The five a.m. crowd were usually nurses and doctors from Cooley Dickinson Hospital, mixed in with maintenance workers, hospital concierges, and second-shift restaurant workers looking for a place to go after exhausting all other venues.

  Blue Ruin wasn’t pretty. The scarred bar and tables in it had been purchased during the liquidation sale of an old tavern and didn’t fit well into the space. The floor was sticky all the way to the door, the liquor was served in plastic cups, and the only thing they had for garnish were sad-looking limes.

  If ever there was a bar that perfectly captured how Charlie felt that afternoon, it was Blue Ruin. She sat down on a stool, reassured to know she could stay all night.

  * * *

  A n hour later, she was three Maker’s Marks in, with no desire to slow down.

  Doreen had texted to say that she was on her way over and a lot of other things that Charlie hadn’t bothered to read. Charlie had another text from her high school friend Laura about missing her barbecue, plus one from her mother about her new boyfriend’s birthday and how she was hoping they could all get together. Maybe the girls would like to host, since their place was bigger?

  There were two voice mails from work, asking about her coming in on Monday night. She tried to imagine being back there behind the bar, making drinks. Trying not to think of the glass and the blood and choking on shadow. Trying not to think about the sound Hermes’s neck made when it broke.

  She ignored the messages and went into the bathroom to wipe off her makeup. She managed only to turn it into a glittering charcoal smear that covered her eyes and part of her cheeks. Exhaustion and irritability were creeping in on her faster than the alcohol could stave off.

  There was always a dizzying high immediately after a job, followed by an adrenaline drop. Then everything felt a little too dull and you became a little too sensitive. Like right then, when she looked at herself in the mirror, staring into her own dark eyes and drawing a finger over her own scarred lip, she felt unexpectedly and humiliatingly like crying.

  It wasn’t because of Vince. It had nothing to do with him.

  She went back to the bar and ordered another drink. If you were going to drown your sorrows, you needed a lot of liquid.

  The bartender was a friend of Don’s and tried occasionally to make conversation, but Charlie wasn’t doing a good job of keeping up her end. At some point she realized he might be flirting.

  “Kyle,” he told her with a grin, looking up from his phone. “That’s my name. Maybe Don told you about me.”

  Charlie was suddenly sure that Don had told Kyle about her.

  Kyle had a head full of thick, wavy brown hair. A tattoo of a rosary climbed his arm from the wrist. His shadow appeared utterly normal. He’d be better at erasing her dread and horror and sadness than all the whiskey in the world.

  For fifteen to twenty minutes, at least.

  She ought to call someone. Laura, so she could apologize for not showing up for the barbecue. Barb, who could make her laugh. José, who was sad too.

  “Did you know,” she told Kyle, trying to make conversation, “a few grains of salt are supposed to take out the bitter in coffee. Isn’t that strange, to think it works better than sugar?”

  “I don’t think that’s true.”

  Kyle was probably a terrible bartender. She shrugged. “I like things bitter anyway. Like me.”

  He gave her a look like he wasn’t sure how to take that.

  A warning, she ought to tell him. Take it as a warning that I am in a very bad mood and happy to have an excuse to take it out on you.

  Charlie wanted everyone to think of her as hardheaded and hard-hearted. Hard as old petrified wood, as rocks, as candy that cracks your teeth. But she wasn’t.

  “There you are.” Doreen sat down next to her at the bar, clearly seething. “The great Charlie Hall.” She was wearing work clothes—white jeans and a collared blue shirt with the name of the dental place where she was a receptionist embroidered over her heart. She must have dashed out of work when she’d gotten the texts about Adam’s whereabouts.

  Charlie rolled her eyes. “What? I got your guy and your ring.”

  “Please tell me you didn’t rob a pawnshop.” Doreen’s voice was loud enough to make the few other grizzled-looking patrons wasting their day look over at her.

  Charlie shrugged.

  “Adam was just borrowing the ring. He told me he was using the money to make a deal that was going to change our lives.” Doreen obviously wanted to believe that. “He wasn’t rolling bliss.”

