“Where’s your shadow, Charlie Hall?” he asked her, voice full of menace. She could feel his shadow at the edge of her mind.

  “Coincidentally, not attached. Which is how I like to approach a puppeteer.” The shadowless couldn’t be possessed, possibly because they didn’t have souls.

  “I could just kill you instead,” he said.

  She snorted, walking past him to pick up an apple out of a bowl. “This house is ridiculously nice.” Then she took a big bite, snapping it between her teeth. Sweetness bloomed on her tongue.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Not worried?”

  “Why would I be when I’m here to give you answers? You wanted to know what happened to Rooster Argent. Well, he’s dead.” She leaned against the counter.

  His microwave beeped. They stared at one another.

  “Where’s the body, then?” he asked.

  Charlie turned the bitten apple in her hand. “Is that the important part? Rather than who murdered him and who’s responsible for the massacre in the church basement?”

  “Well?” he said. “Let’s have it.”

  “I don’t know his name, but I bet you do. The same person who was harvesting shadows for you to sell to the wealthy and desperate at Solaluna this coming weekend.”

  Mr. Punch shook his head, a smirk on his face. “Not possible. He’s nothing. A gloamist for a year, maybe a little more.” At her look, he went on. “He’s a coward who basically traded his life to Salt for some kind of indentured servitude.”

  Charlie tried not to react at the mention of Salt’s name.

  Mr. Punch hadn’t denied that there was a harvester, nor that he’d been planning on selling the shadows at Solaluna. Charlie tried to keep her feelings from showing on her face. Had the harvester made an alliance with the shadows he harvested? With the gloamists he intended to harvest from? She thought of that house and the dead couple on the couch. “That’s why he needed all that blood.”

  Mr. Punch didn’t laugh this time. “So where can I find him?”

  “I know where he was as of yesterday,” Charlie said and rattled off the address.

  He nodded, clearly grudgingly impressed. “You did well. I don’t say that lightly. I am prepared to reward you. Money, of course, and more opportunities.”

  “All I want is what you promised,” she said. “Backing me to the Cabals.”

  “Of course,” he said, entirely too easily, as though that was a favor he didn’t expect her to ever call in. “I don’t suppose you’d like to harvest shadows? You’d be good at it, I think. Better than you are at hunting down Blights. But, of course, they’d be useful too.”

  Charlie would be good at it. She could steal shadows and be rolling in wealth. But stealing a part of a person wasn’t like stealing books from wealthy collectors or even elite institutional collections. And did he really think he was the first one who’d ever suggested she do it? “That’s not for me.”

  “A thief like you can’t afford morals?” Mr. Punch told her. “Shadows aren’t exactly an ethically sourced commodity.”

  He looked so normal, standing in his kitchen with countertops of local limestone and handmade tiles on his backsplash. He didn’t look like a man who could make your friends walk into traffic. “Rooster was doing this before you got involved, back when Malik was the one in charge. Malik didn’t know, did he?”

  Mr. Punch waited for a long moment. “You’re good, but there’s such a thing as being too good.”

  “I’m not stealing shadows,” Charlie said. “Not for anyone.”

  “Then make sure you stay out of my way,” he told her, opening a door under his sink and reaching inside. He came out with something that looked like a brick, wrapped in duct tape and Target bags. “Take this and forget we ever met. If I find out that you gave so much as a hint about my identity, you will live only until you first lose everything you’ve ever cared about. Now get out.”

  Charlie headed for the door, chucking the bitten apple onto his manicured lawn.

  Once she got to the van, she ripped open the wrapping on the brick. It contained a chunk of money, in mixed denominations, all of it dirty.

  * * *

  According to its website, Solaluna specialized in health and wellness. It hosted a variety of high-end yoga retreats, exclusive seminars, and tasteful weddings featuring a lot of billowing white cloth. The spa offered craniosacral massage, aromatherapy, and crystal chakra realignment. If Charlie’s mom won the lottery, she’d rent a room and never leave.

