Charlie folded her arms across her chest and waited.

  Finally, Doreen nodded slowly. “I guess I could ask.”

  Which could mean a lot of things. Charlie opened the trunk of her janky Toyota Corolla. Her collection of burner phones rested beside a tangle of jumper cables, an old bag of burglary supplies, and a bottle of Grey Goose she’d bought wholesale off the bar.

  Charlie took out one of the phones and punched in the code to activate it. “Okay, let me try something and see if Adam bites. Tell me his number.”

  If he answered, she told herself, she’d do it. If he didn’t, she’d walk away.

  She knew she was just looking for an excuse to get into trouble. Wading into quicksand to see if she’d sink. She texted him anyway: I’ve got a job and I heard you were the best.

  If he was worried about not being good enough, then the flattery would be motivating. That was the nature of con artistry, playing on weakness. It was also a bad way to train your brain to think about people.

  “Let’s see if he responds and—” Charlie started to say when her phone pinged.

  Who is this?

  Amber, Charlie texted back. She had several identities that she’d built for con and never used. Of them, Amber was the only gloamist. Sorry to bother you so late, but I really need your help.

  Amber, with the long brown hair?

  Charlie stared at her phone for a long moment, trying to decide if this was a trick.

  You really are as good as they say. She added a winking emoji and hoped ambiguity would allow her to sidestep any of his questions.

  “I can’t believe he’s texting you. What is he saying?”

  “Take a look,” Charlie told Doreen, handing over the phone. “See? He’s alive. He’s fine.”

  Doreen bit her fingernail as she read through the messages. “You didn’t say you were going to flirt with him.”

  Charlie rolled her eyes.

  On the other side of the parking lot, Odette, swathed in an enormous cocoon coat, made her way to her purple Mini Cooper.

  “You really think you can get him to tell you where he’s staying?”

  Charlie nodded. “Sure. I can even go there and hog-tie him, if that’s what you want. You’ll have to do me a better favor for that, though.”

  “Suzie says asking you for help is like summoning up the devil. The devil might grant your wish, but afterward, you’re out a soul.”

  Charlie bit her lip, looked up at the streetlight. “Like you said, I barely know Suzie. She must be thinking of somebody else.”

  “Maybe,” Doreen said. “But all that stuff you did—even back in the day, the stuff people said—you’ve got to be angry at someone.”

  “Or I could have done it for fun,” Charlie said. “Which would be pretty messed up, right? And since I am doing you a good turn, it’d be polite not to mention it.”

  Doreen gave one of those exhausted sighs that mothers of little kids seemed to have welling up in them at all times. “Right. Sure. Just bring him home before he winds up like you.”

  Charlie watched Doreen go, then got into her Corolla. Buckled her seat belt. Tried not to think about the job Balthazar was offering, or who she used to be. Thought instead of the ramen she was going to boil when she got home. Hoped her sister had fed the cat. Imagined the mattress waiting for her on the floor of her bedroom. Imagined Vince, already asleep, feet tangled in the sheets. Shoved her key in the ignition.

  The car wouldn’t turn on.

  2

  KING OF CUPS, REVERSED

  The wind whirled down the tunnel of Cottage Street, stinging Charlie’s cheeks, sending hair into her face.

  Her Corolla still sat in the parking lot of Rapture. No matter how many times she twisted the key or slammed her hands against the dashboard. Jumper cables hadn’t done a thing to resuscitate the car, and tow trucks were expensive.

  She’d considered calling Vince, or even a cab, but instead she’d gotten the vodka out of the trunk and done a couple of sulky shots straight out of the bottle, standing there feeling sorry for herself. Looking up at the sky.

  The last of the leaves had turned brown; only a few still hung on branches, drooping like sleeping bats.

  A car had slowed at the stop sign. The driver called out a vulgar proposal before he hit the gas. She flipped him off, although it seemed unlikely he noticed.

