Charlie hung up, shaking with rage.

  Posey gaped at her. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Typical Charlie Hall. Think you can fuck her over? She’ll fuck herself over even harder.

  Her phone rang. She hit the button to send her mother’s call to voicemail. “Because I am not going to be extorted by anyone and certainly not by you. That medium bullshit? I did it for you, because Travis hit you. And you hated me for years because you couldn’t stand all the attention I got from Mom. I bet you can’t stand that the only reason you have your dream—the only reason you’re a gloamist—is because I gave it to you.”

  Posey’s upper lip curled, like a dog growling. “I got the best part of you when I got your shadow. There’s nothing left of you that I want.”

  Charlie met the nastiness head-on. “Good. Because I threw away more of myself for you than I ever did for any man. It will be a relief not to carry your dead weight.”

  “Good,” Posey shouted back, then grabbed her coat and headed for the door.

  Which is how Charlie found herself sitting on the floor wet-eyed like a kid, when Red manifested. His eyes were embers and he was still half shadow, but he loomed in front of her, giving her a target for all that hurt and rage.

  “Liar,” she snapped.

  He was silent for a long time. Then he knelt on the floor beside her bed, light streaming through him, eyes like holes. “Charlie.”

  She wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. Once, she’d pinned her hopes of him getting his memories back on that vial she’d stolen from the vault in the watchtower, but now she wasn’t at all sure that’s what she wanted. “Are you—”

  “If I could be him again for you, I would.”

  Relief flooded her, guilt hard on its heels.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “For all of it.”

  “Liar,” she said again, but there was no heat in it.

  “For some of it, then,” he said, smiling as he corrected himself.

  Charlie had already fought with her sister and her mother—even if she hadn’t given her mother the chance to fight back. She wasn’t sure she had it in her to fight with him too. “Explain. What happened? Why not just tell me?”

  He glanced away from her, as though telling her all this was difficult. “Inviting me to the house was a trap.”

  “Obviously,” Charlie said. “As it turns out.”

  “It was a trap meant for you,” he said.

  Charlie felt as startled as if he’d abruptly kicked her in the ankle.

  “Rose was one of those people who wanted to do good in the world,” he said. “Who was excited about her future and had boundless enthusiasm. And her shadow … Rose talked to her shadow. She wasn’t afraid of it.”

  Charlie wanted to ask him so many questions, but she bit her tongue and waited.

  “If Rose’s shadow had stood by when Remy was killed, I would have never forgiven her,” Red went on to say. “So when she came to the house to ask me for help, she was right that I owed her. And if she wanted me to free her from the person to whom she was bound, I’d do it. But something didn’t sit right. I saw shadows creeping around our house. And she was so cagey about obvious things, like the name of the person I was supposed to kill.”

  “And you didn’t tell me all this, why?”

  “I thought she wanted me dead, and for understandable reasons.” He spread his fingers against the wooden floorboards. “I couldn’t be sure and I felt obligated to try to help her. But then I became afraid that it wasn’t me that she was after, but you.”

  “But why go after me?” Charlie asked. “I’m nobody.”

  “At first I worried it was revenge for Rose,” Red said. “But you’re the Hierophant, investigating the Grace Covenant murders.”

  “And I guess Rose’s shadow is bound to the person who committed them,” Charlie said. “Same brand of cigarette. Same bite marks on the victims. Did you see him?”

  “No, I didn’t see anyone human,” Red said. “I approached the house through the backyard, thinking I was going to be able to get close enough to figure out if Rose’s shadow was playing a game with me. I didn’t see anything. Then two shadows came at me out of the dark.

  “I killed one and chased the other into the house. We fought there, when a third shadow attacked. By then, I was hurt badly. Rose’s shadow came at me, ready to finish me off. It seemed possible she could kill me, especially because I hesitated to hurt her.”

  Charlie shivered. “What did you do?”