  That’s what Charlie managed to pull up on her phone before she fell asleep on the couch, a veggie burrito still spinning in the microwave.

  When she woke, muzzy-headed, but finally no longer hungry, she checked on Red, who was still sleeping. Then she brushed her teeth and went to see if Posey’s laptop was available to borrow. It was resting on her bed, beside an old book with a worn leather cover. The spine read: On the Perils of Possession: A Gentylman’s Guide to Spirites, Influence, and Commande. It looked like something Charlie would have been sent to steal.

  Resolving to ask her sister about its provenance, Charlie grabbed the laptop and brought it out to the common area.

  Searching “Solaluna,” and “gloamist” yielded a glossy website advertising the dates—starting on Thursday, the last weekend before Christmas—for the Umbral Elevation Retreat, a “life-altering long weekend, teaching those of you who have had success in the rest of your lives to finally access the incredible power of your shadow” with special guest TikTok star Rooster Argent, as well as a Cabal leader who must remain anonymous, but would speak at length about “the secrets of the gloamists.” To find out more, you were encouraged to fill out a form. Charlie clicked through and noted that to submit it, you had to pay a nonrefundable hundred-dollar deposit.

  It seemed a violation of privacy to look at Posey’s super-secret, self-deleting chat, but Charlie didn’t feel the same way about using Posey’s Reddit account to access private boards. Charlie had worked Posey’s password out ages ago: Lucipurrrlovesmice91.

  Her sister’s icon was an anime-style cutesy version of Posey with a giant shadow looming menacingly over her. Charlie huffed a laugh. Then she pulled up the subreddit r/glooms—one of the bigger private shadow magic discussion boards. She searched “elevation” because that didn’t seem like a word that got used a lot.

  As she hoped, a thread about the conference popped up. A lot of the discussion around it was speculative. Were a bunch of one-percenters about to get scammed or were they about to gatekeep the secret to waking shadows? It was rumored to cost $55,000 per person, not counting the lodging or food. Everyone was pissed off about it.

  That certainly qualified as hideously expensive.

  Charlie went back to the Umbral Elevation website to put in a request for information for a Vincent Carver. She paid the hundred-dollar surcharge with a credit card she’d nicked from Topher’s wallet.

  The reply she got was immediate and obviously automated. All the spots for the retreat were taken, but not to worry, her money would be counted as credit toward the next retreat and she’d be on an early list for the invites. Ah well, she’d tried.

  And what was she even doing this for? She had a brick of cash and the promise of a Cabal leader to back her—better, she had something to hold over his head, since she knew his identity and his address. Once Bellamy figured out that the vial with the remains of Red’s shadow was no longer in his vault, she’d need him on her side.

  But Mr. Punch selling stolen shadows to the wealthy wouldn’t leave Charlie’s mind. Quickened shadows, ripped from people like the girl she’d seen crying in that shadow parlor. New gloamists, excited about having magic, who were going to be shadowless for the rest of their lives. They would be crushed. There would be a new “harvester” who wasn’t Charlie, who would be stealing more shadows so wealthy people could burn them up as fast as they bought them.

  Unless someone blew up the whole scheme. Unless someone stole those shadows before the rich got what they wanted, so they would no longer consider the Cabals a reliable source.

  To do that, with no possible benefit, a person would have to be a fucking idiot.

  With a sigh, Charlie went to the booking page for Solaluna. No rooms were available on the weekend when the Umbral Elevation Retreat was scheduled. Nor did the on-site restaurant have any tables available the entire four days, despite being theoretically open to the public.

  Maybe that was a sign for her to leave this the hell alone.

  She dialed the number on the website.

  “I really need your help,” she told the soft-voiced woman who answered, allowing herself to sound as flustered as she felt. “I’m trying to book a room. Wait, let me start over—I just got this job as an assistant and I am going to get in so much trouble. My boss is Mr. Carver and his grandmother told him that Solaluna would be the perfect place for him to recuperate and now he’s obsessed and won’t consider anywhere else. But he says it has to be this weekend, and you’re all booked up.”

