She appeared to be quite drunk. “Tell Red to kiss me.”

  Remy was far from sober himself, but even he knew that was a bad idea. “Come on, Adeline. Sit down and play with us.”

  Her shadow whipped toward one of the girls, smacking her in the head hard enough that she bit through the glass she was about to take a sip from.

  He stood as the girl’s friends tried to use napkins to stop the bleeding.

  Remy didn’t want to think about the girl’s pink teeth. The way the chunk of glass had fallen onto the table, glossy with spit. “Come on, let’s go home. It’s late.”

  “Don’t you want Red to?” she shouted as he dragged her through the club.

  Remy didn’t answer.

  “Tell him he has to do what I say.” They were out on the street. “Or I’ll tell my father that he’s a Blight half the time.”

  Remy groaned. “Stop with the threats. It’s exhausting. You’re exhausting tonight.”

  “Tell him,” she insisted.

  “Fine,” he lied. “I just did.” It wasn’t like Red hadn’t heard everything anyway.

  “I think you’re the one that made him be awful to me,” she said.

  Remy didn’t bother to deny it. They were both wasted, and likely to get into a stupid argument. They’d been together too much these past few months, living in each other’s pockets. It wasn’t normal. They shared too many awful secrets. It was making them snipe at one another.

  Adeline was still sulking as they staggered into the pied-à-terre. Remy didn’t care. He was planning on going to bed and sleeping through brunch.

  He sobered up fast when he saw his grandfather waiting for them. He sat on the couch, a single light on, giving his face an eerie illumination.

  “Have you ever heard of Cleophes of York?” he asked them, as though continuing a conversation they’d been having.

  “No?” replied Remy hesitantly. This was the price of Salt’s money, living on his terms and his time.

  “A very old Blight,” Salt said. “Tethered five years ago. I think I figured out a way to talk to him without the person who’s been wearing him knowing. We’re going to try an experiment.”

  Adeline frowned. “What kind?”

  “Good old ketamine.” He picked up a vial of liquid from the coffee table and shook it. “I am going to inject Edmund and we’ll see if that allows Red to puppet him.”

  “I’m too drunk,” Remy protested. “Mixing booze and drugs is how rock stars die.”

  Salt snorted. “Don’t flatter yourself. Now sit on the couch and roll up your sleeve.”

  “Seriously,” Remy said. “Tomorrow.”

  “Now,” Salt corrected. “You will find that I am very serious.”

  Remy gave Adeline a beseeching look, but she didn’t meet his gaze. She was looking out the window, her face carefully blank as though her thoughts were far away. She’d stopped fighting her father years ago. The price of disobedience was too high.

  I could possess you without any needle, Red whispered. If you let me.

  But his grandfather didn’t want to know what Red could do, he wanted to know what ketamine could do.

  Then let me kill him.

  No more murders, Remy thought automatically. All he needed to do was get through this unpleasant thing and then forget it. Shove more fear and anger into Red. And if sometimes Remy felt as though he’d given so much of himself away that there wasn’t much left, he was unwilling to contemplate any of the alternatives.

  Remy flopped on the couch, shook off his jacket, and began unbuttoning his shirtsleeve.

  Remy’s grandfather took a needle out of plastic packaging and removed the safety thing. Then he stuck it into the top of the vial and sucked up the clear fluid. He was having a hard time telling the difference between his and Red’s thoughts. They were running together in panic.

  If Remy stopped breathing, no one would believe that he hadn’t taken ketamine at the club. That was the real genius of his grandfather, to set up things so that no matter what happened, he would never be accountable.

  Then there was a sharp prick on the skin of his arm. He glanced at Adeline. She was watching him, her expression soft. And then he felt a sensation like falling.

  He tasted blood, as though he’d bit his tongue.

  The last thing he remembered was the sound of his own voice, turned unfamiliar in his ears. “No more Remy now. Only Red.”