  It was nothing Charlie hadn’t heard before anyway. She saw herself reflected in her car windows. Dark hair. Dark eyes. A lot of everything else: breast and butt and belly and thigh. Too often, people acted like her curves were some engraved invitation. They seemed to forget that everyone gets born into bodies they can’t just kick off like slippers, figures they can’t transform as though they were shadows.

  Another gust of wind sent a few leaves into the air, although most clotted together along the edges of the road.

  And that was when Charlie had decided it would be a great idea to hoof it the mile and a half home.

  It was a nothing walk, after all. A stroll.

  Or it would have been, for someone who hadn’t been on her feet all day and half the night.

  The term “pot-valiance” occurred to her, too late.

  She passed a darkened bookstore, in the window a fall display of pumpkins with plastic vampire fangs jammed into their carved mouths. They rested toothily beside horror novels and a decorative dusting of candy corn, their orange bodies just beginning to sag with rot.

  The whole street was shuttered. Pulling her coat tighter, Charlie wished that Easthampton was like some of the surrounding college towns—Northampton or Amherst—full of enough tipsy students stumbling through the late-night streets to justify at least one pizza place staying open after the bars closed, or a coffeeshop for up-all-night overachievers.

  All the quiet gave her too much time to think.

  Alone on the dark street, Charlie couldn’t escape Doreen’s words. But all that stuff you did—even back in the day, the stuff people said—you’ve got to be angry at someone.

  She kicked a loose chunk of cement.

  When she was a kid, Charlie had been a mop of black hair, brown eyes, and bad attitude. She’d gotten into one kind of trouble after another, but along the way, she learned she was good at taking things apart. Puzzles, and people. She liked solving them, liked figuring out how to get at what they were hiding. To become what they wanted to believe in.

  Which made her consider the Adam thing again. It couldn’t hurt to play it through. Distract herself from the night.

  Charlie fished out her phone and typed: There’s a volume in the Mortimer Rare Book Collection at Smith College that I’m sure contains something important. I can pay you. Or we can work out a trade.

  Gloamists were always on the hunt for old books detailing techniques for shadow manipulation. They’d been known to kill one another over them. She was offering Adam an easy job.

  It had to be somewhat tempting.

  For ten years, she’d stolen things for one gloamist or another. Books and scrolls and occasionally other, worse things. For ten years, she’d kept her identity secret. Kept a low profile, worked off and on in restaurants and bars to give her cover, and used Balthazar as her go-between. A little over a year ago, she’d put down a deposit on a house. Convinced Posey to apply to colleges.

  Then she’d blown it all up.

  It seemed like there’d been a furnace inside Charlie, always burning. A year ago she’d seen how easily she could turn everything to ash.

  Adam wasn’t writing back. Maybe he was asleep. Or high. Or just not interested. She shoved the burner back into her bag.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Charlie thought she saw the oily slide of something in the space between one building and the next.

  It took her mind off her past, but not in a good way.

  People talked about disembodied shadows walking the world the way they talked about Slender Man or the girl with the cheek full of spiders, but Charlie knew Blights were more than a story. They were what was left over when the gloamist died and the shadow didn’t. Quite real, and very dangerous. Onyx worked on them, and fire, but that was about it unless you were a gloamist yourself.

  Her real phone chimed, drawing her thoughts back to the present with a start. It was a text from Vince: All okay?

  Home soon, she texted back.

  She should have called him, back at Rapture. He would have picked her up. He probably would have been nice about it too. But she didn’t like the idea of leaning on him. It would only make things worse when he was gone.

  A sound came from down the street, by where Nashawannuck Pond ran into Rubber Thread Pond, across from the abandoned mill buildings. Someone was there.

  She walked faster, shoving her hand into her pocket to wrap around the handle of a folding tactical knife attached to her keys. It had kept an edge despite her using it to open cereal boxes and chip putty off old windows. She didn’t have much of an idea how to use it to defend herself, but at least it was sharp and had an onyx handle to weaken shadows.

  A flicker of movement drew her gaze down an alley. A light on outside one of the shop doors illuminated a heap of stained clothing, white bone, and a wall spattered with black spots of blood.