  “Maybe he told you about the stone in the ring not being original too,” Charlie said. “Because he sold it years ago.”

  Doreen flushed. “You really are like the devil, you know that? Knowing all our sins.”

  Charlie felt as though she was observing the conversation from very far away. “That’s ridiculous. I’m a fuck-up, Doreen. But I found your guy and even got your ring, so if you learned something you didn’t want to know about Adam, too bad.”

  They stared at one another for a long moment.

  Charlie took off the ring and put it down on the bar top. When Doreen reached for it, though, Charlie covered it with her hand. “You made some threats about what your brother could do to Posey’s account at UMass. I want a confirmation that the deadline for paying has been pushed back. Three months at least. I need to see the notice on my phone when I sign in to my account.”

  “You can’t expect him to risk—”

  “I one thousand percent do.” One of the more frustrating things about trading her work for other work was that people put a high value on her trade until a thing was done, then became convinced it must have been easy. Renegotiation was never in her favor.

  Doreen looked at the ring under the cage of her hand. “That’s mine.”

  “It will be,” Charlie said. “As soon as you call your brother and I get that email.”

  Doreen made a show of taking her phone out of her pocket as she walked to the door. A few minutes later she came back in, mouth pinched.

  “You know, Adam said he was going to get my ring back. He used it as collateral for a loan.”

  “That’s interesting,” Charlie said, in a way that let Doreen know how uninteresting she found it.

  Doreen sighed. “I talked to my brother. He says he can’t access your bill. It’s not working.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Charlie said. “What does that mean?”

  “He doesn’t know.” Doreen looked worried, which was the only reason that Charlie didn’t accuse her of making this whole thing up. “It could come from a different department that doesn’t run their billing through his office. Or your account could have been flagged. But he tried.”

  For a moment, Charlie felt a white-hot flush of anger, most of it at herself.

  She took her hand away from the ring. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that if she had been half as interested in making money from her schemes as she was in the schemes themselves, she’d be better off.

  Doreen hesitated. “Now what?”

  “Go on,” Charlie said. “Take it. Fuck it. Fuck you. Fuck me. Fuck everything.”

  “What is wrong with you anyway?” Doreen gestured around, as though to indicate that Blue Ruin wasn’t a very nice place, it was late afternoon, and Charlie was well on her way to wasted.

  “I’m celebrating,” Charlie said. “Being single.”

  Doreen gave a bitter little laugh. “Well, look at you. Brought down by love. Suffering just like everybody else.”

  “Have a drink with me,” Charlie said, raising her plastic cup. “To suffering.”

  “I’ve got to get back to work,” Doreen said, disgusted. “I have responsibilities. And I guess you do too, so don’t suck down so much whiskey that you forget yours. Oh, and if you did knock over a pawnshop, don’t implicate me when the police come after you.”

  “If I’m lucky, I’ll suck down so much whiskey I forget we had this conversation.” Charlie threw back the Maker’s in a single gluttonous gulp. “Bring me the bottle, Kyle.”

  “You know,” said Doreen, halfway to the door, “I saw your guy once, and the minute I saw him I knew he was going to cheat on you. Guys who look like that—”

  “Nobody knew him,” Charlie told her.

  “Except for you?” Doreen snorted.

  Charlie shook her head. “Nobody. He didn’t exist. Never did.”

  Making a noise of frustration at the incomprehensibility of drunks, Doreen left.

  “You didn’t really knock over a store, right?” Kyle asked her as he brought over the bottle of Maker’s.

  She gave him her toothiest smile. “Definitely didn’t.”

  “You actually want to buy this?” He set it down next to her.

  “Definitely do.” She poured her own drink out of her own bottle. It was like being in one of those fancy places with bottle service, except for the fancy part.

  It didn’t matter if she couldn’t afford it. Her future was clear. She was going back to work for the gloamists. Paying for Posey’s school the way she should have from the start. Making a clean break from her friends. If she was going to blow up everything around her, then she needed to keep everyone she cared about far away.