  27

  THAT AWFUL THING I LIKE

  When Charlie had moved out from her mother’s apartment, she figured that she’d finally be free of the fear and guilt that followed her through adolescence. But seeing her mother always brought its return, ready to fill the air to choking with everything unsaid between them.

  She hated the feeling. Hated the long-stay motel where her mom lived because her credit was bad and her job history patchy. Charlie hated the better-than-average chance she was going to wind up living in a place just like it one day.

  Lots of people lied to their mothers; there was nothing special about Charlie having lied. The problem was that her mother would never forgive her if she found out. Charlie had made her mom believe that the universe cared about her, that spirits had arrived to protect her in her time of need. If someone took that from her, she’d hate them. Even if it was the person who’d given it to her in the first place. Especially when those lies had made her mother susceptible to more lies from more liars.

  As Charlie pulled the Corolla into the parking lot of Residence Suites and around to the side where her mom’s room was, her chest felt tight. This late in November, leaf peepers had stopped coming through the Valley, and no one was driving up from Connecticut to pick apples, so the hotels were mostly empty. There were plenty of places to park and no excuses to delay.

  As she took the key from the ignition, Charlie noticed that there was some kind of small metal thing stuck to her keys. It took her a moment to remember that she’d taken it from the bottom of Vince’s duffel, thinking it looked like a watch battery. Apparently, it was magnetic.

  Frowning, she tossed the keys back into her purse, magnet still attached.

  Posey knocked. Bob, Mom’s current boyfriend, opened the door, took one look at Charlie’s swelling face, and yelled, “Jess!”

  Their mother came to the door. She had been in high school in the eighties and still used a crimping iron faithfully. Her long, dry hair fell over her shoulders, rippled with ridges from the hot ceramic, and bottle-black. Her fingers were covered in silver rings and her eyes were thick with liner. “Oh no, what happened? And why do you have the cat?”

  Charlie gave an abbreviated version of the story, omitting the theft. Mom was sympathetic, but it wasn’t lost on Charlie that, once again, she’d won that sympathy with lies.

  “You should call the police,” Mom said. “Have them escort you home and arrest Adam. He assaulted you!”

  Charlie didn’t plan on doing that, but she wasn’t above suggesting to Doreen that she would. Adam wouldn’t want them nosing around, what with his illegal dealings. Maybe it would get him to back off.

  Once ushered into the motel room, Charlie let her mother steer her to the couch, while Posey found a perch on a barstool beside the kitchenette counter where she could plug in both her phone and her laptop. The place was essentially three rooms—a bedroom with a door, a bathroom that you had to go through the bedroom to get to, a kitchenette, a little bar-height table with two chairs, and a couch in front of a television. Cable came included in the week-to-week price, no extra charge.

  Mom and Bob had brought in some furniture from previous residences. Two lamps Charlie remembered from her childhood, an unfamiliar but obviously not hotel-originated rug, some bookshelves, and stacks of Bob’s cardboard boxes of individually plastic-sleeved Magic: The Gathering cards, of which he had a lot.

  He claimed that they were valuable enough that when he was ready, he was going to sell the whole collection and buy a house, but he couldn’t until he finished his legal battle with his old employer. Mission Trucking was the unambiguous cause of his back problems and had been court-ordered to pay for his insurance. They wanted to settle so they could wriggle free from their obligation, but Bob wasn’t taking less than a million.

  He kept promising her mom that once he got it, they’d live in style.

  It was his version of the big score. And about as likely.

  “We need to put something on your eye,” Mom said. “Oh, honey, that doesn’t look good now, but it’s going to look even worse tomorrow.”

  “I’ll get her some ice,” Bob said. “You get in a few good hits?”

  Charlie laughed. “You bet.”

  “Hope you kicked him where it counts.” He brought her a package of frozen peas, and she pressed them to her eye. Bob had a balding head and a paunch and wore a t-shirt proclaiming his love for the Ramones.

  Having plugged in all her devices, Posey hopped down off the stool to get the cat some water in a plastic takeout soup container.

  “So you two are going to spend the night,” their mother said. “I insist.”