  “I told her that you’d discovered our plan and that the Cabal was coming. That I’d come to warn her. I told her to run.”

  “Clever,” Charlie said with a snort. “But you really didn’t see the gloamist?”

  “The next thing I saw was you.”

  “You’re lucky you did.” Charlie met his burning eyes.

  “I was wrong about you. I should have seen you more clearly, but I see you now. I have a lot to apologize for.” He took a deep breath, even though she wasn’t sure he needed one. “I don’t always think like a person.”

  Red thought like a person who had grown up around a wealthy sociopath who’d had and done everything he desired, but she wasn’t about to make excuses for him.

  He caught her gaze. “I am deeply sorry. I will not keep things from you again. I will not make choices for you. I won’t take anything from you, even if the thing I am taking is danger.”

  Charlie’s cheeks felt warm. No one talked like that and she didn’t want him to see how much it got to her. “That’s a very pretty apology,” she said, attempting to seem unaffected. “I’ll think about accepting it.”

  He closed his eyes. “That’s more generous than I deserve.”

  Well, she had something to tell him while he was feeling repentant. “So, I, um, planned something stupid and may have used Remy Carver’s name to do it. I’m going to Solaluna and I plan to steal shadows back from Mr. Punch before he can sell them to a bunch of rich fuckers.”

  He glanced up, raising his brows. “So you needed another rich fucker to get through the door?”

  She shrugged, since she was still angry with him and unwilling to admit that she had done anything wrong. “If you don’t want to help, I’ll figure out another way.”

  “And miss seeing you in action?” he asked, a light in his eyes like maybe he didn’t mind so much that she was a charlatan. Like maybe he liked it.

  “Mr. Punch promised you your freedom,” Charlie said. “If we pull this off and he finds out, he won’t support you with the Cabals.”

  “They’d never let me go,” Red said. “Even if Mr. Punch really spoke up for me, which I doubt he would.”

  Charlie believed there might be a way to hold him to his word. “Still.”

  “You want to save shadows?” he asked gently, but with great seriousness. “I am going to help.”

  Charlie grinned. “That’s good, since the room is booked in your name. But don’t worry, I used Topher’s credit card to pay for it.”

  He laughed out loud. “How old were you when you started scamming people?” There was no judgment in his voice.

  “Thirteen,” she said. “Maybe fourteen. Rand needed a kid, I guess.”

  “I was about that when we came to live with Salt.”

  Her voice dropped to a whisper as though if asked quietly, the question wouldn’t be so bad. “And became his personal assassin?”

  He made a motion with his broad shoulders that was half shrug and half acknowledgment. “Salt told Remy that his mother needed help. He offered to put her in the best rehab on the East Coast, so long as Remy would help him with a few small problems.”

  “That’s fucked up,” Charlie told him. “Remy was his grandson. She was his daughter.”

  Red looked as though he was trying to guess what she thought of him. “It was little things at first. Spying. Stealing.”

  “Yeah, it starts with the little things,” Charlie agreed with a sigh. “They’re the reason you have to do the bigger things. By the time you realize it, you’re in so deep that you’re drowning.”

  “Rand?” he asked.

  Charlie looked away. “It’s not like he was a bad guy.”

  “What’d he have over you?”

  She opened her mouth—not sure if she was about to lie or not—when her throat closed up around the words. It would be easier, she thought, to tell him, if she didn’t like him so much. The shame of what she’d done—deceiving her mother in such a childish, fumbling way and succeeding—was fresh in her mind.

  Still, of all people, he might not judge her.

  She took a deep breath and looked at the floor, deliberately not meeting his eyes as she told him the story of Travis moving in with them. Of him hitting Posey and their mother not believing it. And then Charlie, always with a scheme, pretending to be a medium. Of channeling Alonso Nieto, warlock. Of drawing her mother into believing. Of becoming more interesting and beloved as Alonso than she’d ever been to her mother as herself.