  Fuck everything.

  Charlie stayed at Blue Ruin into the evening, messing with the jukebox in the corner, going in with two elderly alcoholics on a pizza they got delivered, and dancing around with one of them to an old song from the eighties. Things started to blur together. The room began filling up. She remembered sitting on the toilet in the bathroom, sticking the back of a pin she found in her bag into her skin over and over. She remembered falling down on and lying on the floor and Kyle saying something about how he wasn’t supposed to serve her if she couldn’t stand, which made her laugh and laugh.

  She didn’t need him. She had her own bottle.

  As she climbed back up on her stool, holding on to the edge of the bar to steady herself, her former boss from Top Hat walked into Blue Ruin with three of his friends.

  “Well, well,” he said, giving her a once-over. “Look at what the cat dragged in.”

  “Richie, never met a cliché you didn’t like,” she said, trying to disguise the slur in her voice. He was in his early fifties, with hair that was thinning on top and eyes like a raptor. He owned property all over the Valley, including two bars and three restaurants. When he’d fired her, it was with the expectation that it meant she wouldn’t be able to work anywhere else, and he took it as a personal affront that she had.

  “Over at Rapture, I hear.”

  “Yeah…” The Valley was small, but she didn’t like the idea of it being that small.

  He mimed the lashing of a whip and waggled his eyebrows. “You tying people up now? I bet you like that.” His friends chuckled.

  “Rot in hell,” she said, without any heat.

  “Oooh, don’t get out the thumbscrews.”

  Charlie threw the mostly empty bottle of Maker’s at him. He dodged in time so that it smashed against the wall behind him. Liquor ran down the dingy paint.

  “Crazy bitch!” But he was no longer smug, no longer sure that he could say whatever he wanted and the people around him were going to take it. He even looked a little bit scared. She liked scared.

  A smile pulled at the corners of Charlie’s mouth.

  “You’ve got to go,” Kyle told her, then leaned forward and lowered his voice. “You probably shouldn’t come back for a while, either.”

  “Been kicked out of better places.” Charlie got up and carefully put on her coat while Richie glared. She counted the cash for her tab and tip and placed it on the wet counter. Then she blew a kiss to the old man she’d danced with and was immensely gratified when he mimed catching it.

  She only stumbled twice on her way out the door.

  * * *

  Charlie woke in the back seat of her car with a dry mouth and a pounding head that felt as though it were stuffed with insulation foam. Her limbs were stiff with cold. Rain pattered against the roof, and the sky outside was dark and heavy with the promise of more.

  Moving to sit up, she caught sight of her reflection in the glass of the window. Her mascara had run and, although she didn’t remember crying, her cheeks were streaked with the tracks of tears. A familiar shame washed over her. She’d had so many nights like this, when she’d woken up with the knowledge that she’d done something for momentary satisfaction that would turn out to be in no way worth the cost.

  But as she clambered down the hill into the stretch of woods to piss on some leaves, she was willing to embrace all her faults. She’d been lying to herself when she thought she could change.

  She was the exact same Charlie Hall she’d always been. Messy. Impulsive. Alone.

  Walking up to her car, Charlie saw that someone else was standing beside it. A man with white hair and a long black wool coat.

  Her stomach churned.

  “You must be Charlie Hall,” he said. “I’m Lionel Salt. I believe I have a job for you.”

  20

  TWO-PART POISON

  The man leaned on a silver-tipped cane. Behind him was the matte black Rolls-Royce of legend. Even the windows of the car were tinted dark. A small elderly man stood beside him, holding an umbrella so that Lionel Salt would stay dry. Half the man’s coat was already dark with rain.

  Just looking at him filled her with a feeling of horror so strong that it locked up her muscles. She knew she had to get to her car, but her body urged her to run deeper into the woods and hide.

  “A job?” she called up to him, her voice surprisingly steady.