  Charlie stopped, muscles tensing, her stomach lurching, as her mind tried to catch up. Her brain kept supplying her with alternatives to what she saw—a discarded prop from a haunted house, a mannequin, an animal.

  But no, the remains were human. Raw flesh torn open, shredded along with clothing as though whoever did this was desperate to get to the person’s insides. Charlie stepped closer. The cold contained the smell, but there was still a charnel sweetness to the air. The man’s face was turned to one side, eyes glassy and open. His rib cage was broken and partially removed, jagged pale bones rising above the mess of flesh like a circle of silver birch trees.

  And against the wall, there was the movement again. His shadow, which ought to have been as still as his corpse, was shredded and wafting in the breeze, as though it was torn laundry on a line. As though a strong gust might blow it free.

  The man’s face was so changed by death that it was the clothes she noticed first, tweed, wrinkled and a little dirty, as though he’d been living rough in them. This was the man Balthazar had thrown out of Rapture’s parlor. The guy who’d proposed selling something of Salt’s back to him.

  Two hours ago, she’d been setting a Four Roses in front of him. Now—

  There was a sound at the opposite end of the alley, and Charlie looked up with a sharp inhalation of breath. A man in a long dark coat and hat, with eyes as dark as bullet holes, was staring at her.

  There was something wrong with his hands.

  Really wrong.

  They were entirely made of shadow, right to the scarred nubs of his wrists.

  He began to walk toward Charlie, his footsteps sharp and distinct on the asphalt. Half her instincts were telling her to run, the other half wanting her to freeze because running would ignite the predator’s desire to give chase. Was she really going to fight? The knife in her hand seemed ridiculously small, little better than cuticle scissors.

  Sirens wailed in the distance.

  At the sound, the man paused. They watched one another, the corpse between them. Then he stepped back, slipping around the corner and out of her line of sight. Charlie felt light-headed with shock and horrifyingly sober.

  Forcing herself to move, she stumbled out of the alley and fast-walked toward Union. If she was near the body when the police arrived, they were going to have a lot of questions—and weren’t likely to believe a story about some guy with shadow hands. Especially not from Charlie, who had been hauled in twice before the age of eighteen for confidence schemes.

  Her legs were carrying her forward, but her mind was reeling.

  Ever since the Boxford Massacre twenty years ago, when the world had become aware of gloamists, Western Massachusetts had been lousy with them. The Silicon Valley of shadow magic.

  From Springfield with its shuttered gun factories and boarded-up mansions to the universities and colleges to the idiosyncratic farms of the hill towns, polluted rivers, and the marshy beauty of the Quabbin Reservoir, the Valley was cheap enough and close enough to both New York and Boston to be a draw. Plus, it had an already high tolerance for weirdos. There were goats available for mowing lawns. A gun club that ran an annual Renaissance faire. You could buy an eighteenth-century bedframe and a hand-thrown pot in the shape of a vagina and score heroin from a guy at a bus station—all within a fifteen-minute travel window.

  These days you could add on stumbling into a shadow parlor and getting an alterationist to remove your desire for any of the aforementioned vices, or adding on a new one. Rolling bliss was skyrocketing in popularity. The more gloamists there were, the more the towns were changing, and there wasn’t enough onyx in the world to stop it.

  And yet, for all that, this murder seemed uniquely awful. Whoever or whatever had done it would have needed incredible strength to crack open a body like a walnut.

  She shoved her trembling hands deep into her pockets. Her familiar route had become strange to her, full of jagged shadows that moved with each gust of wind. Her nose seemed to catch the scent of spoiling meat.

  Two more breathless blocks, and then she was heading up her driveway, hands trembling.

  The bell over the door jangled as she entered into the ugly yellow kitchen of their rental house. A frying pan and two dirty dishes sat in the sink. There was a plate domed with another near the microwave. Their cat, Lucipurrr, nosed it hopefully.

