And if she’d known he was related to Salt, she would have broken a bottle over his head.

  Charlie tried to focus, to imagine what he’d been thinking that night. Probably worried that he didn’t have a future, right? He’d stolen the Liber Noctem, and then something had gone wrong. Something to do with the girl? Something that had resulted in two dead bodies and a need to fake his own death?

  He’d gotten that fake Minnesota driver’s license somehow, one good enough for Charlie not to question it. Of course, she’d never seen a real Minnesota license, or taken his out of the plastic sleeve to inspect it, and she supposed very few other people had either. But he had no credit card and no credit. No social security number. Just a gruesome job cleaning hotel rooms under the table.

  Enter Charlie. Probably saw her drinking alone and figured her for an easy mark. A sad girl, ready to take him straight to bed. Desperate enough not to ask too many questions. That’s what good con artists did. They didn’t need to convince you of anything, because you were too busy convincing yourself.

  Then nearly a year later, Vince walks into Rapture and finds his grandfather’s hired gun standing there. If Hermes spots him, he’ll be in more trouble than ever. So Hermes has to go. He hadn’t done it to save Charlie.

  She felt a little light-headed, a little dizzy.

  “Did you mean to leave—” Posey leaned against the doorframe, hand still on the knob. Her eyes widened slightly at the mattress shoved up against the wall, the dumped-out drawers, then her gaze went to Charlie sitting on the floor. “Did you know you left thirty bucks in singles in those clothes you tossed in the trash?”

  “Shit,” Charlie said. Her tips for the night. She was losing it. Seriously losing it.

  Posey came into the room to hand her the money, then looked around again. “What’s going on? Because you do not look like you’re napping.”

  “No, not napping,” Charlie admitted.

  Posey gave a big sigh. “I am going to make some ramen and another pot of coffee. You have ten minutes to finish up whatever you’re doing, and then we’re going to have a conversation.”

  As soon as her sister was gone, Charlie went back to the internet. She typed “Edmund Carver” in again. Photographs came up in society blogs, him standing around at parties. None from the last four years, but before that, notices of his attending openings and balls.

  She found an article about a French Heritage Society gala that showed a picture of him with a blond woman identified in the caption as Adeline Salt. She wore a white silk shift that looked particularly expensive on her tanned and toned and probably microsculpted body.

  In the photo, Vince—Edmund—had an arm thrown over her shoulder and a champagne coupe in his hand. He was in mid-laugh, the light catching him so that his shadow loomed over them both.

  Charlie knew the girl. She was the one in the photo in Vince’s wallet. Salt’s daughter, which would make her Edmund’s aunt, even though they appeared to be around the same age.

  Adeline. The girl he called out for in his sleep.

  Several people had posted in the comment section of the newspaper article.

  This is the problem with celebrating the parasitic one percent. It’s okay if he’s a murderer so long as he knows all the right people.

  I don’t believe the accusations against Remy and anyone who knows him wouldn’t either. He was always willing to go out of his way for people, from getting soaked helping staff put up a tent after a rainstorm threatened to torpedo a party in the Hamptons, to lying down on the filthy sidewalk to retrieve a stranger’s purse that had fallen through a grate. I will never forget sneaking out of the Central Park Conservatory’s luncheon to walk through the park with him. That’s the Edmund I choose to remember.

  Maybe I’m a bad person, but I’m glad he’s dead. I wish he’d died before he could have taken the life of an innocent girl with him. It’s disgusting that anyone would defend him, no less “choose to remember” him as anything but what he was—a sociopath.

  Charlie heard her sister put something in the sink and knew she had only a few more moments before she was going to have to talk to Posey. But there was one more thing she wanted to do. She put the name Lionel Salt into Google, something she hadn’t done in years.

  There was a profile on his estate in West Springfield, apparently bought for $8.9 million in 2001, along with some links to his name associated with ongoing legal cases. As soon as she saw a photograph of the house, Charlie’s palms started to sweat.

