Mom shrugged. “She used to buy shrooms off a friend of mine. Partied hard. Told disturbing stories about her father, but people want to believe that the rich are keeping their fingernails in jars like Howard Hughes, and she seemed like the kind of person who’d say whatever got her attention. Fell in with some ex-cons up in Boston, got knocked up. Eventually her father put her in rehab, and that’s the last I heard. She didn’t talk to any of the old crew after that. Why?”

  “I heard she died, that’s all,” Charlie said.

  “Sad,” said her mother.

  Charlie stretched, rolling her shoulders. “I think I am going to go inside and see about the air mattress.”

  “Think about what I said,” her mother told her as she stood.

  As Charlie walked away, a memory came to her of when she was very little and her parents were still together. She was sitting in the back seat of the car, the window down. Wind whipped her hair. The radio was on, Charlie’s little legs swinging along with the music, and Mom and Dad were laughing together. Golden sunlight had turned the world dazzlingly bright, and it seemed as though night would never come.

  As she and Posey took turns pumping up their bed, Bob and Mom moved comfortably around the room. They seemed contented. It was weird, but nice. Like there was no curse, just a casual family inheritance of bad relationships, in a cycle that no one was doomed to repeat.

  Charlie and Posey lay down next to one another, trying not to bounce the mattress. Charlie remembered a whole childhood of sharing beds with Posey, whispering to one another, back when they had the same secrets.

  Back when they had the same gifts.

  Charlie thought of the moment when her consciousness split, when she understood how to be in two places at once. Even now when she closed her eyes, she could feel her shadow. If she concentrated hard enough, she could see herself from its vantage.

  As soon as she did, though, panic sent her spiraling back to her own body.

  Charlie didn’t have a goldfish or a turtle, because she worried she’d forget to feed anything that couldn’t yowl for its dinner. She forgot to take her birth control pills at least twice every month, sometimes for two days at a time. When she’d downloaded an app to help her remember to drink water, it had come with a pixelated plant you were supposed to tap when you drank a glass. She killed the plant over and over—sometimes she’d drink the water but forget to tap the plant, and sometimes she’d just forget to drink the water. How was she going to remember to give blood to a shadow every day?

  How was she going to keep from accidentally letting it drink up all her energy until she withered away? How was she going to keep it from becoming her own personal monster?

  Lying on the mattress, the soft susurrations of breath surrounded her as the others succumbed to sleep. But Charlie’s mind couldn’t stop racing, couldn’t stop worrying, wouldn’t stop assembling and reassembling the information she had.

  Once Salt realized his grandson had magic, he would have wanted to control him. Kiara’s situation was rife with opportunities for exploitation. Salt could easily get custody of Vince in court. He had the money to feed Kiara’s habit; she might not even contest it.

  And for Vince, the promise that his mother would be sent to rehab, that she might get better. And then doling out access to her as a reward for good behavior, the promise of reuniting hanging forever over his head. And the fear of her being punished for his missteps motivating him further.

  If Charlie could come up with that plan, she had no doubt that Salt had concocted a worse version.

  And so Vince does what Salt tells him, and Red, whatever he was before, becomes a reflection of those things they do together. But controlling an adult is much harder than controlling a child. Especially one with a long education in manipulation and cruelty.

  So Vince plans to leave and join his mother, but something goes horribly wrong. Possibly Salt realized that he didn’t need Vince if he had Red, and cut off his grandson’s shadow.

  But if he planned to have it sewn to him, that didn’t happen. It became a Blight, the talking kind, so he had to make a deal. He could have been the one who offered the ritual from the Liber Noctem, and Vince the one who stole the book to keep Red from walking the world.

  There was no way Salt would mind making a monster, so long as it served his interests. And in the meantime, Red keeps on killing for him. Keeps on doing his bidding. Together, they get him accepted into the Cabal.

  But if he’d promised Red his reward by the time of the announcement, then she could see why he needed the book. The problem with monsters is that you need to keep them leashed, or they turn on you.