  The woman on the other end of the phone was quiet for a moment. “What are the dates he’s hoping for?”

  Charlie gave the specifics, trying to keep her voice a little high and panicked. It wasn’t hard.

  “I see,” the woman said. “What did you say the name was?”

  “Carver,” Charlie repeated. “Remy Carver.”

  There was another long pause. “Let me talk to my manager.”

  “Thank you.” Either the woman taking reservations at Solaluna was a very nice person or Carver was a very good name to drop.

  After a few more minutes, she returned. “There’s a private cottage on the grounds. The person who booked it canceled and my manager said that she would be happy to offer it to Mr. Carver.”

  Charlie didn’t even want to think about the price per night, but she knew enough not to ask. “You’re saving my job here.”

  “There’s just one thing. This weekend we have a private group in. We can make sure he doesn’t share any of the same spaces and the spa will be open as usual, but some parts of the grounds will be closed off.”

  “No problem,” she said into the phone.

  “And we need a credit card,” the woman said. “How would you like to pay?”

  Charlie read off the numbers on Topher’s credit card before she could think better of it.

  “Just to confirm,” the woman said. “We’ll be charging a deposit of eleven thousand dollars to hold the cottage and we’ll charge the rest when Mr. Carver checks in. Please let him know that he will have an on-site butler who can assist him in arranging whatever he needs at any time of day or night.”

  Charlie’s palms felt sweaty. Eleven thousand dollars for three nights? The idea of that much money made her head swim. And that was just the deposit.

  “Miss?” the woman asked, into her silence.

  “That’s fine,” Charlie ground out, telling herself that Topher would hardly notice. He probably spent that much most weekends, jet-setting, getting bottle service in clubs, and buying those ridiculous outfits.

  One of the biggest rules of the con, the rule so obvious that it didn’t need to be repeated, so clear that most people figured it out on their own, was that no scam should touch the scammer’s real life. You slithered into the lives of the wealthy and then you slithered out again, leaving nothing behind.

  But she wasn’t doing that. If Topher realized his card was stolen, he only had to glance at the charge to trace it back to her. And he was bound to realize eventually.

  Charlie told herself that once she got to Solaluna, she’d find a way to reverse the charges or slip some other card from some other wallet and use that.

  “What are you doing with my computer?” Posey asked from the doorway.

  “Hey, you’re home.” Charlie logged out of Reddit as Posey jerked the laptop out of her hands. Not enough time for Charlie to delete the history. “Chill! I needed to look something up.”

  “What?” Posey looked at her expectantly.

  “A retreat upstate,” Charlie said, since there was no reason to lie about that.

  “Funny thing.” Posey sat down on the couch next to her. “I am not going to ask where you went last night or why you ate all our peanut butter, but you should see what’s on the news.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s about the Hatfield Massacre,” Posey said. “They found another body.”

  27

  Bad Decisions

  Posey passed her phone over, with a video cued up on YouTube from Western Mass News. A newscaster in a red sweater had been paused midsentence:… the coroner has determined the time of death to be too close to the Hatfield Massacre for the events not to be related. The body of TikTok darling Dave Pugliese, who went by the name of Rooster Argent on the platform, final victim of the nightmarish event that changed this sleepy town forever, was found buried in the graveyard behind the Grace Covenant Church. If you have any information, the Hatfield sheriff has put up a tip line to call. The square over the woman’s shoulder, which had been showing the icon of a shadowy church, changed to an image of a balding man. Next, new charges in the Maine governor’s election fraud case—

  Charlie paused the video, hoping that somewhere Mr. Punch was impressed. Rooster Argent was dead, just like she’d predicted.

  “See?” Posey said. “I knew he didn’t do it.”

  Charlie had forgotten about the argument she’d made in favor of Rooster being the murderer. “You’re right. My bad.”