  It looked just like the palace she remembered.

  14

  A SWARM OF BLACK FLIES

  Posey was slurping up ramen doctored with a ton of chili garlic sauce when Charlie emerged from the bedroom.

  Dressed in leggings and an oversized shirt, Posey had pulled her brown hair into a single braid. Normal, except she was also wearing eyeliner, lip gloss, and calf-high zip-up boots. She was planning on going somewhere. Charlie just hoped it wasn’t a lab.

  “Okay, so you wanted to talk to me without Vince around,” Charlie said, forcing herself to concentrate on this conversation and not everything she’d learned. “What for?”

  Posey poked at her bowl. “You’re not going to tell me why you trashed your bedroom?”

  Maybe she should get a tarot reading, like saps everywhere. Maybe she needed to hear someone else say it: He’s no good. “You go ahead with your thing first.”

  “Fine. So last night, I was talking to this guy…”

  Charlie abruptly wished she’d said a lot less the night before. “You told me you wouldn’t.”

  “I stopped arguing with you,” Posey said. “I never actually agreed to do what you said.”

  With one stupid phone call, Charlie had almost gotten herself killed. What would happen if Salt somehow heard Posey’s story and linked it to Hermes?

  “I was careful,” Posey insisted.

  “Take it down. Whatever you put out there—take it down.” Charlie looked around for Posey’s laptop as though she could toss it into Nashawannuck Pond and somehow that would remove what she’d posted from the internet.

  “It wasn’t online,” Posey insisted. “It was an encrypted chat that deletes everything after it’s read.”

  Charlie sat down at the table. Her head was throbbing. The events of the last twenty-four hours were too much. She wanted to curl up in a dark hole and maybe engage in some screaming therapy.

  “Forget about all that for a minute,” Posey said. “Because that’s not the part I want to talk to you about.”

  “Fuck,” Charlie said, lacking any more coherent response.

  “There’s a graduate student over at UMass. Madurai Malhar Iyer. He’s been working on a doctoral dissertation on quickening shadows. The guy who told me about him had been trying to get Malhar to talk to him for ages, but Malhar kept blowing him off.”

  Charlie had a feeling she knew what was coming next, and that she was going to hate it.

  “I knew you weren’t going to agree to meet him, so I wrote to him and said all that stuff that happened to you happened to me. Only…”

  Charlie stared at her unhelpfully.

  “Only I can’t go alone,” Posey finished.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it didn’t happen to me,” Posey said, as though that should be obvious.

  Charlie stuck a fork into her sister’s ramen and let the hot chili sear her mouth as she ate it. “That sounds like a big problem for you.”

  “I told him we could meet him at the UMass library tonight to talk,” Posey finished, voice lilting up in the manner of someone who wants to ask something without asking it. “Tonight.”

  “No—no,” Charlie said, holding up her hands. “No way am I going. That’s not happening.”

  Posey narrowed her eyes. “Busy with something? Planning on ransacking the living room?”

  Charlie got up. “Last night was real bad and I definitely don’t want to discuss it with a stranger today.”

  “You lied about meeting Katelynn. I know you did. You were looking for something and you didn’t want Vince to be here when you did it.” Her threat was implied, but effective nonetheless.

  They stood staring at one another. Charlie’s hands had unconsciously curled into fists so tightly that her nails were pressing into her palms. “Don’t do this.”

  “I don’t have a car. At least drive me,” Posey said. “Please.”

  Charlie groaned and headed for her room.

  “Where are you going?” Posey called after her.

  “To get my coat.”

  She passed Lucipurrr, tail lashing, staring at one of the walls near the bathroom. Sometimes you could hear mice scrabbling in there, and it set the cat on edge. She supposed they were all on edge, these days.

  Back in the bedroom, Charlie tried to put it into a semblance of order—making up the mattress with new sheets to give her the alibi of cleaning if anything was out of place.