  The Hierophant wanted the book as much as Salt did. Had the Blight tied to him made him some kind of promise, some arrangement to get the same ritual? Or was he working on behalf of the Cabal, trying to keep Red from becoming a new and more terrible form of Blight?

  And, more importantly, what was Charlie going to do? Salt expected her to bring him the Liber Noctem by the weekend, and the weekend was coming up fast.

  Charlie’s head hurt and her eye hurt and her ribs hurt.

  Her gaze rested on the refrigerator, with its dozens of magnets. And as she looked at them, a thought came to her, about the little magnetic silver thingy dangling off her keys. The one she’d found among Vince’s belongings.

  Maybe that’s all it was, a magnet. A magnet for holding a metal-covered book.

  She got up as quietly as she could and, clad in a borrowed shirt of Bob’s, slid on her shoes. Put on one of her mother’s coats. Slipped out the door as quietly as she’d slid into plenty of other homes.

  In the parking lot, the angle of the streetlight gave everything long shadows. The hiss of cars on the highway was distant, the streaks of the lightning farm barely visible.

  She popped the hood of her Corolla and looked at the puzzle of the engine and spark plugs and other things she didn’t really understand. Rich people never performed their own oil changes, or rotated their tires. They never even vacuumed their own seats. And Vince had spent a lot of time working on her car.

  But the Liber Noctem wasn’t stuck in the guts of the Corolla, and though she crawled underneath, the only thing she discovered was an oil leak.

  * * *

  In the morning, Charlie’s neck felt hot against the press of her fingers. She went into the bathroom and splashed cold water in her face, combing it back through her hair. Her mother’s dire predictions hadn’t proved accurate. The swelling had gone down around her eye. It had, however, turned a magnificently dark purple, with plenty of yellow and green bruising at the edges.

  “I’m heading out to Rite Aid,” she announced over breakfast, drinking down the sweet milk in her cereal bowl.

  “You can’t go to work like that,” their mother said.

  “I know,” Charlie told her. “That’s why I need to go to the drugstore first.”

  Posey snorted indelicately.

  A few minutes later, Charlie was out the door.

  According to the YouTube tutorials she’d watched while the air mattress slowly deflated beneath her, Halloween makeup was her best chance to fix her face. Luckily, some remained in the clearance section. She got herself a cheap palette that consisted of white, lime green, royal blue, bright yellow, and cherry red. Charlie was concerned she was going to look like a clown.

  She added to that some regular stuff—a full-coverage concealer, liquid eyeliner, distractingly red lipstick, new deodorant, a three-pack of panties, and the only black t-shirt in her size. Unfortunately, it was emblazoned with a red-nosed reindeer below IT’S BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE FUCK THIS in puffy letters. Still, it was a fine opportunity to break Salt’s hundred-dollar bill.

  Back at the motel room, Charlie poured the stuff out on her mother’s bed and sprawled on the comforter to put it on.

  After a lot of googling of color wheels and watching that video again, she mixed bright yellow with a little red and dabbed it on the purpling parts. Then she waited for it to dry.

  Surprisingly, by the time she applied the concealer in careful dabs, the only thing that showed she’d been hit was the swelling—and even that was less obvious next to a red lip and a little bit of gold dusted on her eyelids.

  “You look good,” her mother said with a frown. “But I still think you should call out sick and go talk to the police.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Charlie lied.

  “Are you ready to go?” Posey asked. “And can I use some of that?”

  Charlie ducked into the bathroom to fix her hair and turn the disturbing reindeer shirt inside out. When she returned, Posey was wearing eyeliner and some sparkly shadow.

  They split the pack of underwear.

  * * *

  That night, being back at Rapture was strange. The mess had been cleaned up, the broken glass was gone. New bottles rested on the shelves. Although the bar wasn’t as well stocked as it had been—the unusual whiskeys and gins that Odette liked (rose and rhubarb were favorites) would take time to replace—it was functional.

