

  And lied.

  And lied and lied and lied—

  “Can I borrow some cleaning stuff from your van?” Charlie asked.

  He hesitated. “Let me get it for—”

  “Great,” she said, cutting him off cheerfully. If he didn’t want her rooting around in his van herself, it was probably because he had something else to hide. Maybe she’d find a head rolling around in the back.

  Or maybe he was just being nice, offering to get the stuff for her.

  Or maybe Hermes’s body was in plastic-wrapped pieces and he wanted to spare her the sight.

  Charlie turned back to the fridge with renewed vigor. She scrubbed it as though she could scrub away all her desire for him, all her foolishness.

  Vince brought in cleaning stuff and went out to clean the gutters, mug in hand. And hide the head, Charlie’s mind unhelpfully supplied.

  Posey got up even later than usual, around four. She looked ragged as she staggered into the kitchen and filled a cereal bowl with all the remaining coffee, then stuck it in the microwave.

  Charlie had dated a fellow burglar for a couple of months, before he skipped town with a pair of earrings she’d managed to convince him were set with diamonds. He’d told her that when he’d first started breaking into houses, he’d thought rich people would keep their really expensive stuff in safes, but it turned out that people mostly kept things where they could see them. Wealthy people kept a key under the mat like everyone else, because they misplaced their keys too. They wound up locking away birth certificates, marriage licenses, and legal paperwork instead of valuables. Jewelry was in the primary bedroom closet, even the really good stuff, because people wanted to wear it. Laptops were on desks or sofas. TV on the wall. Expensive liquor on the bar cart. Guns in the first drawer of the nightstand.

  People like their stuff close by, including their secrets. What makes you feel safe when you go to sleep at night? Being able to check and see that your secrets are still hidden.

  If there was something for Charlie to find, there was a good chance Vince kept it in their bedroom.

  Once she had the thought, it caught like a burr.

  She needed to get him out of the house—and soon, before temptation overwhelmed her common sense and she went through his stuff while he was likely to walk in on her.

  An hour later, Vince came inside, his hands sooty. By then, she had her story ready.

  “Katelynn wants me to meet her for coffee tonight,” Charlie said, trying to sound offhanded.

  He washed his hands in the sink, soap all the way to his elbows. “The tattooist. With the moth-eating cousin.”

  “Right,” she said, unnerved. She hadn’t noticed them talking at the party. “I’m thinking about getting something new.”

  “Oh yeah?” he asked, wiping his wet hands on his black jeans.

  The expression on his face—slight smile, seemingly honest interest, no judgment for the trouble of the previous night—unnerved her as well. He really seemed to care for her. He’d killed someone to save her.

  She wanted to trust him.

  “Vince?” She took his hand and looked up into his pale gray eyes. “How did you lose your shadow? For real this time.”

  His gaze slid away from her. “I didn’t. I—” He stopped, then started again. “I didn’t understand the danger we were in.”

  He wasn’t necessarily lying. The truth was often complicated and hard to explain. “What danger?”

  He shook his head and picked up their compost bucket—bought by Posey, online, in an effort for them to be better environmentalists, now filled with slimy cucumber remains and other fridge remnants, plus a lot of coffee grounds.

  “That’s not an answer,” she called after him.

  But whatever she’d been looking for, she didn’t get it. He only went outside to dump the compost into a weird worm bin that none of them was sure was working. With all the coffee grounds they added, the only thing Charlie was certain of was that those worms were wired. If a bird ate one, it was going to fly directly into the sun.

  By the time he came back in, he had his phone to his ear. He’d been called in for a job. A residential double homicide.

  “I can stay if you want,” he said to her, turning the phone away from his mouth. Faintly, she could hear his boss yelling at someone. Before that moment, she hadn’t been sure if Vince had faked the call, just to avoid talking.

  She shook her head. “I’m going out anyhow. Katelynn, remember?”

  He got his coat. Kissed her on the mouth and then at the edge of her jaw. A kiss that obviously meant something, but whether it was apology or promise, she wasn’t sure.

  After he left, she stared at her bedroom door. If he hadn’t gotten called in to work, he might have given her answers. And she knew that any newspaper advice columnist would tell her that she should wait, respect his privacy, and ask him more when he returned.

  She made it fifteen minutes before she got up and made a show of stretching. “Well, I’m going to take a quick nap before I go out.”

  “Hold on,” Posey said. “I was waiting for him to leave. There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  Charlie did not want to hear more about DMT and how it was absolutely necessary to steal some for Posey’s let’s-experiment-on-ourselves-in-the-woods retreat. “I won’t be long.”

  In the bedroom, with the door firmly closed, Charlie looked around. Tangled sheets. Clothes and shoes scattered on the floor. A dresser cluttered with yellowed paperback books and pots of makeup and a vase stuffed with receipts.