  With only days until Salt’s party, Charlie didn’t have time for a black eye or being stuck at her mother’s place. And yet the pain in her face was yielding to exhaustion. Besides, there was something she’d come here to find.

  “You want me to get the blow-up mattress out of the station wagon?” Charlie asked.

  Her mother shook her head. “No, you stay put. Your sister can go. Or Bob.”

  Charlie got up, glad to have an easy excuse for her search. “I got it.”

  A constellation of magnets covered the refrigerator. A few were from local businesses, and others were emblazoned with sayings like “All I Need Is Coffee and Wine” or “So Punk Rock I’m Out of Safety Pins.” Charlie grabbed the car key from where it was suspended and headed back out into the cold.

  At almost sixty, Charlie’s mother had collected more stuff than was going to fit comfortably into the hotel, especially given Bob’s cards, which required a “climate-controlled environment” and were too important to him not to be kept nearby. And so, the back of Mom’s wagon was full of her clothes for the off-season, decorations, taxes, and, apparently, an air mattress. The bins were crammed in tight. One of them was marked “CHRISTMAS,” another “FAMILY PHOTOS.” Charlie found the stale-smelling plastic mattress under a tub marked “VITAL DOCUMENTS.”

  That was what she’d come for.

  After she’d escaped from Salt’s house, the guy who’d found her had called an ambulance. She didn’t remember much after that, but they must have done a tox screen at the hospital. The results ought to be with the rest of her medical paperwork.

  Charlie pulled the lid off the bin. And there, under birth certificates and her mother’s divorce proceedings, she found a folder with her name on it. Inside was a copy of the police report, hospital release, and the bill sent to the insurance. She skimmed over the details. Scratches on arms and face consistent with branches. Mild dehydration. One stood out: traces of ketamine in system.

  She closed the folder, Liam’s words echoing in her head: One of the doctors that works here is known for being generous with prescriptions. I saw Remy’s cousin Adeline buy some ketamine off him.

  It seemed that stealing a quickened shadow hadn’t slowed down Salt’s experiments, and that he’d gotten the rest of the family involved.

  “Did you find it?” her mother called across the lot.

  Charlie stuffed the folder under her shirt so her jeans held it in place. “Yeah, Mom,” she called back, and dragged the mattress inside.

  Her mother had made feverfew tea, which she said was good for pain. Bob slipped her some ibuprofen, which worked much better.

  Charlie went back to the couch and the frozen peas. After a few moments, when she was pretty sure no one was looking, she eased the folder out from under her shirt and into the seam on the side of the couch, where the cushion would cover it.

  Lucipurrr patrolled the new space, meowing as Mom took out some chopped meat and started making something for dinner. Bob put on that show where people bring in old stuff and experts tell them whether the item is worth money.

  A long-haul trucker had brought in a cuckoo clock of his grandmother’s that turned out to be a real antique, from the Edwardian period. When it struck midnight, a man appeared, running from his own shadow. “This was a time of great spirituality,” said the elderly appraiser, stroking his beard thoughtfully. “Gloamists performed elaborate shadowplays against the walls of ballrooms. Magic was right in front of people, and yet few looked closely enough to discover it.”

  “Don’t let the front desk know you’ve got a cat in here,” Mom told Posey. “There’s a hundred-and-fifty-dollar cleaning fee for bringing a pet into the room.”

  “I wasn’t going to tell anyone,” Posey complained, an adolescent whine creeping into her voice. “And I don’t know where I am supposed to talk to clients. It’s so loud in here.”

  “Try the bathtub,” Mom said unhelpfully.

  An hour later, they ate goulash sitting on folding chairs around a café table that couldn’t hold all their plates at once. They drank Posey’s wine. They were following the Hall family tradition of pretending everything was okay, and Charlie was glad. Nothing was okay and she had no idea what to do about it.

  “Posey tells me that Vincent moved out. I’m so sorry,” Mom said.