  “I hired a man, Hermes Fortune, who is in the same line of work as you. Unfortunately, he’s gone missing. It seems I need a new thief. And I hear you’re quite good?”

  Charlie made it up the hill and gave him a wide berth as she headed for her car. The sparkly dress she’d worn to the MGM burned bright in the late-morning light. In the reflection of the car window, her smeared makeup, marred by tear tracks, made her feel entirely too vulnerable. Maybe the rain would wash her face for her, although she suspected it would only make things worse. “I’m out of the game,” she said. “There’s a guy named Adam that does a bunch of my old gigs. Balthazar can put the two of you in touch.”

  The corner of his mouth turned up. “Adam Lokken? I have him working on something else for me.”

  Balthazar had told her that Adam failed to find the Liber Noctem. She didn’t think of Salt as someone who went back to people who’d disappointed him. Had Salt been the person on the other end of the phone call she’d overheard?

  “That’s too bad,” Charlie said. “I still can’t help you.”

  “I spoke to an old acquaintance of mine, Odette Fevre. It seems you might have been the last person to see Hermes alive. Such a coincidence, don’t you think? She called you Charlie Hall. Is that your real name? I’ve only ever heard you called the Charlatan.”

  It just figured that Odette knew him. She had enough wealthy clients to have had to cross paths with local billionaire Lionel Salt. And Odette had implied to Charlie that she’d talked to someone about Hermes. Charlie ought to have immediately jumped to the worst possible conclusion.

  At least Salt hadn’t recognized her. Of course, she’d been fifteen, just a kid. And it wasn’t like there’d have been anything special about that night for him. He’d probably killed lots of people before and since.

  But if he thought blackmailing Charlie by holding the disappearance of Hermes over her head would work, he was far off the mark. After Rand, Charlie had learned that blackmail only gets worse with time. Also, she didn’t think Odette gave a shit if Charlie was a stone-cold killer, so long as she showed up for her shifts on time and kept the till balanced.

  After the silence stretched long enough that he realized she wasn’t going to answer, he spoke again. “Speaking of coincidences, what are the chances that a well-known pilferer of magical books would find herself involved with a man who ran away with one of mine?”

  “I do appreciate you calling me well-known,” Charlie said.

  “My grandson certainly knew you, didn’t he?” Salt’s voice stayed level, but he clearly didn’t like her attitude. Probably he thought someone who’d peed in the woods, and who looked as though they’d had the kind of night people promise not to talk about outside of Vegas would have the grace to act ashamed.

  “The late Edmund Carver,” she said. “My condolences.”

  His eyes narrowed. “I believe you call him by his middle name. Odette described him in unmistakable detail, so let’s drop the charade.”

  “Vince?” Charlie said, all innocence. “He dumped me yesterday afternoon. It looks like you just missed him.”

  “I think you better get in the car,” Salt ground out, no longer trying to hide his anger. “We have a lot to discuss, and I don’t think either of us want to do it out here in the rain.”

  So many young men of her acquaintance would be envious that she’d gotten an invitation to ride in the Rolls, but the idea chilled her blood. “I’m already wet, so no thanks. I’d only drip on your nice leather seat.”

  Lionel Salt reached into the inside pocket of his wool coat and took out a matte black Glock. It matched the car perfectly.

  The elderly man holding the umbrella didn’t so much as flinch.

  “I’m afraid I am going to have to insist,” Salt said, pointing the barrel of the gun casually. Waving it toward her. Not aiming. Not yet.

  It was broad daylight and they were standing in the middle of a parking lot. Anyone could have walked out of Blue Ruin. There weren’t many cars in the parking lot, but there weren’t none. The road running past wasn’t heavily trafficked, but vehicles passed every now and again. For Salt to be comfortable having his gun out reminded Charlie that he believed he could get away with anything.

  It had been more than a decade since vomiting up beet juice and running had saved her life. The night had haunted her since, but drugs and time had blurred her memories into a kaleidoscopic nightmare instead of a recollection.