  When she looked down at her hands, she was surprised to find them shaking.

  Charlie ripped the bedding all the way off, then pushed the mattress up against the wall. It was heavy and wobbled, but she got it up. Things got hidden under beds in movies. Which meant that people who watched movies hid things under beds.

  But beneath the mattress, all she found was a pair of underwear she’d lost, a crumpled tissue, plus something gross and fuzzy and flat that might have once been one of Lucipurrr’s hairballs.

  She thought of her mother, looking for evidence of another woman, in drawers, in pockets. Impossibly trying to prove a negative. Hoping for nothing, and knowing that nothing only meant you weren’t looking hard enough. Charlie swore that she would never wind up like that.

  Yet here she was.

  Charlie moved on to Vince’s half of the dresser, shoving her hands all the way to the back, then taking everything out and turning over the drawers. Vince was tidy—never left his clothes on the floor, never left his hair in the sink—so it was a surprise to find shirts and jeans thrown together haphazardly. She hoped there was no system to the chaos, because she’d never be able to re-create it. If he left five balls of socks in a particular order to detect snooping, she was screwed.

  But she found nothing of interest. Nothing incriminating.

  She went to the closet next. Most of the stuff in there was hers, but he had a winter coat and a pair of boots shoved deep in on the left side. She wriggled her hands into the pockets and took out two receipts. One for gas, another for milk, bread, and eggs. Both paid in cash.

  Peering into the darkness, she noticed an empty-looking black duffel bag on the floor, past the boots. She dragged it out and unzipped it.

  At the bottom she found a metal disc about the size of a nickel, and a driver’s license. She turned the bag over and shook everything onto the floor, but nothing else fell out.

  She picked up the small metal disc. It was thick and heavier than she expected, almost like a watch battery, but without any markings. A part to something electronic? A piece in a game? She tucked it into her pocket.

  Then she looked at the driver’s license. The picture was of a younger Vincent, smiling wide, with neatly barbered hair that someone had used product on, a collared shirt just visible along the bottom of the image. An address in Springfield, with an apartment number. And over the state capital, an entirely different name.

  Edmund Vincent Carver.

  For a dizzying moment, she thought she was looking at a fake ID. But the card had uniform edges and bended right, and when she held it to the light, the tell-tale metallized kinegram shone over his picture.

  Lionel Salt’s grandson. The one who’d stolen the Liber Noctem. The one who was supposed to be dead.

  Lionel Salt’s heir, lying beside her in the dark.

  Charlie found it hard to catch her breath. She was pretty sure this was a full-blown panic attack, and that if she kept inhaling so quickly and shallowly, she’d bruise her lungs.

  She took out her phone and snapped a picture of his license, amazed to find that she could manage it. Everything seemed to be happening too fast. But she still made herself go to her laptop and open her search engine. She typed “Edmund Carver” and “Springfield.”

  The first hit was an article that came up from last summer, printed in The Republican:

  SPRINGFIELD—The burnt remains of two bodies were discovered in a car two blocks from the MGM casino in the downtown area in the early-morning hours of Monday.

  Police have identified one as belonging to Edmund “Remy” Carver, 27, socialite and grandson of Lionel Salt. The other was Rose Allaband, 23, who had been reported missing after disappearing from her apartment in Worcester four months ago. Early forensics suggest a murder-suicide.

  The sheriff’s office is not looking for additional suspects at this time.

  Charlie’s heart sped.

  A few more clicks and she found Vince’s picture with a dozen other young, broad-shouldered men on the New York University fencing team. He wore a collared white bodysuit, arms folded across his chest, hair shorter than on the license, faded close to his scalp on the sides. He looked like he was in a costume, except for the way he was smiling at the camera, as though he believed the world was made for people like him.

  Vince didn’t smile like that.

  Of course, back then he’d called himself Remy and been wealthy and happy. He hadn’t killed somebody or faked his own death. He wasn’t working an under-the-table job cleaning up corpses or shacking up with some broke girl to have a place to sleep.

  She remembered the sweat trickling between her shoulder blades in the crowded bar the night they met, the taste of gin and tonic made with well liquor because she’d wanted to get drunk on the cheap, her friend dipping out early, how Vince had stood like a wall between her and getting shoved into the fire door.

  If she’d known he was filthy fucking rich, would she have taken him home when she was feeling self-destructive and foolish? No way. Of course, she’d never have believed him either. She’d have thought it was the world’s worst line. Oh, the grandson of a billionaire, you say? Well, I only get down with bajillionaires. Just your luck.

  If he’d convinced her, though? Never. Not a guy who’d graduated from a prestigious university, a guy with a trust fund and a future ahead of him. No chance she would have brought him back to her rental house, so he could sneer at how she lived, so he could look down on her for her job, her lack of education, and all her choices.