  As they pulled out of the driveway, Charlie’s thoughts were a jumble of memories of Salt’s murder of Rand and the ease with which Vince had covered up a murder the night before. Had he killed for his grandfather? Had he killed that girl they found dead in his car for Salt? Had he killed her for himself?

  Vince had been careful, and thorough, and unnervingly competent—but he hadn’t seemed as though he’d liked murder or was eager to do it again. She had a hard time imagining him hurting someone for fun.

  Of course, it’s not as though she would have easily imagined him standing in the middle of the sort of gala that she’d only seen on television, wearing an outfit likely to cost more than her car, and guzzling Champagne that was allowed to use the capital C because it came from the right region of France. It was possible that Charlie had a severely stunted imagination.

  “So tell me about this guy, Malhar,” Charlie said, to distract herself.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know that much. He seemed nice over chat.”

  “No offense, Posey, but there are a lot of graduate students in the Valley, and they’re just that, students. What makes you think this guy has that much more information than you do? I mean, you spend every night online doing research. You’ve probably read a million accounts of quickened shadows.”

  Posey’s frown deepened. “I don’t do research, though. People can make up stories, or exaggerate for attention. Videos can be faked. I might know a lot, but so many things I’ve thought were real turned out not to work. Meanwhile, he’s authenticating the information he gets. He has proof.” Posey shifted uncomfortably in her seat. Possibly because the seats were, like everything else in the Corolla, kind of busted. “Speaking of which…”

  “What?” Charlie said.

  Posey made a face. “I might have exaggerated some things too—”

  “For his attention.” Charlie looked out the window at the darkening sky. “I guess you got it.”

  After that, Posey was silent all the way until they crossed the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Bridge.

  The University of Massachusetts rose like a surprise city in the middle of nowhere, complete with a football stadium, tall buildings, traffic jams, and a miniature Stonehenge. If you took a wrong turn at a farmers market you got surrounded by a swarm of students, arriving every year like locusts, thirsty for beer and boba tea. Students were the lifeblood of the Valley, and if Charlie resented them, she knew she needed them as much as anyone if she wanted to keep slinging drinks.

  And soon Posey would be one of them, and go on with them to a future full of possibilities. At least, that was the hope.

  Charlie parked in an enormous lot, one that was marked with some letters that might or might not mean she was in the right place.

  As they got out, Charlie once again regretted her leather coat’s lack of warmth. The sun slipped low and red in the distance. They could see the lightning farm over in Sunderland, harvesting energy with ominous crackles and strikes.

  “You okay?” Charlie asked.

  “I just can’t imagine coming here every day,” Posey said.

  They stood there for a few seconds until Charlie reminded Posey that she was the one with the directions. She frowned at her phone for a while. “I think we’re supposed to go toward that pond.”

  They got lost twice, wandering through the campus, passing clumps of students in UGGs and pajama pants. A Black woman with an on-point eyeliner game sat outside the student center, reading a feminist translation of Beowulf. A white boy tried to hand Charlie a flyer for an anime festival. Three guys in team sweats jogged by.

  Vince had gone to a school like this, sitting in lectures, learning to fence. A more expensive university, one that was supposed to spit him out ready to rule over the less fortunate.

  He’d had everything. Money. Privilege. Power.

  For the first time, Charlie wondered what could have possibly made him run away.

  * * *

  Madurai Malhar Iyer was waiting for them in the lobby of the library. He was a tall guy, young, with brown skin, wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a flannel over a t-shirt, slender in a way that spoke of spending so much time studying that he forgot to eat.

  “I’m Posey,” Posey said. “And this is my sister, Charlie.”

  Malhar signed them in as his guests and led them into a study room in the back. “Thanks for agreeing to meet me so quickly,” he said as they walked through the stacks.

  Posey nodded, obviously a little embarrassed. She wanted to impress him, Charlie realized.