  And then Rand discovering her secret.

  “He was going to tell Mom and then she would have hated me,” Charlie said. “She would have blamed me for the end of her marriage with Travis.”

  “And now she knows,” he said.

  Charlie looked at the floor. “Maybe she won’t be so mad. I think she’s happy with Bob—”

  “The Magic card guy?” Red asked.

  It always threw Charlie that Vince had paid attention to the little things. The throwaway comments she made about people or her past. The gossip that flowed around Rapture. She’d never had a boyfriend do that before and it was alarming and gratifying in equal measure. He saw her, but sometimes she felt safer not being seen. Red did it too and it unnerved her all over again. “Yeah, the Magic card guy—who’s going to want you to come to Christmas dinner, by the way—but even if Mom isn’t mad about Travis, she’ll still be furious I made a fool of her. And I took something away from her. She really believed she spoke to a spirit who chose her because of her spiritual importance.”

  He considered that for a long moment. “What did she think Rand was doing with you?”

  It wasn’t just the attention Red paid to what she said that was disturbing either. He was unnervingly good at spotting the part of a story that didn’t quite add up, the dissonant note. It had never been easy to con him. “He was part of her spiritual group, so she thought he was mentoring me in my abilities—you know, as a medium.”

  Red gave her an incredulous look.

  Charlie shrugged. That was just one part of the raft of unsaid things between her and her mother—things that had been better off that way, but would always bother her. Even back then it hadn’t seemed right to let Rand spend so much time with Charlie. She’d been a young girl, alone with a much older guy, and even though he’d been instructing her on the finer points of swindling, pickpocketing, and scams, her mother hadn’t known that. As not-great as he’d been, he could have been something much worse. She had no illusions that her mother wanted to see nothing evil in an older man who kept one of her daughters busy and sent her home with money or gifts. Since Charlie didn’t want to say any of that, she changed the subject. “Why did you help me back then?”

  “I—” He hesitated.

  She thought of him again, as the boy he would have appeared to be, crouched over Rand’s body, blood on his mouth. “Remy never knew, did he?”

  Red shook his head.

  “Was it hard to keep things from him?” Charlie asked, wrapping her arms around her knees.

  “No,” Red said. “He wanted me to keep things from him. That’s what I was for. Like a vault full of everything you don’t want to see.”

  She didn’t like the way he talked about himself. “So, why did you smuggle me out of the mansion that night?”

  “Because I thought you had a chance,” he said. “And I liked you—the beet juice was funny and clever. It might have worked, before Salt discovered shadow magic. I didn’t want you to wind up like the others.”

  Charlie thought of how many people he might have seen die, murdered by Salt and his friends. Thought about what Adeline had said about her own participation, about what Red had been forced to do.

  “Did Remy ever hurt—” Charlie began.

  He looked away. “Remy never did anything by his own hand.”

  Red might be good at seeing the dissonant notes in other people’s stories, but that didn’t mean he saw them in his own. She believed that he missed Remy. She believed that he loved Remy and would have done anything to have him back. But underneath all that was fury at bearing the brunt of their pain for so long. Rage at being loved, but not well enough to keep the person who loved him from using him cruelly. And guilt over Remy’s death that kept him from examining any of those emotions, leaving them festering inside of him.

  Charlie recognized the feeling. “He would want you to be happy.”

  “You don’t know that.” Red didn’t snap at her, but she could hear the tension in his voice.

  “He wanted you to have birthday cake,” Charlie said. “And when he was dying, he gave you everything that was left of him. He knew you couldn’t save him, but you could save yourself.”

  28

  Unusual Selves

  Solaluna had a gate along its entrance, with a call box on the left hand side. Past that, all you could see were trees—no buildings at all. A low fence ran in either direction from the gate, but if the security was as lax as it seemed, Charlie could have just jumped over it with no one the wiser.

  “Welcome to Solaluna,” came a voice from the box.