  Normally, Wednesdays were slow, but since the bar had been closed for the better part of a week, there was a lineup of performers. As Charlie came in, a body modification artist was up on the stage doing public piercings and tongue splittings.

  By the time she was pouring her first drink, an acrobat with labrets through fresh holes in the dimples of her cheeks was performing a set that was half sleight of hand and half burlesque.

  An hour in, Charlie was sweaty and footsore. She had to make a conscious effort not to touch her face and wipe away her careful makeup. Even with it, customers had to notice the swelling.

  Balthazar gave her an odd, guilty look the one time she saw him out of his shadow parlor.

  “Make me that awful thing I like,” Odette said, sitting herself down at the bar. She was in a red vintage Vivienne Westwood sweater set printed with black barbed wire.

  Charlie turned away to spray a coupe glass with absinthe from a spritzer.

  “How are you holding up?” Odette asked.

  “I’m fine.” Charlie shook up Odette’s burnt martini and pushed it over to her, along with a twist of lemon peel for garnish. “Glad to be back.”

  “You’re a darling for saying so, anyway,” Odette told her.

  “I met a friend of yours,” Charlie said, keeping her voice low. “Is it true you have a client who’s an actual billionaire?”

  Odette took a sip of her drink and grimaced a little at the bite of the alcohol. “Lionel? A client? Goodness no. He’d rather be on the other end of the whip.”

  Charlie pretended to be surprised.

  “Have you ever been to his house?”

  “I certainly have. It’s a grim old place, plush carpets, lots of incense, and horrible art. But his liquor is top-notch and he knows a lot of interesting people.” She paused. “He called me the morning after that man came in. Asked me a great many questions about your Vincent. What do you think he wants with him?”

  Charlie looked at Odette as steadily as she could. “No idea. Maybe he’s got an odd job he wants done.”

  “Ah, yes,” Odette said. “It must be something like that.”

  “You remember that thing you said about pasts being the only thing that matter?” Charlie said. “What did you mean?”

  “Did I say that?” Odette looked surprised. “Well, if I did, I suppose I must have meant it exactly as it sounds.”

  “Isn’t who we are today what counts?” Charlie didn’t know why she was pressing this point, since she wasn’t particularly happy with the person she was today. And Odette had been talking about Vince when she’d said it, not Charlie.

  Odette laughed. “Sure, honey.”

  “Isn’t that the point of reinventing ourselves?” Charlie asked.

  Odette took a second sip of her drink and closed her eyes in pleasure. “Ah, yes, that’s good.” Then she fixed Charlie with a look that made her remember that Odette had lived longer than she had and maybe lived harder too. “Who we were and what we did and what was done to us—we don’t get to shrug that stuff off and become some new shiny person.”

  Charlie raised her eyebrows. “We can try.”

  “Take fetish. No one is into sucking on someone else’s feet or worshipping their shoes or rubbing a balloon all over themselves for no reason. I know a boy who used to sit under the kitchen table and draw while his mother and her friends talked. He would look at their shoes, and know that if he touched one, he would be discovered and then he’d have to leave. You can guess what he likes. But if he didn’t admit it to himself, what then? It takes bravery to be an adventurer,” Odette said, lifting her drink and walking away. “And what better adventure than the discovery of our true selves?”

  As Charlie worked, she let the physicality of the tasks take over, let herself fall into the rhythm of the work. Fill this, shake that, swipe a card, start a tab, pocket the change. Hold the pilsner glass at the exact right angle for the exact right head on the beer, do a boss pour for the hipster requesting one, dole out Fireball to a trio steering straight for regrets.

  As she wiped down the bar top and collected wet napkins and wooden stirrers, her thoughts turned to her last days with Vince. The day before he’d left, he’d gone outside with the excuse of cleaning the gutters. He must have known that it was only a matter of time before Salt connected the dots and discovered him. Maybe he’d taken that opportunity to move the Liber Noctem to his van. She’d tossed the room only hours later. She could have been that close to finding it.

