“Oh, I know,” Charlie said, walking out of the bathroom and yanking open the upper cabinet, above the sideboard unit with the mini fridge and Nespresso machine.

  Red looked up. “What?”

  “The hotel safe.” Built into the wall, it was a basic model, but sleek, with a glowing keypad. Charlie turned the lever. Locked. Which meant it was in use. If he hadn’t programmed it, it would still be ajar. “He put something in there.”

  “Can you open it?” Red asked.

  “Let’s see.”

  With safes like these—and especially in a place like this that didn’t expect there to be any real theft—the first thing Charlie was going to try was to see if Solaluna had reset the administrator password from the manufacturer. She pressed the lock button twice and the word “SUPER” came up on the digital screen. Then she typed in the default 99999 and held her breath.

  Inside the wall, she heard the telltale grind of gears. She turned to grin at Red, who raised his eyebrows at her.

  Outside the door, she heard footsteps in the hall.

  Archie’s familiar voice sounded. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “Don’t come at me, motherfucker,” said another voice that Charlie recognized from being woken in the middle of the night. The redheaded puppeteer who had brought her to Mr. Punch.

  Charlie pressed clear on the safe and closed it. Then all she had time to do was throw herself to the floor and roll under the bed. A moment later, Red was beside her. She tried to still her breaths as the door opened and the two men walked into the room.

  Archie’s voice was lower and calmer when he spoke again. “I’m sorry, Sean, but what am I supposed to do? You’re delivering me three more shadows. That makes thirteen and your boss knows I have twenty-five appointments. I can’t give these people their money back. They don’t care about that—they just care about getting what I promised them. If I don’t get them a shadow, there’s not going to be a conference next year.”

  “That’s your problem,” the redhead—Sean—said. “Not mine. And not Mr. Punch’s. Figure it out.”

  “I’m going to talk to him myself,” Archie warned. She could hear him at the safe tapping in the code.

  Charlie glanced over at Red in the dim light, trying to see if he was thinking the same thing that she was. Archie planned on talking to Malhar.

  “Go right ahead.” Sean sounded smug.

  There was the clink of glass-on-glass. Something being put in the safe.

  “Let’s go talk to him together,” Archie offered. “He’s just downstairs, after all.”

  Charlie heard the safe lock engage, then silence.

  “What are you talking about? Mr. Punch isn’t here.” Well, that answered one question. At least the puppeteer leader wasn’t actually at the conference.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I spoke to him this morning,” Archie scoffed, which was a testament to either his gullibility or Malhar’s and Posey’s powers of persuasion.

  “Yeah?” Sean said, suspicion in his voice. “Then I definitely want to talk.”

  Panic made it hard for Charlie to sit still. She itched to get out of there and warn Posey. But in a moment, Archie and Sean would leave and she would be able to act.

  Red raised his eyebrows in a question. She wasn’t entirely sure, but she was afraid he was asking if he should keep Archie and Sean from leaving the room. She shook her head minutely. The chances of failure were too high and success … She didn’t like what success looked like.

  After a moment, the door opened and shut. Charlie counted to ten, then slithered out from under the bed. She went immediately to the safe and punched in the passcode.

  Red frowned. “Don’t you have to do that override thing?”

  “I heard the numbers,” Charlie said. “Each one has a distinct sound.”

  She couldn’t help but be gratified at how impressed he looked.

  The door to the safe opened. Inside, long glass vials stood like scrolls, stoppered at either end with onyx. When she lifted one, it felt both heavy and fragile in her hands. As she tilted the glass, a dark shape wriggled inside.

  Kneeling, Charlie took a shirt from Archie’s open suitcase and rolled up the vials in it to pad them. There was one too many to fit, so she stuffed that last vial into her shirt, straight down under her bra. Then she stuffed the bundle into a conference bag. Handing that to Red, she closed the safe and wiped off her prints.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

  He slung the bag over his shoulder and they left. Charlie was careful to wipe away the rest of her prints on the way out.