  “Does that mean you’re not going to that Umbral Elevation thing, since you can be sure he won’t be there?” Posey asked.

  Charlie tried to make a noncommittal motion, a half shrug that might not have looked like anything at all. She should have guessed that Posey would immediately know what retreat upstate she’d been investigating. “I never said I was going.”

  “Getting into places you’re not supposed to be is your thing,” Posey said.

  There was no point in denying that, so she didn’t.

  Posey put a hand on her hip. “I’m going with you.”

  “You can’t,” Charlie blurted out, too surprised to consider her words.

  “Bullshit,” Posey said. “I want to know what’s going on among the wealthy gloamist-wannabes. This is one of the most exclusive conferences ever, and if you’re going, I want to go too. I know you can get me in.”

  “That’s a bad idea,” Charlie said.

  “You keep treating me like a kid,” Posey replied. “Hiding things from me. Acting like you have to protect me. Deciding my future without me Remember those months you barely got out of bed? I have my problems, but so do you.”

  Charlie got up and started to clean off the kitchen island, pouring out the remains of bottles and cans, then dropping them into the recycling. It was familiar work and it kept her from letting her agitation show. “I never said I wasn’t a mess. But I’m not the only one hiding things.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Posey demanded.

  Charlie turned to her sister, frustrated. “How about you tell me what you’ve been doing for work?”

  Posey’s face had gone carefully blank.

  “Well?” Charlie gestured to the apartment. “Where are you getting the money to pay for this place? And why have you been trying to pretend to me that it’s secretly affordable, when I know the rent in this building is well beyond what we should be able to afford?”

  Posey met her gaze, looking flummoxed. She still didn’t speak.

  “Exactly.” Charlie started back toward her room. “Look, I got into this trouble all on my own and it’s mine to fix.”

  “If I did what you’re doing for a man, you would never let me hear the end of it,” Posey called after her. The words cut, worse than she could know.

  “Is this another complaint about Red?” Charlie returned.

  Posey seemed to have a sister’s intuitive sense that she’d struck true. “You’ve been like this for years, throwing yourself away on one worthless guy after another. You think that you can make them love you by doing things for them no one else would do.”

  “Let it go,” Charlie said, warning in her voice.

  “And you talk about the Hall family curse like it’s real.” Posey’s voice had risen. “It was just a stupid thing I said.”

  “Well, you are the fortune teller. Who better to prophesy?” Charlie crossed her arms in front of her.

  “You’re going to wind up just like Mom,” Posey snapped.

  “And how long have you been waiting to say that to me?” Charlie asked, her anger uncoiling like a snake, fangs dripping venom. “Am I supposed to be insulted, when you live in our mother’s pocket? How many times a day do you call and text her, apparently all the while thinking that comparing anyone to her is an insult?”

  “She’s apologized for the past,” Posey replied.

  “Not for what she actually did,” Charlie said.

  “How can she when you’ll never tell her the truth about what happened?” A light came into Posey’s eyes. “Of course, I could always tell her.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  Posey smiled, pleased to have stumbled into leverage. “So take me with you to the Umbral Elevation Retreat.”

  It was clear that Posey thought Charlie was being unreasonable, so strong-arming her was justified. She might not have ever intended to follow through. But Charlie felt a roaring in her ears at the familiar threat of blackmail, the one she’d caved to for so many years.

  She picked up her phone and called their mother.

  It wasn’t like she hadn’t been making terrible decisions all day.

  “Charlie?” her mother said, picking up on the third ring.

  “What are you doing?” Posey asked, although the horror in her voice made it clear that she had a good guess.

  “I am not a medium and I never was a medium,” Charlie said, too fast to be interrupted. “I pretended to channel that warlock Alonso Nieto, so that I could trick you into leaving your abusive, asshole husband. It was all an act. Smoke and mirrors. Lies. And Rand? He wasn’t teaching me how to be a better psychic. He was teaching me to help him scam people. He was a thief.”