  Charlie looked at Red and nodded toward the speaker.

  “This is Remy Carver,” he said, acid in his voice. “Checking in.”

  As the gate lifted, he raised the car window. “Pretending to be him feels like spitting on his grave.”

  That was Charlie Hall, using everyone around her. She could blame her upbringing or Rand, but whatever the reason, it had become her nature to look for an angle. And Red was full of angles.

  “But you’re right. This is what he wanted for me,” Red went on, surprising her. “To live. To have everything I could take. And throwing that gift away would be worse than anything I could do to his memory.”

  She gave him a stunned look. “So you’re taking the money?”

  “When this is over,” Red said. “I am taking everything.”

  The road led up a hill to a large white building full of windows. As she drove up, she spotted a waving man in a navy jacket and a pink baseball cap with SOLALUNA written across it in white type.

  Beside her, Red had put on sunglasses, which made him look appropriately hungover and had the added bonus of hiding his eyes if they started to smolder unexpectedly.

  “We can park your car for you,” the man said, when Charlie rolled down her window.

  She got out, thankful for the Porsche so she wasn’t asking the attendant to drive a beat-up white van.

  Charlie had done her best to prepare for this venture in the short time she’d had—a little black dress, hair slicked tightly back, natural makeup, tights, and Adeline’s Prada boots on her feet. She hadn’t had an appropriate coat so she just hadn’t brought one.

  Her tattoos peeked out over the neckline. Bad for business, Rand had told her, when they’d come across another criminal who had them. Too memorable.

  But that had been the reason she’d ended up getting them. Charlie had transformed herself so many times she’d stopped knowing who she was. She’d needed something to hold her in place. Something to ground her. Something that said this is Charlie Hall’s leg, marked with stars. This is Charlie Hall’s throat, inked with scarabs.

  The attendant took their one small suitcase out of the back of the Porsche. They followed him inside.

  Red was in dark pants, black shoes, and a fine cashmere sweater. Over it, he had on a wool peacoat. He looked as though he belonged, and not just because of the clothing.

  The scents of rosemary and eucalyptus filled the lobby like the inside of a high-end spa. A huge rose quartz lamp sat near a small seating area with nubby-looking cream chairs.

  A woman smiled at them from behind a hotel desk of light wood. “Remy Carver?” He had broad shoulders and a lot of money. Who wouldn’t smile? “I just need a form of identification and—would you like to use the card on file?”

  Charlie opened her mouth to spin a story.

  “Can I see your phone?” Red asked the receptionist, before Charlie could speak.

  “Mr. Carver?” she asked, obviously confused.

  “Please,” he said, putting out his hand.

  She took it out of her pocket, unlocked it, and placed it in his palm.

  He pulled up an article about being found in his father’s basement when everyone had thought he was dead, then handed her phone back to her. “I don’t have a driver’s license right at the moment, but there’s a photo of me in this article.”

  Oh, that was clever.

  The woman behind the desk looked flustered. “I guess that is all we need.”

  From his wallet, he took out the credit card that Adeline had given him and placed it on the counter.

  Charlie nearly choked. He’d just wiped away her need to fix things with Topher’s credit card.

  “Here’s your key, Mr. Carver,” the woman said. “There’s a private butler that services the cottage. I am sure you’ll have everything you need, but if not, you can call me.”

  “I should have copied down your personal number,” he said, in a tone that was as privileged and flirtatious as Charlie could have asked for.

  He was good at this. Good at improvising. Good at acting relaxed, like someone who had come to Solaluna for a restful, restorative weekend, not to steal shadows from the Cabals.

  The woman behind the desk met Charlie’s eyes, guilt in her expression. Charlie wasn’t sure that meant the receptionist wasn’t tempted, though. Remy Carver seemed like a terrible boyfriend, but an interesting one-night stand.

  Maybe Red looked very comfortable playing the part of the rich socialite because he was one.