  “Malhar is supposed to be speaking any minute now,” Red said as they went down the stairs, too fast now to seem natural. Charlie didn’t want to slow him down, though. Not when Archie and Sean were ahead of them.

  The hall leading to the conference room was empty. No shouting or sounds of confrontation marred the tranquil atmosphere. She darted toward the door to where the talks were being held.

  Opening it, she stepped inside. No Archie. No Sean.

  Malhar was already in the room, near the front. He gave Charlie and Red a grin when he spotted them coming in. Before she could signal that they needed to leave, he’d stepped forward and cleared his throat.

  “Hello,” he said, giving the audience a wave. He was smiling too much and a sheen of sweat was visible at his brow. “So, time to divulge all my secrets.”

  People laughed. It was a good start. But some of the audience looked around, as though wondering why Archie wasn’t there to introduce his most important guest. Charlie cracked the door and peered out, but the hall was still clear.

  Perhaps Archie, already worried about his convention attendees, was waiting until after the speech to confront Malhar. Probably, if that was the case, Sean had gone to gather the two other puppeteers from the cottage. The glass vial shoved beneath the underwire of her bra pressed hard against Charlie’s chest.

  She slid out her phone and texted Posey: Archie knows.

  Malhar continued to speak. “I asked several people what would be the best thing to talk about in front of you all. Everyone said the same thing—quickening shadows.” At that, the room became much more alert. He went on, pacing. “There is a lot of conventional wisdom out there, but I am going to give you an underlying theory. First, I want to tell you a story. When I was in graduate school, I was living with a couple of roommates. One of them had a girlfriend in the psychology department. One night, we were all staying up late talking—and yeah, okay, shrooming—and I got to telling her about the bicameral mind and the bifurcated consciousness.”

  Around the room, people were frowning. Most seekers would have heard of bifurcated consciousness, but not the bicameral mind.

  Posey hadn’t so much as glanced at her phone.

  “Okay, right, so does anyone know what the bicameral mind is?”

  The room was silent. After a long, awkward moment, Red cleared his throat. Malhar swung his attention toward him gratefully.

  “The early Greeks—and I guess other people—believed their thoughts were gods speaking to them in their minds,” Red said. A moment later, he seemed to realize the way Charlie and Malhar were staring at him. “It was in a reading on the origins of theater when Re—when I was at NYU.”

  Malhar nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, exactly! The bicameral mind is thought to precede our modern idea of consciousness. In some ways, shadows really are in that state, right?” His gaze flickered to Red and then away. “They act at the behest of the person controlling them. The voice they hear isn’t their own.”

  Malhar held up his hand. “I can see you all want to argue with me. But I’m obviously not saying that shadows can’t have individual consciousnesses—what I’m trying to trace is the path they take to arrive at that consciousness.”

  “I think therefore I am,” Red said.

  Malhar smiled, as though the words meant something different to him. “Green eggs and ham.”

  This had stopped feeling like a performance and started feeling like something else, something more dangerous. A real theory.

  “Where are we going here?” a guy in the audience interrupted. “You were shrooming and you talked about deep shit, just like everyone else who’s ever shroomed. So what?”

  Charlie tried to catch Posey’s eye, to indicate that she needed to look at her phone. It didn’t work.

  Malhar answered the man, not seeming at all nervous in the way he had the night before. “After I explained about the bifurcated consciousness that gloamists cultivate, she insisted that it sounded like what gloamists were doing was inducing mental illness. That pissed me off.”

  “You were both so high,” one the people in the crowd said, and a few more laughed.

  Malhar laughed along with them, not seeming at all rattled. “She said that the bicameral mind sounded like people with schizophrenia and that the bifurcated consciousness was just disassociation. The argument went on. It was a wild night but that’s the part the stuck in my head. Disassociation.”

  They were quiet as an indrawn breath.

  Charlie glanced into the hall again; it was empty. If they could keep enough of these rich folks near them as they walked out, Archie might hesitate to stop them. Since he didn’t stop the speech, it stood to reason he would be loath to openly disavow the speaker.

