Staring at the wall, she sipped her coffee.

  She had no better idea of where to find him than before. Her mind traveled down predictable paths to the same dead ends. She’d already tried his cell phone. She’d gone to the address on his license and talked to Liam. She’d called his boss and found out he hadn’t shown up for work and was pretty much fired.

  What had he wanted with grotty hotel rooms and cleaning blood off ceilings anyway, being the grandson of a billionaire? But maybe he’d gotten used to that, tidying up after his shadow’s messes.

  Maybe he liked it, being in all those empty hotel rooms, the way she’d liked breaking into houses.

  But then she had a very different thought.

  There was a story that Vince told, about how his boss’s wife was furious because her husband brought her to a fancy hotel for the weekend, not revealing that he had the key because the room was the newly cleaned scene of a murder. Probably cleaner than any other room in the hotel, his boss had told everyone at work. Nothing for her to complain about. The wife hadn’t agreed, and made him spend a week on the couch.

  If there was an unoccupied hotel room, Vince could have gone there. He wouldn’t have needed any identification. He wouldn’t have even needed to break in.

  Charlie took out her phone and poked around a bit until she found the number of Craig, one of Vince’s coworkers. The young guy who’d taken a job cleaning up bodies so he could one day do super authentic special effects makeup for movies.

  The last text she had from him was from four months ago: Vince’s cell died & he wants me to tell you he’ll be home in 1hr w veg lo mein.

  It was such a normal message that she couldn’t stop looking at it.

  Charlie thought about the horrible moment when she’d been sure it was Vince’s body on the couch, Vince’s blood on the walls. She had to find him before Red did.

  She called the number. Craig picked up.

  “This is Vince’s girlfriend,” Charlie said. “I know he’s in the doghouse at work, which is why I’m calling you.”

  “Is he okay?” Craig asked, sounding like his usual friendly self. “Winnie and me were saying it wasn’t like him to just drop off the face of the earth.” She always found it a little funny how upbeat Craig and Winnie were, considering what they did.

  Their boss, not so much.

  “He got really sick,” Charlie said, thinking that covered a host of possibilities. “When he’s feeling better he’ll give you a call, but he wanted me to ask about a place he cleaned. It’s the room that wasn’t going to be able to have guests for a week or two? He thinks he left his watch there.”

  “In Chicopee?” He sounded a little wary, but not yet suspicious.

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “But he totally spaced on the room number and he doesn’t want to ask at the desk.”

  “Gimme a sec.” The tension had gone from his voice. She hadn’t asked for the name of the hotel, after all, or an address. He believed that she knew the place. “Says here it was 14B.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “Vince’ll give you a call when he’s feeling better.”

  “Tell him to hang in there,” Craig said, and disconnected the call.

  Charlie typed in “murder” and “Chicopee” into her phone’s search engine and sorted the results by most recent. It appeared that there’d been a stabbing at the East Star Motel, on Armory Drive, eight days before.

  She gave herself a victory spoonful of peanut butter and went to get her jeans out of the dryer.

  * * *

  The East Star Motel hunched on the corner of two streets, a one-story building with exterior entrances to the rooms, not unlike where her mother lived. But if that place was intended for long stays, this was the opposite. It rented by the hour, its sign promising vacancies, Wi-Fi, color television, and discretion.

  Charlie pulled into the lot. The Corolla made a strange sound as she did, a sputtering sort of cough. And then the engine died.

  “No,” she told the car, in what she hoped was a stern manner. “This cannot happen. Not right now. Come on. Come on.”

  But all it did was drift a short ways forward and then stop, halfway in and halfway out of a parking spot.

  She slammed both hands down on the steering wheel, but that did nothing. Turning the key in the ignition did even less.

  Finally she got out, slung her bag over her shoulder, and pushed the car so the back of it wasn’t sticking out. It was on a weird angle and taking up more than one parking space because of it, but there wasn’t much she could do.

  At least her car had gotten her to the motel before it died.

  There was no white van in sight, which wasn’t a great sign. But then, Vince might have gone out—or even stolen himself a new vehicle. She could hear a television on in room 12B and some moaning from 15B. Her gaze went to the locks on the rooms with a professional eye.

  They were digital, but not expensive and not all that secure. Unless someone had done up the dead bolt, it was possible that she could force it with a well-aimed kick.

  The blinds on 14B were drawn and shut. She hesitated, hand on knob, thinking of walking into another darkened room just hours before. Thinking of the husk of Adam’s body and a single dripping word written all over the walls.

  The idea that Vince might actually be on the other side of the door gave her pause too, as much as she hoped for it.

  She needed to be ready for the possibility that Remy Carver wasn’t much like Vince. He could have played her. He could have been acting. He might even be in a relationship with Adeline, which was deeply messed up, but people in messed-up families did messed-up things.

  If Vince didn’t exist, then better she observed it for herself. Like going to an open casket funeral: sometimes that was the only way you could accept someone you loved was truly gone.

  She tried her Big-Y-card-in-the-seam trick, but the lock resisted. In her car, she had a wire bent into an under-the-door-device. These didn’t look great to use, since you had to squat down and shove a wire into the seam between the door and ground. Once inside, the wire bent up, and if you angled it right, the loop at the end grabbed the lever. You tugged, and the knob turned.