  Hiding the book in his van was a short-term strategy at best, though. Since Vince had no legitimate ID, he couldn’t have a vehicle registered to him. If he was ever pulled over, the van would be impounded.

  And if Lionel found his grandson at any point, it would be an obvious place to look.

  Now that she thought of it, her car would have been an equally bad hiding spot. Someone like Hermes might have taken it apart that night he came to Rapture. Salt had been standing right next to it not four days ago.

  But that left the whole rest of everywhere to have put The Book of Night.

  Liam said that when Vince would hide something, he’d pick one of the places rich people don’t see. Perhaps he’d hidden it in one of the areas of Salt’s own house he’d never gone. The laundry room. The pantry. Behind the television. That would be something, for Salt to be walking past it the entire time and never noticing. But it was risky too. It would be hard to reobtain the book, and there was no guarantee it wouldn’t be disturbed by someone else. Even if he taped it to the chimney, slate repair people might stumble on it.

  Even on a roof—

  Charlie stopped, nearly overpouring soda in the scotch and soda she was making.

  Who cleans the gutters the day after they murder someone and the day before they leave their girlfriend? A ridiculously considerate person, she supposed. Someone who’d been meaning to get to the task and wanted to get it done before they were gone.

  Or someone who was moving something to a new hiding spot, one that no one was likely to stumble on, and which wasn’t the sort of place that someone like Salt would even remember existed. Their rental house had a chimney, connected to the furnace and water heater rather than a fireplace.

  And it had a metal top on it. One that magnets might grip.

  Of course, there were lots of things that were made of metal in a house. But outside of the house made sense if he wanted to protect the people inside. And if Vince wanted to be able to retrieve it without having to face Charlie.

  She could look, anyway.

  It would give her a chance to check and see if Adam had busted up their place. If it didn’t seem like he’d been there, Charlie would call Posey and they could move their stuff and themselves back in the morning. Put a baseball bat by the door. See if their landlord would mind if Charlie installed a couple of better locks.

  If she did find the Liber Noctem, she had a different problem. No one blackmailed you into one job. Do that job, and there’d always be another. Carrot and stick, back and forth, until you forgot you ever had a choice in the first place. And then what? There wasn’t a reward at the end, just a knife in the back.

  Charlie might not agree with Odette that the past was the only thing that mattered, but it had taught her something.

  Besides, she’d be damned before she rolled over for Lionel Salt.

  She was going to have to con him. She wasn’t sure how, but she would have to beat him at his own manipulative game. Realizing she had to manage that or die trying brought her a great calm, like letting a riptide drag you away with it.

  As she waved good night to Odette and got in her car, Charlie had the bittersweet feeling one gets just before leaving town. Bidding farewell to everything, because you’re not sure you’re going to see it again.

  Charlie parked a block down from her house and walked over. As she got close, she saw lights moving on a screen inside. The television was on.

  She slowed her step. Had Posey forgotten to turn it off before leaving? Was Adam so arrogant that he’d broken in to the house and then kicked up his heels?

  Quietly she took the ladder from where it was leaned against the side of the house and set it against the gutters.

  As she climbed up the rungs, she could see inside more easily.

  Someone was in the house. In the shifting light of the television, she was able to make out a figure slumped to one side of the couch, as though he’d fallen asleep while waiting for someone to return home.

  28

  ABANDON ALL HOPE

  Up on the roof, Charlie crawled over the asphalt shingles. The pitch wasn’t particularly steep and the moon was bright enough for her to see her way to the short faux chimney, with a metal grating covering the top. She pulled herself upright, looking out over the neighborhood for a moment, then, satisfied that no one was out on the street watching, she checked for bolts screwing down the cover. To her surprise, the whole thing lifted off. It was flimsy, like tin or aluminum. Looking down the chimney, she saw that the inside edges were lined in heavier metal strips.