  Malhar paced back and forth. “Tell me how you’ve heard people attempt to trigger their own shadow quickening.”

  “Swimming with sharks,” Lars said.

  Malhar nodded. “Smart. In a cage, that’s scary, but not particularly dangerous. It might be more likely to work on someone with a phobia. But what does it mean? Why does it work sometimes on some people?”

  Another person spoke up. “I did that thing where someone strangles you with a belt during sex. Highly recommend, but it didn’t work.”

  That got a few murmurs and titters from the audience.

  “It’s like looking death in the face,” that guy went on.

  A person next to him spoke up. “I set part of my arm on fire with rubbing alcohol and then put it out fast. Oh, and got punched in the face.”

  Red snorted.

  Charlie shoved his shoulder.

  “How about a demonstration?” someone called from the other side.

  A couple of people laughed.

  Malhar must be a very good teacher. In front of this “class,” he was animated. He made her believe that he was teaching them something secret.

  “The other thing you can do—is drugs.”

  More laughter.

  “Yeah, man,” someone called out.

  Sean walked into the room, alone.

  Like a car crash in slow motion, Charlie saw Malhar look up. His gaze passed over Sean and then back to the crowd, with absolutely no sign of recognition. Her slight hope that she could convince him that Malhar was being puppeted by the real Mr. Punch went up in smoke.

  “Mushrooms have worked for people. Acid. Benadryl. Massive amounts of hash,” Malhar said. “But the percentages are small. Please recall my own experience with shrooms, which led to a theory, but not any shadow quickening.

  “We all understand in a vague way that trauma wakes up people’s shadows—but only some people’s shadows—and we all know about the bifurcated consciousness—but that’s considered something you need to cultivate once your shadow is quickened, not something that you need in order to quicken your shadow—so the connection between these two things isn’t obvious at first. To be honest, I think I lucked into it. Trauma makes some people disassociate. And disassociation is what awakens the shadow.”

  Charlie blinked. The silence was so profound that she was both aware of it and part of it. Hope shone in the eyes of some seekers, confusion in others. Even Sean looked a little stunned.

  This wasn’t a sales pitch, nor a con. It didn’t seem possible that her sister’s boyfriend had figured out the key to the world being more magical. But Charlie had never heard quickening explained this way before either.

  “You’re taking that in,” Malhar said. “But the next step—and I can see from your expressions that some of you got to this question already—is how do you choose to disassociate?”

  There was a murmuring from all around Charlie and she found herself as engaged as the rest of them.

  “Good news. We all disassociate. You know how sometimes you’re driving a familiar route and you wind up at home, but don’t remember how you got there? That’s disassociation! Unfortunately, not a deep enough disassociation to trigger shadow awakening, but a good start. Your goal is to achieve the feeling of standing outside yourself. So whether you engineer the stress or you experience it organically, when it happens, your objective will be to make yourself feel as though it’s happening to someone else. A different you.”

  Charlie thought of the night her shadow awakened, recalled that feeling of seeing herself from a distance.

  “Now I’ve given some thought to relatively harmless stressors and—”

  A woman’s scream came from just outside the door.

  Charlie was through it and into the hall before she could think.

  Vera lay on the ground, her stomach ripped open and a woman’s indistinct shape crouched over her, licking her insides, the shadowy hands sharp-ended and covered in gore.

  Vera was still alive, but mercifully, the light in her eyes was fading fast.

  Then Mark turned the corner, his shirt stained red, dragging Archie’s limp body by the arm. When he saw Charlie, he laughed. He let go of Archie and spread his arms wide.

  Shadows unfurled from both sides of him, like those sheets of paper that you cut into the shape of a single angel and then unfolded to show a string of them.

  The Nine-Shadow Man from the fairy tale.

  For a disorienting moment, all Charlie could do was stare, heart in her throat. Screams were all around her. People were shoving past her. One knocked into her hard enough to make her stumble.