  Charlie nodded. The less said about that, the better. One more thing that was definitely not okay. “Yeah, well. You know my luck.” She didn’t say our luck, because she liked Bob. Of course, it was possible that she would have liked anyone who’d brought her ibuprofen. If he’d brought her coffee too, she might have married him herself.

  Her mother waited, as though hoping she might say more. Might share. When Charlie didn’t, her mother deflated a little. Charlie felt guilty all over again, in a new way.

  After dinner, Mom turned to Bob. “I want to show them where we sit outside.”

  “Outside?” Charlie asked. “It’s cold.”

  “Under the stars. You get the blankets and I’ll get the folding chairs.”

  A few minutes later, they were in the parking lot, looking at the lights of Springfield in the distance and the stars above.

  “Not bad, right?” Mom said. “Like a porch.”

  Bob stood by the car and looked up obligingly. “Rain cleared out the clouds.”

  “I am not staying out here, freezing,” Posey said. “I have a chat with some friends. We’re revising plans.”

  Hopefully, that meant ayahuasca was off the table.

  “Be careful,” Charlie reminded her.

  Posey gave her a sharp look and went inside.

  After a while, Bob left too, saying something about making himself some tea. Charlie stayed wrapped up in her blanket. She didn’t want to go back to that claustrophobic room, air thick with her own mistakes. And she worried that Posey was desperate enough to be a gloamist that she’d allow herself to be tricked, and that all the promised sweetness would be there to drown in.

  “I’m glad you came to us,” Mom said.

  “Me too,” Charlie replied automatically, alert to the dangers of this conversation.

  “I’ve got a lot of regrets about decisions I made as your mother. When I was younger, I wasn’t always paying attention to the right things. I wish you felt like you could come to me when you were in trouble years ago.”

  Charlie had a sinking feeling that this was about Rand, that Posey had said something during their daily tarot chats. “When was I in trouble?”

  “I know you don’t like talking about it—”

  “There’s obviously something you think you know, so go ahead and say it.” Charlie needed to stop talking. Instead of splitting her tongue into two parts, she needed to bite the whole thing off. She should be trying to avoid this conversation, not indulging it.

  “I saw you take your old medical file out of the car,” she said. “And I’ll never forget how I felt when I got that call from the police. And then, when they found Rand’s body, with that dead girl in the trunk. That girl could have been you.”

  That was true, but not for any of the reasons that her mother was imagining. “It wasn’t me, though. I’m fine.”

  “Are you?” her mother asked. “I know you were with him that night you wound up in the hospital. If you never deal with what happened, you’ll never heal from it. You’ll stay in that hurt, angry place.”

  Charlie Hall, with a furnace inside her that was always burning.

  Of course she was angry.

  She wanted her mother to have believed her when Travis smacked them around, to have loved her better than Alonso, who wasn’t even real.

  She wanted her mother to have protected her from Rand, who was bad enough, and still so much better than he could have been.

  She wanted her mother to believe her now, even though Charlie had lied before.

  “I’m fine. Sound as a bell,” Charlie said. “Right as rain.”

  “I wanted you and your sister to have the freedom to express yourselves, to make mistakes, to discover yourselves. I didn’t want to hold you back.” Mom was playing with one of her chunky silver rings, rolling it around her first finger. “I didn’t have that as a kid. And you had a gift. I thought Rand would show you how to use it.”

  Guilt came over Charlie in a swell. She had to change the subject. She couldn’t stand feeling this way anymore, torn between a desire to scream and a desire to confess. “Maybe when I stopped using it, the gift moved on to Posey.”

  Her mother gave her an impatient look.

  Charlie sighed. “You want me to talk to you? Okay, here’s what I want to know. Have you ever met Lionel Salt’s daughter?” They were around the same age, and the area had been even smaller back then. If her mother knew Vince’s, maybe she’d know what happened to her.

  “Kiara?” Her mother looked up, blinking like she was trying to refocus her thoughts. “We didn’t run in the same circles.”

  “But you know her name,” Charlie insisted. “So you must know something about her.”