  Glancing around the parking lot, she was ready to go back for the wire when a woman came out of one of the rooms, holding an ice bucket.

  While she waited for the woman to get her ice, then mess around with the vending machine, Charlie wondered if there was a simpler way to get inside the room.

  Her shadow. She sent it out deliberately for the first time. Pushed it through the open spaces between door and frame. Her vision split, and a headache started between her eyes.

  She tried to concentrate on her shadow hand becoming solid enough to turn the lever, but it felt like grasping at nothing. Part of her was conscious of the woman moving back toward her room, of a light drizzle starting up. The rest of her was fumbling in the dark.

  She tried to push energy into her shadow. She wasn’t sure if she was doing it correctly, until her hand became briefly solid, and the lever turned.

  Her shadow flowed back to her in a rush, and the sensation was so intense and strange that Charlie had to lean against the wall, shudders running through her. It was as though moths alighted everywhere on her skin and then were somehow absorbed into her.

  And even more overwhelming—the possibilities that opened up, the vast expanse of things she would be able to do, the places she’d be able to worm her way into, unfurling in front of her.

  Taking a deep breath to steady herself, Charlie pushed the door the rest of the way open.

  She flipped the lights and had to smother a scream. A massive bloodstain covered the gray patterned rug. It took her a few moments of standing there, light-headed, fighting down panic, to absorb that it was only a stain, and an old one at that. There were smears at the edges, where scrubbing had made the blood blur.

  That was why the room couldn’t be rented. It needed a new carpet.

  Charlie closed the door slowly behind her, making sure it didn’t slam.

  Photographs had been taped up along the wall, above a cheap-looking pressboard cabinet. A bed resting in the middle of the floor had a stripped-down mattress covered in clothes. The blinds on the window had been taped over from the inside with garbage bags, and a rolled-up towel rested near the door, probably used to hide any light from peeking out while Vince was inside.

  Torn packaging from Williamson’s Clothier was scattered over the chair near the bathroom—a shoebox, a heavy wooden hanger, and one of those zip-up body bags fancy suits came in.

  As she stepped into the room, she realized the lamp on the bedside table had been knocked over and smashed. The bed itself was pushed a bit diagonal, as though something heavy had shoved it. And on the other side, she found a chair, turned on its side.

  There’d been some kind of struggle. Was the absence of the van in the parking lot evidence that Vince had escaped his assailants? Or had Salt taken him and the van both?

  Charlie forced herself over to the wall. Photos of the Hierophant had been taped there—standing on a street corner, meeting with Malik from the Cabal. A shot of him covered in what looked like shadowy armor, as though he were some kind of knight.

  And beneath them, a printout of an article from two years before: Suspect in Shadow Theft Case Has All Charges Dropped, Victims Outraged. The photo of him was small and blurry from being printed off the internet, but she recognized him right away. The Hierophant’s name was Stephen Vorman.

  But she still didn’t understand the connection between him and Red, unless the Blight to whom Stephen had been tethered was Red. But he’d wanted her to give Red a message, so that couldn’t be right. It bothered her, the idea that she wouldn’t be able to tell. If she knew Vince, she ought to know his shadow.

  On the nightstand, she found a notebook, rinds of paper stuck in the coils left over from pages that had been ripped out.

  In the bathroom, she found a comb and pomade.

  And in the trash can beside the toilet, she found a glued-together box with clay inside of it, a Styrofoam cup stained with black paint, a bottle of clear nail polish, and two empty plastic containers that had a two-part resin in them.

  He’d obviously been molding something, but what? Turning over the box, she noted the squarish-shaped depressions.

  Charlie went back to the bed, with the notebook. Fishing around in her bag, she came out with a pencil and did the old trick of running the graphite lightly down the page so the marks of previous writing would be revealed.

  Char,

  I don’t know how to say goodbye to you.

  Charlie sat there for a long time, staring at the ghost of a letter.

  While she didn’t understand what it was, Vince was out there executing a plan of his own. And given what he’d written, he didn’t seem optimistic about how it was going to turn out. She needed to think.

  Paul Ecco had a page of the book. He’d gotten it from someone.

  And Knight had seen the book, although he hadn’t found the ritual that made The Book of Blights famous. The ritual that Red was hoping to enact.

  Maybe Knight had missed that part. After all, a quick flip-through in an auction house wasn’t enough time to be certain there was nothing important inside. Charlie had seen plenty of secrets that weren’t readily apparent. Tiny words written in artwork. Lemon-juice print revealed by heat. Ciphers that were all but impossible to decipher without an equally well-hidden key. Any of the puzzles that gloamists created for one another.

  But Knight had said he had the means to bring someone down, and she had every reason to believe that person was Salt. So there had to be something.

  Fetching Knight Singh’s book, she smoothed out its leather cover and thumbed through the pages, skimming for Salt’s name. For anything to do with Blights, or immortality, or the breath of life.

  Nothing. And Raven, who’d read it, claimed not to have found anything either.