  Heading toward the living room, she found Vince asleep in front of a television turned down low, his big body sprawled on their scavenged couch, a paperback resting on his stomach. When she looked at him, she felt a stab of longing, the uncomfortable sensation of missing someone who hadn’t yet gone.

  Her gaze went to where his shadow ought to have fallen. But there was nothing at all.

  When Charlie had first met him, her eye had noted something off, as though he was always a little out of focus, a little blurred at the edges. Maybe she’d been distracted by being drunk, or by his being hard-jawed and clean-cut in a way guys attracted to her never were. It wasn’t until she saw him the next morning, silhouetted in a doorway, seeming as though light was streaming through him, that she realized he didn’t have a shadow.

  Posey had noticed right away.

  Now Charlie’s sister sat on the worn gray shag rug, squinting at a grainy moving image on her laptop, a spread of cards in front of her. She had on the same pajamas that she’d been in when Charlie left, the cuffs scuffed and dirty. No bra. Her light brown hair twisted into a messy bun on top of her head. The only adornment she wore was an onyx-and-gold septum ring, which she never removed. Posey took all her Zoom calls with the camera on her end off, at least partially so she didn’t have to dress up for them.

  She sounded entirely professional, her voice soothing as she continued her tarot reading, barely seeming to notice Charlie. “Nine of Wands, reversed. You’re exhausted. You want to give a lot of yourself, but lately you feel as though there’s nothing left to give—”

  The person on the other end must have started spilling their guts, because Posey cut herself off and just listened.

  When they were kids, their mother had dragged them to lots of psychics. Charlie remembered staring at dusty velvet pillows and beaded curtains in the front room of a house off the highway, Posey’s head on her lap, listening to their mom getting lied to about her future.

  But even if it was a scam, their mother had needed someone to talk with, and it wasn’t like she was going to open up to anyone else. Psychics were therapists for people who couldn’t admit they needed therapy. They were magic for people who desperately needed a little magic, back before magic was real.

  And while Charlie didn’t believe Posey had powers, she did think that her clients got someone who treated their problems as important, who wanted to help. That seemed worth a fifty-dollar donation and a subscription to her Patreon.

  Charlie went back out to the kitchen and uncovered the plate. Vince had cooked egg tacos, with sliced avocado on the side and twin splashes of Tabasco and sriracha. From the plates in the sink, it looked like he’d even made some for Posey. Charlie ate hers at the rusty folding table in the kitchen while she listened to her sister talk.

  “King of Cups, also reversed. You’re a smart woman, but sometimes you make decisions you know aren’t the best.”

  A shiver of leftover adrenaline made her put down her fork for a moment and take a few ragged breaths. She tried to focus on her sister’s voice, on the familiarity of the story Posey was telling.

  The majority of people who called for readings had problems to do with love. Maybe they wanted to know if they had a chance with somebody in particular. Or maybe they were lonely and wanted someone to tell them it wasn’t their fault they hadn’t found the right person. But most often it was because they were in a relationship that had gone bad, and part of them wanted to be told that it would be worth all the suffering, while another part of them wanted permission to get out.

  Most of their mother’s visits to psychics had been about relationships. The Hall women fell in love like they were falling off a cliff. They were terrible at picking men, as though there were some kind of ancestral curse that started with Nana’s marriage to a guy so awful that she was still in prison for shooting him in the back of the head while he was in his BarcaLounger, watching TV. It lasted through Mom making Charlie and Posey sit quietly in the back seat of a Kia while she drove around trying to catch their father cheating, through a stepdad who broke Posey’s wrist and an ex-boyfriend of Charlie’s so desperate for money to pay a gambling debt that he convinced her to file tax returns for dead people and give him the cash from the refunds. Posey said that a guy had to have a hole in his head, his heart, or his pocket for one of the Hall women to go head-over-heels for him.

  Maybe that was true. Maybe there needed to be something missing in a man, so that Charlie felt she could pour herself into that absence and heal him like an elixir. Or maybe it was only that Charlie felt as though she’d lost something too, and loss sings to loss.