  Malhar swung his bag over his shoulder and set it down on the table, removing his laptop and a notebook. Several pens fell out, an apple rolling behind them. “Do you want anything? There’s a coffee machine, but it’s not very good. The hot chocolate is okay, but someone told me they got a boiled roach in their cup.”

  Posey wrinkled her nose. “I’m going to pass.”

  “I’ll take the roach coffee,” said Charlie. The buzz of Balthazar’s candy coffee was starting to wear off, and she needed something to keep going.

  “I’ll grab you some,” he said, and then hesitated. “I’m sure it’s fine. I mean, lots of people drink it.”

  He came back with three cups. Two coffees and a hot chocolate. She supposed he felt obligated to have one himself, like a host taking the first sip of wine to show they aren’t poisoning their guests.

  “So,” he said, clearing his throat. “Posey, I’d like you to tell your story again, and I’d like to record it. Does that sound okay?”

  Posey pushed back her shoulders. “It was my sister, really. I told you it happened to me, because she wasn’t sure she wanted to talk about it. But I convinced her that it was important.”

  His gaze went to Charlie. She shrugged.

  “So you’re the one with the quickened shadow?” Malhar looked flummoxed.

  Charlie didn’t blame him. She turned to Posey. “The what?”

  Posey looked sheepish. “It is. Or at least, it’s something. You know how weird it was acting last night.”

  “I’m going to kill you,” Charlie said, standing. “Straight-up murder. No one would blame me. I can’t believe I let you drag me over here—”

  Malhar held up his hands, forestalling violence. “We could do a few tests.”

  Posey had told her in the car that she’d exaggerated the story, but Charlie still hadn’t seen this coming. “No way. We’re out of here. She’s wasting your time. All she wants is for you to tell her how to wake up her shadow. She’d say anything if she thought it would convince you to do that.”

  “Wait,” Posey said, grabbing for her arm. “Let him look at it. Tell him the story.”

  Charlie shook her off. She wanted to knock over her coffee. She wanted to throw a chair.

  And yet, another part of her wondered—could her shadow be magic? Wasn’t it worth letting her sister get away with an extremely annoying scam, if some of the information they got was actually helpful?

  “Fine,” Charlie said, and threw herself back into the chair. “Go ahead. Test my shadow. Whatever. But when all this turns out to be bullshit, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Malhar held up his phone. “So it’s okay if I record this?”

  “Nope. It sure isn’t,” Charlie said.

  “Come on,” Posey said.

  “You won’t have to give your names on the recording,” Malhar said. “I’ll keep your identities secret in my notes. This is just for me to go back over, so I’m sure I have everything right. No one else is going to hear this.”

  Charlie looked between him and Posey. “Okay. No names.”

  Pressing a button, he put the cell down between them. “Okay, well, we’re rolling. We’ll figure this out. First, tell me a little bit about yourself. Age. Any other details that seem important.”

  “I’m twenty-eight.” None of the rest was anything Charlie was going to put on a recording. “Not much more to know.”

  “How about you?” He turned to Posey.

  “Me?” She had been nervously picking the skin around her thumbnail. She bit the edge of it and then seemed to notice what she was doing. She folded her hands on the table.

  “You’re going to be speaking on the recording.” He smiled in a reassuring way.

  Posey raised her voice a little, as though afraid the recording wouldn’t pick her up. “I’m twenty-five. I’m her sister and I read tarot cards for people over the internet.”

  “Really?” Malhar asked.

  She nodded, tilting her head. “I could do a spread for you.”

  “Yeah, maybe I could use one.” He looked as though he was regretting everything about tonight. “Let me explain a little bit about the project you’re going to be a part of. It started as an ethnography—a cultural study of gloamists. You know, a deep dive into that community. It seemed important when there were still people around with living memory of it being secret and others who only knew it primarily through seeing altered shadows in magazines.