  Charlie went through the book again, more carefully. She felt each page’s thickness, to see if any had been glued together. She checked the spine, to see if anything had been inserted into it. Then she checked the endpapers, running the pads of her fingers over them to check for any unevenness. On the back inside cover, she found light glue marks along one edge, as though perhaps the paper had been removed and replaced. Getting the knife attached to her keys, she tried scraping at the edge. Sliding it into the seam, she pried up the edge, loosening the leather. And there, underneath, were papers written in an unfamiliar hand:

  There seem to be various ways to cut a dormant shadow away from a living person. Remy is able to make Red pick up the shadow of a knife and wield it. (Interestingly, the knife does permanently lose its shadow, and the next morning, I perceived spots of rust on the blade, which warrants further investigation.) Remy, as a gloamist, can use his fingers and, while making a snipping motion, use those “scissors” to sever the bond between person and shadow. It was also possible for me to cut away a shadow using an onyx knife.

  All those means can also be used to remove a shadow from a corpse, but this shadow has a discernable difference in texture and weight. This also warrants further investigation.

  That had to have been written by Salt. It wasn’t quite a confession, but it was damning nonetheless.

  The next page was worse.

  I cut her wrist several times, thinking that perhaps that would be enough trauma to quicken her shadow, but she died like all the rest, despite the alterations done to her.

  Yeah, that was bad. Charlie wasn’t sure if any of this would be admissible in court, but it would lead investigators to look for evidence, which was almost certainly out there.

  And it would ruin him in the court of public opinion. Not to mention what the Cabal would be forced to do, since it was other gloamists he’d been targeting.

  The third page was about Red.

  Remy has been doing experiments of his own, ones he’s been hiding from me. He has been setting his shadow free. I have no idea how he’s managed this, and have it return to him, but it does.

  Does he feed it excess blood? And if so, how much? How long has he been doing this? Now I will be paying close attention.

  Another thing I must know—is he controlling it? And if not, does that mean Red is self-aware? Cogito, ergo sum? And if so, what has it stolen from Remy to become that way?

  And then a final page.

  I have made a mistake, one I hope I will be able to correct.

  If I can’t have Red, then I will have to kill him.

  If Salt knew that Knight Singh had those papers, then he would certainly have wanted Knight dead. Salt had to have been the client paying Adam, the one he’d hidden from Balthazar.

  Now she had the leverage, if she could figure out what to do with it. If she could solve the puzzle in time.

  A con, after all, was about uncovering the truth. Warping it, sure, but uncovering it first. It was the closest thing Charlie had to Posey’s tarot, a belief in something larger than herself. Just like Posey could put down cards in neat little rows, Charlie could plan out her schemes. But eventually she had to surrender to improvisation and trust her instincts.

  Charlie recalled lying on the rug of Salt’s house, with a hidden room and a safe only steps away. Where all his most valuable possessions would be kept, including ones that were never supposed to be found. That was what she needed to get into.

  Just in case Vince came back, Charlie ripped a piece of paper from the back of his notebook and used her pencil to write him a message.

  I found the letter you didn’t send me. Call me if you find this. And don’t do anything stupid.

  Love, Char

  She left the note on the mattress. Then she flipped off the lights and carefully closed the hotel room door, keeping her head down as she crossed the parking lot.

  29

  THE PAST

  Vince sat at the bar, every part of him alert to the crush of people around him, to the smell of sweat and the sweet rot of syrupy drinks sunk down into the grooves of the floor. The music was turned up loud enough to discourage much in the way of conversation, but to the right of him, a guy was trying, shouting at another guy about a video game where you built a house underwater.

  That’s the whole point, the guy was yelling. To survive. Build your base. You’ve got to get ready for when they launch the update and the sharks come.

  It had been a month and a half since he’d left Salt’s house, and every day he was away from the place he simultaneously hated it more and missed it. He felt homesick for what had never been his home. And for the one person who had mattered to him most, and was gone.

  The hardest part was having so much time to think. To have to make his own decisions. To wrestle with the guilt of being alive when by all rights he shouldn’t have been. Vince was used to measuring out his life in small moments, never letting himself look much ahead, and never daring to look behind.

  Here we are, on a boat.

  Here we are, with a knife.

  Here we are, in the bedroom of a CFO in the middle of the night.

  And now Vince had to make plans if he was going to survive. He had something he could use to bring down the old man, but he couldn’t use it on his own. Better to pass it off to Knight Singh, with his web of connections and his dislike of Salt. The item was in the messenger bag slung across Vince’s shoulder, and he wanted nothing more than to be rid of it.

  Maybe Vince could have a future where he wasn’t constantly looking over his shoulder. That thought brought a rush of guilt with it.

  The problem was that Vince wasn’t used to the setting-things-up part. He’d been all about the execution.

  “Another?” the bartender asked.

  Vince had allowed himself to be talked into a pumpkin beer, having no idea what to order in a place like this. Adeline would have had champagne with vodka to “wake it up.” Salt would have had a single malt from a place that Vince was certain he’d butcher the pronunciation of, and which was likely to dig deeply into his cash reserves.