  You always think you know everything and you’re always wrong.

  A moment later, two of the shadows flowed toward Sean. Three went at Red.

  “I am going to kill every last person who wronged me,” Mark said, heading straight for Charlie. “And you, I am going to kill twice.”

  With trembling hands, Charlie drew the onyx knife from her boot. She held it into the space between them, wishing once again that she knew how to fight beyond just trying to put the sharp part in whatever was coming at her. Mark stopped, glaring.

  One thing she was sure of. If he got close enough, she wouldn’t hesitate to stab him.

  To one side, Red grappled with a shadow that was recognizably female in shape. She had her hands around his throat. Another was on his back, biting and scratching. Red’s eyes were bright embers, burning with rage. “Get out of here,” he gritted out when he caught her eye.

  Charlie took a step back automatically.

  Sean lay on the floor, screaming, blood running down his arm. His shadow was in tatters. Puppeteers didn’t usually engage in open combat and the fear on his face was terrifying.

  Behind him, Posey’s shadow grew larger and long-clawed, like a distorted, fiercer Charlie. It grappled with a third shadow. Her gaze snagged on that.

  Distracted, Charlie hadn’t seen the approach of another shadow. She didn’t realize it was behind her until she felt a hand grab her onyx necklace and pull so hard it snapped. She whirled and brought up her knife, stabbing as a thick fog of shadow surrounded her, invading her throat. She could taste it on her tongue. She choked on it.

  Her lungs burned. She couldn’t breathe. Darkness edged in at the corners of her vision.

  And then it eclipsed every bit of light.

  31

  HenHouse Full of Foxes

  Charlie woke on a carpeted floor that stank of cigarettes and the rotten smell of old meat. She looked up at a water-stained ceiling. Gingerly, she experimented with pulling at her wrists, then her ankles. Both were pinioned with what felt like zip ties.

  Her head throbbed and her lungs hurt, a dull ache with every breath. A painful pressure on her chest made it worse.

  She rolled onto her side.

  A woman sat beside her, body as translucent as a ghost. “He’s been looking for you.”

  Charlie swallowed a scream.

  Rose Allaband had been a beautiful woman, with dark hair and dark eyes. Her shadow was no less beautiful. When she tilted her head, her hair moved as though blown by an invisible wind.

  Charlie looked past her to a messy room covered in newspapers and take-out boxes, half of them turned into ashtrays. “Why am I still alive?”

  Rose’s shadow shrugged. “He hasn’t decided how to kill you yet.”

  “Are you the only one who … talks?”

  The girl shook her head. “Not exactly.” She beckoned and several shadow shapes crowded in around her.

  Terror washed over Charlie, wiping away her ability to do anything but tremble. There was a horrible wrongness to them, an unnaturalness to their movements.

  The girl’s hand rested on the back of a shadow that seemed half wolf and half human. “This is Archer.” Then she introduced the others—JonJon, Maw, and the NeverMan. That meant there were maybe five left. She hadn’t really counted, back in the hall of Solaluna. She wasn’t sure how many they’d started with.

  But what she’d been trying not to think about since she woke was everyone she left behind. Red and Posey and Malhar. Were they hurt? Were they alive? Imagining grieving them sent her spiraling into a despair deep enough to temper her fear.

  “Where am I?” Charlie managed to ask.

  “Our new house,” said the NeverMan. He had a haunting flatness to his voice. “We’ve had a lot of houses.”

  “He’s the other one that talks,” the girl said. “Although Archer howls and sometimes Maw whispers things that I don’t think are words.”

  “Should I call you Rose?” Charlie asked.

  “Rosalva,” she said. “I’m from Rose, but not Rose.”

  “A rosy dawn,” said the NeverMan.

  “Our new house” meant nothing. Mark could have set up camp close to Solaluna or they could be miles and miles away at a new place. She would know more if she could figure out how long she’d been unconscious, but she suspected their sense of time was probably as bad as their sense of place.